Umbra OG: A Collectible NFT for our Supporters

Umbra is a grant funded public good project. We've never raised venture capital, and we don't have a token. Umbra's existence has been made possible through the gracious support of the ecosystem.

Some of that support has come in the form of grants from organizations, such as the Ethereum Foundation and MolochDAO. We are extremely grateful for that institutional funding.

A large portion of Umbra's support, however, has come via individual contributors to our Gitcoin Grant. Tens of thousands of users have given varying amounts— some small, some large— and helped us earn even more via Gitcoin's quadratic matching mechanism.

This support, in particular, means an enormous amount to us. For so many individuals to give organically toward the development of more private payments on Ethereum has consistently blown us away. It motivates us to keep pushing Umbra forward.

Today, we want to offer a small gesture of thanks.

Umbra OG Supporters Collectible

The Umbra OG Supporters NFT is a collectible ERC-721 token. It's available to mint now on the Polygon network. It is a free mint eligible to every address that gave to our Gitcoin Grant before our 1 year launch anniversary, which we celebrated in June 2022.

If you contributed to our grant in our first year, you can visit https://collectible.umbra.cash and mint your OG Supporters token now.

There is a one year window to mint, after which no more OG NFTs will be created. Please visit the site and check your eligibility soon!

Why not a POAP?

We love POAP! We've worked with the POAP team before, and we collect them ourselves. In fact, we planned on launching the OG Supporters collectible as a POAP, and even announced as much after we'd taken the snapshot and commissioned the artwork.

Unfortunately, after submitting our list for POAP delivery, our submission was rejected by the curation board because of the number of eligible addresses. We fully support POAP in this product curation choice, and harbor absolutely no hard feelings. It makes sense from their perspective to think carefully about the number of users who can mint a given POAP.

That said, it didn't feel right to us to limit our collectible only to high-dollar donors in order to pare the address list. After all, Gitcoin's quadratic matching algorithm is based on the idea that you get more signal from many individual donors giving a small amount than from a small number of individuals giving a lot. We wanted to say thank you to everyone who contributed, regardless of how much they'd given.

That's why we've decided to launch our own collectible NFT for our supporters.

Onward

We want to reiterate our thanks to everyone who has helped support Umbra's development to date. While this collectible NFT is a token of thanks for those who have helped get us this far, there is still much work to do.

Now, more than ever, we believe it's important for the ecosystem to continue supporting the development of neutral, decentralized privacy tools. We're committed to pushing stealth addresses on Ethereum forward. We hope you'll consider supporting us further in that mission!