UNFK Launches Crypto Movement to Prank Big Banks and Corporations

This is Decrypt’s second attempt to interview “Love Pirate and Mystic” Gunnar Lovelace; the first was canceled because he accidentally ate chocolates that he’s “pretty sure” were laced with magic mushrooms.

“I was knocked on my ass,” he said.

That’s fitting, since Lovelace’s latest project is aiming to knock banks, big business and financial institutions on their collective ass.

UNFK (short for “United For Kindness”) is a merry band of pranksters that’s already made waves at crypto conference Consensus, with a stunt that saw an impersonator playing JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon being walked around by a dominatrix on a leash.

“I have always been a prankster,” Lovelace told Decrypt, adding that he’s “always been interested in the intersection of media, technology and art.”

UNFK operates squarely at that intersection, weaponizing the crypto community to promote positive change by putting social pressure on banks and other big institutions using memes and pranks.

“Large consumer brands are incredibly vulnerable to pressure,” Lovelace said, adding that, “there's a very, very deep anti-establishment, degen energy that is alive in crypto.” UNFK is looking to harness that “incredibly powerful force,” he said, using gamification and other crypto-native incentive mechanisms to direct its campaigning efforts.

UNFK is gearing up for phase two of its campaign with the release of its web app—which, according to Lovelace, serves as a “home for UNFK agents to magnify their impact in the world through crypto.”

Its first campaign? A meme competition directed at crypto’s favorite regulator, U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) chair Gary Gensler. UNFK’s manifesto singles out the regulator who’s engaged in a so-called “war on crypto,” urging Gensler to “Please resign so the good people of the SEC can focus on innovation.”

The UNFK app itself serves as a hub for coordinating its agents, who complete quests to unlock points and rewards. They can earn points via recruiting other agents, interacting with UNFK content, playing upcoming UNFK games, or participating in a multitude of IRL activations.

Those activations include everything from meme campaigns directed at “giving the finger to corrupt bankers and Gensler,” to planned large-scale IRL pranks.

Who the UNFK is Gunnar Lovelace?

Lovelace has past form with influencing the policies of corporations and institutions through pranks and stunts.

As a student, he started a prankster group called The RASCALS (“an absurd acronym for Radical Action Student Coalition Against Lies and Suppression”) before going on to found several successful consumer brands including Thrive Market.

Inspired by campaigner Medea Benjamin, whose consumer boycott campaigns “knocked billions of dollars of enterprise value off Nike’s stock,” Lovelace has balanced his 20-year career in the tech industry with activism.

Over the course of his career, he’s funded and advised “large-scale social advocacy campaigns, particularly focused on large consumer brands profiting on negative externalities that rob from our children's future.”

One of the groups he funded was Rainforest Action Network, whose stunts included protestors dressed as Mickey and Minnie Mouse chaining themselves to the gates of Disney’s corporate headquarters, to highlight the company’s use of virgin paper.

“‘The Jungle Book’ was being printed on paper harvested from the jungle, causing huge destruction in the rainforest,” Lovelace said, adding that as a result of Rainforest Action Network’s pranks, Disney immediately replatformed over 10,000 printers away from a supplier that sourced its paper from the rainforest.

UNFKing the world

Lovelace, a “long-time crypto enthusiast,” believes that crypto can help to supercharge these social movements and improve the world.

“These kinds of campaigns, they really work,” he said. “But what hasn't existed before is a large-scale social game and economic incentive engine that ties people together to do that over and over again.”

On top of that, he said, the crypto industry itself is at a “critical moment,” with mass-market use cases bringing its values to the wider world. “We have to be really careful not to be co-opted by the institutional forces that are moving in,” he said, adding that there’s an “historic opportunity” to build upon Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto’s initial values and harness the “incredible creativity and power that we have as humans when we collaborate together.”

Lovelace claims that UNFK was inspired by a transmission from “The Oracle,” a UNFK agent from the future—who told him that the 2020s were a “critical decade” for humanity, and that he should form a secret society of UNFK agents to prank corporations. “It was warning us that if we don’t change the trajectory of where we’re headed, humanity will enter into a very ‘Blade Runner,’ ‘Mad Max’-ian world,” he said.

Beyond the messages from the future, Lovelace believes that society is at a pivotal historical moment, where the crypto infrastructure built over the past decade can be used to unite people and help them collaborate.

Crypto, Lovelace explained, enables UNFK to align the incentives of everyone involved, from the agents on the ground pulling pranks to the performers contributing to them. “We’re in this incredible time with memes, memecoins, and the attention economy,” he said. “When you have a liquid asset class tied to a meme, and you can drive attention to it, it tends to distribute aligned incentives to stakeholders in a way that's never existed before.”