In the NFT world, a launch with any major problems is often regarded as either a “rugpull” or a major slip-up that is impossible to recover from. That, or some projects, simply scam people for their money. It’s not too uncommon to encounter these “rugs”, as they are called colloquially; this project, however, didn’t just leave it there and instead, took the bold step of refunding everyone at a $28,000 loss, turning heads and giving their existing community renewed levels of trust.
After we came across this project on Twitter, we had to check them out – after all, how many projects refund people for errors? Even if they didn’t plan on rugging at first, most people probably would’ve ditched the project if they had to take a $28K loss. So we dove right in and after a chat with them casually in their discord, we found that the recently “failed” project – Funky Punks – is designed by Funky Labs, a team that had another NFT project on Ethereum recently, themed around cultural idiosyncrasy and celebration.
They were founded by e-commerce entrepreneurs who found their passion in NFTs and, according to them, they wanted to bring individuality to everyone through the Metaverse.
Their initial project was called International Punks, but it was cut short a few days after the initial mint; looking at the transactions, the mint went well for the first 2 days until a spike in gas caught them unprepared and far exceeded the mint price itself. Unwilling to call it quits on their NFT journey and also reluctant to disappoint their early supporters, they decided to work around the gas issue while still providing affordable mints by finding a home on the Solana network.
Unfortunately, their launch was not as “funky” as they would’ve liked, or just a bit too funky. A harsher critic would say it was a tragic calamity that could not be resolved. Major problems started to pop up only as launch time loomed large, and one issue led to another, and nothing really went right at all. Worst of all, people were charged for the mint even when it was supposed to be a free mint, which, to many, sounded like a betrayal of trust.
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But as you’ve seen above, they’re a determined lot, and _Funky Labs/name of founders_ decided to battle this problem as well and refund everyone, taking a $28,000 USD loss in the process (hyperlink to medium article). Operating under extreme pressure, expectations, and demeaning “fud” (negative sentiment and comments) calling them “scammers”, they somehow manually refunded over 2,000 people within 2 and a half days.
Looking at their Discord announcements, they were quite transparent with their errors and swiftly addressed them. According to their founders _name_ and _name_, they never even thought about taking the money and running, and would not abandon their devoted community and ruin their reputation for these “small blips in the journey”. We admire their optimism in times like these; thankfully, the developers of Funky Labs seem to treat their major mistakes as just another stumbling block.
Looking at their explanations about being caught unprepared when errors flood the system, it seems like they’re quite determined to be safer than sorry, with plenty of new hires coming on board, including experienced developers in cloud computing, C++, and website frontend to handle mistakes in a composed and orderly manner, as well as a copywriter to explain their ideas and updates on their work in an orderly manner to the community. There’s also good news for everyone who wants to mint one of their punks right at launch: they have decided to do extensive testing long before the launch and make sure not to make abrupt changes right before launch, in order to prevent sudden server issues last time out.
While their initial launch faced so many errors, the community was not particularly thrilled, to say the least; in fact, before the refunds were announced, people reacted with the emojis R, U, and G under their announcements in the Discord. But when we scroll to the present day, it appears that everyone has been rejuvenated and uplifted due to a new sense of trust that has been instilled from getting their money back. This sort of transparency is indeed somewhat rare with NFTs, and we, too, enjoyed their constant communication with us when we took a look into their Discord.
Looking at their roadmap and aspirations, it appears that there is a reason why these people are so committed to their project – to the extent where they’d take a massive personal risk with no guarantee that they’d ever make it back to the actual launch. Apparently, their passion for distinctiveness in the NFT space is what drives them, and this hard work just might pay dividends. With their experience in online marketing and brand-building, they cover most of the key elements that make a project great; with all the hype around the Metaverse, this project addresses that thirst by creating 3D voxels and a community-based DAO that rewards early holders of their previous project on Ethereum, as well as dedicated community members that purchase a token to the DAO.
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Funky Punks will host their re-launch on November 5th (at 12AM UTC), and we think they’re armed with the knowledge that prevents any more failures. After all, it’s on Solana – we won’t be wasting any gas fees. Maybe we’ll see you there.
