Cryptozunks was created by an anonymous team and minted out in August 2021 for 0.05 ETH per zunk. By September 2021 most of the original team had left the project. It's still unclear who this team was, but it's suspected they were fictitious team members created by the founder 'Kane'.

Kane stuck around in the Discord but very rarely engaged with anyone and was largely unresponsive most of the time. The floor price of the project rapidly declined and hit a low of 0.001 ETH on October 18th 2021.

During this period a community member 4lmnc started sweeping floors, quickly amassing around 150 Cryptozunks, and reigniting interest in the project. Along with 4lmnc, community members muckemsayuh, nonexistent and dxv persuaded Kane to set up the Community Team in order to try and rescue the project and bring it back to life. The idea was for the team to moderate the Discord, promote the project, encourage Kane to keep working on Cryptozunks and generally help out with anything that needed doing. This was all on a completely voluntary basis.

Over the following weeks however it became apparent that Kane was a huge bottleneck to the ambitions of the new Community Team. Kane withheld access to the Twitter account, retained complete control of the Discord and wouldn't grant the capabilities/access/funds the team needed to make an impact. Kane also became increasingly unresponsive and absent from the project; sending a simple tweet would sometimes take days as Kane was the only person who had access to the account.

Due to these frustrations and other professional commitments 4lmnc, muckemsayuh and nonexistent decided to step away from the project. Dxv carried on working for Cryptozunks in more of a marketing and bizdev role, and various other community members eventually stepped forward to try and help out. Our current team members 6feels and Kimha became part of the Community Team in December 2021.

Over the next few months the team were in occasional contact with Kane who had promised to develop a Cryptozunks marketplace and funds for various other 'utility' ideas such as adding Cryptozunks to the WorldWide Webb game. The team set up the weekly poker tournaments and also collaborated with the Creepz and Complete the Punk projects, offering whitelist spots to Zunk holders.

In early March 2022 Kane completely vanished from Discord and stopped all communication with the team and community. The project was left with no contracts, keys, or funds, and the majority of holders left.

Cryptozunks 2.0?

The team stuck around to deliberate what they could do to save the project and in April 2022 they decided to create Cryptozunks 2.0. A new Discord server was created and the team pushed ahead with plans to clone the original Cryptozunks contract and create a more community owned project. They officially recruited 0ldtech to help with the research and development side of this and dxv contacted 4lmnc to try and bring him back on board. They then persuaded the rest of the community to follow them to the new Discord and this is the current Zunkz Discord server in use today.

In May 2022 some prominent members of the Phunks community, Kiosko and JpegPapi discovered that Kane was in fact responsible for creating Phunks, Zunks and Tendies and had abandoned the projects to go and work on Azuki after making millions from each mint. Kane now went by the name Zagabond, and he was pressured by Kiosko, JpegPapi and the wider community into handing back the money he made to the respective communities.

Thanks to their efforts the project received $1.73m ($1.59m mint proceeds + $140k royalties) from Zagabond on 14th May 2022 and the Zunkz community has voted to reward them with $120k ($60k each) for helping us secure this money.

We spent much of the first month in meetings discussing ideas, branding, marketing, the future direction of the project and the best way of organising ourselves and delegating work. Just getting every team member up to speed and organising the day to day efficiently can take a while to get right and we're the first to admit that life at Zunkz started out slowly as we were setting up processes and tools to help us manage things going forwards.

One thing we underestimated was how team members being in completely different time zones would affect the communication and productiveness of the team. We have team members in North America, Europe, Asia and Australia. Trying to coordinate the whole team when spread across time zones is tricky and it was very difficult to hit the ground running.

Original contract, images and metadata

As soon as the Zagabond news broke we started negotiations to get control of the original Cryptozunks contract. After some back and forth ownership of the contract was eventually transferred to us. We also secured some old source code for the website and all the metadata and images from the original collection. There was now no need to create Cryptozunks 2.0 and this idea was scrapped.

Cryptozunks Zunkz

We decided to slightly rebrand the project from Cryptozunks to Zunkz. This was in order to differentiate it from the Zagabond/Kane controlled project and signal a fresh start. We acquired the domain names and ENS name, and had to fix some small issues on marketplaces related to the name change.

Metadata + IPFS

Hosting the metadata in a more decentralised way became an early priority for the team. The metadata was originally being served by an API built by Zagabond and hosted on AWS (not decentralised) and we had no guarantee that Zagabond wouldn't rug the API. We therefore got the Zunkz metadata on IPFS (decentralised file storage) as soon as possible because that was the most pragmatic solution at the time. Storing metadata on-chain is more decentralised but also much more complex and we didn't feel it was necessary at that point in time.

Having said that, the metadata for each Zunk is technically already on chain in the form of a sequence of numbers. However, this is the metadata in its most basic form and it needs to be interpreted by an external service (Zagabond's API) in order to be usable for platforms like Opensea. Storing JSON metadata on IPFS was the quickest solution for us to move away from relying on Zagabond's API.

Note: Right now, the ZPet metadata is still being served by the Zagabond API, simply because they are still being minted and are not pre-determined i.e. they are randomly generated at mint. This means it isn't as simple as just dropping the images/metadata on IPFS. We would need to build an API to interpret the sequence of numbers stored for each pet in order to generate the images and metadata required for platforms like Opensea and we've just not had the resources to look into this yet.

The Orc

One of our early ideas on how to take Zunkz forwards was to be much more of a storytelling project using digital comic books, animations and other mediums. We didn't have any concrete ideas yet but Goblintown was pumping around this time and we thought it would be cool to try and integrate goblintown into the Zunkz story.

Based on what we'd seen so far we believed goblintown to be a future 'blue-chip' project, and we wouldn't just throw that term around lightly. Shortly after the goblintown mint we saw the Orc goblintown 1/1 for 77.75 ETH ($141,304 at the time) on Looksrare. This was the cheapest 1/1 by around 150 ETH at the time and we made a snap decision to grab it. The idea was to keep quiet about the purchase so it would give us time to work it into our story and slowly reveal it over time, using hints and clues spread across Discord and the web.

In hindsight spending this much money so flippantly without any kind of vote from the community was wrong and for that we wholeheartedly apologize. We let our excitement cloud our judgment, however we were always acting in good faith and with the best of intentions. We want to build a fun project and we believed, in that moment, that acquiring a 1/1 goblin for future utility in the project would generate hype and be looked on favorably. Unfortunately, the way we executed the purchase had the opposite effect and it came across as self-indulgent and shady. Rest assured we have taken all feedback on board and learnt from this.

For what it's worth, we still believe holding the goblin 1/1 will prove to be a good long term investment for the Zunkz community, and anyone is free to submit a proposal on how best to utilise the Orc.

Alpha channels & Zunkz School

One of the most successful things we've implemented so far has been the Alpha section of our Discord run by HttpPwnHub. Alpha members have access to HttpPwnHub's daily analysis and his calls are netting people decent profits. Just this week, in the depths of a bear market, three Zunk holders together made around 40 ETH of unrealized profit just by following calls in the alpha channel.

We don't just want our community to follow someone blindly though. Holders also have access to icytools alerts, an alpha chat that's extremely lively where the community can discuss different strategies and we've also implemented Zunkz School.

Zunkz School acts as a recurring weekly learning platform for the Zunkz community and a discussion stage for any insight and/or questions. Each week has a dedicated discussion topic(s) and serves as a place you can either leave a little knowledge of your own or leave with the knowledge of your peers.

Members currently need to hold 5 Zunkz to gain access to the alpha channels, but we will soon be reducing this down to 3. We feel this is a better balance between being more inclusive but also still helping to drive some demand for Zunkz. A larger alpha community will also be more attractive in gaining access to whitelists in other projects.

Website

We discussed building a brand new website but we didn't feel like it was the best use of our resources when such a great website already existed. Therefore in the short term we decided to just deploy the site to our own host so that we weren't reliant on Zagabond hosting it for us.

The website that Zagabond built is a React app, and should have been fairly straightforward to deploy. However, when going through everything we realized that the source code we'd been given was outdated, and not the latest code currently deployed to cryptozunks.com. Apparently, Zagabond doesn't use Github, because we were told the code was stored on his machine and after being 'hacked' this was the latest code he had access to.

This meant we had some extra unforeseen work to do to fix the code and get everything working. This slowed us down because we now had to understand the codebase and try to recreate the existing experience. In the end we opted for a slightly simpler version of the website because it was more important to get the site live and working so people could see their zunkz and mint their pets.

Community proposals and voting

When we received the money back in May we committed to giving 100% of secondary market royalties to the community for the next 12 months to use for anything they want, subject to a vote. These community fund proposals have been live in the Discord since June and so far we have held three votes on Snapshot.

We don't feel this goes far enough though and given recent feedback will be shaking up how we do proposals so that the community are much more involved in the decision making of the entire project going forwards.

Marketplace

Dxv was responsible for pushing the idea of a Zunkz-only marketplace. This is a marketplace-as-a-service product and will allow Zunkz to take a % of the platform fees that would usually all go to the platform i.e. Opensea. We've still not launched this but it's ready to go and will be live very early next week.

Metaverse

We've been interested in metaverse projects since December. Creating a place where Zunk holders can meet and play together (chat, walk around, play poker) was something we've been asked to do by the community and something we're really interested in pursuing.

Thanks to Shera, one of our community members, we first thought of doing a clubhouse on Sandbox and we've been testing this out recently. We've found a designer to help with the build and will shortly put it to a proposal for the community to vote on.

We also wanted to create skins and wearables for the different metaverses and we currently have some Decentraland wearables awaiting approval. As soon as these have been approved by Decentraland they will be used as prizes for Zunkz that participate in our giveaways and game nights.

As well as that we are also collaborating with WorldWide Web3 and will be among the first projects to try their metaverse 2.0 with our own Zunkz avatar which you can use within the game.

We will of course keep looking into different metaverse projects and creating new things as we go for the benefit of all Zunk holders.

Poker nights

We currently run a weekly Poker night for Zunkz with prizes dished out to the winner. This has proved fairly popular and we will continue to run it as long as it’s popular.

Going Forward

The Zunkz project has seen ups and downs throughout the year. One thing is sure, this collection holds and will hold for a long time to come thanks to the dedication of its community, the people who believed in the project, and the excellent atmosphere that reigns every day within the community.

Good Zibes are the words that best describe our project and we will continue to thrive and be responsible for this jewel which for some will be engraved forever in our memories. #ZunkzForEver

Cryptozunks was created by an anonymous team and minted out in August 2021 for 0.05 ETH per zunk. By September 2021 most of the original team had left the project. It's still unclear who this team was, but it's suspected they were fictitious team members created by the founder 'Kane'.

Kane stuck around in the Discord but very rarely engaged with anyone and was largely unresponsive most of the time. The floor price of the project rapidly declined and hit a low of 0.001 ETH on October 18th 2021.

During this period a community member 4lmnc started sweeping floors, quickly amassing around 150 Cryptozunks, and reigniting interest in the project. Along with 4lmnc, community members muckemsayuh, nonexistent and dxv persuaded Kane to set up the Community Team in order to try and rescue the project and bring it back to life. The idea was for the team to moderate the Discord, promote the project, encourage Kane to keep working on Cryptozunks and generally help out with anything that needed doing. This was all on a completely voluntary basis.

Over the following weeks however it became apparent that Kane was a huge bottleneck to the ambitions of the new Community Team. Kane withheld access to the Twitter account, retained complete control of the Discord and wouldn't grant the capabilities/access/funds the team needed to make an impact. Kane also became increasingly unresponsive and absent from the project; sending a simple tweet would sometimes take days as Kane was the only person who had access to the account.

Due to these frustrations and other professional commitments 4lmnc, muckemsayuh and nonexistent decided to step away from the project. Dxv carried on working for Cryptozunks in more of a marketing and bizdev role, and various other community members eventually stepped forward to try and help out. Our current team members 6feels and Kimha became part of the Community Team in December 2021.

Over the next few months the team were in occasional contact with Kane who had promised to develop a Cryptozunks marketplace and funds for various other 'utility' ideas such as adding Cryptozunks to the WorldWide Webb game. The team set up the weekly poker tournaments and also collaborated with the Creepz and Complete the Punk projects, offering whitelist spots to Zunk holders.

In early March 2022 Kane completely vanished from Discord and stopped all communication with the team and community. The project was left with no contracts, keys, or funds, and the majority of holders left.

Cryptozunks 2.0?

The team stuck around to deliberate what they could do to save the project and in April 2022 they decided to create Cryptozunks 2.0. A new Discord server was created and the team pushed ahead with plans to clone the original Cryptozunks contract and create a more community owned project. They officially recruited 0ldtech to help with the research and development side of this and dxv contacted 4lmnc to try and bring him back on board. They then persuaded the rest of the community to follow them to the new Discord and this is the current Zunkz Discord server in use today.

In May 2022 some prominent members of the Phunks community, Kiosko and JpegPapi discovered that Kane was in fact responsible for creating Phunks, Zunks and Tendies and had abandoned the projects to go and work on Azuki after making millions from each mint. Kane now went by the name Zagabond, and he was pressured by Kiosko, JpegPapi and the wider community into handing back the money he made to the respective communities.

Thanks to their efforts the project received $1.73m ($1.59m mint proceeds + $140k royalties) from Zagabond on 14th May 2022 and the Zunkz community has voted to reward them with $120k ($60k each) for helping us secure this money.

We spent much of the first month in meetings discussing ideas, branding, marketing, the future direction of the project and the best way of organising ourselves and delegating work. Just getting every team member up to speed and organising the day to day efficiently can take a while to get right and we're the first to admit that life at Zunkz started out slowly as we were setting up processes and tools to help us manage things going forwards.

One thing we underestimated was how team members being in completely different time zones would affect the communication and productiveness of the team. We have team members in North America, Europe, Asia and Australia. Trying to coordinate the whole team when spread across time zones is tricky and it was very difficult to hit the ground running.

Original contract, images and metadata

As soon as the Zagabond news broke we started negotiations to get control of the original Cryptozunks contract. After some back and forth ownership of the contract was eventually transferred to us. We also secured some old source code for the website and all the metadata and images from the original collection. There was now no need to create Cryptozunks 2.0 and this idea was scrapped.

Cryptozunks Zunkz

We decided to slightly rebrand the project from Cryptozunks to Zunkz. This was in order to differentiate it from the Zagabond/Kane controlled project and signal a fresh start. We acquired the domain names and ENS name, and had to fix some small issues on marketplaces related to the name change.

Metadata + IPFS

Hosting the metadata in a more decentralised way became an early priority for the team. The metadata was originally being served by an API built by Zagabond and hosted on AWS (not decentralised) and we had no guarantee that Zagabond wouldn't rug the API. We therefore got the Zunkz metadata on IPFS (decentralised file storage) as soon as possible because that was the most pragmatic solution at the time. Storing metadata on-chain is more decentralised but also much more complex and we didn't feel it was necessary at that point in time.

Having said that, the metadata for each Zunk is technically already on chain in the form of a sequence of numbers. However, this is the metadata in its most basic form and it needs to be interpreted by an external service (Zagabond's API) in order to be usable for platforms like Opensea. Storing JSON metadata on IPFS was the quickest solution for us to move away from relying on Zagabond's API.

Note: Right now, the ZPet metadata is still being served by the Zagabond API, simply because they are still being minted and are not pre-determined i.e. they are randomly generated at mint. This means it isn't as simple as just dropping the images/metadata on IPFS. We would need to build an API to interpret the sequence of numbers stored for each pet in order to generate the images and metadata required for platforms like Opensea and we've just not had the resources to look into this yet.

The Orc

One of our early ideas on how to take Zunkz forwards was to be much more of a storytelling project using digital comic books, animations and other mediums. We didn't have any concrete ideas yet but Goblintown was pumping around this time and we thought it would be cool to try and integrate goblintown into the Zunkz story.

Based on what we'd seen so far we believed goblintown to be a future 'blue-chip' project, and we wouldn't just throw that term around lightly. Shortly after the goblintown mint we saw the Orc goblintown 1/1 for 77.75 ETH ($141,304 at the time) on Looksrare. This was the cheapest 1/1 by around 150 ETH at the time and we made a snap decision to grab it. The idea was to keep quiet about the purchase so it would give us time to work it into our story and slowly reveal it over time, using hints and clues spread across Discord and the web.

In hindsight spending this much money so flippantly without any kind of vote from the community was wrong and for that we wholeheartedly apologize. We let our excitement cloud our judgment, however we were always acting in good faith and with the best of intentions. We want to build a fun project and we believed, in that moment, that acquiring a 1/1 goblin for future utility in the project would generate hype and be looked on favorably. Unfortunately, the way we executed the purchase had the opposite effect and it came across as self-indulgent and shady. Rest assured we have taken all feedback on board and learnt from this.

For what it's worth, we still believe holding the goblin 1/1 will prove to be a good long term investment for the Zunkz community, and anyone is free to submit a proposal on how best to utilise the Orc.

Alpha channels & Zunkz School

One of the most successful things we've implemented so far has been the Alpha section of our Discord run by HttpPwnHub. Alpha members have access to HttpPwnHub's daily analysis and his calls are netting people decent profits. Just this week, in the depths of a bear market, three Zunk holders together made around 40 ETH of unrealized profit just by following calls in the alpha channel.

We don't just want our community to follow someone blindly though. Holders also have access to icytools alerts, an alpha chat that's extremely lively where the community can discuss different strategies and we've also implemented Zunkz School.

Zunkz School acts as a recurring weekly learning platform for the Zunkz community and a discussion stage for any insight and/or questions. Each week has a dedicated discussion topic(s) and serves as a place you can either leave a little knowledge of your own or leave with the knowledge of your peers.

Members currently need to hold 5 Zunkz to gain access to the alpha channels, but we will soon be reducing this down to 3. We feel this is a better balance between being more inclusive but also still helping to drive some demand for Zunkz. A larger alpha community will also be more attractive in gaining access to whitelists in other projects.

Website

We discussed building a brand new website but we didn't feel like it was the best use of our resources when such a great website already existed. Therefore in the short term we decided to just deploy the site to our own host so that we weren't reliant on Zagabond hosting it for us.

The website that Zagabond built is a React app, and should have been fairly straightforward to deploy. However, when going through everything we realized that the source code we'd been given was outdated, and not the latest code currently deployed to cryptozunks.com. Apparently, Zagabond doesn't use Github, because we were told the code was stored on his machine and after being 'hacked' this was the latest code he had access to.

This meant we had some extra unforeseen work to do to fix the code and get everything working. This slowed us down because we now had to understand the codebase and try to recreate the existing experience. In the end we opted for a slightly simpler version of the website because it was more important to get the site live and working so people could see their zunkz and mint their pets.

Community proposals and voting

When we received the money back in May we committed to giving 100% of secondary market royalties to the community for the next 12 months to use for anything they want, subject to a vote. These community fund proposals have been live in the Discord since June and so far we have held three votes on Snapshot.

We don't feel this goes far enough though and given recent feedback will be shaking up how we do proposals so that the community are much more involved in the decision making of the entire project going forwards.

Marketplace

Dxv was responsible for pushing the idea of a Zunkz-only marketplace. This is a marketplace-as-a-service product and will allow Zunkz to take a % of the platform fees that would usually all go to the platform i.e. Opensea. We've still not launched this but it's ready to go and will be live very early next week.

Metaverse

We've been interested in metaverse projects since December. Creating a place where Zunk holders can meet and play together (chat, walk around, play poker) was something we've been asked to do by the community and something we're really interested in pursuing.

Thanks to Shera, one of our community members, we first thought of doing a clubhouse on Sandbox and we've been testing this out recently. We've found a designer to help with the build and will shortly put it to a proposal for the community to vote on.

We also wanted to create skins and wearables for the different metaverses and we currently have some Decentraland wearables awaiting approval. As soon as these have been approved by Decentraland they will be used as prizes for Zunkz that participate in our giveaways and game nights.

As well as that we are also collaborating with WorldWide Web3 and will be among the first projects to try their metaverse 2.0 with our own Zunkz avatar which you can use within the game.

We will of course keep looking into different metaverse projects and creating new things as we go for the benefit of all Zunk holders.

Poker nights

We currently run a weekly Poker night for Zunkz with prizes dished out to the winner. This has proved fairly popular and we will continue to run it as long as it’s popular.

Going Forward

The Zunkz project has seen ups and downs throughout the year. One thing is sure, this collection holds and will hold for a long time to come thanks to the dedication of its community, the people who believed in the project, and the excellent atmosphere that reigns every day within the community.

Good Zibes are the words that best describe our project and we will continue to thrive and be responsible for this jewel which for some will be engraved forever in our memories. #ZunkzForEver