MetaVault: Dec 30th Town Hall Recap
This is MetaVault, a weekly-ish newsletter that makes sense of the Pixel Vault universe: PUNKS Comic, MetaHero, United Planets, $PUNKS, $POW, and lots of DAOs.
Over 800 people listened in to GFunk and the team host their last Town Hall of 2021. A massive jump from the 100 or so of us who joined the Town Halls in the summer. The community is growing. The project is growing. The PV Team is growing. Exciting times.
Want to give a shout-out to Rusty for live tweeting the Town Hall. BCheque has done this in the past. Love to see this kind of leadership from the community for the community.
Elite Ape Release Mechanics
We have to start with the biggest news from the TH. The mechanics around the Elite Ape covers is next level. Let’s break out what we know as of now:
Before I read (skim?) the rest, give it to me straight.
PV wasn’t happy with the distribution of Comic #2. They collaborated with the Elite Apes and built a mechanic around the release of the Elite Ape covers. Early in January, if you own a PV NFT, BAYC, or MAYC, you’re eligible to claim a new Mint Pass, which is a new Ape Coin NFT. After you claim your Ape Coin, PV will run a raffle-like draw to select who can burn their Ape Coin for an Elite Ape Comic #2. If you’re not selected or choose to not use your Ape Coin for the Elite Ape cover, the Ape Coin will have future utility. Many more details to come in the next week or two.
Ok, so who’s eligible again?
BAYC and MAYC holders. Anyone holding a PV NFT — with the only exception being the adidas NFT.
Does eligibility vary by asset class?
Yes! Let’s hear from GFunk:
If you are a holder of the Founder’s DAO token, you'll have a higher chance. And then our set holders, either planets or the original Genesis set, you'll have the highest odds of getting access to mint one of these limited edition covers.
What this means in practice is that if you’re holding a set, you’ll likely get three Ape Coins. If you’re holding just Founder’s DAO token, you’ll likely get two Ape Coins. If you’re holding any other PV NFT, BAYC, or MAYC, you’ll likely get one Ape Coin. Again, more details to come from the team.
Wen snapshot?!
Already taken.
Tell me more about this Ape Coin.
The Ape Coins is a unique NFT designed by Raw & Rendered. Back to GFunk:
People are gonna love these as collectibles themselves. So that was ultimately the goal right after all of the burns, even the people that don't “win” are going to have a really cool NFT that will also not be overly distributed once once all of the burn mechanics are unveiled. So trying to do something that that sort of made up for the poor distribution of comics, to allowing for a very fair distribution of these elite eight covers, and also a very fair distribution of this really cool NFT in its own right, so that our entire community wins… It's like the coolest POAP possible.
Wen claim?
Roughly one week into January with a two-week claim window.
GFunk: You'll have the opportunity to claim roughly one week into January. And we'll have like a two week claim window for those NFTs.
Wen mint?
GFunk: And then the first week of February we'll start doing these kind of like lotto style raffles where people will be able to burn this ape coin and purchase the special edition cover. So the plan is to throughout the day continue cycling through winners until all of the the covers have been claimed. So that will be very, very early February.
So it's going to create a deflationary supply. And we have a future utility plan with the Elite Apes as well. That's going to continue burning the supply moving forward. And ultimately that will result in what we believe will be a very cool collection in and of itself that hopefully the community will deem is valuable on its own right. And, you know, the free giveaway in that sense. So imagine it like a mint pass where you're burning it and purchase the the special edition.
You know we love utility. Any future utility for this new NFT?
Quick answer: Yes!
GFunk: The Elite apes have seen it, I think everyone's going to like it as its own NFT. And that's sort of the the ultimate goal is to have it be a very cool collectible in itself. And there'll be future utility for this token as well past what we're doing with these elite covers. So very much a cool collectible in its own right.
So, I mean, I'm expecting probably somewhere around 25,000 total to be distributed, it could be less. And then ultimately, people are going to have to choose to claim to burn one in exchange for the Elite Eight cover, right? So 6,000 will go away there. Some people are going to want to hold on to these as collectibles. And then we have future utility plan for these that we're expecting in February or March. So definitely something that is going to keep people engaged moving forward, as opposed to just something that you know, we're distributing now and forgetting about.
Why does the adidas NFT not qualify?
From a fair distribution stand-point, the adidas release was a huge success. Lots of unique holders and new members to the community. This mechanic looks to reward people who’ve been in the ecosystem and likely didn’t get to mint Comic #2. Back over to GFunk:
We're sort of limiting it to people that the elite apes would like to to have participate. The BAYC community, and that includes mutants, and also our own token holders. There are 30,000 additional tokens there, it would just be too many tokens, right? You don't want to issue a token that's going to be worthless. So given the fair distribution of the Adidas drop, right? Over 20,000 holders, across 30,000, NFTs. All of these communities had a chance to participate in that drop. Our hope is that anybody that was involved with our ecosystem, got an Adidas NFT. But they're also holding other assets that would have qualified them otherwise. So you know, unfortunately, we can't always include everything. And just just due to the sheer numbers of those NFTs. We wanted to limit it to to like a max of, you know, 25 to 30,000 total possible claims.
Origin Stories
The big news here is that Origin Stories will be released in partnership with Coinbase:
GFunk: We're going to be starting Origin Stories, likely at the end of January, with the first issue focused on Courtney's backstory and how she ended up meeting up with the Punks and coming to Origin City.
Origin Stories will be our comic short series. So like five to 10 page comics that are released at higher frequency. Ultimately, we do plan to release these in partnership with Coinbase. So looking to have this as like a great onboarding tool for new members of the ecosystem. Shorter comic, lower price point to allow people access to the community.
But I really think these first couple will be tremendous sort of collector's items as it's essentially the third brand under Pixel Vault. PUNKS, MetaHero, and the MetaHero comic will be launching next year as well. In origin stories, which is meant to allow for quicker development of the IP, trying to generate more story and more backstory for all of our characters, so that everybody becomes more familiar with them, what drives them, etc.
Yeah, so ultimately, that's what that's sort of where we see that franchise living. I have no idea when Coinbase is going to come online. But as you know, we are a launch partner of theirs. So still unsure when that is going live.
We're ultimately probably going to be launching that franchise month by month through Coinbase. But at the outset here, it'll it'll be a typical PUNKS Comic-style drop through our own website until Coinbase is up and running.
AAA Game Development
For the newer members of our community, Virtunaut talked through the path forward for building a AAA game based on the MetaHero universe:
We are trying to build a first person shooter that leverages the MetaHero NFTs. It's also been mentioned that you don't have to own a MetaHero NFT in order to play this game, because we obviously don't want to restrict our player base to 10,000 players. The the idea is to have it be a play to earn game.
Games like this take time. This isn't something that we're releasing in a couple months. Games [of] the size and scope that we want to make are going to take a couple years. And, you know, it's also kind of a learning process for us because games of this scope haven't really been built yet in the in the space. And we have a DAO (UPDAO) that has funds in it for this game development. And so, you know, it's going to be a learning process for us to figure out. It's getting flushed out, we're going to be moving into pre-vis soon.
So I think it'll be a long journey. And I hope people have the attention span, because you know, we're living in a hyper-stimulating world right now where it's literally hard to do anything for more than 30 seconds
And VGF added a key point difference between how PV wants to build this with the UPDAO’s participation:
VGF: Well, and I like that [Virtunaut] capped it off with MetaHeroes being this vision for a community-owned, community-governed gameverse. I think that's really what differentiates the game we're trying to develop from many others.
$PUNKS Treasury
With over $5M in ETH in the $PUNKS treasury, the outstanding question the community has is: wut we buying?!
GFunk: Still sort of considering our different options. I know, the community is sort of divided as to what they'd like to do with it. Some people have wanted to just use it for buybacks. I think that that is sort of a fleeting benefit, right? Essentially, we're just going to burn through millions of dollars of ETH providing exit liquidity for people.
I think we're better off acquiring assets and allowing for community ownership of those assets, the tokens or DAOs, or some mechanic like that. And then, you know, you'd be able to stake your original $PUNKS token for whatever that next asset may be. I think that's a more virtuous circle long term, wealth building, as opposed to, some sort of fleeting mechanic that obviously would be beneficial to the $PUNKS token but long term doesn't do much for us. So still considering whether we want to do another Crypto Punks vault acquisition or if we want to buy Apes, or if we want to do some sort of ensemble of NFTs. Nothing confirmed yet. That's going to be something that we we dig deeper into in January.
Misc
Core raffle coming in early Jan
Comic #1 physical claim coming “in the next couple of weeks.”
Welcome to Jacob Wittman! He’s joining PV full-time to lead several initiatives, beginning with the legal formation of the DAOs:
Jacob: I will actually be leaving Fenwick (his current law firm) in middle of January and joining the pixel ball team full time where my focus will be building out the DAO communities, building out the structure and making sure that the community has a voice. I'm excited to focus on this full time and, and really give you guys a voice because it's at the end of the day, it's about you guys. We can build, but the reason we build is for you. And we want you to be able to participate in that. So it's exciting news for myself. Exciting news for the team, and exciting news for you guys. Can't wait to join, we're gonna really just just blow this thing up.
A bit on the Planet Giveaway schedule:
GFunk: Throughout January we're going to be doing two separate free planet DAO giveaways. And each one of those claim windows will be three planets at a time. This will get us basically done with all of the planet giveaways in January, which will allow us to do the sidekick mint pass snapshots and distribution of the sidekick mint passes in February.
WAGMI United updates?
GFunk: Yeah, so I don't know if you saw the news, but there was some turmoil with the team that we were planning to acquire. Yeah, so we are in contract with a different team. It's still proceeding, but I can't really talk about it until the deal closes.
Any opportunity that generative MHs might appear in the comics? Nothing confirmed yet, but the team wants to figure this out!
Variable earning rates on $POW by rarity? The team is exploring how to do this effectively.
Down here at the bottom, I’ll bury what should probably be the lead for long-term collectors:
GFunk: The big goals for 2022, sort of the landmark items: One of them is already well on its way and will likely be unveiled in January. And number two and three, I would hope will also be sometime early in January with the announcement of a major game development partner for the MetaHero Universe and a major production partner for our IP, whether it be PUNKS or MetaHero through more broad media channels.
Some Disclaimers: None of this is financial advice. DYOR. And yes, I’m obviously a PV collector and long-term hodlr.