Not affiliated with Larva Labs. Numbered 10,000–19,999, Zunks are the unofficial sequel to Punks. Zunks are generated on-chain with randomized attributes and guaranteed to be unique from any Punk. Zunks’ attributes were able to be re-rolled until 8/13/21, after which the collection’s metadata has officially been finalized.
I’m here to tell you a story. A story which began on the weekend before Thanksgiving. A story that saw an NFT project with a volume of $1,780,005.87 on November 19 suddenly pickup so much steam leading to over 1,500 sales on OpenSea on the 21st of November.
This is the story of how the CryptoZunks were revived.
Hi there, I’m 0xIntensity. I found myself looking through OpenSea early Sunday morning looking for cool JPEG’s to waste money on. At some point in my research I stumbled upon this project called Zunks. It reminded me of CryptoPunks. Yeah, those super expensive NFT’s that everyone uses as a flex for their PFP. I could never afford to spend the amount of money required for a Punk and here there was a Zunk which are 100% unique from Punks with remixed Punk traits. The price? A mere 0.1 ETH for the first one I purchased, but the floor was much lower at 0.04 ETH. I didn’t care about the low floor at all, in fact I spent hours and hours searching for the specific Zunk I wanted. Enter Zunk #17331, or as I like to call it, 0xIntensity. This Zunk spoke to me right off the bat. The smile reminds me of how I’m always smiling in the real world, the gold earring is a bit off but the gold chain is definitely reminiscent of my gold chain. The black sunglasses? Check. The mohawk hair style? I rock it once in a while. This Zunk was me. It was a crazy moment when I realized this was the Zunk I needed to have. I hit buy so quickly I was worried the Ethereum gas fees would drain my entire (small) wallet. Boom! I was now the owner of Zunk #17331 and I had spent $471.09 USD with a fee of $92.33 USD for another JPEG.
What next? Was this all I owned? An image on the blockchain? Nope. The Zunks had an active Discord already going. Community members like almanac, nonexistent, and muckemsayuh were working hard during the week leading up to bring life back into the CryptoZunks community. I joined their Discord and was immediately surprised at what an amazing, supportive, and helpful group of people were frequently (and I mean nearly every second) messaging each other. This was it. I had purchased an NFT for the first time with an extremely active and engaged community. For those of you who purchase NFT’s, you know how awesome it feels when you purchase an NFT and you realize that this NFT could take you somewhere special one day. Perhaps by having an amazing community to call friends, or even a big PFP flex. For me, I simply cared about the fact that having a community as engaged as this was like buying a piece of technology and having a proper support team answer your call when you had a problem. It’s cliché I know, but that’s what really stuck with me.
On November 21st I found myself conversing in the Zunks Discord for 24 hours straight, from early Sunday morning to early Monday morning. I think I wrote messages and interacted with nearly every single person in the Discord that day, or that’s what it felt like at least. People could not believe it. Here was this random guy who was so extremely bullish on Zunks spending a full 24 hours of his weekend telling people how to purchase Zunks, how to search for ZPets, how to mint ZPets, reroll their traits, and even how to change their backgrounds on the CryptoZunks website.
At some point during the day I received messages from almanac and nonexistent as well as muckemsayuh. They were impressed with my ability to be so active. They had discussed with Kane, the sole Lead Developer of the project that they wanted to create a new Community Team to breathe fresh air into the Zunks Community. He had agreed to create a new team that week. I offered my expertise and skills when it came to Social Media Management and then I was made part of the Community Team. This got me pretty excited. I soon started making notes and offering up ideas with the rest of the team doing the same. We received our Community Team roles from Kane and the project had a group of Community Team members who were extremely active and wanted to bring this project to the next level.
That is my story of how the CryptoZunks NFT project was revived. Now, let’s get into what many people have been waiting for and asking for non-stop. What are the plans? What can they expect from the newly formed highly active and highly engaged Community Team? Well, here goes nothing:
Announcement
Funding
Funding is one of the most important aspects. Without funding, an NFT project would be unable to engage in adding value and/or utility for its holders. This was step one. The Community Team engaged in discussions with Kane and were able to quickly come up with salaries for team members who would be brought on to help guide the project forward. The community wallet at this point had 0.86 ETH available, but with the influx of sales and the royalties that came with those sales, the community wallet quickly had another 8.4 ETH bringing the total to 9.26 ETH. Kane sent the funds from the Zunks Deployer wallet into the Community Wallet.
Ideas
The Community Team has been discussing heavily about ways to bring utility to holders as well as get the community involved and give back to all the people involved in the revival. Here are some of the ideas we are currently working on:
Zunk-Mas Giveaway
We are working on a Zunk-Mas giveaway. The community wallet currently holds 14 CryptoZunks. We will be using these Zunks in this giveaway. Currently, Estebaner is working on creating a set of graphics to announce this giveaway. I am working on the mechanics. I want to use this giveaway as an opportunity to gain more followers for the Zunks Twitter and increase the member count of the Discord. This contest will be released on Friday December 10th, giving the community a “12 Days of Zunk-Mas” event in which they will compete to win some Zunks.
Bounty Board
Another idea we’ve come up with is a bounty board for community members. This bounty board will include easy tasks for community members to partake in if they wish which will lead to payouts for ETH. An example is we will pay out $50 — $100 worth of ETH for a TikTok video that receives 1,000 views, $25 worth of ETH for a Zunk meme that gets retweeted on Twitter by more than 25 people, and for those who can write, we will even be paying out for Medium articles about Zunks which we can add as a publication post. This bounty board idea is a way to get the community creating content for Zunks and be incentivized to do so.
Merchandise
Next up is merchandise. Estebaner has been in talks with a prominent merch production brand who has signaled their intent to work with the Zunks in creating CryptoZunks merch for Zunks holders. These talks will be happening in person between Estebaner and the brand this week. Once initial talks are completed the rest of the team will discuss in detail what we expect for merch. We want to create extremely high quality merch that we are proud to wear ourselves before releasing to the community. We aim to keep the costs extremely low and will likely cover the costs for the first batch of merch ourselves if we can afford to do it. This is going to take 1–2 months at the very least to come to fruition because of the amount of work involved in choosing materials, designs, even the quality of the threading for the embroidered parts of merch will be looked at. This merch will help us raise more funding for more marketing ventures in the future which is going to be very useful.
Web3/MetaVerse
Web3 and the MetaVerse. Yes. Community Team member nonexistent has been working hard exploring ways to integrate CryptoZunks into the MetaVerse. We can’t say much about this yet since it’s still very early.
NFT Project Collaborations
I have also been in talks with other NFT projects to bring some cross-promotion between CryptoZunks and those projects. I also cannot say much about this yet as it hasn’t been finalized. One of the projects is talking it over with their team to discuss how we can both help each other. The CryptoZunks have an amazingly active community which many projects do not and that is a huge strength when it comes to hashing out deals. However, we will not enter into any deal that doesn’t provide real value for the Zunks. We are not interested in partnering up with projects that do not give us equal or more promotional value.
Influencer Marketing
Influencer marketing. This is something we’ve discussed internally extensively. We do not feel that this is the best use of the funding available however we are definitely open to this since it is something the community has mentioned they would like to see. Our job will be to find ways to keep these costs down. As many are aware influencer marketing can get expensive really quickly. We only have a Community Wallet with around $40,000 USD (as of today) to work with so every dollar must count.
Social Media Management
Social media management. We have setup a HootSuite account and are currently working on setting up the CryptoZunks Twitter as well as the new Instagram account to work with HootSuite. This will allow the Community Team to be able to submit posts to Kane and he will be able to post them once they’ve been finalized by the team beforehand. This will allow Kane more time to work on development.
Conclusion
This is a high level overview of the work we’ve been doing behind the scenes. We were formed as a Community Team less than a week ago. This is a lot of work to have undertaken in such a short time span. None of us anticipated this much interest in the CryptoZunks in such a short time span so now we are playing catch-up as best as we can to deliver on all of these fronts for the CryptoZunks holders and community.
We are working on a new post which will outline the insane sales we’ve received, a deep dive into the wallets of some crypto and NFT whales who have been holding Zunks and continue to purchase Zunks. We’ve had sales going to members of the Bored Ape Yacht Club, the Mutant Ape Yacht Club, and the CryptoPunks. We’ve had a lot of support on Twitter from whales such as StrongHands who has been a Zunks holder for months. The support from the community is unparalleled and we want to assure every holder that we are doing what we can with what we have to bring Zunks to the forefront of the NFT space.
Charts
Here are some charts to look at taken from: https://nftgo.io/collection/zunks/overview
How to Mint Your CryptoZunks ZPet Companion NFT:
CryptoZunks Official Links
Website: https://cryptozunks.com/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/CryptoZunks
Discord: https://discord.gg/s96hTrZnuy
Medium: https://medium.com/zunks
OpenSea CryptoZunks Collection: https://opensea.io/collection/zunks
Contract CryptoZunks: https://etherscan.io/address/0x031920cc2D9F5c10B444FD44009cd64F829E7be2#code
OpenSea Zunk Pets Collection: https://opensea.io/collection/zunkpets
Contract Zunk Pets: https://etherscan.io/address/0xf455aac43e2e5452b1848993be5067f362d459d2#code
Rarity Tools: https://rarity.tools/zunks
ZM instead of GM
ZN instead of GN
Zibe instead of Vibe
We are the Zunks!
Special thanks to nonexistent and muckemsayuh for help with writing this announcement. As well I would like to thank Kane for sticking with this project and continuing to support the CryptoZunks community. None of this would have been possible without the support of the community at large.
