2025

Rewriting Old Narratives (an excerpt)

One of the things I love about CryptoPunks is that the story is still being written. New things happen all the time, but also sometimes we learn things that change our understanding about what has led up to this point. 8 years later, there are still things to be uncovered and surprises to found if you happen to turn over the right rock. If you think you know the story of the claim and airdrop, sit down because it’s about to be rewritten. (The following is a slightly modified excerpt from my forthcoming book PUNKS: NOT DED which should be shipping next month, June 2025. Pre orders and a few limited edition hard covers are still available.)

On June 23, 2017, at 9:50 AM New York time (1:50:51 PM UTC), Larva Labs deployed the new “CryptoPunksMarket” contract, marking this a pivotal moment in crypto art history. The distribution process began immediately after deployment and would take almost six hours to complete. Until now the story was that Larva Labs reverted all transactions on the V1 contract, and claimant wallets received the airdrop. However, while discussing final edits on the book niftynaut and I discovered something curious. Punk #4638. This punk is sitting in a long inactive wallet, the V2 was airdropped to it and the V1 is there as well. OK, sounds right so far, clearly a claimer wallet right? Wrong. Wait what?

On June 13th, Tony Herrera claimed Punk #4638 with his primary wallet. 3 hours later he transferred it to a new wallet. 10 days later on June 23rd Larva Labs sent the V2 airdrop to this new wallet, not the wallet he claimed with.

How could this be possible if as we had previously understood claimer wallets, not holder wallets, received the airdrop? We started digging and found punk #4958, another punk claimed by Tony. Same thing here, he claimed it with one wallet, transferred to a new one, the airdrop went to the new one. Then we found another, and another. This wasn’t an exception or a mislabeled transaction on etherscan, this was clearly the intended action. Larva Labs never explicitly explained their process and it was notoriously hard to understand at the time, but since 2017 the general understanding was that all transactions were reverted, and claimer wallets were airdropped V2 punks. Looking at this now with better tools and insight, it seems that only sales were reverted, but all the transfers (which might have been trades, direct sales, or simply wallet moves) were honored. 

…

Of the approximately 300 transactions on the V1 contract before the V2 contract was deployed, less than 100 were sales. And 2 accounts (Hemba and LarvaLabs) were involved in almost 3/4ths of those. So the actual number of “impacted” wallets is considerably smaller than many of us thought. Keep this in mind – at the time there was no real way to see NFTs in your wallet, so the way you knew which punks you had was to look at the Cryptopunks website and look at your account page. Along with the airdrop, Larva Labs updated the website to look at the new contract. If you looked at your account page on June 22 you saw your punks, if you looked at your account page on June 24 you saw your punks, and unless you were on one end of the ~100 punks that were sold before the V2 contract was deployed, those looked like the same punks. If you’d sold some punks, you had them back again. If you bought some punks, you didn’t have them anymore. Some people who noticed asked about it, and most of those cases were resolved quickly and quietly, but many people didn’t even notice it.

This also creates a provenance issue, only the V1 contract has the correct claim history, who claimed what and when. The V2 contract shows all punks “claimed” on the same day as well as misattributing the claim wallet for the ~200 or so punks that were transferred (not sold) before the V2 contract was published. So to get the full and accurate details for any punk both contracts need to be looked at. If we revisit #4638, looking only at the V2 contract (and the current corresponding front end) we’re told 0x400946 claimed this punk on June 23rd, 2017. We know that June 23rd was the airdrop, not the claim, but until now the assumption has been that this info was still correct and 0x400946 was the claimer sometime between June 9th and June 23rd as well, though we’d have to check the V1 contract to get the exact date. But we now know #4638 was actually claimed by 0xfaf4a3, not 0x400946 so to get the accurate provenance for any punk, both contracts need to be considered.

The Precious and Arcane (an excerpt)

I was in 6th grade in the 1980’s when a classmate gave me what he called “a punk mixtape.” Side A was labeled SKATE ROCK and on Side B was scrawled SUICIDAL. We had basic cable and I’d already become a devout MTV watcher which had heavily influenced my musical tastes, but this cassette rewired my brain in irreparable ways. (I consider that a good thing by the way, anytime you have the opportunity to have your worldview turned upside down I highly recommend it.) I listened to it until it broke, and only later learned that the first side was tracks from Thrasher Magazine’s Skate Rock series, and Side B was part of Suicidal Tendencies first album. My parents refused to let me purchase a replacement for either.

The following year I traded a Bon Jovi cassette for a copy of ‘Wild In The Streets’ by The Circle Jerks. My homemade copy collection was growing and that summer I talked a friend into dubbing me a copy of ‘Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols.’ These songs and ideas were exciting in a way nothing ever had been for me, but it wasn’t until almost a year later when I had the opportunity to buy a Gorilla Biscuits 7” when my collector nerd gene activated. Purple logo, yellow vinyl. 2nd pressing, only 2000 existed in the world. There were only 1000 of the first pressing, and 102 of those had a special stamp on the label. How did I know this? That’s where things got really exciting.

By now we had dial up internet and BBSs where you could leave messages for people, but the World Wide Web was still a few years away. My lifeline at this point was fanzines and penpals. This was precious and arcane knowledge shared carefully in small circles. If you were into collecting punk records at that time you knew a guy (or knew a guy who knew a guy) who knew how many of what color of what record was pressed when, by who, and how to tell them apart. I started writing down details and specs when I learned them for later reference and before long people were calling me and asking for information on this record or that. I had a spiral notebook filled with discography notes, it was like my bible. Collecting was fun, but knowing what to collect was even better. I was surprised how few people knew the specifics, and was happy to share what I knew when I could. Beyond documenting the rarities, I was also starting to take note of design themes and ideas, and began learning what references bands were trying to make with cover art and how the visuals were another way to give a subtle nod to their influences, if you know you know kind of thing.

….

A decade later I was spending a lot of time on a website called Alen Yen’s Toybox DX. As a kid I’d lusted over the big metal Voltron toy that separated into lions and heard stories about the “real” Transformers from Japan with missiles that actually fired. I watched Godzilla movies for monsters, but also for the robots and dreamed about what cool toys Japanese kids must have had access to. With the (still early) growth of the internet, websites were popping up where a small handful of dorks who were obsessed with some weird obscure thing could find each other and talk about it. 30 years later things have progressed and now large handfuls of dorks obsessed with boring normcore mediocre shit can easily find each other as well. Anyway, Alen Yen threw up a flag and a bunch of us Japanese robot toy nerds rallied around him. Diecast, vinyl, plastic – all were welcome.

Sharing information became the cornerstone, if only because the audience was largely English speaking collectors from Europe and America drooling over near impossible to find 20-30 year old toys from Japan (and sometimes neighboring outposts in Asia). Someone would find an old ad and get it translated, or someone else would interview someone who had worked on a long forgotten project. We were learning things everyday and the site became a knowledge base for all things chogokin/sofubi/kaiju/sentai related. It was there I met Matt Alt who would become a longtime friend and collaborator across various cultural niches. We built a website called Jumboland trying to catalog and document an obscure line of robot toys called Jumbo Machinders made in the 1970’s which at that point were selling for hundreds of dollars and today sell for tens of thousands. Sadly the website is no longer online, but I still get messages from people who have screenshots or Internet Archive clippings asking me to fill in missing details to help their treasure hunting.

It was also around this time when I started paying attention to bootlegs. Music of course had bootlegs, but they were usually just crappy recordings from live shows or unauthorized re-releases. With toys, bootlegs were an entirely other world spawned from both licensing conflicts and poor translations. Toy manufacturers who couldn’t get a license (or never bothered trying) might release something similar but changing just enough details to skirt infringement issues to a market they didn’t expect anyone to ever know about. In doing so they (likely unintentionally) created new collections with their own fan bases and fanatics, who in many cases would eventually find their way back to the original inspiration. As a bonus, the bootlegs were often just as rare if not more so than the originals, but sold for a fraction of the price so if you decided to collect them it was all about the hunt. A motivated and industrious collector could build really cool collections for very little money that couldn’t be replicated by someone else with a lot of money simply because they didn’t even know where to look.

Some people ignored these as worthless knock offs, but others saw the value of a vibrant derivative culture, illustrating the inherent stickiness and virality of this “thing” which caused people to want to build on it and add to it. I realized a fanbase isn’t a circle, but a series of concentric and ever wider rings demonstrating more than one way to express admiration. Since then I’ve used this as a marker for the cultural importance of something – the more people trying to copy it the better.

….

It seemed like for a while anytime I heard about Ethereum it was in reference to some scammy ICO, but by 2020 I was hearing more and more about people using it for in game currencies, and more interestingly for art. I had an art background. I knew a lot of artists from my gallery days so I thought maybe I should finally get around to looking at this and see if any of it was interesting. Turns out it was, when I looked at how art was being bought and sold, and how onchain provenance helped distinguish originals from copies, and how royalties could be built into sale transactions, I immediately realized this was the solution to so many problems I and other artist friends had been wrestling with our entire careers. As a photographer, editions vs originals was an ever constant topic, and some friends who were video artists or digital illustrators had never been able to think of a file as an original, even if they knew it was their first saved version of something.

As I bounced around from marketplace to marketplace I started seeing a pattern and the more I looked at little pixelated characters I kept thinking this was something I’d seen before, but couldn’t place it. A lot of people were clearly making the same cultural reference, but it wasn’t just some random 8 bit video game graphics, it was something more specific… and then I remembered… CryptoPunks. 

I was already interested in Cultural Diffusion and Phenomenology and took note anytime I saw an idea spreading through a community. I’d seen it with records, toys, and art. One of my penpals from the 1990’s was Shepard Fairey, whose Obey Giant campaign specifically played with the idea of repetition and how things like his “Andre The Giant Has a Posse” stickers, when they become ubiquitous enough, take on a life of their own. By this time we’d collaborated on a number of different projects, exhibitions and an early version of his website obeygiant.com. One thing we did with that was make a page trying to document all the bootleg versions of his stickers and art that people were inspired to make on their own. (Eventually that grew too big to be comprehensive, but there’s still a fantastic collection of examples online today obeygiant.com/engineering/bootlegs/ )

Seeing people making derivatives of CryptoPunks clicked for me, and I immediately started taking notes. What had happened between my first interaction with these little pixel people and now, and where was this all heading? I had to catch up, and so I started doing what I always do.

[This is an excerpt from my introduction to the forthcoming book PUNKS:NOT DED, my unofficial companion to CRYPTOPUNKS: FREE TO CLAIM. NOT DED is available for preorder in limited hardcover and unlimited softcover, hopefully heading to the printer sometime this month.]

Where to find me

I’ve written a lot about social media and the state of it at various times, as well as my participation (or not) in various aspects of it. Most famously this piece from over a decade ago about why I don’t use Facebook. More recently I wrote about many of the different current offerings though that was pretty extensive and several months later I’ve mostly decided to focus my efforts and wanted to share my thinking, and where to find me – I’m not going to list every account I have everywhere, just the ones I’m actively looking at.

The old:
I’m @seanbonner on X – I was indignantly calling this Twitter long after the name change but I have to admit the X of today is nothing like the Twitter of yesterday, and essentially everything I loved about it has been replaced with things I hate. As one of the first 140 people to join Twitter, this one has been had to accept and let go of. I still have a blue check because at the beginning of last year I paid for a year, and even though I cancelled it a long time ago it persists along with increasing “your premium account is expires soon!” warnings, so I expect that to go away soon and along with that any visibility I used to have there. The only reason I keep the account is because CryptoTwitter – the community there – still hasn’t entirely moved anywhere else and it’s like this tiny pocked of joy and inspiration and friends and hope surrounded by a moat of bot vomit and trolls. I will continue to encourage everyone there to go elsewhere.

I’m @seanbonner on Instagram – I made excuses to justify Instagram while avoiding Facebook for a long time but the worse Meta gets the hander that is to do with a straight face. While this used to be a great place to connect with other photographers, the algo sucks and the new image format sucks and the ads suck and everything sucks so while I’m keeping the account for the name and will probably crossposts for a while, the future sees far less of me there. (Also I have an account for my noise project Drone War because again, the noise community seems to only be there at this point.)

The now:
I’m @seanbonner.com on Bluesky – I wrote before that this is the most Twitter like of the Twitter alternatives, and I think that’s in part why it’s gotten critical mass. Technically Bluesky is the front end built on the open AT protocol which anyone can build on so you aren’t locked into anything, and only you own your content and social graph (followers). There’s no ads or algo manipulating the feed, so you see posts by the people you follow. Using your own domain to verify is brilliant. Blocking and mutes work, and so far there’s a pretty low percentage of troll bots. The only real complaint I have right now is that the lack of a real crypto community there has allowed a ridiculous flood of long debunked 2021-era rumors which people with large followings state as if they are facts, to much applause and fanfare. So that’s a little gross, but hopefully it shifts in the near future.

I’m @seanbonner.photos on Flashes – Flashes is an Instagram like interface for AT Protocol while it’s technically also a Bluesky account, the content is more designed to be viewed in Flashes, which ignores text posts and beautifully presents imagery. Currently Flashes is iOS only, and it’s a single dev project, however they just celebrated 50k downloads from the App Store so I hope the growing popularity allows them to bring in some more people and expand to web & Android soon. I made a dedicated account for this app rather than just use my main, because I wanted this to really photos on photography and visual art, and not get sidelined by random news or drama of the day.

I’m @seanbonner on Telegram – This is actually my favorite place to hang out, largely because I’m in small well curated groups so it’s more of a bunch of private group chats, but that’s really what I want out of social media anyway – a good way to talk to my friends.

More privately, I’m @seanbonner.01 on Signal – in a perfect world I’d migrate all my Telegram groups and chats to Signal, and we’d all turn on disappearing messages and sleep much more soundly knowing we’re not being snooped on. Alas, this tends to be more for friends who are tech savvy and paying attention to privacy and security issues. (Related, I’m also on Session which is it’s own thing, built outside of the US but using some Signal tech. If you need to reach me securely and don’t want to use Signal ping me and I’ll give you my account)

While talking about this forthcoming post over the last few days a number of people have asked me if I’ve I’ve tried this or that app which they are really liking, and the answer almost universally was “yes, but..” the “but” being that it was yet another centralized app that will eventually have the same problems as all previous centralized social media services and at this point I’m not going to commit to or spend time building a following on anything like that. I’ve done it too many times and it’s groundhogs day at this point. The only way I’m seriously considering anything is if it’s decentralized / built on web3 foundations, because if I choose to leave I want to take my stuff with me – I don’t want to keep starting over from scratch.

And again, I’m on a few other apps which I’ve mentioned before I just don’t actively check them. That’s it for now, if you aren’t there yet come hang out on Bluesky.

Los Angeles

I visited Los Angeles for the first time in February of 2001. I’d passed on previous opportunities to visit because I assumed it would be a place I’d hate. The only things I knew about it was there were lots of earthquakes and fake people. I didn’t work in the movies, had no interest in plastic surgery or fancy cars and generally didn’t think there was anything I’d find interesting there, so why bother? I eventually decided to check it out not for any grand reason other than that it was really cold in Chicago. I’d just carried my suitcase 5 blocks through the freezing ice and snow to get home after visiting family during holidays in sunny Florida, and couldn’t come up with a reason to say no when an LA based artist friend of mine proposed a visit. Fuck it, why not, right?

I expected to go, enjoy a few days of warmth and see some friends, check another city off the list, then go home having all my preconceptions confirmed. I was wrong.

It felt electric. Almost immediately I realized my assumptions were misplaced. This was not all glam and glitter, these were normal people doing normal shit. But there was a buzz that I’d never felt before and it didn’t take me long to figure out why. College aside, which is transient by design, everywhere I’d ever lived the majority of the people who lived there were also from there. They were used to it and comfortable with it, and had accepted their place in it. Los Angeles was the opposite. Most of the people I encountered moved there from somewhere else, driven by aspirations, chasing some kind of dream. At the time I joked that it might be a dumb and completely unrealistic dream, but it was a dream nonetheless. And that hope and optimism could be felt everywhere. People were trying to do things. On top of that, there was this feeling that everyone you met was a potential collaborator rather than what I was used to, which was competition at every turn. It was intoxicating, I’d never felt anything like it and immediately knew I needed to live there. 

I went back to Chicago, informed my boss of my decision, made arrangements and 3 months later I was living in LA. 

I spent 16 years in LA, almost 3x as long as I’ve lived anywhere else in my life. When I eventually left, I left not to get away, but because I realized that commuting back and forth to Tokyo every month was ridiculous and something had to change – however no matter how far away I was, Los Angeles stayed planted in my heart. It was the first place I ever lived that felt like home. It wasn’t painless and the city certainly dished out its fair share of drama but I loved it and it became a part of me. Metaphorically, but also physically as evident by the number of Los Angeles tattoos I got over the years. Los Angeles is like no other, everyone says that about every city and I’m sure it’s true to some extent but one of the reasons New Yorkers don’t like LA is because they expect all cities to work like NY – and most do – but LA explicitly doesn’t. It’s it’s own thing, and it’s proud of that. Something that became evident to me living there is that people in LA are actually fake, just like they are everywhere else, but only LA embraces that, celebrates it, and is up front about it. It’s a costume, all part of a show, which can be taken off without fear or concern of being found out, and this reveals the deepest vulnerability and humanity I’ve ever experienced. Imagine my surprise, the fake people I was worried about were actually the realest.

Another thing is that LA knows how everyone else feels about it. LA knows everyone thinks it’s just earthquakes and fake people, just glam and glitter. And it doesn’t care. It’s over trying to convince everyone it’s something else, and its just confident it being what it is. LA gets shit done, because shit needs to get done and no one else is going to do it. Whatever you want, whatever you need, whatever idea you have, LA can provide a way to do it and excited collaborators to help you out with it. Every project or company I started there, and there are many, started out with a simple “anyone want to riff on this with me?” post somewhere, or “oh! I know someone you need to meet!” It was beautiful.

And that’s just the people. The landscape, the architecture, the food, the history, the culture… there are so many things, all of the things, and I could essays about all of them. On a normal day anyway, but today is not a normal day.

I’ve been trying to write this for over a week and keep getting stumped because I don’t know how to say what I’m feeling, watching this place that I love burn and not being there to do anything. Not that I could if I was of course, which complicates it further. Balancing the knowledge that we all knew this might happen eventually, with the disbelief that it actually happened. I have friends who have lost everything and I want to hug them. I have friends who didn’t but their fear and stress is just as real and I want to be there for them, just to do something. But I’m far away, speechless and helpless. Just watching, and hoping for the best for whatever is left, and whatever comes next. We haven’t even begun to realize what was lost, or what impact that will have on the future.

To my friends still there, the survivors, I love you all. I miss you. I’m thinking about you nonstop, and can’t wait to see you again soon and deliver these promised hugs. Stay strong.

[This post was originally sent out to my newsletter, apologies for anyone who got it twice.]