I didn't expect PunkStrategy to really take off

On the Ethereum mainnet, a coin named $PNKSTR has risen by about 160% in the past two days, with its market capitalization briefly surpassing $50 million, becoming a bright spot in the extremely dry on-chain market. Currently, the token has slightly retreated, with a market cap of approximately $43 million.

The full name of $PNKSTR is "PunkStrategy," which completes the NFT and token circular flywheel through trading CryptoPunks NFTs. Each $PNKSTR transaction incurs a 10% fee, with 8% deposited into the protocol. Once the protocol's funding pool accumulates enough to purchase CryptoPunks, the contract will automatically buy a floor-priced CryptoPunk and list it for sale at 1.2 times the purchase price. After a successful sale, the ETH obtained will be used to buy and burn $PNKSTR.

Currently, the fee income from $PNKSTR has approached 700 ETH, and it has completed the full buy-sell transaction process for 12 CryptoPunks, with approximately 2.8% of the total supply of tokens being burned.

Basically, this is the hottest topic in the NFT circle recently, with active NFT KOLs and various Twitter users discussing it extensively. Interestingly, the prominent NFT KOL @waleswoosh tweeted on September 15 when the market cap of $PNKSTR fell below $10 million, stating that $PNKSTR would soon perish, but a week later, $PNKSTR surged.

The dev behind $PNKSTR is not an unknown figure but rather TokenWorks, a group that has been actively involved in various on-chain projects, composed of developers who have long been active on the chain. TokenWorks' official Twitter follows five individuals, each of whom is a familiar player in the on-chain space, such as @surfcoderepeat, who previously worked on Lotus on Arbitrum and FrenPet on Base.

Before $PNKSTR, TokenWorks' most famous and successful project was the "Black Hole Coin" $O on the Shape network, which even received a promotional tweet from beeple.

Prior to the launch of $PNKSTR, TokenWorks had already launched 10 on-chain projects, each utilizing unique on-chain gameplay.

With the success of $PNKSTR, on September 20, TokenWorks further launched NFTStrategy, introducing tokens for five NFT projects: BAYC, Pudgy Penguins, Moonbirds, Meebits, and CryptoDickbutts. The mechanism is the same as $PNKSTR, except that from the 10% transaction fee, 1% is paid as royalties to the NFT series owners, and 1% is used to purchase and burn $PNKSTR.

These five new tokens are currently performing similarly, with none exceeding a market cap of $3 million. However, in the past 24 hours, the token corresponding to Meebits has had the highest trading volume, approximately $1.6 million, and is currently in a slight lead in market cap.

When NFTStrategy was just launched, to prevent snipers, the purchase fee started at 95%, decreasing by 1% every minute, ultimately stabilizing at 10%. Due to a large number of early purchases, the protocol quickly accumulated enough funds to purchase floor-priced NFTs corresponding to the NFT series, providing an opportunity for arbitrage. The address 0xa3d297423b17a3894dddd582dc41ff20e237ab75 netted 181.706 ETH, approximately $813,400, by buying and selling 10 BAYC, 7 Moonbirds, 5 Pudgy Penguins, and 4 Meebits within three hours.

The reason was not a vulnerability in the contract, but rather that the project team did not deploy the corresponding operations. CryptoPunks has an on-chain market, which leads to slight differences in the buying and selling process of the new token compared to $PNKSTR. Since there is no on-chain market, the new tokens can only ensure that they can indeed acquire the purchased NFTs through the contract, and anyone can call the contract to trigger specific purchases.

Perhaps due to the team's workload, TokenWorks did not deploy corresponding bots to ensure immediate purchases when funds reached the minimum purchase amount. However, this issue does not seem to have affected the performance of the new tokens, and Yuga Labs' blockchain department VP @0xQuit also stated that he personally deployed a bot to address this issue.

Today, TokenWorks announced that starting this Friday, they will launch a new NFTStrategy token every day for a week, with NFTStrategy tokens for seven projects: Chromie Squiggles, CrypToadz, Goblintown, Checks, Max Pain by Xcopy, Good Vibes Club, and Milady coming soon.

In the future, TokenWorks will also open up for any NFT series owners to deploy their own NFTStrategy tokens.

Discussions about NFTStrategy remain lively. Yesterday, a tweet proposing that OpenSea spend $2 million to purchase NFTStrategy-related tokens sparked considerable discussion.

In summary, we can conclude the success of $PNKSTR as follows:

• A development team with a certain level of recognition

• Wide recognition from the NFT player community

• Compared to fast-paced meme players, NFT players are more enthusiastic about accepting NFT-related memes and on-chain experimental gameplay

• Although NFTs have been sluggish for a long time, the prices of top NFT series have stabilized within a relatively fixed range; while the glory is gone, enough stability and audience have been established

However, this is ultimately a form of "left foot stepping on the right foot" stimulation, and how long it can be sustained remains to be seen.

(Original link)