Frank DeGods

Frank DeGods is the online alias of Rohun Vora, a non-fungible token (NFT) entrepreneur and founder of the DeGods and y00ts NFT projects.^[4]​^[3]​^[11] Vora served as CEO of DeGods until stepping down from the role on May 12, 2025.^[13]​^[14]​

Early Life

According to the founder, the pseudonym “Frank” was inspired by the musician Frank Ocean. The LA-based NFT founder was exposed to movie sets as early as 15, which inspired his film studies, but he dropped out of UCLA to pursue his entrepreneurial dreams.^[11]​

One of Frank’s earliest business pursuits was NutAds, which he founded in May 2018 as a creative agency focused on building brands for early-stage startups. He later founded Duffl in 2019, a company that used e-scooters to deliver groceries to customers.^[12]​

He was later accepted to the startup fund and program Y Combinator, where he was able to raise $1.3 million. Soon after, and after briefly studying software engineering at General Assembly, he joined a coding bootcamp. He then landed a job at MainStreet, a software development company, where he worked as a one-person marketing team while MainStreet raised funding at a $500-million valuation.^[2]​^[3]​

​DeGods founder Frank DeGods stayed anonymous throughout DeGods' development but revealed his identity via Twitter on November 29, 2022, disclosing that he is Rohun Vora.^[4]​

Career

DeGods

Frank DeGods founded DeGods in March 2021 as a Solana-based deflationary NFT collection consisting of 10,000 colorful gods. Staking for DeGods went live in January 2022, with more than half of its supply staked within the first day.^[1]​

Y00ts

Y00ts, originally called Duppies, is an NFT collection from the DeGods team that went live on September 6, 2022. It consists of 15,000 NFTs that allow users to make their own PFPs, and the collection revolves around a sheep avatar with layers of metadata that give each NFT its unique characteristic.^[5]​^[6]​

According to the y00ts paper,

“Each collection would have its own ⓨ registry, where it’s easy to track who’s approved to be using the NFT’s IP. This allows projects to approve & reject usage requests at Web3 speed.”

To mint a y00ts NFT, interested individuals had to apply for a scholarship to get on the y00tlist – the y00ts version of a presale list.^[7]​^[8]​

Polygon Grant

In January 2023, Frank DeGods announced that DeLabs — the startup behind DeGods — received a $3 million non-equity grant from Polygon to expand the team and scale an upcoming incubator project. He mentioned that there were other chains that had offered more money than the Polygon team, but he chose Polygon as it was the best direction for the y00ts project overall.^[9]​

Frank also stated that the company would expand its business with growing teams including business development, graphic design, content creation, and event coordination personnel. The revelation of the investment came a week after the DeGods team announced its plans to shift blockchains.^[9]​^[10] Later, after Dust Labs decided to move y00ts away from Polygon and onto Ethereum, it returned the $3 million grant to Polygon.^[15]​

Frank DeGods Steps Down as CEO

On May 12, 2025, Rohun Vora, popularly known as Frank DeGods, announced his departure from the DeGods project and named those who would take over.^[13]​

"today is my last day as ceo of degods. my chapter is closing, but the story isn't over. & will be taking over." - he tweeted^[14]

He did not explain in detail why he was leaving but suggested that a focus on the “Frank DeGods” brand may have been holding the project back. He also said that he felt “the hate was overdone” at times. “For the record: I’m not ‘on the run,’” he added. “There are no investigations, because I have never done anything illegal.”^[13]​

Reporting in 2024 and 2025 linked Vora to a loose group of Los Angeles-based crypto influencers sometimes referred to as the “LA Vape Cabal,” and described community criticism around the LIBRA token and other memecoin launches associated with that circle.^[13] In response to these allegations, he publicly denied engaging in insider trading or any illegal activity, characterizing some of his critics as trying to protect the broader crypto industry.^[13] The Block summarized his more than three-year tenure leading DeGods and y00ts as a period that combined experimentation and innovation around NFTs with a series of public disputes and controversies within the community.^[15]​