We Will Win
When Oekaki Connect decided to release Kemonokaki on the Base blockchain we knew that we might face an uphill battle. We accepted this reality, and decided to work as hard as we could to create a beautiful, inspired, and successful project named: Kemonokaki.
Read: The Pawprint of Kemonokaki
Prologueโ
Kemonokaki performed tremendously, especially when measured against the performance of any other collection on Base; even so in the context of all L2s combined. Oekaki Connect are a proudly independent and self-sufficient team of talented creators who are all-in on pushing technology forward to a brighter place through the power of art, and Kemonokaki emerged as an immediate and shining testament to the passion and resolve of everyone involved.
We understand the importance of the independent effort of organic, bootstrapped creators such as ourselves in setting better standards in this space โ as well as championing the adoption of these technologies for any independent creator striving to share their voice & vision with the world. Along with committing our time and resources toward this greater mission with little expectation of support beyond the passion of our creators and the love of our community.
And yet it remains a curious mystery โ why is it that Kemonokaki never receive a simple congratulation from Base? No outreach, no communication, no interest in our further involvement on their platform despite our position as the #1 Base collection and the first sincere creative project to ever exist on Base. This indifference struck us as strange. We had a reasonable expectation that Base couldn't possibly overlook our stratospheric success at the top of their platform. Would our self-evident hard work and resultant achievements as the emergent figurehead for all future creators on Base not be mutually beneficial for them to speak on? We had no expectations but found ourselves concerned by ignorance of the unignorable, and questioning the motives behind such a thing.
We are the kind of team with energy and enthusiasm who does not feel a need to rely on the platform we are launching on. After all, we launched many art projects on Ethereum L1, and the Ethereum Foundation never highlighted us either, we never got Vitalik's attention nor ever really tried. Base is young and new and it seemed like they should be willing to embrace creators who are excited to create things in a genuine and honest way. We thought that Base would especially appreciate that we brought over so many people from Ethereum L1 mainnet who previously were not engaged in Base at all. We often get told that Kemonokaki is the entire reason so many got interested in Base.
A rundown of the eventsโ
Recently, we decided to be more active in the Base community and Discord, thinking our lack of presence might be why we weren't noticed. Haiku, one of our team members, joined the server and was banned after just two harmless messages. When asked why, the mods initially claimed Haiku sent malicious invite links, but later changed it to just 'links.' The moderation team quickly banned anyone who inquired further. However, one of our community members managed to speak with a higher-up mod, who checked the logs and confirmed Haiku was wrongfully banned. After a friendly chat with the mod, it seemed we could resolve things. Haiku informed Oekaki Connect that OC would support Base more and created a #base channel in the Oekaki Connect Discord, including a subscription to Base announcements and a pinned invite link to encourage collaboration. Our intent was to become a place where we would help more artists onboard onto Base.
One week later, Haiku was banned again. When asked, the moderators said it was for posting a malicious discord invite link. People once again on their own went to the Base Discord to ask why our community was being mistreated. This time they were much more aggressive with immediately banning people. As soon as people joined, if they said Kemonokaki or had a Kemonokaki PFP, the Base Discord mods would ban them within seconds. The Base Discord moderators took their aggression against Kemonokaki a step further by joining the Oekaki Connect Discord to collect "evidence".
Base then used this "evidence" to make specific accusations, alleging that death threats and doxing of individuals had occurred. Anyone who spends time in our community knows how white hearted it is. We moderated a fair bit, we had many words on wordfilter to automod them away, because we didn't want to encourage people to be too rough with each other in our space. It was our choice for the calm and fun tone we wished to have in our community. We also have a very, very clear ban on doxing. Anyone who doxes someone immediately gets banned. We also don't tolerate death threats, we have banned people who entered our community and did both.
Jesse posted two sample images of the death threats and doxing. The first image was of an ENS address labeled "iknowwhereyoulive.base.eth" and the second was a variation of the "kill with hammers" meme.
Both clearly jokes. Both clearly harmless. Yet employees of Base decided to use these messages by some anonymous members of our community to get the entire Discord deleted and 2,000 people banned with our lead artist ina having her account stated to be permanently banned (with no strikes ever). On top of this, anyone else who did have at least 1 strike was stated to be permanently banned forever as well. In what world is this professional or justified? In what world can a lawyer of Coinbase sit back and pretend that their actions did not harm Oekaki Connect and its community, that this is not a Base issue, that this is not an issue with the very purpose of building things onchain and away from the permissioned web2 hell world where overzealous Discord moderators can cause so much obvious damage to a billion dollar company and then blame it on neochibis.
This action by Coinbase employees accomplished the following:
- 2,000 enthusiastic Base users having their accounts either suspended or permanently banned, many of these users never even posted in the Oekaki Connect Discord community, they simply joined to lurk and enjoy the fun of our community, yet they were still impacted by the actions of Coinbase employees.
- The Oekaki Connect Discord community being permanently deleted entirely. Above all else, this community included a memorial to Putrid, who passed away earlier this year, where members of our community wrote about how much Putrid's work meant to us all and how much she touched all of our hearts. We had no expectation that our community would ever be targeted in this way and it is incredibly shocking that this desecration occurred. We are infuriated at all of the "Base influencers" who thought the best thing to do was to laugh at us over losing the memories of our friend.
- Our lead artist ina's personal Discord account being permanently banned and her unable to archive anything important to her that only she had access to. This experience has been traumatic to ina and she no longer wishes to do any further work on the Base blockchain.
All that Oekaki Connect was building for Base, all of the amazing art and games with onchain features that the Oekaki Connect team made explicitly for Base will likely be no more. We thought we had found our forever chain where we could comfortably build on forever and help to achieve a truly onchain world together with others. We were wrong.
They got a women-led team of creators banned and pretended that our weekly Kakizone was somehow an event to "harass and bully" a billion dollar company. Instead of EVER joining one of our fun and free events, where we gave away thousands in Base NFTs, they decided to lie about us and take things out of context. People are angry because they were there and they understood it was a love pilled place to have fun online. Instead of basing their actions on something real and true, they relied on dishonest and misleading people who felt it was in their job description to destroy us.
Thankfully, most of the crypto community are on the side of Oekaki Connect. They know it is not just about us but the bigger picture and meaning of these baseless actions. There were too many real and influential people who saw the progressively escalating actions of the Base Discord moderation team and can attest to them, along with the nature and value of the Oekaki Connect community. Oekaki Connect's community was loved by many powerful people who have good taste in art and love to support genuine artists and share their love with others.
Whether these attacks or coincidences are due to a petty grievance, or any other intent...
It doesn't matter.
It is now abundantly clear Coinbase / Base doesn't want us on their centralized blockchain and so, we as a team and community are leaving Base. We want to move on and look forward, and only give our talent to those who actually want us to create for their blockchains. We are not asking anyone to do anything personally. Everyone should do what they know in their heart is the right thing to do.
Kemonokaki is very precious to us. It was one of the last projects our dear friend Putrid made with us. We know that the actions against us would have infuriated her. We want to do right by Kemonokaki, right by Putrid, we want to do right by our community. We are thoughtfully considering if and where we will bridge Kemonokaki, it is important to us that Kemonokaki finds a good new home. This decision needs time for us to think about the best course of action for the collection and our community.
We will be fine, we will rebuild, we will win. The need for onchain alternatives to every single web2 service is more evident than ever. We cannot trust Discord nor any other service that enables this kind of damage. We must help to build the alternatives which are actually necessary for the future of the onchain world. This is what we mean by us going to war. We are meant to be doing art, but now split our efforts in also building highly resilient and trustless systems so that others can build onchain communities that are impossible for a billion dollar corporation to snuff out.
"Civilization dies by suicide and not by murder." โ Arnold Toynbee
WE. WILL. WIN.
When we say "we" we don't only mean us, as in the OC team. We mean you, the community of Oekaki Connect, our friends who share this onchain space with us, and the billions of people around the world who will soon join us onchain. You as a creator who wishes to uphold Truth and Beauty. You as an individual who loves art and wants cute to win. You will win, we will win!
Where are we going next?โ
Simply put, everywhere else all at once.
"Kemonokaki went from the first NFT on Base, to the Last NFT on Base" โ John Oekaki (CEO Of Oekaki Connect)
We have friends at Arbitrum, Sanko (Arb L3), UWU, Optimism, Polygon, ETH Mainnet, Abstract, and more. Many kind people have reached out to us and offered to help us, and we are humbly grateful. We want to honor all those who want to work with us and give them a part of what was once meant for Base. We will not forget any of those who reached out their hand to us in public support.
Notably, a new friend came to us saying they could help get our Discord back, Vedant (@0xBigVee). After some brief communication and back and forth we also began talking about Abstract. Early today, the Discord server was reinstated and the bans were lifted from majority of the communities accounts. Many users submitted reports and many factors such as the pressure from Coinbase and Jesse likely went into what got the Discord to be reinstated, but regardless of exactly who made it happen, we thank EVERYONE for their help. Thank you to all of our community. Thank you everyone in CT. Thank you Pudgy Penguins for what you did for us. Even though we have our Discord back, it's still in a suspended state, which means new people cannot join. We have two servers currently and you likely will be able to join the second one.
https://discord.gg/oekakiconnect
As far as Discord goes, we will no longer be relying on it. We are effectively leaving as immediately as we can. We are working to decentralized our communities as much as we can so that there can never be so much risk relying in one place.
We are also sunsetting our Kakizone events in Discord. We will find and build new alternatives to host these events on. During this summer, we gave away thousands of dollars worth of Base NFTs to people, many of whom had never held a Base NFT before. We gave them an exciting and fun first memory of Base. Kakizone is an entirely free event, and we will continue holding them in the future and welcoming everyone to join them.
In terms of chains, we are committing to a future drop on Abstract when it goes live in November. But not only that, there are plenty of different chains that we want to try out, whether it be for fun open editions, or full projects. We want all our future endeavours to be on chains / platforms that are not only viable long term to our community and align with our goals, but are also friendly toward Oekaki Connect. There was so much we had cooking for Base that is amazing and we want to spread the release of those out as much as we can. We're decentralizing everything. Where we have our communities and where we have our art.
Lastly, In terms of communications; while we do have our server back, we are still continuing our initiatives to move OFF of Discord and centralized chat platforms. We will have more information about this in future. Follow the kakichat.net X account and click the Notify bell to be notified once there is news. This X account will only be used for posting news about kakichat.net and so will be less active than others.
WE. WILL. WIN.
Conclusionโ
While this situation was a very stressful and painful inconvenience for our community members, the bans have been reversed and our home has been returned to us.
We will not forget what happened, and will instead use it as motivation to keep building and keep doing what we are doing. We will continue to build our own chat hub and other services that are both web2 and web3, and we will keep an open mind to any applications who wish to have us on their platform. We will be decentralizing our communication so that we never lose it again.
There is a lot of tension and heat from the situation, but we ask everyone to be kind to each other now and remember the mission. Do not let anyone sway you from what you need to do, do not let the drama distract you. The fight isn't over. Our mission has always been a big one, and you have always been a part of it.
Oekaki Connect will make the world our meadow. We thank our community for being at our side and having our backs while we suffered this injustice. We promise to always be loyal to you and always work hard so that we can all enjoy new beautiful creations and the promise of fun they offer.
Never Forget 9/14. ๐จ๐บ
