Hey Guys,
Rei here. Thank you to everyone for all the support poured into the PXN reveal. It’s been a tremendous achievement for us and so rewarding to see all the months of hard work come to life in this collection. To everyone rocking their Ghosts as their new pfps, you all look banging, and we are proud to have you in the family. To the portion of the community who have concerns about the anime inspired 1/1s, you haven’t gone unheard, and we’d like to address this topic openly.
As a space, we all seem to be largely fine with derivative collections of other NFT projects and even paying homage to things in pop culture that had a large influence on our lives. There are plenty of occasions where various elements of culture are brought into a collection.
To start, we’d like to say, not to toot our own horn, but our art is definitely one of the most meticulously thought out and carefully executed within the NFT space. As a project creator and the Art Director for PXN, I am immensely proud of the work that we have put out. Our complex 2D generation system was built over months to tackle and work around various challenging elements. In order to achieve more natural asset combinations, each hairpiece for example consists of multiple sandwiching layers to achieve a foreground/background effect even with generative art.
Each asset was carefully crafted over and over to achieve the perfect lighting, design, and fit. Our rim lights… the chromatic aberration. These are all very difficult to get right.
In addition to our varied assets, we included a very tiny portion of anime inspired 1/1s within our 10,000 Ghost collection. I did it for the love of anime, these characters formed a huge part of my life growing up. I did it to pay homage and to add a bit of fun and energize our anime-loving community.
Let’s be honest, PXN has a very strong core collection which has a ridiculous amount of crazy and original pieces. These original pieces are what define and showcase our DNA. Frankly speaking, the anime pieces were never a huge selling point. We never advertised them since I left them as a surprise for the lucky people that would pull one. I’m also a fan of mystique and my love for free marketing and gacha is also well known.
However, the feedback so far has definitely gone beyond simple legal considerations. This is something that the community is actually concerned over, for the future longevity of PXN. That, I am incredibly grateful for. Because if people didn’t care about holding and seeing us through building out our tech start up, why would they care whether there are legal concerns down the road?
I get it. The “they did it too” mentality can certainly not be construed as a great argument, even if we were prepared to suffer some criticism for our fun, the community, our investors that have real money put into us. They’re backing our vision, not our off the cuff additions of anime pieces.
We are really here to build a long standing platform that could really bring new people into the NFT space, to offer the community more employment and financially rewarding opportunities in this wonderful web3 space. This isn’t lip service, this is something that we have been emphasizing on over and over during our PXN build.
I don’t want this trivial thing to devolve into a divisive topic.I want us to focus our attention on actually becoming behemoths in the web3 arena.
So let’s put this to rest. Nip it in the bud, so to speak. I am the one responsible for adding them in, so I’ll be the one to take the heat for taking them out.
My proposal is the following:
We will be pushing out blank images in a few hours to act as placeholders for some of the NFTs in question.
These are Legendaries and Epics in the collection that we deem as problematic pieces that are in the strike zone. Probably around 15–20 pieces stand out to me at this point.
Anyone that is affected will have 10e compensated when their NFT is re-rolled into another Epic or Legendary PXN original that will knock your socks off. (You all have seen how stacked our art team is, so you best believe it).
We know that this will probably not satisfy everyone, so I do apologize for it. We tried to build a unique narrative, it wasn’t perfect, it was difficult and risky. We tried to prevent a gas war, but we had to take on fud for days since we were hiding our gated mint.
We’re not perfect, and I’m certainly far from it. But I can assure you that we do try our best to keep your interests at heart. So, thank you for your patience and understanding. You can look forward to some newer and better rare pieces joining our collection in the near future.
-A very tired and sleep deprived Rei, out.
P.S. From Pants:
PXN wanted to include anime inspired 1/1s in our collection because we as a space had adopted this form of expression, projects both big and small (or even bluechips) before us have long since put beloved but proprietary characters into their collections with full support from the community. We have seen this take form in varying levels of derivation, and welcomed it with open arms because it defines us, and how we behave in web3.
For some reason, this sentiment has changed with PXN hitting the market, and whether past derivatives are looked kindly upon or are simply forgotten, the fact of the matter is that PXN has come under scrutiny through a new lens. We don’t fully understand this, but we accept it completely, because another important part of web3 is that its actors are held accountable by the community, and the path forward is forged together through collaborative input. This is why we’ve decided to address the community’s concerns seriously, and put forward the solutions seen above.
- ye
