It’s October 2022, I’ve been exploring two ideas, YungPunks and Thursday.wtf.

YungPunks is a pixel art derivative of CryptoPunks with influencers from across culture, and of course, web3 in general. I’m excited, I love the art, I love the spin on it.

Thursday.wtf is a decentralized social media application where your data, and it’s history isn’t leveraged via opaque business practices that we’ve come to simply accept.

Fast forward to roughly 4/20, I’m doing what I do, building up ideas, making art, exploring. The YungPunks artwork is coming along, Thursday branding and prototypes are looking good, these 2 separate ideas exist, they are happening, and then…

This changes everything, I realize that YungPunks can be to Thursday what Blockies/Jazzicons are to Ethereum. And the idea of on-chain digital identity is here.

YungPunks and Thursday.wtf, in an instant, become one project.

YungPunks are the accounts for Thursday, every user gets a unique YungPunk on sign-up. And what’s more, with ERC-6551 every account (every YungPunk) has it’s own wallet! YungPunks can be customizable with new traits and because they are Ethereum accounts that can connect to dApps, transact and so much more, these users are truly digital identities that we can reward for interacting with web3 as a whole.

It’s a big idea, I’m going to do everything in my power to make it happen. I rope my friend Sparked in to help with the engineering work. We come up with DankestAI, an AI tool built on Stable-Horde that will enable easy image and text generation for Thursday.wtf users and so much more.

Fast forward again to September 2023, we’ve been working on this slowly, carefully, cautiously for a year, and then I make the first mistake, I begin to rush.

To preface what I’m about to say next, I am not a rich man by any stretch of the imagination, I’m bootstrapping all of this with no bank balance, no cash injection and no investment. I brought in some more friends to help. Motor, Monty and Toshiba, guys who all believe in the idea, that are passionate about it, that are willing and able to put in the work. People who see the future of YungPunks and Thursday and don’t need paying right now.

Ok, here goes. The uncomfortable bit, the failure.

PunkPasses, 10,000 mint passes where the holders could claim the first 10,000 YungPunks and get a bunch of exclusive traits & perks. It was an attempt to raise some capital to hire and expand the team. We decided to use Optimism and thirdweb for PunkPasses. Reduced fees and pre-made contracts made it easy for us to execute this idea and we decided to launch PunkPasses on Nov 1, the first anniversary of the YungPunks Twitter account creation. I started running daily spaces talking about everything we had planned.

We deployed $YPUNK, our native platform and governance token that will be used throughout of ecosystem and launched the PunkPool and PunkPoints to give anyone fair access to get access to an allocation of $YPUNK.

Realistically, we did not rely PunkPasses and PunkPoints to make yungPunks and Thursday work. We didn’t NEED the capital then and we don’t need it now, but it would have helped for a number of reasons. Being able to hire the team so we can all give more time and energy to the project would have helped, being able to expand the team would have helped, being able to deliver some amazing marketing activations would have helped, but that’s all extra. PunkPasses and PunkPoints failed as capital generation tools, but they succeeded in helping us generate the beginnings of an amazing community. The YungPunk claim and public sale was going to happen on December 24th regardless.

What happened next could be viewed as a Black Swan event. We get the email from thirdweb that they have found a vulnerability in an open-source library they use and ALL of our contracts need to be locked (which we did immediately), snapshots need to be taken (which we did immediately), and we have to recreate, redeploy and redistribute all of the assets to our community.

What does this mean for the team and for the community? As a team, it means we have to recreate and redeploy 3 contracts and airdrop the new assets to our community. This takes time, careful consideration and money. It is a huge bump in the road.

As a community it means they (you) have to wait longer for the YungPunks claim.

It’s not ideal and I think some people would throw in the towel, but not me, not us. I am so deeply bullish on the idea of YungPunks X Thursday.wtf and I will not stop.

YungPunks is more than a PFP collectibles collection. Since merging the ideas of YungPunks & Thursday we always knew that we were building something more akin to protocols and public goods.

YungPunks is an ecosystem, we are building cool stuff for web3 and creators in general and we will not stop.

There’s been alotta success, alotta failure, and we’re not done.

To everyone that has stuck around, to PunkPass and PunkPoints mintooooooors, to our partner communities, we’ve got you, the timeline has changed but the ideas and goals remain the same.

I appreciate you, we appreciate you.

Jack