Chris: Hi! Can you tell us more about yourself and the role you're playing in that blooming project?
Boss: Hi Chris, We are a husband-and-wife team, who go by the pseudonyms: the “CEO” and the “Boss,” respectively. The PunkinsNFT art project emerged from each of our backgrounds. The CEO is an engineer who has dabbled in cryptocurrency and Web3 development, while the Boss is a marketer and creative designer who has successfully built her own business as an influencer online, having collaborated with major brands including designers for HGTV, the Inside by Havenly, and MME.MINK. For now, we prefer to remain anonymous to protect the privacy of our children. We both agree, “It’s not about taking credit or praise for our work. We want to teach our children to share their talents with the world, simply because they can.”
Chris: Punkin NFTs are essentially pumpkins celebrated as an artwork NFT. Is that correct? How do the NFTs reflect the theme of the token?
CEO: That’s right, Chris. PunkinsNFT is a new NFT art project focused on bringing families closer together. To that extent, we intend to donate 20% of all proceeds received from the sale of our artwork to the New Orleans Area Habitat for Humanity, with the goal of covering all financial costs related to the build of one new house. It may seem odd to combine pumpkins, family, and building a house, all together in an NFT art project; however, it makes perfect sense when you know the backstory. We think the Boss says it best, “Our dream started last October, watching Charlie Brown’s Great Pumpkin with our children. We are so fortunate to have a safe and happy home to share these moments with our family, and we wanted to give that blessing to someone else.” So, we started thinking about the best way to share our experience; we wanted to give homage to Charlie Brown, hence the pumpkins, while at the same time drawing on our own family memories. Each Punkin should remind the collector of his or her own childhood, hopefully reflecting on happy times spent together as a family.
Chris: The Punkins are hand-drawn characters yet so different from each other. What are the unique features and characteristics of the NFT?
Boss: Each Punkin is hand-drawn and inspired by the mind of a seven-year-old. While each NFT relies on the same base drawing of a pumpkin, we had a lot of fun coming up with new ideas for unique traits. Our kids all got involved. They helped us think of new ideas, and they even drew a few of the traits that made it into the final collection themselves (e.g. the Santa Claus hat, the Minecraft-themed helmets and pickaxes, as well as the “Nerf” guns and bow-and-arrow, to name a few). However, we will admit that the elementary drawing process was time-consuming...think “Crayola on copy paper.” Literally! No Adobe Illustrator or Photoshop here. All images were drawn on the same base pumpkin template with a blank piece of paper overlay, scanned in, and brought to life with the simplicity of Microsoft Paint. There are 18 different arms, 40 faces, and more than 140 distinct hats, which yields the potential for over 100,000 unique Punkin possibilities, all set against a backdrop of randomly generated r,g,b “millions-of-colors” combinations. The permutation of the entire set was programmatically generated, then randomly sorted, and the first 10,000 Punkins were selected from the random array. (In full disclosure, we did swap out the first 7 random Punkins for our specific family members, but we made sure that they are not repeated throughout the rest of the collection.) Each Punkin has the same orange body, and most of the arms are green; however, there are a few “Lil-Devil” red hands interspersed in the collection, that should make those Punkins more rare than the others.
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Chris: Moreover, the Punkin NFTs also get smashed and carved. This is cryptic. What does it mean?
CEO: This first generation of Punkins is intended just to be fun. And keeping in tune with the childhood theme, the slightly devious side of our brains went back to our own Halloween traditions, when carving a pumpkin with your father was always a highlight of the year. You got to use a big kitchen knife to “kill” the pumpkin, and then you would spill its “guts” onto newspapers spread over the garage floor. Then as older kids, who doesn’t remember actually smashing pumpkins in the street on Halloween night? We thought it would be fun to bring back that same sense of creativity and juvenile irreverent feeling of power in future generations of PunkinsNFT. The exact manifestation for these future Punkins has yet to be determined, but we want it to be interactive. Perhaps we’ll let collectors “buy” a knife, hammer, pickaxe, or maybe even a catapult, and perhaps they can choose certain aspects of the design or destruction of their Punkin, to make the next generations of Punkin carving or Punkin smashing a choose-your-own-adventure story.
Chris: You want to donate a house to a deserving family. This is something unheard of. How do you plan to pick the family that deserves the house created by the Punkins community?
Boss: Giving a family their own home really is the heartbeat behind the PunkinsNFT project. To elaborate, as we mentioned earlier, our goal is to donate enough money to the New Orleans Area Habitat for Humanity chapter, so that PunkinsNFT will be able to cover all financial costs related to the build of one new house for a deserving family. As for the family selection, Habitat has its own application and vetting process for families seeking assistance. We would never want to interfere, and will leave that decision in the hands of the Habitat professionals.
Chris: The cost of one Punkin is 0.02ETH. Do you also plan to have a presale?
CEO: Yes. As an introductory offer, all Punkins will be sold for only 0.01 ETH each starting on April 1, 2022. They’re fun and affordable. And no, it’s not an April Fool’s joke! Of course, all good things must end, and the presale will also stop on Tax Day, April 15, 2022.
Chris: Followingly, what is the minting date for the tokens? Please help the readers with the minting process.
Boss: Following the presale, minting will stay LIVE on PunkinsNFT.com, which is the ONLY site where you can mint an original Punkin. To keep things simple for now, we chose only to integrate our site with the Metamask browser extension and the Metamask mobile app. After minting, all Punkins will be tradeable on OpenSea.
Chris: In the end, what are your plans for the future of Punkin NFTs?
CEO: So far, PunkinsNFT has been a successful experiment in collaboration. We’ve not only worked together as husband-and-wife to create a fun art project for our family, but we’re also bringing together the NFT community with the city of New Orleans. Our goals are to give collectors a fun piece of original art that reminds them of their own childhood, while at the same time donate to the New Orleans Area Habitat for Humanity, so that together we can build a family a home.
