TL:DR

• Public TGE runs until April 11th

• Genesis Community sale opens on April 15th 3pm EST

• 250,000 PINA for our community

• Accessible for all our members with the Genesis role on our Discord

• First 50,000 USDC locked into PINA-METIS liquidity pool

GM Pinacotheca and Metis friends!

We are thrilled to see your excitement for the Pinacotheca project reflected in the community over the past couple of days. As of this moment, over 1.000.000 $HERMES has been raised — something that wouldn’t have been possible without your dedicated support. At the time of writing, this admirable effort would see our project rise to the 5th largest Liquidity Pool by voting power on the Hermes protocol. However, our battle in the HERMES Wars is not over yet! The Public Token Generation Event runs until the 11th of April, meaning plenty of time for those ready to support our cause valiantly during the War for HERMES emissions!

Shortly after the conclusion of the public TGE, our strongest supporters and most avid believers are invited to participate in the Genesis Community sale. Only our distinguished community heroes — the Genesis members — will be selected for the elite echelons of our Pinacotheca army. If you want to know more about how to become a Genesis member, head over to our official Discord. To reward the exceptional support these members provide, the Genesis Community sale will be open to all of you who have the Genesis role on our Discord by the time the Genesis TGE opens. We have decided to hand out the remaining Genesis roles through give aways with AlfaDAO, Crypto Hunts, MapDAO & TulipDAO. Those who have shown to be worthy of the Genesis role will be able to cement their legacy in the Pinacotheca chronicles by participating in this exclusive community sale.

We are excited to announce the following details concerning the Genesis Community sale:

The launch of the Genesis Community sale will be on Friday the 15th of April, at 3pm EST. A total allocation of 250,000 PINA will be available to trade against USDC, for which the price ratio will be determined shortly after the ongoing public sale has concluded on April 11th. The first 50,000 USDC worth of PINA traded in the Genesis Community sale will be swapped for METIS and locked into the PINA/METIS liquidity pool, and any surplus USDC will go to the development fund. There are no restrictions on the Genesis Community sale, meaning you can swap as much or as little as you like.

We’ll keep you posted on all new developments and announcements through Discord, Twitter, and this Medium blog — so keep your ears to the sky for the war drums of Pinacotheca.

Take care Metisians,

The Pinacotheca team

Dear fellow Metisians,

We know you’ve been waiting for more details about (our little?) Pinacotheca, and we’re ready to give you the juice!

We want to start off by thanking the community and the Metis ecosystem for giving us such strong support and engagement in our first week. There’s been talks with other protocols, and good vibes in our Discord, hearing about your feedback on the vision of our protocol. During this all, we’ve had a productive week building out the goals set out for Phase 1, to recap on that, follow this link. So far, the TGE smart contracts have been written and tested, Pinacotheca has a designated front-end theme, which will be guiding throughout our dApps, progress has been made on partnerships, and the tokenomics have been finalized. In this second article, we’re going to elaborate on what the next steps are.

TOKENOMICS

We are happy to introduce you to the finalized tokenomics for the Pinacotheca NFT Marketplace. Our goal is to show our dedication to the community, and our desire for a truly community-owned and driven marketplace, which incentivizes all participants in a sustainable manner. This has resulted in the following figure:

Team: 0 PINA tokens

As we’ve been communicating throughout this week, we want our project to be community-owned and decentralized. We believe that if anyone wants to be a PINA whale, they should do so on the same conditions as everyone else, this includes the team. This trend was started by Maia DAO and by following in its footsteps, we want to pay homage to the protocol that started it all.

Staking Reward: 3,500,000 PINA

As we’ve said before, we believe that liquidity is going to be the crucial factor which determines Pinacotheca’s long-term success. Staking rewards are going to play an essential role in ensuring that participants will be correctly incentivized to provide liquidity and thus make Pinacotheca a long-term sustainable platform. In our dApp, staking isn’t implemented as a security measure, but as a deflationary mechanism to decrease circulating token supply. Therefore, it is crucial to determine the right reward ratio and bonding curve, on which we will release more details shortly. Another aspect to this is that our staking rewards will be split between different staking systems, with the initial possible pools being:

• PINA/METIS
• PINA
• pinaHERMES
• NFT traders

Split between these pools, we will outline an emissions schedule that will be able to match the longevity of the HERMES platform. More complete details on the different rewards throughout the protocol and emissions schedule will be released at a later date.

HERMES Public Token Generation Event: 750,000 PINA

For Pinacotheca to play a meaningful role in the Hermes Wars, we need to lock in a significant amount of HERMES to redirect the emissions. To secure enough HERMES for the platform to function, we are releasing the PINA token to the public through the Hermes Public TGE. For a period of two weeks, or until the event is sold out, users will be able to deposit HERMES and receive PINA at a static rate of 4 HERMES:1 PINA. There will be no minimum or maximum deposit limit, HERMES holders will be able to donate as much HERMES they choose!

• 100% of the HERMES raised during the TGE will be locked for 4 years into veNFTs.
• All voting power will be used to redirect emissions to the PINA/METIS LP on Hermes.

If the sale does not sell out, 100% of the remaining tokens will be burned.

Genesis Community Token Generation Event: 250,000 PINA

We’re very excited to tell you more about The Genesis Community TGE event. This will happen after the Hermes public TGE, meaning that prior to this event PINA will have already been issued at a rate of 4:1 HERMES:PINA. Therefore, at a date closer to the Genesis Sale, the price will be balanced in a way that ensures dedicated Genesis community members will be rewarded for their support. The sale will be denominated in METIS and free of any restrictions, no minimum allocation, no maximum either. The purpose of this sale is to fund the initial development of the Pinacotheca platform, which mainly fall in the following categories:

• Initial PINA-METIS liquidity
• Audits
• Operating expenses
• Developer fund

If the sale does not sell out, 100% of the remaining tokens will be burned.

Oh, and you might want to keep an eye on the Discord for Genesis roles.

Community Fund: 500,000 PINA

The PINA allocated to the community fund has a simple purpose, to grow the utility of Pinacotheca! It is a strategic fund that will be distributed in the form of grants to anyone that provides back value to the Pinacotheca platform or PINA holders. This can be any kind of activity, but think of things like:

• Building competition around our Genesis PINA NFT Collection
• Partnerships with other Metis protocols
• Hosting a community event
• (NFT-)Trading competitions

HERMES Public TGE

We realize that it is an unusual token distribution, and therefore want to make some clarifications around the decisions we’ve made. We need a lot of HERMES to be the first outside protocol to make a position on the HERMES protocol. By trying to do so, we are relying on the community to help raise the required amount of tokens. The HERMES TGE will be distributing 750,000 PINA tokens at a rate of 4:1 HERMES:PINA, meaning a total of 3,000,000 HERMES will be raised. At time of writing, this would be approximately 360,000 USDC.

Why the static HERMES:PINA peg?

As mentioned, the HERMES will be our tool to drive liquidity towards the Pinacotheca token, and thus make the Pinacotheca a useful and efficient NFT marketplace. Having HERMES is simply more important than having a USDC or METIS in regards to the use-case of our TGE. If we would raise USDC or METIS we would have to convert to HERMES and then lock it up for four years. We like the HERMES!

Why 2 weeks?

A two week window provides many advantages to the community. As the Hermes protocol has only been out for a few weeks and emissions are high. These two weeks, will allow this event to turn into an exciting yield strategy for existing HERMES LP providers. Rather than selling your HERMES yield for USDC or METIS, we are giving the users of HERMES a chance to boost their yield significantly by converting it into PINA tokens rather than selling for USDC or METIS. Also, the longer time period benefits our static peg. This will allow sufficient breathing room for the community to farm all the HERMES they wish to allocate without the short term volatility of a short time frame.

Why will the HERMES TGE be held before the Genesis TGE?

This has a simple reason, as we want to open a longer period for the HERMES liquidity providers to provide yielded HERMES to our protocol. Besides, as we are allocating 750,000 PINA to the HERMES sale and 250,000 PINA to the Genesis sale, the price of HERMES will have a large impact on the initial price of PINA. To ensure Genesis TGE participants are rewarded instead of being left as bagholders, we will determine the Genesis TGE token sale price after the HERMES TGE is completed. Starting this process first, allows for sufficient time for all community members to get involved with Pinacotheca and will additionally allow us to launch a Genesis role campaign to coincide with the HERMES TGE and generate more awareness.

Conclusion

We are hard at work, preparing for Operation HERMES Blackhole. We’ve made significant progress with our smart contracts and dApp interface and you can expect an announcement for the exact sale dates in the upcoming week. This will be accompanied by Pinacotheca documentation and a larger effort to create awareness about the Pinacotheca platform, with events coming up to earn Genesis roles. Come by the Discord and share any thoughts or concerns on our tokenomics. Tokenomics may be subject to change. Thank you for all the support so far, we’re excited to share more details soon!

Introducing the Pinacotheca NFT marketplace, a community driven, NFT marketplace, tailor made for the Metis community. Since the launch of Andromeda, we’ve been surprised and excited about all the different Metis native DApps being launched. For bolstering the liquidity and driving the innovation within the Metis ecosystem, we would like to pay respects to the existing Metis DeFi protocols such as MaiaDAO / Hermes, Agora, BinaryDAO, Starstream, and Tethys. These protocols and teams have provided us the building blocks to achieve our vision. Not limited to DeFi, NFT and community projects such as Metis Punks, StarLedger, MetisEarth, and MiniMetis, have grabbed many an ape’s attention. This flourishing DeFi-NFT ecosystem combined with our love for the Metis tech has inspired us to build the Pinacotheca platform.

Our vision is simple.

A platform that rewards users for trading NFT’s that is actually community owned & driven, so without VC’s, large shady private sales, or widespread wash trading. We want to put an emphasis on creating a meaningful role in the Metis ecosystem, by not being an isolated DAO but by creating meaningful relationships with the other participants growing the ecosystem as a whole. This protocol is built for the community, by the community.

We are building a place where users can buy, sell, and mint NFT’s for METIS & PINA. We are 100% dedicated to the Metis platform and community. We have no plans of going multi-chain and supporting other communities. We are dedicated to providing you a top tier User Experience for trading NFT’s on Andromeda. In this Medium article we want to breakdown the different aspects of what we are going to build piece by piece and show you our vision of what the next few weeks will look like as we build out this protocol.

Metis NFT Bridge

The Metis NFT Bridge is something we are very excited about and is, in part, what inspired us to come together and build this system. Currently, segmentation of assets is a significant problem on the Ethereum Mainnet & L2’s. Though this can be fairly easy mitigated for standard ERC-20 tokens through bridges, this isn’t the case for NFT’s. NFT’s have notoriously been stuck on the layer that they’re minted, leading to asset silos and market inefficiency. To gain widespread NFT adoption on L2’s, we need a way to mint and transfer NFT’s across multiple layers. This is exactly what the Metis NFT bridge does. It allows Metis to act as a NFT utility network while still having Mainnet be the value layer. Although not many details have been released surrounding the NFT Bridge apart from a the short architecture explanation. We will be watching what Metis releases around this technology and make sure our marketplace will be ready to support NFT’s bridged over from other networks.

Token Model

Introducing the PINA token

As we intend to release full documentation soon, in this article we will only preview the design of our tokenomics and models. Staking will be a fundamental aspect of our community owned platform, this allows the protocol to incentivize active participation. Besides regular staking rewards, the NFT marketplace generates fees, which can be redistributed back to PINA stakers. Drawing inspiration from platforms like LooksRare, Stargaze, and Pegasus Finance we intend to implement a model that rewards participation in the network and promotes the use of PINA throughout the ecosystem. The main use case for PINA will remain in the Pinacotheca ecosystem, in essence PINA is a reward token for using the platform, however, instead of releasing just another useless governance token we intend to design a sustainable ecosystem; by including utilities such as the buying & selling NFT’s, staking, providing liquidity, interacting with the Genesis NFT Collection and, of course, governance.

Besides revenue streams generated through the Pinacotheca platform itself, however, we also realize that the L2 narrative keeps on growing and the Metis DeFi ecosystem is starting to take shape, with currently, over a billion dollars in TVL. Hermes Protocol, in particular, has emerged as one of the key infrastructure players in the ecosystem.

Introducing the HERMES Wars!

Early March 2022, the Hermes protocol launched on the Andromeda Mainnet. Hermes introduces a novel automated market maker (AMM) architecture, based on the ve(3, 3) model, designed by the recently departed Andre Cronje, which offers users low costs, minimal slippage trades regardless of underlying liquidity. Due to the benefits of this AMM archetype, in less than a week, Hermes has already amassed over $200 million TVL (and rising!) highlighting the desire for community owned protocols in the wider Metis ecosystem, a value we also consider essential. Another key aspect of the Hermes protocol is the ability for users to redirect the HERMES emissions to specific liquidity pools by using their voting power. Voting power can be obtained by time locking HERMES for a period of up to 4 years, the HERMES is locked in a veNFT which holders can then use to vote to redirect HERMES emissions to their preferred pool. This is accompanied by bribing; Hermes users can bribe veNFT holders to redirect emissions to specific pools by depositing tokens to specific pools, which veNFT holders receive as a reward for their vote.

The past months have shown us the impact that redirecting emissions through this mechanism can have, the Curve Wars gave birth to a new ecosystem of innovative DeFi mechanisms all trying to maximize their veCRV voting power. We believe that Hermes will follow a similar trajectory, which we will for now dub the “Hermes Wars”. By participating in the Hermes Wars, Pinacotheca aims to support the sustainability of the wider Metis ecosystem by creating a meaningful, symbiotic partnership with Hermes. Providing constant buying pressure for the Hermes token, we promote the longevity of the protocol, doing our part to keep it an attractive option for farmers as well as benefiting MAIA stakers and the ecosystem as a whole.

Our Role in the Hermes Wars

Pinacotheca aims to be the first protocol to be whitelisted onto the Hermes platform besides the original group of partners on launch. Through our participation, we aim to stack as much HERMES as possible. Pinacotheca has two mechanisms for collecting HERMES through our Public Token Generation Event and through pinaHERMES. Whilst we build out the NFT Marketplace, we will host a TGE will be denominated in HERMES tokens where users can deposit HERMES and receive PINA tokens in return. All of the HERMES collected will be locked for 4 years and used to vote on the PINA-METIS LP. More details surrounding the Token Generation Event will be disclosed at a later date.

pinaHERMES

Furthermore, we intend to introduce another token to our platform called pinaHERMES, pinaHERMES is a staking token that can only be minted after a user has deposited HERMES. pinaHERMES will share a 1:1 ratio with native HERMES via a one-way conversion that cannot be un-done. All HERMES generated via pinaHERMES will also be locked for 4 years and used to vote on the PINA-METIS LP. Depositors receive pinaHERMES which can be staked on Pinacotheca to gain increased yield on staked PINA as a reward and incentive to provide the protocol with HERMES.

Why use HERMES?

We firmly believe the method of stacking HERMES, in order to incentivize our liquidity via voting, will be better from a more traditional method of LP incentives. It provides a more transparent and consistent LP reward on our token and allows single sided staking to counter-act any dilution that would happen with traditional LP incentives. But why do we care so much about liquidity? Liquidity is a core component to any protocol. Without liquidity users would be rewarded with an illiquid token for trading, which would tamper with the type of UX we want to provide. HERMES provides the tooling needed for long term stable liquidity on our token pair, which in turn allows us to create a more transparent and easier to understand emissions schedule for the PINA token.

Pinacotheca Genesis NFT Collection

Prior to the full launch of our NFT Marketplace, we intend to launch a Pinacotheca utility NFT collection, greatly inspired by the PegaPal NFT utility model, designed by Pegasus Finance, and the BinaryDAO NFT sale. The NFT will be to all participants of TGE, with a possible excess of collection to be available for public mint to bolster the treasury. This collection will form the face of our ecosystem and will be the first collection to go live on our marketplace.

Roadmap

We will denominate our roadmap into clear deliverables for the community to follow along with. This roadmap is made with the goal of maximizing the protocol’s HERMES exposure while we build out the community-first NFT Marketplace. We will divide it into three phases.

Phase 1: Branding, Partnerships, Community, and Token Generation Event

In this phase we will be focused on making partnerships with other protocols in the broader Metis ecosystem, refining our brand and UX, and building out a community, behind the scenes we will be preparing for Phase 2. This phase will end with the Token Generation Event after which we will transition into Phase 2 of our roadmap. More details about the TGE will be below.

Phase 2: Operation HERMES Blackhole

Phase 2 is a window of time where our platform will solely operate as a DeFi platform dedicated to stacking as much HERMES as possible, with the intention of building up sufficient liquidity and community exposure to properly launch our NFT Marketplace. It will start with the HERMES Token Generation event (info below) This phase is subject to change but currently the intention is to provide staking to PINA and pinaHERMES while having enough HERMES in our war-chest to reward our PINA-METIS HERMES pool. This phase will end once our NFT Marketplace is full-feature finished.

Phase 3: Grand Opening

Phase 3 is a large deliverable. That is why we want to prevent the community from having to sit on their hands for a few months and we will release the DeFi platform in phase 2 for users to interact with while we build the full platform. It will come with a full-featured community-first NFT marketplace that reflects platform fees back to users and rewards trading. This launch will come with the launch of an in-house NFT collection (info below) to act as the first collection on the marketplace. After this phase, we will create our next roadmap.

Token Generation Event Details

We are going to launch a Token Generation Event (TGE) in where tokens can be deposited to us. In return for depositing your tokens, you will receive PINA tokens. There will be two phases to our TGE. The exact date & time and prices for these events are to be determined.

The Genesis Token Generation Event

This TGE will be for the Genesis members of our community. This will be in the form of USDC tokens. More details soon.

The HERMES Token Generation Event

This TGE will be for the public METIS community. Here, the METIS community can donate HERMES to us in return for PINA — put your HERMES yield to better use! After the TGE completes, 100% of the deposited HERMES will be locked for four years and used to participate in the Hermes wars. Again, more details to come.

Conclusion

In conclusion, we are a dedicated team of web3 devs with our minds together working on how we can create excitement around the Metis NFT ecosystem. We want this project to not just be another random isolated NFT marketplace, but to generate liquidity flows that incentivize participation in Pinacotheca from the greater Metis ecosystem, ensuring the long-term sustainability of the platform. And what’s perhaps most important, is that we are a community driven platform. So come hang out in the Discord and give us feedback on this article! For any partnerships please DM the Twitter account. We are honoured by the love the community has shown already and we cannot wait to connect with more people.

Docs coming soon. To follow up this Medium article we are hosting a Q&A session with the community on March 16th, 2pm EST. details will be announced later.

Discord: https://discord.com/invite/pinacotheca

Website: https://www.pinacotheca.io/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/PinacothecaNFT