1,000 procedurally-generated NFT monkeys on Ethereum — 50% donated to rainforest conservation

During the NFT craze of 2021, my brother and I built Funky Monkeys together. A similar project had gone viral and made serious money for its creators, and we wanted to take our own swing — but ours would give back. The concept: 1,000 unique animated pixel-art monkeys on Ethereum, with 50% of every sale automatically routed to The Rainforest Foundation US.

The collaboration split naturally. I bought my brother Aseprite, a sprite editing program, and he designed over 170 individual pixel art assets — hats, backgrounds, accessories, expressions — while I built everything on the engineering side. A custom pipeline layered his assets procedurally to generate each monkey as a unique animated GIF. The smart contract used a bonding curve that priced monkeys from 0.02 ETH up to 1.00 ETH as the collection filled, and I built a metadata API that only revealed assets for minted tokens so nobody could preview unminted monkeys. The frontend was a Nuxt.js app where you connected your wallet and minted directly.

The Rainforest Foundation had a public Ethereum wallet, so I hardcoded their address directly into the smart contract — 50% of every purchase split automatically on-chain. No middleman, no trust required, fully auditable by anyone who read the code.

The collection is on OpenSea. This was a fun project, and it taught me a lot about smart contract development, procedural generation, and building with NFTs.