Get To Know 0xkaya And Spiky Nads
I joined Monad in December 2023—in three days, it’ll be a full year. Before Monad, I had never really been involved in any community-oriented work within the crypto space. To me, everything felt like just farming—nothing genuine. And honestly, I’ve never been a fan of fake interactions, if you know what I mean.
When I joined Monad, my initial goal was to interview a few team members—like what we’re doing right now. But, for some reason, I wasn’t able to make much progress with it initially. About a month later, though, something changed. A couple of friends from the Monad community helped me get a better feel for what the community was all about. I quickly realized that it wasn’t just made up of farmers. The vibe was genuine, and I can say I fell in love with it pretty quickly.
What really stood out to me was how people—complete strangers online—would talk, share personal stuff, and build real friendships. That kind of authenticity really influenced how I approach Spiky Nads and what it represents, drawing inspiration from Monad’s community.
Fast forward to February 2024, my co-founder Jakx reached out to me. At the time, I didn’t know him personally, but I knew I wanted to build something within Monad. My perspective on community-building had done a complete 100% in just two months, from never participating in Web3 communities to loving the experience. When Jakx reached out, he introduced himself as a pixel artist with a vision to launch an NFT collection.
At first, I wasn’t sure. It felt risky. You know how it is: you build a reputation for yourself in a space like Monad, and the last thing you want is for that reputation to be tarnished by a poorly executed NFT project. But, I decided to take a leap of faith. I wanted to do things my way, the way I’d learned from Monad’s community values. So, I said yes.
From day one when Spiky Nads was founded in February 2024, our goal with Spiky Nads has been to build a completely organic NFT project. We’ve stayed away from Twitter bots, Discord party boosters, paid campaigns, whitelist raids, and all those shortcuts. We don’t do things like offering ten whitelist spots in exchange for raiding someone’s Twitter. Everything you see in Spiky Nads is 100% organic. Roles are given manually to genuine contributors who align with our vision.
It is not easy. Building something organic is tough, but we’ve chosen this path. We want to ensure that every single whitelist holder is a real person who truly understands and loves what Spiky Nads is about.
Ultimately, our vision is to create a cult-like community on Monad—one that’s deeply inspired by what Monad has achieved with its own community.
WHY PIXEL ART, AND WHAT DOES NFTS ON MONAD MEAN TO YOU?
The reason we chose pixel art is because Jakx, our co-founder, is a pixel artist and the main artist behind Spiky Nads. Personally, I’m a big fan of pixel art too, even though I don’t have any experience creating it myself. That’s all Jakx. All the sneak peeks you’ve seen and most of the tweets are made by him. Some are also created by our second artist, SSS. Shoutout to both of them—they’re amazing!
Pixel art on Monad, especially, is super rare. Jakx has even been teaching some people how to create pixel art because it’s such a niche skill. If there were 100 artists on Monad, maybe only five of them would specialize in pixel art.
From my perspective, Monad’s NFT space is both exciting and challenging. The hype around Monad is huge, and with that comes both good and bad. Initially, the NFT ecosystem felt overcrowded, with people just trying to ride the hype wave. But over time, I’ve noticed that the good projects are starting to stand out, while the less genuine ones are fading away.
I’m really excited for the standout projects because Monad has a super strong community. If these projects can recruit and engage community members effectively, I think they have a great chance of succeeding. As for Monad NFTs, there are four projects that come to mind right now that I believe will reach great heights—though I’d rather not mention names. Overall, I’m optimistic about the future of NFTs on Monad.
IN THE ART OF BUILDING, WHAT ARE SOME OF THE CHALLENGES YOU’VE FACED BUILDING ON THE MONAD ECOSYSTEM?
The most obvious challenge I’d say is the delays in Testnet. We’ve now been a pre-mint NFT for nearly 11 months, and when you think about it, most NFTs don’t even survive 11 months post-mint. It’s definitely been tough, but I see it as a fun challenge. The extra time has allowed us to experiment a lot—trial and error—to find the best ways to engage with our community and make their time with Spiky Nads more enjoyable.
Within these 11 months, we’ve tried a lot of unique ideas. For example, we created a jail system early on. When we opened the Discord, we attracted a lot of bots and farmers. These bots were often robotic, even if programmed to chat. One of our mods came up with the jail system, and I was inspired by a tribunal system from a game I used to play. The tribunal involves punishing suspicious accounts—like those suspected of farming or botting—by putting them in jail. The community then votes on what to do with them: ban them or give them a second chance if they’re deemed real humans. Many people have told me this tribunal system is pretty unique.
This jail system has now completely evolved into something else because the community chose to vibe with it. No matter how serious we made that role, people wanted to meme the jail and wanted to get inside instead of avoiding it. So jail has now become our FCFS WL role instead of what it was 10 months ago, purely because that’s what the community was leaning towards.
Additionally, we’ve focused on hosting AMAs, Twitter Spaces, and game nights with other communities. These collaborations not only strengthen our ties with others but also help our team grow.
Another big challenge is the competition. Monad is the hottest project right now, and there are a ton of NFTs launching on the platform. At one point, there were 25-30 NFTs popping up. However, as I mentioned earlier, the less committed projects are starting to give up, and the promising ones are getting the attention they deserve. It’s a tough ecosystem, but it’s also exciting to be part of it.
WHAT ARE THE KEY PRINCIPLES YOU’VE APPLIED TO BUILDING A SUCCESSFUL PROJECT ON MONAD THAT HAVE HELPED YOU?
I think this changes from person to person, but for me, it has always been about trying to find what resonates with the community. I want to build something organic, and I can’t do it with fake hype. I can’t do it with bots on Twitter or fake numbers. I can’t do it with people we pay to chat on Discord, so we don’t do those kinds of things.
For me, the key principle is believing in what you do. I believe in organic community building, and I haven’t compromised on that. If we had decided to buy bots on Twitter and reach 30k followers, it might have looked good at first, but people would eventually realize those numbers are empty, and we’d lose credibility.
Other than that, consistency is key. The first couple of months after I got demoted to part-time in my Web2 job were very tough for me, this was due to the fact that I was so focused on Spiky Nads so much that I performed poorly on my Web2 job. As a result of this demotion and the financial struggle that came with it, I wasn’t able to stay consistent on Spiky Nads, and I was getting burnt out. What I’m trying to say in essence is that, when you’re inconsistent, it shows almost immediately. If you stop caring for your project, people sense it. They see it and think, “If the co-founder doesn’t believe in the project, why should the community?”
Also, having good friends and a strong team is crucial. Your team has to be strong, especially for an NFT project. A team is everything, and you need to cover different characteristics. We have Jakx, who is the most wholesome person you’ll ever meet—he’s super nice but a bit shy. Then we have Mondalf from the core team, who has been in the Monad Discord since day one. He’s the brains of the project. When we want to do something, we run it by him, and he usually has either a better idea or a more efficient way of doing things. I’m sort of in the middle. I’m not 100% wholesome or 100% the genius, but I’m the talkative guy in the community. So a strong team is a must.
WHAT WOULD BE THE UTILITIES OF YOUR PROJECT? ARE YOU CREATING JUST FOR FUN, OR DOES IT HAVE UTILITY ATTACHED TO IT? WHAT WILL BE IN IT FOR THE HOLDERS? WHAT WILL THE MINT PRICE BE, AND WHAT WILL THE TOTAL SUPPLY BE LIKE?
So, for utility, I don’t know if you saw “Cryptunez’s NFT 10 Commandments.” It really guided us while building Spiky Nads. Since we’re focused on community, we don’t really want to do any utilities on our NFTs because most of the time, utility is fake. You do something like add staking if you have a token, which is a forced utility for us because you’re creating a token to make that staking feature work.
It’s not fake, but artificial and forced. This, for us, replaces the value of community and puts it on that staking feature, which ultimately I think would reduce the floor price. So this is more, as you said, like a fun PFP project. Its strongest area is community, and maybe the community could be seen as the utility. If the community is strong enough, your floor price is going to go up. Then we can potentially secure some airdrops, and so on. Those could be things that happen in the future. But overall, we’re not thinking of doing any utilities like staking or other stuff.
