Newsletter #3

Welcome to the third and final Megapont Newsletter of 2021. What an incredible end to the year it has been so far. We have been extremely fortunate to work with the Megapont community and we are truly grateful for the opportunity that you have afforded the team.

In this newsletter, we want to take the opportunity to look ahead at where we want to go as a community rather than reflect on the year gone by.

Megapont has always been about building something sustainable and valuable for our community. We strongly believe that our focus on creating a venture fund, the Megapont Robot Factory NFT drop and further exclusive benefits in 2022 will help us achieve this goal.

Let’s dive into each of these topics in more detail below.

Megapont Fund

Today, we are pleased to announce the introduction of the Megapont Fund: a venture fund that will invest capital and resources into projects within the Stacks ecosystem. This is a critical step in developing the Megapont community.

The Megapont Fund will have several key areas of focus:

• Investing in infrastructure tooling within the Stacks ecosystem. This includes tooling that will help bring new NFT projects to the market quickly, along with tools that provide collectors with a means of analysing their portfolio as well as on-chain activity.
• Working with new creators interested in launching NFTs, especially underrepresented creators.

To be eligible, the only stipulation is that the projects supported must provide some direct benefit to the Megapont community. We hope that projects will use this to think about benefits that extend beyond whitelists and tried and tested formulas.

We are aiming to have our application process live on the Megapont website before Christmas. The first two investments we are going to be making using the Megapont Fund will be announced shortly.

Megapont Robot Factory

The Megapont Robot Factory is going to open for business in just ten days! We wanted to take the opportunity to outline a few details of this exciting new mint for Ape holders. However, we are not going to go over everything as the process of using the factory is reasonably descriptive. The team will be on hand to ensure that everyone gets the assistance they need.

Robots or Mainframe?

We may have made things slightly confusing by using the term Mainframe. A Mainframe is simply a Robot without any components. From today, we will not be using the terminology Mainframe, and every Robot will merely be called a Robot.

Airdrop or Mint?

Due to many Apes being kept in Ledger wallets or listed on custodial marketplaces, we are not going to be airdropping Robots and Components to holders. Instead, these will need to be claimed.

These claims must also be made for your complimentary Component Crate and Robot. You can claim a Component Crate and Robot for every Ape you own. We will update the Megapont marketplace so that it will indicate if a Robot has been claimed for that Ape.

What are Component Crates?

Each Component is an individual NFT, and the Component Crate is just UX sugar on top of a mint-many function. What this means is that when you Claim or Mint an additional Component Crate, you are minting several Component NFTs at once. Therefore Component Crates can not be sold or traded, but all of the individual Component NFTs can.

We have an updated Marketplace UI for this.

How many Component Crates, and at what price?

There will be 2,500 Component Crates reserved to be claimed at no cost for Ape holders. Additionally, there will be another 7,500 Component Crates to Mint. These will only be mintable by holders of a Robot! If you sell or list your Robot at a custodial marketplace, you will be unable to mint additional Component Crates.

We are monitoring the Stacks price before setting the Component Crate price in stone. They will cost no more than 20 STX each and they will contain at least 6 individual Component NFTs.

When does the Factory close?

We have not determined a date just yet, but the closing of the Megapont Robot Factory is likely to be around the early summer of 2022.

When Mint?

Get out.

Megapont 2022

Some community members have previously said we might be too transparent with what we are doing. We disagree. You are our partners and investors, and building alongside the community in public is how we will continue to do things.

Q1 2022: MegaDAO

We are making good progress in ensuring that the DAO is functional as soon as possible. After Robots and the holiday period, you can expect our efforts regarding the MegaDAO to ramp up considerably.

After all, there’s that previously discussed vote on the CC0 licence for Apes to put to a community vote.

You can read more about the CC0 and Public Domain efforts in a previous post from the team.

Q1 2022: Mega Kongs

I do not need to say much about Mega Kongs. We all know they are coming and we all know they are awesome. Mega Kongs will mint on Ethereum. Fifty percent of the supply will be reserved for Apes. The remaining fifty percent will be sold in a public sale, making it a 50/50 split.

There will be accompanying pixel art for when the Mega Kongs transfer across chains between Ethereum and Stacks. This artwork will be revealed by Weasly when the bridge is complete.

Q2 2022: Ethereum Bridge and derivative Apes

Our full ETH <> STX bridge is going to be launched with a bang. A 1/1 generative derivative collection of Megapont Apes on Ethereum.

There will be a mechanism to get your Ape’s ETH representation without having to bridge. We do not want to force people into ETH and feel like the entire community should benefit from seeing how awesome their Apes will look with another artist taking on the amazing pixel work.

Q2 2022: …

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Q3 2022: VX Apes on Ethereum

Work has already begun on what the team considers to be the beginning of the next phase of Megapont—having a Public Domain voxel representation of all Apes.

We will endeavour to ensure that our voxel Apes are usable not just in the Sandbox game but all other ‘metaverse’ projects, including 3D printing.

This is the most significant time and resource investment that we currently have ongoing. Therefore, our art team has expanded beyond Weasly and Bearlogger to account for this additional work.

To kickstart a home for the VX Apes, we will release details of acquired Sandbox land in due course, along with information about our development partner who will be responsible for recreating Megapont City in the Sandbox.

And naturally, there is more to come…

There are other ideas and items currently being worked on. Some of these will make it to the public, others will not. Until we are committed to releasing work, we will not show it to the community. Furthermore, the DAO is likely going to become the mechanism for us to gauge interest in future derivatives and mints moving forward.

Conclusion

This is a lot of words. Too many words. We hope that this gives you confidence that you are part of a project that is here to innovate and take the community on an exciting journey across the blockchain.

For those of you taking some family time and stepping away from crypto and NFTs over the holiday period, have a fantastic time and enjoy every moment with your family and loved ones. See you on the other side!

Part II

Look out for a Roadmap Part 2 on Sunday outlining some very exciting updates from partner projects and upcoming mints!