Oasis Vault Is Giving Away a CryptoPunk

We bought a CryptoPunk and we’re giving it away. Here’s the thinking behind it.

Downstream From Self-Custody

Everything valuable about crypto is downstream from self-custody.

Crypto is valuable because it lets people store and transact value without having to ask for permission or trust anyone in the process. That was Satoshi’s big breakthrough: a decentralized ledger of ownership where participants don’t have to trust each other and can still trust the network as a whole.

That property, trustlessness, is the foundation for everything else. And nothing can be trustless without the ability to self-custody:

• Uncensorable money? Only if you hold the keys.
• Private money? Impossible by definition if someone else has custody.
• DeFi? Not if a company can freeze your position.
• Permissionless markets, decentralized payments… all of them only work properly because self-custody exists.

True ownership is rare in the physical world, but it’s even rarer in the digital one: you don’t own the money in your bank account, and you don’t own your digital identity either: your social media handles, your iCloud photos, your Google docs. You’re just trusting a corporation to not take your access away.

Crypto is the only place where that actually changes. It’s the only system that lets you hold value in digital form the way you hold cash in your pocket.

But self-custody still has a long way to go before it’s accessible for everyone. It only wins if it’s both strong and usable. That’s why we built Oasis Vault: so you can hold serious wealth in an easy-to-set-up multisig without any single point of failure, and without losing your privacy in the process.

What Is Oasis Vault?

Oasis Vault is a self-custody crypto wallet built on a 2/3 multisig model. You hold two keys (mobile + hardware), and we hold the third as a recovery key. We can never move your assets on our own. Full control always stays with you. But if you lose a key, we can help you recover. The same setup also unlocks inheritance: just share one of your keys with a beneficiary, and together with our key they can recover the funds if something happens.

All of that runs in a mobile app with strong UX, full Bitcoin and Ethereum support, stablecoin yield via Morpho, and seamless swaps (including cross-chain with BTC). All of that without ever leaving your vault.

Back to the Punk

NFTs, apart from being fun and a really useful tech, have been a great onboarding tool for self-custody. You can’t store them in a centralized exchange, and there’s no Punks ETF. You either hold the keys or you don’t own it. That made NFTs one of the strongest representations of true digital ownership.

We believe CryptoPunks are one of the best examples of crypto-native culture: minted for free in 2017, with a custom contract and a decentralized marketplace before ERC-721 even existed.

If we were going to give something away, it had to be a Punk.

So we bought CryptoPunk 909, and we’re giving it away.

Raffle details:

• Open to anyone who signs up or upgrades to a paid plan
• Entry is capped at 500 participants and closes on October 31st at the latest.
• Number of tickets per participant varies by plan and duration
• The raffle will be drawn 7 days after entry closes (either when we hit 500 or on Oct 31, whichever comes first).
• The Punk will be transferred to the winner’s address the day after the draw.

More details here.