PUNKGA.ME
A cyberpunk manga multiverse — readers, artists, and characters share one on-chain world where every chapter, mint, and cameo is licensable IP.
- ORG
- Tentou Labs
- Year
- 2024
- Role
- Frontend developer
- Timeline
- Q1–Q4 2024 · ongoing
- Live
- punkga.me ↗
The brief
Indie manga artists ship for free and lose ownership the moment a chapter goes viral — no shared canon, no licensing rails, no way for fans to keep a piece of the story they helped grow.
The Vietnamese and SEA indie manga scene is loud, prolific, and completely off-chain. Artists post to Facebook, Instagram, and Pixiv; fans translate and re-upload; characters get borrowed across scenes; and the original creator earns nothing — even when their IP powers an entire fandom.
Tentou Labs wanted to build a publishing platform that doubled as a programmable-IP layer — one place where artists upload chapters, readers earn for showing up, and every character is a licensable on-chain asset other creators can remix without losing the paper trail.
The job: design and ship the reader app, the artist studio, the character-NFT mint, the quest layer that drives daily reading, and the contest system used to launch the platform with partners (Aura Network, Kaia, Story Protocol).
What changed
How it got built
- 01
Designed the reader for binge sessions, not browse.
Manga lives or dies on read-through rate. Built a vertical reader with prefetched panels, gesture-based chapter jumps, and a resume-anywhere session that survives wallet reconnects — so a reader who quests for 30 minutes a day doesn’t lose their place when the RPC drops.
- 02
Built the artist studio as a one-screen pipeline.
Upload → arrange panels → tag characters → mint → publish. Wrapped the whole pipeline in a single
useReducerstate machine so a creator who has never touched a wallet can ship a chapter in under five minutes. Drafts auto-save to the local cache, and tagged characters pull straight from the on-chain registry. - 03
Wired character NFTs to Story Protocol licensing.
Every character mint is registered as an IP Asset on Story — license terms (commercial-remix, non-commercial-share, etc.) are picked at mint and enforced when another artist tags that character in a panel. The studio surfaces the licence stack inline so creators see exactly who owns what before they save.
- 04
Launched the quest engine + leaderboard.
Read-to-earn missions, weekly leaderboards, and seasonal contests sit on one points ledger. Built a thin contest framework that powered the Aura × Kaia ‘Kaia Island’ launch event end-to-end — submissions, voting, prize pool ($2K), and on-chain settlement of winners.
- 05
Shipped the multi-chain wallet layer.
Punkga reads from Aura, settles IP licences on Story, and hosts contests that touch Kaia. Built a wallet abstraction that detects chain context per action and prompts the user once — so an artist on Aura can mint a Story IP Asset without thinking about which network they’re on.
What it’s built on
400+ artists, 100+ titles, three chains under one reader — and the first cross-chain manga contest shipped end-to-end on a four-week deadline.