The Bunker: a tunnel to the Future
The Bunker
0x2148
April 21st, 2023

We're thrilled to share that Bunker is now our main brand serving as the umbrella for all of our collections. With this exciting change comes the opportunity to shake things up even more - by upgrading our visual identity and unveiling a brand-new shiny✨ web dApp. In this article, we'll take you on a bit of an introspective journey from our past to our future, providing an overview of what these changes mean for the short and the long term.

The Past

Mint is live Tweet in 2021
Mint is live Tweet in 2021

Going all the way back to 2021, Zombie Society was the first collection Hex launched, during the height of the bull market. The standard at this point in time for NFT PFP collections was the 10000 piece Cryptopunk/BAYC derivative model. In this context the Zombie Society collection was launched. With an initial supply of 5000, featuring totally original art and a true grass-roots community. We decided to stop the mint at 2500 after a few months of steady minting. At a mint price of 15 FTM the MC at the time was a modest 37.5k FTM, and at this time of writing we’re happy to have a floor that holds above mint (although FTM is down currently down ~5x 🥺 ). After dropping the initial collection holders also got airdropped an additional two collections, the Tales of Crypto Twitter and bitZombies. Both of which originals by Hex.

After the bear market kicked off we dropped Hex’s Inferno in the middle of 2022. The collection took months to plan and design both because of the novel minting mechanics and technical challenges. With an original concept by Vencintocles and Hex, the minting was inspired by some collections (notably Deamon Punks and Afterskool Paint Huffing) that would drop small batches for random drops. The aim was to create an engaging experience for community members. On top of that we introduced Cantos do Inferno, a companion collection of edition pieces (mostly 25). Each Canto corresponds to a particular batch of Hex's Inferno and depicts a humorous story or event that occurred during its minting process. We airdropped these pieces for free to the holders of their respective batch.

Besides the illustration and animation gigs, Hex worked as a product designer at various tech companies for the last 10 years. During this time he developed a fascination with coding and web development, so he began exploring the intersection of art and technology. These complementary skills proved invaluable in launching and growing the Bunker operation. The overall acceptance of these collections then allowed Hex to finally pursue his dream career as a full-time artist and illustrator while still maintaining a foot in the tech industry.

The Present

Daily interactions with our community members, whether we’re sharing stuff about the collections or just talking shit about the Crypto space happen in The Bunker.

Today marks a pivotal moment, we are putting our complete output under the one unified umbrella — The Bunker Studios — introducing a brand new visual identity. With as the first new initiative a novel and more capable dApp.

The importance of the rebranding

The rebrand marks the move from Hex’s as solo Artist to a brand and we believe now is the right time to take this step. The ultimate goal is to open the gates of The Bunker to a wider audience and spread awareness of our brand. There were two main forces that got us to this point.

Vencintocles joined the project at an early stage and his contribution became more important at each milestone. At first he was focused on the community side of things, but later he became an essential part of defining the creative direction. This means that everything we do has been the result of teamwork for some time now.

New visual identity - logo
New visual identity - logo

The second force is the community side of things. We are embedded in the fantom ecosystem and share our members among a number of awesome communities with whom we do shared events and in general participate in. These people and the channels we inhabit are in some sense part of the brand. On top of this there are a number of awesome hardcore community members who participate actively in our Multi-sign vault. It makes sense to move the spotlight from one person — the artist — to a more abstract concept that is a better representative of a group of people — the brand.

The name

The name of the discord server has always been The Bunker. Obviously in a world overrun by twitter addicted zombies the only safe place is a (discord) bunker.

The community multi-sig wallet that receives revenue share was renamed to the Bunker-Vault shortly after inception. Daily interactions with our community members, whether we’re sharing stuff about the collections or just talking shit about the Crypto space happen in The Bunker. Our personal meetings, quick updates, chats and general interactions happen in The Bunker. The Bunker really represents the heart of what defines Zombie Society, Hex’s Inferno, BitZombies etc.. So, for older members of the community the name Bunker might not come as a big surprise.

The dApp

The decision to rebrand was taken a few months ago, and one of the first steps was to look into our foundational values and tools, understand where we can do better and work on it. Today we are happy to introduce the first of these steps, our brand new dApp:

The Gallery page displaying all the collected NFT's across 6 collection
The Gallery page displaying all the collected NFT's across 6 collection

Get to know our brand new Bunker Studios web app!

This is not our first website, in the past we always hosted our mints in this very exact domain, but the big difference is that this time, instead of having a fork of something else, this time we have something built right up from the ground. The Bunker dApp is integrated intimately with our collections thanks to rich interaction with the blockchain. The idea is that this is your home for all the bunker collections.

We invite you to try it out, and before that a quick summary of some of the design and tech notes:

  • Landing page: Designed to be easily digested by 2 different groups - on the one hand people who know our work and at the same time anyone who has never heard of Bunker Studios. It has a brief overview of project info, relevant links and short summaries about the collections.

  • Wallet: This is where the magic happens, connect an address and see all of your collected tokens from the different Bunker collections. Unlike most marketplaces, the UX is designed to focus on the art, removing all the visual noise around. Clicking on the image shows you the token traits, blockchain details and links to the different available marketplaces.

Finally we have the About and the Collabs pages. Where we go down memory lane to revisit the Bunker story and feature the team ups we did in the ecosystem.

All of this content was wrapped up in a meticulously crafted UI featuring a series of illustrations made just for the occasion. A series of loading skeletons and placeholder animations are spotlighting the iconic bunker eye and way more content.

We will keep updating the dApp and add new features to give a home to our collections. There might be a bug here and there, if you find some please let us know at the usual place

By the way, we have a celebration mint going on, we’re introducing a new edition drop collection called “The Bunker Institute for the Undead studies”. It’s a free mint and this time, for a change we are stepping our foot into ETH. Hope you all like it.

The Future

We’re not moving fast or jumping on trends. Each collection we put out is going to have its own DNA and purpose. The art style, the traits, the descriptions, the things we feel make up the DNA or soul of a collection, is something we focus on a lot.

Due to the high pace of this space it’s hard to predict what’s next. We feel we are ready for the future and empowered by our flexible web application we are capable of reacting and adapting. Overall the core values that guide us will be the same values that help us make decisions in the future.

Bunker studios the brand

From day one, we've been all about creating interesting art that draws inspiration from underground comix artists and the 90s scene, and love to approach everything with a good dose of humour and sarcasm. We especially enjoy capturing and taking shots at the wild world of crypto Twitter. In a space that at times can take itself very serious, we try to not do that too much.

The characteristics we try to embed in our work are focused on being creative, original, and transparent. We will always put creativity in the first place, both from an artistic perspective as well as from the way we wrap things up. Furthermore we will not use our work, words or actions as a vehicle to drive any kind of speculation.

Bring holder value not dilution

We’re trying to push our own boundaries with every new collection we bring. With the risk of stating the obvious, we’re always looking to improve and renew and never to go the obvious way. This also implies that we’re not moving fast or jumping on trends. Each collection we put out is going to have its own DNA and purpose. The art style, the traits, the descriptions, the things we feel make up the DNA or soul of a collection, is something we focus on a lot. We go through multiple versions and discuss until it clicks. The same goes for the purpose. Collections that have a clear purpose, or utility, especially in the FTM ecosystem are persevering. Moonmasters and BitDaemons are a good example of this where the tokens grant access to a DAO, or for instance the Magicats or BBChickens that have an explicit utility value.

bitZombies

Currently BitZombies holders receive 100% of the revenue generated by the collection itself. Furthermore they receive 50% of the revenue from Zombie Society and Tales of Crypto Twitter, as well as 20% of Hex's Inferno and Cantos do Inferno. This means that as a bitZombies holder, you'll not only own a one-of-a-kind piece of digital art, but you'll also have a direct stake in the success of the broader Bunker ecosystem. In the future BitZombie holders will continue to receive revenue from any new collection we release. On top of this are also working on expanding the use of the collection, more on this in the next article.

The Bunker Team

W E B  —  D I S C O R D  —  T W I T T E R  —  Y O U T U B E

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