I met @NiftyWhaleNFT for the first time in the same place a lot of us did, Clubhouse. I was in a lot of rooms with him in the beginning of last year and admired his aspirations of providing value to up and coming NFT artists.
Last spring I was tagged in a Twitter thread asking for tech consultation on a project that would inevitably become Space Poggers. Though the fledgling @RUG_TECH team didn’t offer any code, we were involved in a lot of the discussions leading up to the conception of the project.
In the summer on a whim we released @RUG_WTF. From there Nifty and I went on our own paths for a bit. In quick succession we launched @BlazedCats, @DOJICREW and other projects that would become the backbone of our tech portfolio.
After SP started having problems sustaining momentum, Nifty hired our newly formed marketing and technology firm. We crafted a strategy that harnessed the power of the 13 tribes and started building. Abruptly our resources were re-aligned to SP’s merch drop at Nifty’s request.
Despite resources being over-extended we pressed on with several tech initiatives, charity outreach, and more that averaged us at hundreds of man hours a month, on a $10,000/month retainer and 5% of the project’s 5% royalties. The royalties ended up being mostly negligible.
With over a dozen employees in various degrees of activation blazing down a path of futility the relationship between Nifty and I became acutely contentious. As a company we made the hard decision of “firing” Nifty and Space Poggers as clients.
After our parting it came to my attention that Nifty had been inferring to his community that our company was paid way more than we were for the job we did. He allowed us to be the scapegoat for the leadership ineptitudes that plagued the project at that time.
It was close to this time that Nifty confided in me that he was (presumably) terminally ill, requiring several life saving operations to stay alive. Disagreements aside, it broke my heart to see my friend like this and I immediately offered to take over Poggers.
After some initial hesitation Nifty was convinced that myself and @natebear could be suitable captains of the ship moving forward. Nate and I sprang into action, quickly rolling out new standards of transparency and communication.
During our transition, it came to our attention that there were several ongoing independent investigations on the pogger’s finances prior to us assuming the helm. Many community members felt that things were at the very least not as they seemed on surface.
We aligned data science and legal resources to a report that we released to the poggers community that detailed several egregious budgetary decisions that ultimately put the collection in the position it’s in now.
One of the most alarming bits was the discovery that a development error that ended up costing hundreds of ETH in refunds to collectors was pulled from the project’s treasury, and not the developers who were responsible for the error.
Appalled, I contacted Nifty prior to release of the report. He leveled that things were handled wrong and went as far to put close to $150k back into the project. While appreciated, this was a drop in the bucket to get to where we needed to be to execute on project promises.
The community, largely already defeated took the news as icing on a shitty cake. Many left, and some of the few that remained committed were also working on releasing their independent investigations.
One of them, our cat tribe leader, @BaxendaleNFT has been particularly vocal from the beginning and has poured dozens of hours into researching the pogger paper trail. The tweet thread he released today was has been no secret to the community, especially Nifty.
Bax has kept me in the loop on the thread’s progress and I have subsequently kept Nifty in the same. Last week I warned him of its imminence and was contacted by his lawyer, Brendan Hickey a few days later.
Brendan advised that Nifty would soon be releasing a “significant amount” of funding to the project to us along side of the full IP rights going to @natebear. Regardless of the impetus, this would very much help the project’s success so I’ve been as accommodating as I can be.
And that is where we are today. In a state of limbo waiting to see what weight this promise has. I have no quantification of “significant amount” to budget moving forward, but that has no bearing on our ability to provide the best fucking tech in the industry to it.
With literal jack shit we have built a bespoke governance platform with an accompanying token, and many other ridiculous pieces of tech. Though money will be comforting, nothing will stand in our paths or be used as an excuse to execute.
The point of this thread is to have a matter of record to how things have gone down this year with our relation to the space poggers community. With independent investigations coming out, it’s important to keep the current leadership separated from the past.
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