Holy crap! What a month it’s been for Punks and Pixel Vault. With so much going I wanted to start a monthly recap series to help my fellow punks stay on top of all the exciting news. First things first, Punks Issue #1 sold out! Huge congrats to the Pixel Vault team and everyone that has worked so hard on building this project. The only place to grab Issue #1 now is on OpenSea, with the secondary market price floor already sitting at a nice premium. Now onto the rest of the news!
Pixel Vault
Last month the Pixel Vault team grew considerably. The supremely talented Chris Wahl came onboard as the Chief Artist across all Pixel Vault projects. Manny Morales joined on the engineering side as a full time software engineer and technical liaison. Finally, Woodridge is joining GFunk on business development while Odious will be leading MetaHero Universe (more on that anon) while also serving as Creative Director and Artist for Pixel Vault. Felicitations to everyone! Finally, Pixel Vault will be working with Bittrees who will partner with Pixel Vault on the Solidity side of things, with Manny leading that partnership from the PV side.
Elsewhere in Pixel Vault news, construction of the Pixel Vault HQ in the Metaverse has started. The HQ will be in the CryptoVoxels metaverse, a towering building 17m high in the Gangnam district. Pixel Vault also confirmed the acquisition of a large parcel in Somnium and hinted at a possible build in The Sandbox.
Ape Madness!
With plans for Issue #2 beginning to solidify this month Pixel Vault launched Ape Madness, a March Madness style bracket where fans will be able to vote in 8 Apes to appear in the next comic. While only 8 of the several hundred Apes entered will actually earn an appearance, everyone that submitted an Ape for the tournament will receive an special NFT gift designed by Chris Wahl for participating!
The first round went live June 25th at 7pm EST, with voting available on punkscomic.com. Anyone with a MetaMask wallet can vote, though voting is limited to once per user. For voting on mobile access the site through the MetaMask app. Results from round one have officially posted and round 2 kicks off July 1st.
Tokenomics Update
In May Pixel Vault laid the foundation for how revenue streams like merchandise would flow back to $PUNKS holders. To recap, profits from ventures like merchandising will be used to market buy $PUNKS with $ETH via markets on SushiSwap or UniSwap. This will provide liquidity for the the tokens by adding $ETH to the liquidity pools while also raising the per token value as there is more buy side pressure. The purchased $PUNKS tokens will then flow back to stakers, who are already earning $PUNKS tokens by staking their $COMIC. With this refresher in mind let’s take a look at the new partnerships and revenue streams announced by Pixel Vault this month to drive even more value to $PUNKS tokens holders.
Earlier in June Pixel Vault announced that they’d be leveraging SuperRare to mint 1/1 Punks fine art, collectables and physicals. Like the merch sales 100 percent of the profits here will flow back to $PUNKS holders. The first SuperRare sale already took place in the form of the concept art for Courtney, selling for 2.5E. This revenue will eventually be used to market buy $PUNKS tokens as described above when they are available. Additionally Pixel Vault held their first auction, with a nice bundle of goodies donated by Chris Wahl, including some comics and a few signed pieces. Again, profits here will flow back to $PUNKS holders.
Perhaps the most cryptic and exciting announcement on the “revenue streams for stakers” front was the partnership with MetaHero Universe. Initially announced on Twitter, MetaHero Universe will focus on NFT based identity (starting with avatars…) with a heavy suggestion of future metaverse utility. As with the preceding announcements $PUNKS holders will benefit to the tune of 30% of minting revenue used for token buybacks. The team estimate this to be several hundred ETH.
Final bit of news on the staking side is the announcement of a similar partnership with MetaverseDAO to create a line of Punks Comic metaverse wearables. These werables will see 25% of revenues flowing back to $PUNKS token holders. As we can begin to see the number of revenue streams stacking up to drive value back to $PUNKS stakers is getting fairly impressive.
Hope you’re still with us because there is also a lot going on on the burn side! To kick things off the Founders Vault DAO acquired some new pieces starting with an alternative art Punks cover from the incredible BornOld. Additionally the 1/1 signed Punks cover by the Pixel Vault team minted through SuperRare will be sent to the DAO. Finally, in the spirit of Ape Madness both Beanie and GFunk have donated their apes to the Vault DAO. Beanie’s Ape is #5860 and GFunk’s Ape is #2002. All in all there these are four great pieces added to the an already stacked vault. How DAO members will benefit directly from this growing collection is unclear but hopefully we will have more details on that soon.
Saving the biggest news for last as we got word from Pixel Vault that the supremely talented fvckrender will be designing the Founders Vault DAO token! This seemingly innocuous bit of news reveals a few things. First, the Founders DAO token will be an NFT, likely an ERC-721. That means the market for buying and selling DAO tokens will likely be on OpenSea. Liquidity for these tokens was one of my biggest unanswered questions from the initial launch details. These deductions go some way toward addressing that. With this in mind perhaps the coolest reveal here is that by burning a COMIC you’ll get an NFT designed by fvckrender. Pretty fvcking cool! Oh, and one more thing. Fvckrender will be contributing a 1/1 NFT to the Founders DAO.
Wrapping Up
July promises to be an even bigger month for Pixel Vault. After laying solid foundations since launch we should hopefully get an update on burning and staking, both of which should hopefully go live in July. Additionally Ape Madness will wrap up and the ball will well and truly be rolling on Issue #2. With all this in store, and I am sure much, much more, we’re set up for another crazy month. Catch y’all again at the end of it.
x0x0BEW
