This week, we're super excited to celebrate the one-year anniversary of icy.tools. And in a space where one year feels like a decade, we take nothing for granted. That's why we want to loop everyone in on the celebration! We also want to thank you for taking this journey with us. We're proud of everything we've built over this last year and have so much more planned for the future that it's tough to keep it all to ourselves — we might just have to leak a little icy alpha below. 👀
We know, it's hard to imagine a world before icy.tools. Watching the icy trending feed has become a daily ritual for a lot of us. Pour a coffee, blast a good-natured "gm" on Twitter, and pull up the icy feed — life is comfy. But before you get too comfy, we want to take you on a journey, all the way back to one year ago, when icy.tools was just a twinkle in its developers' eyes.
icy.tools in the early days:
[email protected] are the first onchain generative NFT. There were few OG minters and years of quiet, followed by a rediscovery last March.
The rediscovery pumped and then dumped mooncats, where they've sat in quiet accumulation for months.
This was the first mooncats break out https://t.co/o4NDuFfLjj
— The Crypto Dog📈 (@TheCryptoDog)
Aug 25, 2021
The story starts like many others. Our founders were trying to track a MoonCats mint. But unfortunately, or fortunately for future icy.tools, they quickly realized there was no tooling around tracking sales and mints. Until that point, it was a guessing game trying to track mints and sales across platforms. At that moment of necessity, the idea for icy.tools took shape. A few months later, in early August 2021, the first iteration of icy.tools went live.
From the icy.tools historical archives:
The very first sneak peek from icy.tools. Notice the time, 4:12 am est.
sneak peak #NFTs https://t.co/U9A0sQ1tsK
— icy.tools - NFT Tracking & Alerts (@icy_tools)
Aug 14, 2021
And then we went live. And the world of NFTs would never be the same.
we live -- check it out @ https://t.co/Inear2l6NC https://t.co/phywai4bnA
— icy.tools - NFT Tracking & Alerts (@icy_tools)
Aug 14, 2021
Memes... maybe.. but we kept building.
THIS ISNT EVEN OUR FINAL FORM https://t.co/jx7CtQpGH8 https://t.co/o6xdhf2u3A
— icy.tools - NFT Tracking & Alerts (@icy_tools)
Aug 20, 2021
Over the next few months, the NFT market went into hyperdrive, and the founders went full-time with icy.tools. They went full dev beast mode and started shipping new features weekly (sometimes daily). One of our biggest successes, and surprises, came when we launched our real-time trending view (yeah, we did it first). The support was astounding. We started seeing icy all over the Twitter timeline. It wasn't long before the icy.tools trending feed became a badge of honor for the projects that made the top spots. Actually, one of the main challenges of scaling icy was ensuring that the site was up and stable for all the new demand flowing in. That's when QuickNode entered the picture for the first time.
Months before being acquired by QuickNode, we looked for the most reliable nodes to run our platform. We tried a few blockchain infrastructure options but weren't satisfied until booting up with QuickNode — some serious foreshadowing, right? Fast forward a few months down the road, and icy.tools was being acquired by QuickNode. The transition so far has been seamless. We were immediately able to tap into QuickNode's infrastructure, resources, and APIs. It was also clear from day one with QuickNode that we are united in our goal of making Web3 more accessible to everyone. Of course, working side by side with some seriously smart people doesn't hurt either! Now, with our toolbox and skillset leveled up, we look toward the future.
Where does icy.tools go from here, you ask? The answer is obvious, we keep doing what we do best — building, building, and building. We have an ambitious roadmap that involves adding tons of new features, new tools, and surfacing more data insights than ever before. You're not going to want to miss what comes next!