Founder's personal story: what the dispirited Moonbirds did this year

By: Kevin Rose, Founder, Moonbirds Compiled by: Luffy, ForesightNews

What a wild and tumultuous few months... it's halfway through the year and I wanted to post a tweet to give an update on the status of the Moonbirds.

Starting at the beginning of the year, I wanted to really challenge myself to answer some very important open-ended questions. So on January 5, 2023, I posted this to the Moonbirds community in Discord:

The formal introduction begins below. In March we published Moonbirds' Beliefs and Aims: Moonbirds is a PFP for Art Collectors. At PROOF, we are dedicated to creating unique experiences for collectors to connect with artists, own and champion their art.

We will continue to increase our efforts to develop products that align with our core vision: arts support, media, virtual/real events, and building meaningful community/artist relationships.

Let me take a moment to share some highlights from the past 6 months: We paid over $1.6 million directly to artists and created opportunities for over 70 artists.

This is done through a series of activities such as Grails III, Evolving Pixels, Diamond Exhibition, Outliers Program, and Archive of Feelings. Additionally, collaborations with Pace Verso, Venus overManhattan, and Transient Labs expand the artist's reach.

At the same time, we also created a great real world (IRL) experience. We hosted events for over 1,500 holders in Tokyo, Austin, New York and Los Angeles, and sponsored 4 community events.

I'm proud of two curatorial tours: one led by Emily Xie and the other led by Tyler Hobbs. Giving Moonbirds holders the experience of meeting great artists is a core strength that we will continue to double down on.

We’re also launching The Foundry, our experimental physical space in Los Angeles that will bring even more surprises and opportunities to artists and collectors.

The PROOF Daily NFT Countdown (launched in partnership with @punk9059) continues to serve collectors by providing a subset of market metrics that many take for granted. (Also, let's not forget the weekly PROOF)

Our media team has been producing top-notch content for the past 6 months. We have over 46,000 hours of YouTube content watched and hundreds of episodes of our live performances, market reports and artist interviews.

Soon... our new series, Mythics, will be born. We hired two fantastic illustrators, Colin and Luke, for Mythics. A real-life story that explores the creative journey, and depicts what happens when fear, uncertainty and doubt take hold.

Finally, a word about our upcoming incentive system. We have a dedicated team developing incentive systems and research distribution mechanisms to connect creators and collectors, which will form the basis of our ecosystem.

Our token will have many use cases, it will be the link for all artistic, digital and real rewards, allowing holders to connect with what they find valuable.

We never waver in our pursuit of each product in order to realize our vision of providing experiences for creators and collectors. TALONS (incentive tokens) and Mythics are just a part, and the core product of PROOF should be a more unified whole.

We know we have more room to grow. One thing I want to clarify is that we don't stop iterating until we get the correct result. The past six months have not been perfect, but we have laid a solid foundation.

Web3 is a wild world in which we are all finding our niche. But we know who we are and what drives us - all of you are key to our success.