DYOR 🔬

We love pixel art, we love CC0, and we love CryptoPunks (especially the zombies). This week, we decided to combine all three into a fun, free mint in honor of the spooky month. Taking inspiration from Dmitri Cherniak’s Goose Generator, we’re proud to present GoosePunks.

It all started when Metaversal investment analyst Matt Miller talked to creative producer Patrick Lawler about creating a PFP project based on Cherniak’s Goose Generator but with CryptoPunk traits and a Halloween feel.

While Lawler’s previously created pixel art, GoosePunks offered a unique challenge: a workspace of only 10 × 10 pixels (compared to Punks’ comparatively expansive 24 × 24 pixels).

Lawler manually drew a range of Punk traits to achieve the right look and feel and chose ones that worked at a lower resolution.

“Our 1/1 micro Zombie Punk was quite difficult to perfect,” Lawler explains. “I ended up turning off aliasing and shrunk down our punk image from 24 to 10, which looked awful in most cases, but I noticed when I’d move the shrunken image left, right, up, or down by 1px Photoshop would completely reinterpret the pixel distribution and leave me with parts of a punk that looked good.”

That process enabled Lawler to work out the basic head shape, and within 24 hours, he’d finalized the art for the collection.

Lawler used the no-code platform Bueno for trait distribution and rarity, and with some help from other members of the Metaversal team, he took the project from the drawing board to minting out in just over a week.

If you want a GoosePunk of your own, you’ll have to turn to the secondary market, because it minted out in seconds… and topped OpenSea’s charts yesterday. We’re delighted to share a little silliness with the world, and we hope you like GoosePunks as much as we liked making them.

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Headliners 🤘

• The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) acquired Refik Anadol’s Unsupervised and added it to its permanent collection. It’s massive news for Anadol, but also for the wider Web3 world, as it’s the first piece of tokenized art MoMA’s added to its illustrious vaults:

• Venture capital firm Spencer Ventures bought six figures worth of Pudgy Penguin NFTs (144 of them, to be precise) previously held by Three Arrows Capital (3AC).

• The founders of nft now announced now media, a new umbrella under which they’re organizing their publications, platforms, and events, along with rebrands of some of them.

• Annual Web3 conference NFT Paris launched a token called $NFTPARIS, that it’ll distribute to ticket holders to encourage early bird ticket sales and reward loyalty:

• Bored Ape Yacht Club parent company Yuga Labs frustrated fans when it revealed prizes for the sixth season of its game HV-MTL worth significantly less than fans spent to get in the running for them.

• 10KTF revealed its forthcoming collection of NFTs will be called “The Grailed” and says it’s “inspired by seminal moments in Wagmi-san's life.”

• Would you get a generative art tattoo designed by Tyler Hobbs and tattooed by a robot? The company behind the robo tattooist, Blackdot, clearly thinks some people will… and that they’ll pay $10,000 for the pleasure:

• NFT marketplace Magic Eden is introducing “tokenized digital collectibles,” starting with 100 Pokemon cards that can be used to redeem their physical equivalents.

• Ledger is making a Pepe-themed hardware wallet.

• The first episode of nft now’s docuseries about CryptoPunks is out and features Larva Labs’ founders:

• DeGods kicked off the first chapter of what it’s calling “The Comeback” by resetting all DeGods art and allowing holders to customize it on-chain.

• Nike’s making real-world versions of the RTFKT Dunk Genesis sneaker that only holders of the Dunk Genesis NFT can order.

Connect for more 🔌

You can find Metaversal on Twitter, Threads, LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok, and Bluesky.

Need an invite code for Bluesky? Here you go:

• bsky-social-22jby-z5kpk

• bsky-social-2f7g2-rntnq

• bsky-social-uhdll-vauib

• bsky-social-nj7b2-7vl6m

Until next time, see you in the metaverse… or the lobby at MoMA. 🖼️