// LORE
Funi is a pixel unicorn drawn by trades. The joke behind it belongs to a potter in Colorado.
Tom Edwards has made pottery in Evergreen, Colorado for about forty years, in a faux-naive cartoon style he calls Wally. In 2010 he painted a unicorn farting into a funnel on the hood of an electric car. The back of the mug read: electric cars are good for the environment because electricity comes from magic. He sold them off his own website for twenty-eight dollars and kept selling them for years.
In February 2017 Elon Musk posted a picture of the mug and said it was maybe his favorite mug ever. Sales went up a little. Edwards was pleased.
On 29 March 2017 a rough copy of the drawing turned up in an image Musk posted. Musk didn't draw it either. He credited it to Nik Jovanovic, who had made it using the sketch pad hidden inside the car's software, and Jovanovic thanked him on 7 May 2017 for putting the drawing in as an Easter egg. It went into the cars, and then onto Tesla's 2017 Christmas card. Nobody asked Tom.
On 23 May 2018 Edwards' lawyer wrote to Tesla's general counsel. The letter said they weren't making an outrageous monetary demand; they wanted a mutual decision about the use of the image. Nobody replied. Westword ran the story on 26 June, and Edwards' daughter Robin, who plays music as Lisa Prank, called Musk out on Twitter. Musk answered that suing would be kinda lame, and that the attention had increased her father's mug sales.
They settled on 20 July 2018, four weeks after the story broke, and Edwards never filed suit. The terms are confidential. Edwards said Tesla paid for the right to use the graphic, the unicorn stayed in the cars, and he didn't get rich off it; he said he took it on as an ethical issue. Musk posted three emoji and a link to the blog post, and the traffic crashed Edwards' website. He later deleted every tweet he'd written about the unicorn.
There's no mint page. A Uniswap v4 hook sits on the $FUNI pool and runs whenever somebody trades it, in either direction, and it draws a unicorn for whoever made the trade. Swapping is the only thing you have to do.
30 bytes per unicorn go into contract storage on Robinhood Chain, and the code that draws them lives in the contract that reads them. There's no IPFS hash and no metadata server. If we stop showing up tomorrow, the picture still rebuilds from chain state.
Funi is our unicorn, not Tom's. The gag about where electricity really comes from has been retold enough times to count as folklore, and this is our retelling of it, in pixels, generated by a pool. The mug is his. The credit is his.
