Pixel Vault's Origin Story
Last updated
Last updated
A story in 2 parts:
Pixel Vault's founder is , also known as or Comicman.
GFunk’s background is in law, entrepreneurship and film/television.
In terms of his crypto journey, GFunk has been around the space since 2014.
The question he asked was:
And just like that, the concept of Pixel Vault was born.
For GFunk, selling out was a big deal. He’s openly shared the fact that he borrowed money from his mum, stepdad and friends.
He studied Law at the and . This led to him starting his career as a Legal Intern at in 2013. After that, GFunk co-founded , a collaboration and workflow management tool for film and television productions. Later, he became the VP of Business Development for , an accounting software for production teams. In his final role before founding PV, he was the Head of Growth at , a cybersecurity company.
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 .
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 , collecting digital and generative art like on , and finding himself welcomed by the community.
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 is a great read.
At that point in time, early in 2021, GFunk noticed many individuals developing brands with their CryptoPunks, like , and . 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.
GFunk: “What if we could create a narrative behind these stagnant on-chain assets, that drove value beyond the collectability standpoint?”
To start, GFunk teamed up with Preston Johnson a.k.a. . 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 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: . 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.
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”
