Case study · Somnia
Quills Adventure
Quills is one of Somnia's OG NFT projects, and the reason most of our tooling exists. The collection was complex enough to need its own generation program; what followed was an on-chain chat app that crossed two million messages, a mascot that became the network's own, a holder mini-game, and a custom bridge that made Quills the first collection to reach Somnia mainnet.
Role
Chain
Platform
The problem
A collection too complex for off-the-shelf tools
Quills had far more traits — and far more rules about how those traits could legally combine — than a standard generator could handle. Getting the collection the team actually wanted meant building the collection program first.
What we built
A custom NFT collection program
We wrote the generation and contract tooling around Quills' trait system, which is what let the team produce a collection at that level of complexity without compromising the art. That program is the seed NFT Builders grew out of.
On-chain social
Two million messages, on-chain
There were no dApps on Somnia when we started, so we built one: an on-chain chat app, tested on Devnet and shipped to Testnet. Across the six-month testnet period it carried more than 2 million messages and minted over 1 million NFTs for tens of thousands of users. It runs on Somnia mainnet today.
Community mechanics
Somini: a mascot, a builders program, an adventure
Somnia needed a mascot. Our designer's entry, Somini, won the Discord round, and for the on-chain final we built the Somini Builders Program — NFT badges recording who backed it. Somini won and became the network's mascot. Alongside it we shipped an adventure mini-game where holders send their Quills out for timed rewards and lose progress if they sell: a loyalty mechanic that doubled as one of the few on-chain apps live on Somnia testnet.
The migration
First collection on Somnia mainnet
Mainnet meant moving every Quill. Nothing on the market did it safely — the closest option broke OpenSea integration — so we built our own bridge, tested it with Somnia's team, and migrated between $3M and $5M of NFTs without incident. Quills was the first collection to complete the move. Somzies, the mainnet collection that followed, is now the second most-traded collection on the network, behind Quills itself.
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