OnChainMonkey – News

Q3 Update

We started Q3 with the Karma mint that raised over 3,000 ETH. Metagood, the company behind OCM, raised an additional equity round to position itself for long term growth. We’ve hired 3 new folks this month, and now have a team of 18 globally. Metagood was founded in May 2021 by Danny Yang, Amanda Terry, and Bill Tai.

Following the Karma launch, the focus is now on Missions, Bananas, and the DAO. Genesis and Karma are the core collections and we’re building out functionality for both. For new folks, here’s a quick background of the Genesis collection. First, behind the simple-looking art of Genesis is highly complex onchain art and tech. The whole 10,000 pfp (profile photo) collection, including the images, the metadata, and the rich distribution was created in a single transaction on the Ethereum blockchain. Genesis was the first of its kind: no one else had done this before.

Genesis was launched on September 11, 2021, and since then a passionate OCM community has been growing around it, following the four core values of !RISE – Respect, Integrity, Sustainability, and Experimentation. Awarded 2022 Fast Company’s 20 Best World Changing Ideas for Impact Investing, the OCM community has made notable real-world impact, and created value for everyone.

Banana Economy

Bananas were created as the community currency to reward people for good actions. Genesis holders can earn bananas by being active in our Discord or tweeting with @OnChainMonkey, which can be redeemed for OCM merchandise, signed books, mint passes, and poker antes. Bananas are integrated with Discord, Twitter, Ethereum, and the OCM website, which is no small feat.

OCM DAO

We’re kicking off Season 1 of the OCM DAO with the theme of Brand and Community Building for OCM. Fifty percent of the Karma mint revenues and royalties are dedicated to the OCM DAO and it currently has ~1,800 ETH. The budget for Season 1 is 100 ETH, and we’ll describe a simple process where many small projects can be funded in an efficient manner. These projects will help align the community to build together and raise awareness for OCM. Genesis and Karma holders all have a vote in the DAO. For holders of both Genesis and Karma, they get a bonus vote, and this is just one example of the extra utility that we will be giving to our most loyal community members.

Monkeyverse Missions

Missions are a way for us to deliver further utility to our members, create value together, and have a bit of fun in the process. Missions were unlocked for Genesis just before the Karma launch, and many Genesis are already nearing completion on their first Lab Mission. The vision for Missions is a big one. Missions are a platform to incentivize value creation for the community through the use of fungible (bananas) and non-fungible tokens. We are building out this platform for the OCM community, and it could be used in the future by other communities looking to create similar incentive systems in Web3. The initial Lab Mission is a simple one, similar to “nesting” in Moonbirds aka hodling your NFT. The Lab Mission rewards long term holders of OCM. After you finish the Lab 1 Mission, you can start the Lab 2 Mission and keep leveling up your OCM. Higher level OCMs will receive more benefits!

The Lab 1 Mission for Genesis takes 30 days, which means you hold your Genesis NFT for 30 days. For Karma, the Lab 1 Mission is coming soon, and will take longer.

Leveling up your OCM unlocks more types of Mission. Missions can encompass many things, including completing projects that create value for participants and the community. Missions will integrate with the DAO. Some Missions will only be available for Monkeys who have specific traits or meta-traits. Note that whether a Genesis has eaten both Desserts (D1 and D2) is also an onchain property of the Genesis and is a meta-trait. Having eaten Desserts is marked with a green check on the OCM website and is considered an onchain upgrade to your Genesis. Some special Missions may also require having the matching sets of Genesis/Karma1/Karma2.

OCM Community & Talks

Part of the value of OCM is the awesome community. We count many founders of web2 and web3 companies as members of the team and community, including the founders/creators/leaders of DuskBreakers, Angry Ape Army, ZenAcademy, CATC, Shonen Junk, Moonbirds, Memeland, Litecoin, Dapper Labs, OneOf, The Sandbox, Axie Infinity, YGG, the Ethereum Foundation, Etherscan, Algorand, Chainlink, Second Life, Virgin Unite, Kabam, Twitch, Crunchyroll, Rotten Tomatoes, Blockchain, Sardine, Nike, Ledger, Animoca, and more. We will be running an OCM Combinator series of talks for our community. Some of the upcoming talks we’ll schedule for our members are:
– Smart contract programming, how to create an onchain NFT
– How to launch an NFT
– NFT Licensing and IP
– How the art for the Karma collection was created (led by our award winning artists)
– Web3 Security Best Practices
– Selecting an L1 Blockchain
– Angel Investing Tips (led by Bill Tai)

Karma Launch

On June 29th, we launched OCM Karma, a membership NFT collection to expand the OCM community and fund the DAO and team. The Karma mint raised over 3,000 ETH with half going to the OCM DAO. Of the 2,500 wallet accounts that minted Karma, 1,500 were new wallets to the OCM ecosystem, and most of the funds raised were from the new wallets. A total of 7,045 Karma were minted. This leaves 2,955 Karma as unminted and are assets that can be used in the future to benefit the community.

The Karma collection had a number of cool features beyond the amazing art. First, all the metadata and traits are completely onchain. Extraordinarily, the distribution of the traits was also created onchain by the smart contract itself. Doing things onchain has long term value which we’ll describe in future OCM Combinator talks. Creating the complex art combined with this onchain generation made the work for the artists more difficult. When they designed the artwork, they had to plan for billions of combinations of Karma. They could not hand pick certain combinations, and remove certain combinations of traits. They had to design traits for all combinations. On top of that, they had to design traits that respected the original Genesis collection which included a bunch of constraints, complex meta-traits, and various matches. They had to do this for two full collections: Karma1 and Karma2. Each Karma1 image required assembling 24 layers of images. Each Karma2 image required assembling 25 layers of images. A layer could be the background, or a body part, or a lighting component. This is why it took 9 months to create the full Karma1 and Karma2 collections.

We had also launched another fully onchain NFT collection in February 2022 called OCM Desserts, which Genesis holders can “eat” (i.e. burn their token) to create a Karma monkey based on the traits of their Genesis.

The Karma collection launch thus included a Dessert eating mechanic, Dessert Early Claim Tickets, VIP allowlist NFTs, and IPFS submarining. We used IPFS in a way that does not reveal the images until Desserts are eaten, even though all Karma1 and Karma2 images have already been loaded into IPFS. It was a complex art and engineering feat, and launching the collection was an intricate dance among several teams that rehearsed for several days in advance. For the actual Karma launch, all the complicated pieces came together perfectly.

The only significant problem happened when the OCM minting website was hit with a DDoS attack during our allow list mint window before our public mint. This made the website extremely slow to use or unusable. The great thing about decentralization is that minting still worked via the Ethereum smart contract directly. We shared instructions on how to mint directly from the contract and some people minted directly using Etherscan! Meanwhile, the Engineering team valiantly fought off the DDoS attack and had the website back up half a day later. No NFTs, wallets, or data were compromised in the DDoS attack.

Over 1,300 people tuned in to witness the Karma reveal live at our Karma Reveal & Desserts Party on Twitter Spaces. And staying true to doing things fairly and securely onchain, the reveal of Karma used Chainlink VRF to ensure that the whole process was provably fair.

What to look out for in the future

The first Genesis will be finishing the first Mission and leveling up. They will automatically start the second Lab Mission. Karma will be able to start their first Mission pretty soon.

We’ll be sending out an OCM Community survey next week. We did a similar survey in October 2021, and we are excited to learn how our community has developed over the last year.

Welcome party (parties) for all members. We’ll host a few welcome parties to get to know old and new members of the community.

We’ll organize a big Banana Poker party later this quarter. Save up some Bananas so you can join the fun. Last quarter we had a lively game with Charlie Lee, Owen Wilson, and Woody Harrelson, among others.

We’ll celebrate our 1 Year anniversary of OCM Genesis on September 11, 2022!

OCM has a big vision and we’ll be building for the long term. We are just starting this journey in Web3 together and have laid a solid foundation. Our core team has diverse experience in crypto, finance, art, law, and technology. Our community has an abundance of successful builders in web2 and web3, and we will be creating value together through the DAO and Missions.

The fact that OCM NFTs are onchain is important, and we’ll see the value of onchain assets more and more in the future. Crypto, defi, dapps, are all onchain. Many NFTs of 2021-2022 are the exception with so many being pointers to offchain servers. OCM is ahead of the curve. The future is bright for onchain and OCM.

Some final alpha: If you thought Karma2 was cool, wait till you see Karma3 (these are the unique 1 of 1s in the Karma collection that have not been revealed), and the new things coming for Genesis and Karma holders who have leveled up!

And final words from Bill: “It’s pretty impressive what’s been done in a year and what’s in the pipeline. A couple good decisions in strategic direction with some good community engagement, plus some ‘wind at our back’ in a market upturn… and we could come out of the current market chaos as ‘a thing’ and break out as an economic engine. The current downdraft will kill off a lot of projects, and when the smoke clears, the few remaining that have defined good ‘engagement mechanisms’ will ‘catch the updraft’ with more share of the overall activity so the growth rates of the winners will surprise everyone in the same way as in previous upcycles.”