Non-fungible token (NFT) company Pixel Vault is under fire for its involvement in what appears to be a roughly $3.5 million rug pull scheme involving its founder and former CEO. In the latest turn of events, the company announced on Wednesday that it has removed Sean Gearin, also known as GFunk, from his position as CEO. The project did not provide details about the alleged rug pull, but stated that the now ex-CEO’s “actions are under review.”
GFunk has been accused by multiple NFT community commentators and former partners on X of misleading investors for personal profit. Specifically, GFunk allegedly encouraged investors to to rotate the ecosystem’s PUNKS token — which represents fractionalized ownership in Pixel Vault’s CryptoPunks collection — into a new token, dubbed GG. The capital rotation occurred between when GG launched in December 2023, and up to the time of the auction of the company’s CryptoPunks collection in 2025. GG is the official token of RebootGG, which is under the Pixel Vault ecosystem umbrella.
Simultaneously, GFunk allegedly accumulated large amounts of PUNKS, just in time for the company’s CryptoPunks vault to be auctioned off for 930 ETH, or $3.4 million, on June 5, leaving GFunk personally with a significant amount of the proceeds.
CryptoPunks valuation tool PunkPredictor claimed that the auction lot was worth closer to 950 ETH at the time.
CryptoPunks auction valuation. Source: PunkPredictor
Community Response
One NFT collector, known as Rodo, slammed the former CEO in an X post over the weekend, stating “GFunk pulled off one of the most blatant rugs I’ve seen in a while.”
Rodo went on to list their allegations against GFunk, including that the CEO had “raised hundreds of millions with Pixelvault,” tricked users into moving funds from PUNKS into GG, and that he was “silently auctioning the punks vault[.]” But, Rodo noted, investors took notice.
When onlookers called out GFunk for what appeared to be nefarious behavior with the vault auction, Rodo claims that the Pixel Vault CEO promised that “proceeds will be used to build the ecosystem,” before proceeding to shut down operations, claiming to be hacked, and going dark on social media.
GFunk’s most recent X post is from June 22.
Other NFT OGs have been quick to join the public shaming. Beanie, another anonymous, but notable, collector, had been involved with Pixel Vault before a public falling out with GFunk, which resulted in the team removing him from operations.
Beanie called out not just GFunk, but also NFT lending platform GONDI, for participation in the scheme. In a post on July 28, he accused the NFT platform of creating a private PUNKS loan prior to the vault auction. Beanie alleged:
“It was done so Gfunk (a Gondi Advisor) could borrow ETH against PUNKS tokens. The collateral used included tokens from the PUNKS staking contract. This enabled Gfunk to get funds to run up the bid.”
Beanie’s statement implies that GFunk not only misled investors to make money off the sale of the auction, but also leveraged his advisory role to run up the auction itself.
It is worth noting that Pixel Vault was publicly bidding on the collection at below the auction lot’s market value, which may imply fair play and transparent practices in the auction bidding process.
Pixel Vault is known for creating the Punks Comics ecosystem, and the project raised $100 million for developing NFT infrastructure in 2022, in addition to funds accrued from its multiple collection mints.
During the 2021 NFT bull run, NFTs in the Pixel Vault MetaHero collection — which is the ecosystem’s profile-picture NFT (PFP) collection — traded at over 10 ETH per NFT, or $40,000 at the time. Currently, the collection is changing hands for just under 0.03 ETH, or about $107.
MetaHero price chart, 2021-2025. Source: OpenSea
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