‘Everything that isn’t Bitcoin is a shitcoin’: Interview with CEO of Pewnicorn Social Club, an infinite DAO on BSV

Pewnicorn Social Club appears to be a DAO, or decentralized autonomous organization, built in Bitcoin SV, specifically implemented via the RUN token protocol. The Club has launched a website, fungible token ($POO) and several unicorn-themed NFTs. Silliness and memes aside, they appear to really be pushing the envelope in terms of aggressively developing a community and demonstrating what tokens, NFTs and RUN are capable of on the BSV blockchain.

I caught up with the CEO of the DAO to ask some questions as they have been quite busy.

What is the Pewnicorn Social Club?

The Pewnicorn Social Club collective for people who love the power of Bitcoin. We want to see Bitcoin fit into more places in our lives and unlock the potential of cool things that are made possible by Bitcoin itself.

For the most part we’re not developers, or artists, or digital marketers, we are just regular people who want more ways to use the most exciting invention of our lifetime. Buying JPEGs is one way to signal to the world but taking part in a club gives us the chance to amplify our efforts and do even more cool things together.

Ultimately the Club will leverage community and events to build and make the Bitcoin ecosystem more fun and exciting.

What is the purpose of the $POO fungible token?

$POO is money for the Social Club’s Economy.

NFTs on Bitcoin don’t have much liquidity, which means when you decide you don’t want a JPEG anymore, it might take you a while to sell it for what it’s worth. Having gone through that personally, I thought about how to make the experience better, and a token that you can buy or sell immediately is a great solution that already works in the real world.

POO allows you to buy or sell a Pewnicorn NFT immediately instead of waiting for a buyer to come along on the open market. Trade-in prices are listed publicly for every NFT, and it’s denominated in $POO.

With POO you can go from BSV to $POO to NFTs, back to $POO and then back to $BSV seamlessly and nearly immediately. 

That’s something I really wanted to be a part of. I want to be a part of that inaugural class. I know it seems silly for JPEGs right now, but if we think about what that means for the future… it’s pretty exciting to think about how people might end up trading their work product, no matter what ‘work-product’ means to them.

Some community members would criticize the DAO and POO token of being an illegal ICO. What would be your response to that criticism?

Well, TBH I’m not a lawyer, so someone smarter than me will have to weigh in on that. But here’s where I’m coming from.

#1 – There was no pre-mine or insider distribution. I bought all the $POO I own, the first day it was listed on the market. Yeah, I had an advantage knowing when it was going to be listed, but we advertised for days, I didn’t make the first buy and I’m not the largest owner. Fair means Fair, even when it put me at a ‘disadvantage’ personally.

More to the point, the tokens aren’t scarce. Literally every day of the earliest sales we made more available on the market than was being purchased. I wanted to make sure that everyone who wanted in, got in. Not for the money, but because being part of something is meaningful. To drive that point home, there was an error in our marketing about how the price worked. I responded by honoring what the marketing said, knowing there would be way more $POO bought at a discount than our original plan.

#2 – $POOs utility value is pretty much pegged to USD unless the DAO votes to change that. If you got a discount for being an early believer, you might make a “profit” but that’s capitalism. When the market balances out, $POO will just be used as cash for exchange, there won’t be much room for speculation or further appreciation.

#3 – (this might be #1 to me) Is the answer to question 5.

Do you have any concerns with the memetic energy and overt marketing in terms of recruiting more community members? (For example, naming the token POO).

The way I see it, everything that isn’t Bitcoin is a shitcoin including $POO. 

I don’t see any problem leaning into it. Even though we use these fungible tokens today, they’ll probably be replaced by something else over and over again until only Bitcoin is left. But if we wait for that day and never use the FTs/NFTs that day will never come.

Plus, Unicorns are mythical, and if BTC was the real bitcoin, NFTs on BSV would still be mythical too. The crypto space is so full of shit, and even though BSV has big blocks and huge TX numbers… they call BSV-ers full of sh*t. It’s maddening.

So, my guess is that if someone is turned off by the $POO meme it’s probably just an excuse that’s easier to articulate than the real reason they’re put off by the club.

The club conducted a pre-order for a generative NFT launch via the $POO token. Can you describe the decision to sell NFTs that way?

I held a pre-order to give anyone who wanted to be in the club, a way to confirm that they would be. Personally, I missed the Based Apes drop because I was literally in sterile gloves helping my uncles nurse. When I was done and washed up like 25 minutes later, they were sold out. Not only that, but one person owned a huge number of them.

Then there was the technical side. The RUN protocol we used for POO includes the sender address baked into each transaction’s details. I knew I would be able to write a script that delivered their orders, and I thought that would be a pretty cool thing to try.

As an added benefit, taking this approach made it easy for people to check for themselves if their pre-order reservations were received, and to know that they would be included.

Instead of using the RelayX minter for the NFTs, it appears the club coded up the mint themselves, as well as sold NFTs directly on the site. What drove this decision

About 4 days before the Mint I realized I could only do 1 of 2 things with Relay, but not both:

1 – I could mint the NFTs metadata in to the NFT

or

2- Do a Mint with a reveal. 

So, I decided to build a way to do both, knowing that in the end, owners would still be able to sell them on Relay if they wanted to.”

This bleeding edge method of minting seems to have had some hiccups. Can you talk through the technical issues you ran into?

🧵What Happened minting #Pewnicorns Today?🧵

First of let me thank to everyone who participated and assure you, you will get your 'corns. They ARE on chain.

1/7

— Pewnicorn Social Club 🦄 (@iampewnicorn) March 12, 2022

“Yes, and hiccup is a really nice way to put it.

In my testing I had no problem pushing a large number of mints into a single transaction. 400 to be exact.

Up against a minting deadline on mint day, I push 1 transaction with 434 mints. The tools we all use to interact with RUN kind of freaked out. It resulted in Relay not being able to see any of the NFTs in that transaction, and so we could only sell 800 instead of 1234. It also skewed the rarity of the collection.

A few weeks later, the additional 400 showed up in the mint wallet. So, while there were some problems, the end result was pretty much the same.

In the end it was still worth it. There was no effect on the minters or buyers, it just limited the collection to 800 instead of ~1200 on mint day.

The club just essentially implemented an on-chain voting system via the POO token. Why vote with tokens?

A voting application based on tokens was the 2nd thing I ever built on Bitcoin. In my mind, the only fair vote is one where everyone can see the results together. Voting with tokens instead of a database makes that idea a reality.

Also, since $POO is the mechanism to vote, the club can send $POO to its members without creating a taxable event. If you choose not to use it in voting so that you can spend it later, THAT may be a taxable event… but this way we can give it out to members without causing a new burden on them.

The club hosted a live concert in March! Can you talk through that whole experience?

Pewnicorn Concert Series – Episode 1 https://t.co/cYmzCiu79W

— Pewnicorn Social Club 🦄 (@iampewnicorn) March 18, 2022

We put together a 60-minute show streamed to PewnicornSocial.club Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube with 3 live performances and 1 recorded set.

Two of the artists had already published on Jamify and another was a finalist on “The Voice” in the USA. We got to include some BSV names like Mandeep and IllFella who are already bringing BSV to new people in their own daily lives. 

The week before the event our setlist got screwed up a little bit because one of the bands was playing in a Fundraiser for humanitarian efforts immediately after our show. But it gave Mandeep the chance to be the headliner.

He played even longer than we expected, and the audience LOVED it. The comment box was lit up the whole time he was performing.

That experience may prove that as many cool apps or tools as we can build, nothing resonates more with people than their connection to music and entertainment. Literally every person in the world likes to be entertained and I’ve never seen that level of excitement for anything else in the BSV community (except maybe Craig signing).

Concerts have the added benefit of attracting sponsors…as we can attract a bigger audience for these sets, the Social Club can use the sponsorship dollars to have more funding to do more cool things.

One of the reasons I reached out to do this interview is the speed of developments happening. How many developers does the club have?

In the beginning it was just me. Now, I have a friend regularly contributing and helping me build out some pages for things like games and events. 

That said, my hope is that we can get the DAO and sites to a point where they’re open-source and anyone can contribute features with a Pull-Request.

What is next for the Pewnicorn Social Club?

I have 3 announcements for your audience:

Pewnicorn Concert Part 2 – The Pewnicorn Concert Series Episode 2 is tentatively scheduled for as a Freedom Festival for July 1st, 2022, streaming live on the website, Twitter, YouTube etc.

If you know an artist that should be on that stage, tag them, DM them, DM me, connect us. 

Bingo Nights! – Starting Soon™️ we’re going to host regular game nights starting with BINGO! We’re in the final stages of building the first Bingo game right now. We worked with another big BSV personality @H10ndamane (aka the Do0D) to design the NFT Bingo Cards.

In a Live Broadcast style game of BINGO! you can use your Bingo Card NFT to play and win Token, NFT, and Cash Prizes.

*If you have a Stud, you’ll even be able to buy the Bingo Cards using POO*

Pewnicorn Comic Book – To me this is the most exciting announcement: A Pewnicorn Comic Book is underway. It debuts the next collection of Studs called “Rockstars,” and the main character is an unassuming Bad Ass. He’s a reluctant Hero, the classic “Anti-Hero.”

If you have a Stud in your stable (a Pewnicorn in your wallet) you’ll get some related airdrops, access to pre-release and limited-edition collections, and the chance to get a 1st Edition stored on chain forever.

Thank you to the club for taking the time to answer my questions. I hope the readers learned more about the Pewnicorn Social Club. Check out the site.

This article was edited for clarity purposes.

Watch: CoinGeek New York panel, The New World of NFTs on the BSV Blockchain