The First Thousand Mutants Arrive

IT’S BEEN ONE MONTH SINCE THE CARTEL’S LAUNCH AND IT’S SAFE TO SAY WE’VE SMACKED A LASTING ORANGE HANDPRINT ON THE MAYC UNIVERSE…

What started as an innovative movement to enrich the MAYC and lift the value of Mutants within it, has crystallised into something ten times more ambitious.

If we’re shooting figures, the last month has seen:

• A community of 1200+ Mutant holders enter the fold
• Clans, Chapters, and recruits to populate them
• 13 Roles within the Cartel lore created
• Six podcasts and a weekly newsletter

• An advanced preview of the Cartel’s exclusive NFT launch
• And one invasion of a bank vault on Wall Street

A lot has happened over the last month, so this is a chance to pause, reflect, and refocus our path forward. We have a great steering committee within the Cartel, but the exponential growth has largely been organic.

Props to every Mutant that’s taken up the mantle of conceiving, creating, and then mobilising the community. We’ll be carving out a corner of the website to spotlight you in the future. A massive nod to the artist(s), designers, and developers toiling away on this project behind the lines, the Cartel will remember your efforts and look to support you with many more hands!

This is a community maturing and manoeuvring for its transition to a DAO. A Tasmanian Devil moving with a good GPS and we’re enjoying the productivity emerging from the chaos. That said, we’re keen to lay the track in the right way and avoid simply finding the fastest way, which we appreciate requires a degree of patience and trust from the community. We know that visibility is integral to continued engagement, so will be anchoring a roadmap to the site for you all very soon. Build for 100 years and then some.

THE FIRST CHAPTERS

As we started scaling north of 1,000 members, we questioned how we would maintain a sense of community and avoid sacrificing the intimacy of the community.

We drafted the idea of Chapters. By empowering localised, or interest-specific groups to form, we hope that more Mutants can mine personal value from The Cartel. The inaugural West Coast chapter has already become a real hive of innovation and production with several parts moving within it.

Any Mutant can start a Chapter by applying through Officer vngrd or Officer Jailbird. All you need are three Mutants by your side and a focus.

RELEASE THE HOUNDS

If you haven’t seen Sam yet, then here he is:

The Darley Arabian of Mutant Hounds that almost all of our hellish beasts can trace their lineage from. He signals a preview of the Cartel’s first character based NFTs.

We’ll be releasing more information on this over the next month, but the fact Sam has been spotted wandering in many forms, and rarely alone, will hopefully get you thinking.

Join The Cartel and get verified so that you’re ready at the gates when we release the Hounds.

[A lot of Clan applications are sitting in the wings waiting for their Mutants to verify. Hit !join in the bot-commands channel]

THE NEXT MEETUP(S)

Hats off to Officer Jailbird for the heavy lifting in organising our first meetup for thirty Mutants (and a handful of BAYC royalty) at Cipriani’s on Wall St.

We’re working on several upcoming events, but realise that this is a global community and want to empower Chapters to host their own localized and more frequent meetings.

We’re working on a meet-up in Miami and another one in London in the close future.

ENTER META… VERSE

Forget about Facebook and Microsoft’s centralised battle over a decentralised world — we’re making strides into building our own HQ in the Metaverse. We’ve enlisted an architect and have been playing around with a prototype in Blender. More on this soon.

We’ll be selling our art, merch, incorporating games, hosting events, and there might even be secret missions sourced from within the world.

PROJECT SERUM

Keep your ears close to the ground on this one.

NEXT MAJOR STEPS

• The trial run for our first poker night launches this weekend, which Officer vngrd will reveal more on in the Discord
• We intend on enabling more Mutants with the freedom to create and collaborate within the Cartel and help build the walls of this community.
• Our artists are fiercely working on producing the first instalment of the eagerly anticipated -NFT comics. These will immortalize the historic milestones and lore of the Cartel and feature prominent Mutants from the community. Watch for these.
• Keeping up the good work on our Mutant Hounds, which we hope to deliver more sneak peeks and previews as we get closer to launching them.
• We’re coordinating efforts to set up the first lines of merchandise, that include inroads into our own brewery, clothing lines, bespoke artwork, and much much more in the future.

There’s even talks of a ten-foot bronze statue…

WHAT TO REMEMBER

We’re not losing sight of the vision, or the course we take to get there. We’re here to enrich the universe of MAYC and our Mutants, as assets, within that.

I’ve worked for unicorns that didn’t move at a fraction of the speed and quality of output as this Cartel. It’s a testament to the passion, ambition, and imagination that’s contained in the MAYC and the power we have in harnessing it.

I look forward to welcoming the next thousand Mutants.