Pixel Vault's Origin Story
A story in 2 parts:
GFunk meets NFTs
Pixel Vault's founder is Sean Gearin, also known as GFunk or Comicman.
GFunk’s background is in law, entrepreneurship and film/television.
He studied Law at the University of California, Irvine and Loyola Law School, Los Angeles. This led to him starting his career as a Legal Intern at Warner Bros in 2013. After that, GFunk co-founded Qruber Virtual Production Office, a collaboration and workflow management tool for film and television productions. Later, he became the VP of Business Development for Indiepay, an accounting software for production teams. In his final role before founding PV, he was the Head of Growth at Syfer, a cybersecurity company.
In terms of his crypto journey, GFunk has been around the space since 2014.
Back then, any profits he made were used to support his real world businesses. Towards the end of 2020, he discovered non-fungible tokens (NFTs) through NBA Top Shot.
What are non-fungible tokens (NFTs)?
NFTs are a way for us to represent digital assets, so that we can own things on the internet. With NFTs, we can verify:
ownership: who owns a digital asset?
authenticity: do they own the real thing?
Having grown up collecting sports cards, he could see the potential of NFTs in enabling the ownership of digital assets. He quickly fell down the NFT rabbithole; making money flipping projects like Hashmasks, collecting digital and generative art like on Art Blocks, and finding himself welcomed by the CryptoPunks community.
What are CryptoPunks?
CryptoPunks are a collection of 10,000 pixelated characters and one of the early NFT collections. They’re widely seen as being historically significant for their role in igniting the popularity and growth of NFTs. For more on this and a backstory of the CryptoPunks, Sandra Upson’s piece ‘The 10,000 Faces That Launched an NFT Revolution’ is a great read.
At that point in time, early in 2021, GFunk noticed many individuals developing brands with their CryptoPunks, like @ClaireSilver12, @punk4156 and @gmoneyNFT . However, with his background in the entertainment industry, he realised no-one was developing intellectual property (IP) behind NFTs in the traditional sense, i.e. by crafting narrative and stories.
The question he asked was:
GFunk: “What if we could create a narrative behind these stagnant on-chain assets, that drove value beyond the collectability standpoint?” (source: Every Punk has a story: GFunk and the PUNKS Comic | PROOF)
And just like that, the concept of Pixel Vault was born.
The birth of Pixel Vault
To start, GFunk teamed up with Preston Johnson a.k.a. SportsCheetah. They had their targets set on building stories around CryptoPunks. But there was one big problem; a lack of capital.
After reaching out to many crypto & NFT influencers/investors, GFunk managed to form a partnership with Beanie. Beanie invested the capital that Pixel Vault needed to launch, and offered up 13 of his own CryptoPunks. Meanwhile, GFunk and SportsCheetah were able to pull together 3 of their own. Without Beanie’s investment, Pixel Vault wouldn’t have been able to launch.
With these 16 CryptoPunks to work with, Pixel Vault launched their first NFT collection on May 10 2021: PUNKS Comic Issue #1. They created characters inspired by the look of the 16 CryptoPunks, and brought them to life through a comic. It took 5 weeks to sell out the 10,000 comics, generating 2,000 ETH in sales.
For GFunk, selling out was a big deal. He’s openly shared the fact that he borrowed money from his mum, stepdad and friends.
GFunk: “I was all in with everything I owned and then some, to launch this project. My whole life was on the line with that comic” (source: Comicman: The Exclusive Interview)
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