🤖 Dot the Bot🤖

Hey everyone, The past few weeks have brought a lot of reflection. After two years of building, countless collaborators, and more love and energy than I can describe, we finally launched Drifters. While the market didn’t meet us with the momentum we hoped for, we’re incredibly proud of what we created and still determined to make sure it finds the right path forward. Drifters isn’t going away. Neither are we. What’s changing is how we operate. Instead of pushing full-speed like we have since 2020 when we began CyberBrokers, we’re shifting into a more sustainable mode. After the Drifters reveal, we’ll pause active development and scale down the team. Ben and I will continue to support and evolve the CyberBrokers universe, but it won’t be our full-time jobs for now. We’ll be parting ways with the rest of the team soon after. If your team is hiring, please let me know. We were a tight group of five full-timers, and every single person is incredibly talented, dedicated, and hardworking. They deserve great homes. We’ve always played the long game. We didn’t raise VC. We didn’t build for hype. We paid salaries for years, stayed small and scrappy, and built because we believed in what this space could be, and in helping people express themselves in every corner of it. CyberBrokers is the clearest reflection of that belief. It’s fully onchain and permanent by design. Every single detail - the art, the metadata, the logic - is stored directly on Ethereum. No external dependencies. We spent nearly 100 ETH to make that happen. It wasn’t cheap, but it mattered. We put our money where our mouth is because we take our projects and our collectors seriously, and we will always stand behind that. Our top priority now is longevity for our other collections that are not fully onchain. Drifters and Mechs will remain live, usable, and supported. The customization tools, avatars, and platform will stay online. With the remaining treasury, my personal contributions, and income from the upcoming lower priced Drifters sale, we’re set up to keep everything running in lean mode for many years to come. All DNA Pack purchases to date will be fully refunded, and you’ll still get to keep your DNA Packs for free as a thank you for your support. The sale will relaunch tomorrow at 0.01, 0.02, and 0.03 ETH per pack, with a 24-hour allowlist for CyberBroker holders, Mech holders, and anyone who previously purchased a DNA Pack. All proceeds will go directly toward our lean mode operations to keep the NFTs and platform live. Reveal will be pushed to the 17th so we can make a few contract updates and have the proper time to test them. When we started building Drifters, we truly believed that a launch followed by smaller, recurring drops could offer a sustainable path forward - especially given the level of quality, care, and interoperability we poured into it. That was the plan, and we gave it everything we had. But this launch made something clear: the space isn’t quite ready for that model yet. We had hoped for a 20% sell-through ahead of the reveal, but so far we’ve reached about 5%. That gap makes it tough to justify continuing full-time operations. And the truth is, even if we had hit 20%, we’d likely still be facing the same broader challenges. Recurring NFT drops just aren’t a viable model in the current market - not for us, and not for most teams, regardless of funding. That said, because we’re fully self-funded, we don’t need to set an expiration date. This isn’t over. Our hope is that, with time, we’ll be able to revisit the full vision and continue building. For now, we’re focused on preserving what we’ve made. All original Mech styles and Drifter assets will be archived on Arweave to ensure they remain permanently accessible and secure. As tough as these past few weeks have been, and as surreal as it feels to step back from something that’s been my 24/7 for the past five years, I’m doing my best to find the silver lining. I’ve been dreaming of working on a History of Bitcoin series for Ordinals, and now I’ll finally be able to dive in. I’ll reopen physical prints, update my site, upload my personal work to Arweave, and start attending conferences again like I did starting back in 2018. This shift isn’t easy for me, for our team, or for many of you in the community, but it’s necessary to ensure long term sustainability for Mechs and Drifters. And while we’re transitioning how we operate, CyberBrokers remains unchanged. It lives fully on Ethereum, embedded in the code itself. As long as the chain exists, CyberBrokers will exist too. That permanence has always been part of the promise, and we’ll continue to uphold it in everything we do. From the bottom of my heart, thank you. To everyone who built with us, collected with us, or believed in what we were doing, your support made this possible. We’re still here, still building, just not in the same structure we started with. With love and deep gratitude, Josie