Newsletter #16

Published in

Megapont

8 min readOct 26, 2023

Welcome to the sixteenth Megapont newsletter.

These regular team updates became somewhat irregular. We’re keen to reinstate the regular, long-form updates, even if the news isn’t always ground-breaking. A special thanks to Chris, an original Megapont member and founder of Console, for giving us the necessary push to make this happen.

This update contains a lot to unpack. I’ll be participating in a Q&A on the Megapont Discord tonight at 21:00 UTC. I’ll be available to address any questions you might have.

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There will be bi-weekly newsletters to take us out of 2024, given the many things we are working on. We hope that the newsletters once again become the easiest place to send someone thinking of joining our community.

We are 2!

Today, on October 26th 2023, Megapont, as an NFT project, turns 2. Megapont, Stacks, NFTs, Kongs, Punks, Apes, Robots and more are all incredible experiences that myself and Weasly have shared with the community.

We have had the highs of bull-market Times Square lavish parties and the lows of refunding a mint we worked 6months on. But one constant has remained: the most incredible community in crypto and Web3. We have all owned NFTs from other projects, from Bored Apes, CryptoPunks, Mutant Hounds, Moonbirds, and DeGods, but we consider Megapont home. It didn’t take much time on Warcraft to realise that “friend game is the endgame” is much more than a meme.

Megapont has always felt a bit rebellious. Somewhere that always attracted the realists of the NFT space. #ape-village is the community chat that almost no other project would want to deal with. We would not swap it for anything. You guys fucking rock.

Myself and Weasly have a clear singular focus going into year 3.

Deliver value consistently to our community. And smile.

Acquiring Apollo

In one of the worst-kept secrets of Megapont and Apollo, Megapont has acquired significant parts of Apollo, namely:

All NFT collections, Apollo Pass, Apes Together Pass, and Apollo Editions.
All smart contracts are owned by the Apollo Deployer.
All Apollo tooling, snapshots, raffles, node infrastructure, editions and other non-public projects such as Ordinal utility.
Several engineers from Apollo will transition to Megapont.

Megapont has not acquired:

Apollo Pay
The Apollo brand
The Apollo Discord and community

The acquisition of tooling from Apollo accelerates our vision to build tools to enable the Megapont community to make the next Megapont. Ordinal infrastructure, in particular, is ripe for disruption. Over the coming months, we will transition all tools and editions to the new MegaHub.

The much-loved Editions will return in December of this year when the MegaHub launches! The concept remains: we will be giving members of the Megapont community a budget to curate pieces. Access will still be restricted to Apollo Passes and their eventual migrated NFT.

You find existing editions from some of the most talented artists in the space here: https://opensea.io/collection/apollo-editions

The Apollo Pass NFT sale is now closed. Those NFTs will undergo a migration in early 2024. We encourage holders of Apes Together NFTs to migrate those. You can do that on the mint application. The current Apollo Pass will be used for all utility until the migration happens in early 2024.

There will be several refunds for purchases of Apollo Pass NFTs, and Apes Togethers NFTs made before Thursday 26th, October 23rd, at 12:00GMT. More details will be released in due course in the Apollo discord.

Apollo will be focussing squarely on payments, the fungible token economy and building the universal crypto payments framework.

MegaKongs to Bitcoin

The process of migrating all MegaKongs to pixel art by Weasly has been a labour of love but is nearing its end. We will soon work on the generative traits. The finish line is in sight.

The migration of your MegaKong to Bitcoin will be a free process and will transform the art into pixel art. For the rare sat hunters, you can specify what sat you want your new Ordinal to be on. Excited to see the PizzaKongDAO form…

The migration process will use teleburning. When teleburning an asset, you send it to an address derived from the inscription ID. It’s a straightforward process that some individuals have used to migrate everything from ENS to dead NFTs to Bitcoin. Even a Bored Ape was teleburned! As you would expect from Megapont, we are making efforts to make the teleburning process easy not just for MegaKongs but for everyone.

Finally, we know that some collectors do not want to part with their Kong but really want the pixel version. What do they do? Those collectors can request that a soulbound token be sent to them at the telenburn process representing the original NFT. This will be a non-transferable token that remains in your wallet. Unless, you send it to the burn address. We will not repeat the locked Punks mistake.

Wen?

We expect teleburning your kongs to kick off in January 2024.

Transitioning to Ord metadata

With the acquisition of Apollo, the first item on the agenda is utilising parent/child and batch inscriptions to get all of the Megapont metadata inscribed as ordinals.

What does this mean? The assets representing Megapont NFTs on other blockchains, specifically Stacks, will point to assets inscribed forever on Bitcoin.

In instances where a marketplace is not willing to entertain an ord pointer rather than ipfs we will fallback to an Ordinals gateway, likely to be the Ordinals.com explorer for the time being and potentially investigate Arweave until that support is added to marketplaces. It would not surprise us if Gamma were the first to add this. Hint hint.

We will begin this process with Megapont Apes, followed by the Robot factory and later our remaining collections. We hear community cries for us to migrate from Stacks to Ordinals. But, Stacks is our home, and we could not be more excited for Bitcoin layers and the release of sBTC specifically.

We have no plans or ongoing discussions to migrate any Stacks collections to Ordinals outside the metadata.

MegaHub

MegaHub will be your home for all Megapont collections and related utilities, and it will be where tools, editions, teleburning, airdrops and future mints happen.

You can build a single profile connecting all wallets and social accounts, share those details with other members, and, more importantly, access everything under the same roof. No more guessing where drops are happening, where news is shared, or where the latest tool and utility are accessed. Everything will happen in a single application.

It’s challenging to convey the profound impact this will have on our NFT collectors and our project. The frequency and simplicity with which we can roll out updates and unique releases, like the McDonalds apes, Superbowl Apes, and market-specific specials, will be significantly enhanced. It also rectifies the currently flawed onboarding process we have.

The first full release of MegaHub will land in December with an update to the acquired Apollo tools and a new much-requested feature…

Stacks Bulk Transfer.

You heard that right: you can use the MegaHub to bulk transfer all your Stacks NFTs. Maybe you want your robot components out of your main wallet, or maybe you want to trade all your Lads for a Space Whale.

MegaPixe

One more thing.

There’s a mint tomorrow.

what? Generative MegaPixe NFTs. Rainbow Unicorn NFTS!

wen? Friday 27th October, 17:00UTC.

how much? 0.0088eth (yes, two zeros, not one, no typo).

who? Everyone. Public mint. No videos, tattoos, cakes or nonsense.

where? https://megapixe.megapont.com/ The Website will go live a few hours before mint tomorrow. Comic Sans included.

supply? Probably, 10,000.

We were getting bored. The NFT space was looking boring. So we got together as a team and asked:

Is it possible?

The MegaPixe NFT collection will be the first Ethereum collection generated on-chain from Ordinals. That is right. The art will be generated on-chain and built-in real time using traits inscribed on Bitcoin.

Now that is fucking cool.

But wait. There’s more. On the 8th of November, we will open an alpha version of the MegaHub, which will feature the only teleburning application that enables you to automate the entire process and pay for your inscription with something other than Bitcoin. In this instance, PixelCoin.

Collectors will be presented with a choice: keep their MegaPixe as an on-chain Ethereum NFT with art rendered from Bitcoin or migrate completely to Bitcoin.

This includes other collections, too.

During the alpha, anyone can log in to the MegaHub application and teleburn any Ethereum NFT, clicking one button and paying the fee associated with the process using either Bitcoin or PixelCoin.

This will be the easiest and most user-friendly way to say goodbye to AWS and IPFS and move your cherished NFTs to Bitcoin.

This opens the door for collectors of NFTs on Ethereum to easily migrate their NFTs to an immutable inscription using an ERC20 token that is readily available.