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 bookniftynaut 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?
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.
As many already know the book CRYPTOPUNKS: FREE TO CLAIM that I worked on most of last year, which is being published by Phaidon, is currently at the printers. As far as I know it should be in people’s hands in early December. I may or may not have seen a copy already, and in either case I can attest that it turned out beautifully. This thing is a brick, at over 800 pages it truly is an epic piece of work. It’s substantial in every way. Beyond just a catalog of all 10,000 CryptoPunks, it’s filled with thought provoking essays and insightful commentary. Interviews and assessments. And it’s put together in such a way that you can pick it up, flip to a random section and spend a few minutes reading and walk away feeling like you gained something from it. It’s not a cover to cover read, but a collection of powerful stand alone work. I’m deeply honored to have played a role in helping shape this from idea to final thing, and will be proud to have it on my shelf, and delighted when I see it on others.
Which is inevitable due it’s size and color. I mean, look at this thing:
You might think being this thick, it’s 100% all encompassing. In our initial talks that’s certainly something we aspired to. The end all be all, totally comprehensive book on CryptoPunks. And in many ways it is, but also–it isn’t. As we got into it we realized how this is a living thing, changing day to day with new stories being written and old stories being revised. While working on it we kept having to change something because something else happened, a big sale, new information uncovered, etc. At some point we had to say “this is the cut off point” otherwise it never would have been sent to the printer.
I also concede that there’s a level of information many people will find interesting and then another level that only the super nerdy dorks like myself even care about. Where possible, this book sticks to the things that are most interesting to the most people. Don’t get me wrong, it goes deep. But not too deep, if you know what I mean. And I think it’s stronger for that. I’d be remiss if I didn’t send a massive thank you shout out to Stone at Yuga Labs and Belle at Zak Group who were my constant and often daily contacts obsessing over this thing as much if not more than I was.
That said, I am a super nerdy dork and I admittedly go too deep all the time, as any number of blog posts here can illustrate. Which brings me to the next point – I realized that I regularly find myself sending people links to things I’ve written on the subject, or hear from someone that they read one of my older pieces and that sent them of on a search of their own. There’s also been a few interesting things that have happened since our self imposed cut off date. So I decided I might as well go ahead and pull all that together, update old things, document and explain some new things, and put out an unofficial companion to CRYPTOPUNKS: FREE TO CLAIM. I floated the idea to a few people and the response was an overwhelming yes, so that’s what I’m going to do. So I present: PUNKS NOT DED.
This one is not for everybody, but it’s definitely for some people. I’m pulling things together and deciding what new to include right now but thinking this is going to come in between 60-100 pages. I’m matching height dimensions as best I can so it’ll look nice on the shelf next to it’s larger sibling. Full contents forthcoming but this will include previous blog posts, expanded wiki articles, some updated and expanded history as well as some new events. Depending on how it works out I might dive into some closely related derivatives a bit more too, as part of the larger conversation, but that’ll kind of depend the page count I land on and what I need to fill it. I’m thinking there will be a few different versions of this.
Semi-limited Softcover. Unsigned. Print run to be determined by preorders, plus a few extra. Available now.
In the meantime, if you haven’t ordered CRYPTOPUNKS: FREE TO CLAIM yet make sure you do so you get the first shipment. It’s available from Phaidon as well as on Amazon and everywhere else near you. I can’t wait for everyone to get this thing in their hands, it’s just worth it.
The last few days have been wild and I don’t even know where to start, or where to continue from because everytime I start writing something it changes and I have to keep starting over. Some wonderful things happened alongside some terrible things. This is a series of somewhat connected thoughts and observations that I hope leads somewhere helpful.
If you want to skip my recap and jump right to the commentary, click here.
Some Background.
Cryptopunks are art. Culturally important genre defining art. I know it, if you are reading this you probably know it, and others are starting to realize it every day. When Matt & John (collectively Larva Labs) the artists who created Cryptopunks walked away from their creation it was largely because community was attacking them for everything they did, or didn’t do – and demanding they do, or don’t do any number of things. They never signed up to manage community expectations, they just wanted to make art. Honestly, I can’t blame them for that at all. This space can be brutal, and they certainly saw the worst of it. At least up until that point, but we’ll get to that later.
Yuga Labs, who bought the IP, stated from the start that they saw their mission was to provide more for the community, and to work to establish deeper recognition of Cryptopunks in the art world. They said they saw themselves as stewards and wanted to make everyone proud.
Museums, and Prints, and Books, Oh My
Under Yuga’s care, punks have found their way into the permanent collections at major museums like LACMA, ICA Miami and Centre Pompidou in Paris. 24×24 pixel on-screen images were recontextualized with high end limited edition large format art prints that no small amount of collectors have proudly framed and hung on their walls. Phaidon, one of the pre-eminent art book publishers in the world have started taking orders on a massive 800 page slab of a book about Cryptopunks, filled with images, essays and interviews. To say they have been making headway on their goal of art world recognition is an understatement.
In Residence
Another initiative Yuga announced was an Artist In Residence program, playfully titled Punk In Residence. AiR programs are a long standing tradition that often gives an artist a chance to explore something they might not have, and gives an organization or institution a way to support the arts with something tangible to show for it. The work produced by not just an artist, but by all the artists who participate in the program becomes a kind of creative conversation, playing out across various canvases (or proxies) and through many lenses. Importantly, these programs are not just one off – they need many artists in series over a period of time to tell a story. I was an Artist In Residence at the MuseumsQuartier in Vienna and have a catalog/book they published at the end of the year showing my work along side the other artists involved and it’s a really cool way to feel like a real part of this thing. They do this every year, and when you look at all the books together it tells a beautiful story about how MQ has helped and furthered all these different kinds of artists experiment with something they might not have otherwise.
Recently
To kick off the Punk In Residence program Yuga announced that the inaugural artist would be Nina Chanel Abney, a contemporary American artist known the world over who has works in the collections of museums like MOMA, Whitney, Ruebell, Brooklyn Museum and others. Abney’s work is unapologetically political often touching on topics such as race & gender, but at the same time is colorful, fun and poppy, leading to the apt description that it’s “easy to swallow, hard to digest.”
Why, 2015, Nina Chanel Abney
Some people might argue that picking an artist with a strong political voice to start this program was a mistake, but both art and punk have always been built on political activism and to ignore that is kind of ridiculous and I think illustrates an ignorance about what this is all about to begin with. Matt and John have said from the start that CryptoPunks was inspired in a large part by the London punk scene, which gave birth to classics like God Save The Queen by The Sex Pistols and White Riot by The Clash. Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ anyone? So if art makes you uncomfortable, that’s probably the point.
[As an aside I think there is a wide gap between people who think of CryptoPunks as art and people who think of CryptoPunks as financial assets. They can of course be both, and if you think of them as primarily a financial asset you are probably less likely to want to see politics anywhere near them, but both Larva Labs and Yuga Labs have stated plainly they believe CryptoPunks are art, so that’s the argument I’m running with here. The financial asset side doesn’t have to like the art aspect at all, but can’t really expect it to just go away.]
A struggle with how things are communicated and cultural literacy was also revealed during promotion of the Phaidon book. Cryptopunk owners (myself included) like to think of ourselves as having our fingers on the pulse and knowing whats going on at all times. But in talking about some of the contributors to the book it became clear some people didn’t have the same reference points as others. We saw people assume that since they didn’t know who someone was, no one else did either. Or perhaps, because they did know who someone was everyone else must know as well. This led to some confusion and a complicated situation – how to inform people who think they already know it? Don’t give enough information and people get mad that they feel left in the dark, give too much info and people feel like they are being talked down to. Striking a balance there is hard, and usually results in everyone being a little irritated.
Beyond promotion the book itself was not without controversy, while many people loved the idea and immediately bought several copies, others felt like they should have gotten one free either because they owned a Cryptopunk or because the book says “Free To Claim” (an obvious reference to the fact that Cryptopunks were originally free to claim). Others had strong opinions about who was or wasn’t contributing to the book, which led to some heated debates. This is a perfect example of how no matter what you do, you can’t please everyone, and how no good deed goes unpunished.
Currently
Last weekend (May 18) many people, myself included, traveled to see the opening of Nina Chanel Abney’s new exhibition LIE DOGGO at Jack Shainman’s The School museum/gallery space in Kinderhook NY. The exhibition includes some retrospective 2D canvases from the last 4 years, leading into a new series of 3D sculptures she has just produced and finally unveiling the world she did for her Punk In Residence project – a collection of 500 animated 3D generated characters built with Abney’s interpretations of many recognizable traits from the Cryptopunk collection, rendered in her own style as well as a significant amount of her usual character traits to make something that was distinctly her own, but with a knowing inspirational nod to Cryptopunks. She called this new collection Super Punk World, a clear world building expansion of the idea she began with her 2022 digital body of work which is called Super Cool World. There were about 3,000 people at the opening, the vast majority of which had never heard of Cryptopunks before, possibly never heard of generative art or NFTs even and every one of them learned about these things in the end. This was a primarily art world audience, not crypto people – so thinking back to the mandate of building exposure of Cryptopunks into the art world, this was a huge success. Everyone was delighted.
(photos by me)
A few days later the official CryptoPunks social media account announced the launch of Super Punk World, and all hell broke loose. Criticisms of the art and misunderstandings around the project quickly turned into attacks on Yuga, the artist and individual Yuga team members who had worked on it. Things got ugly quick, and open forums like Twitter devolved into a flood of racist, sexist personal attacks with trolls and shitposters trying to out do each other to catch the engagement stream. It was the worst of stereotypical cryptobro-ness on full display. I was disgusted by what I saw, embarrassed for the space, and heartbroken for the artist and people who have spent the last year working on it. Before the end of the day Yuga’s CEO would step in and make an announcement that these pieces would be randomly given away rather than sold, and there would be no future Cryptopunks efforts from them.
It’s especially disappointing to see that in an industry like crypto which celebrates independence and being censorship resistant, many essentially admit through their actions that this only applies to ideas they agree with, and lack the self awareness to see that.
Where this goes from here remains to be seen, but this brought up a bunch of things to consider.
Some Thoughts
Communication Misses
Judging by the number of people complaining about “Super Punks,” talking about diluting the original CryptoPunks collection as if this was Cryptopunks 2.0, suggesting no one has ever heard of Nina or that she was hired to make derivative punks (or any number of other ridiculous claims) it’s pretty clear the communication missed some marks. This is valid criticism, recently understood with the book comms I mentioned earlier and Yuga was most likely not trying to flood people with information and assumed they understood things better than they did. This issue probably would have been helped by much more in depth discussions about what an Artist In Residency program is for, who Nina is, why she was chosen to kick it off, where it’s headed next, etc etc etc. The collection having “punk” in it’s title seems to have confused a lot of people, and posts from the main Cryptopunks account very likely exacerbated that.
It’s important not to be one sided here- lots of people also reacted without reading anything, ignoring published information while imagining their own histories and narratives and then panicking about them. I saw lots of people insisting everything had been wonderful under Larva Labs or even that Cryptopunks had been a decentralized community project until Yuga made it corporate. It’s a disappointing state of the world when anything outside of 10 second tiktoks are basically ignored by everyone. What? 2 paragraphs of text? I’m not reading all that!
Hindsight is 20/20 and it’s easy to sit here today – barely 24 hours after the drama kicked off – and say if the collection was called “Punk In Residence: Nina Chanel Abney” and it was announced from a newly created @punkinresidence social media account after several weeks of posting educational materials this probably would have landed very differently, but here we are.
Trolls Gonna Troll
Another crucially important detail: Yuga is a troll magnet. There are a dedicated group of haters who will criticize anything they do, and will look for any opportunity to go after them. This isn’t unusual, in fact it’s online trolling 101 – target the big accounts and you’ll get some of their attention. We’ve seen this tactic deployed across countless genres for decades, it always works because people always take the bait. But Yuga has been tied up in years of battles, both legal and social, and that’s made them both a big target and hypersensitive to it – which ironically makes all that much more rewarding for the trolls. Which complicates things when you consider the next detail…
Yuga has a Trust Issue
Be it massively hyped NFT drops that feel neglected after launch, mini games missing the mark, surprise acquisitions, layoffs, sales of properties, mea culpas, management changes, mixed messages from various accounts and unclear priorities – Any of these things are easily justified or explained one at a time, but in aggregate and the fact that if it’s not one thing it’s another results in Yuga having a serious trust issue, and as such anything they announce is now taken with skepticism and questions about how long until they change their story or abandon it.
To date the Cryptopunks team has largely been exempt from that. Preferring a low key hands off position, under the guidance of Natalie Stone the steps taken from Cryptopunks have widely been seen as thoughtful and considered. The Cryptopunks community has enjoyed a a kind of siloed relationship with Yuga, ups and downs at “corporate” have rarely impacted Cryptopunks initiatives. While there are lingering promises from the early days of the acquisition that are still uncompleted (*cough* revamped marketplace *cough*) most of what Stone has put into motion has been delivered, or is obviously in progress. She’s also been there for the community, listening to concerns, requests, and trying to help people understand where things are at and why. Even over the last 24 hours when the timeline has been full of hate directed towards Yuga, much (not all) of that seems to come with a caveat that people still trust and appreciate her. This is difficult to pull off, and to me least, reads like all is not lost.
The wild card here is yesterday’s post from Yuga’s CEO. To begin with it’s vague as to what next steps, if any, there are. It also brought up a lot of questions, which at least as I’m writing this are not yet being responded to. Announcing something and then changing course less than 8 hours later feels reactionary. No matter how they decided to proceed, I think it would have been better to take a week – hell a day or two at least – to think about it, let the dust settle and give cooler heads a chance to prevail. If you launch a big long term project, work on it for a year, and the first release lands poorly the thing to do is iterate, learn from what happened and apply that to the next round. This is a public show of a desire to improve things, and makes good on your promise to do them. If you cancel it and walk away at the first (and entirely predictable) backlash then that puts every future promise you make into question. Why would punks (or anyone) take Yuga at their word going forward if it seems they will pull a 180 if the road seems bumpier than expected. Why would a world class artist like Abney even consider working with Yuga again if it seems they will just give up if faced with any pushback?
In the last few weeks leading up to this launch several people have asked me for predictions, and in every single case I’ve said the worst thing that could possibly happen would be Yuga panicking and canceling the whole program. I deeply hope that’s not where this is headed. The “in Residence” program is important and valuable, things don’t always work perfectly the first time but efforts should be made to keep it going and try again.
Perceptions by Others
Another very serious problem is that the reaction to Super Punk World was filled with really hateful, xenophobic shit, and even though this mostly wasn’t coming from CryptoPunks, the association is there and sulking away leaves that lingering taste. As an example I’ve mentioned that people still blame the V1 Cryptopunk community for the actions of random trolls because lots of drama happened at the same time and there was no one to come forward and say “this isn’t us, we don’t condone this.” The official Cryptopunks account should post a strong condemnation of the attacks on Nina and others, and Yuga should stand behind her and this project they did together. Abandoning her at this point makes everything I’ve just talked about worse. Standing up and defending an artist would score a lot of points.
Update: Several people within the punks community put together a statement to make clear that the hateful attacks were not from punks and that kind of approach is not welcome in the community.
Way Forward
I’ve had many conversations with many people about what Yuga should do in relation to Cryptopunks. In February when co-founder Greg Solano returned at CEO, one of the announcements was the creation of a new company, BAYC LLC, to house all of the Bored Ape projects. This made a lot of sense to everyone, Yuga shifts to more of a quiet parent/umbrella role and individual properties get siloed teams, budgets and focus. I said at the time that a follow up announcement of a “CryptoPunks LLC” or similar would be welcome and calm fears that the rug might be pulled out from the Cryptopunks team at any moment, or that they would be sucked back into other parts of the company.
That could take a number of shapes, but I’ve iterated on the idea a bit and now think a sort of non-profit foundation or trust might make more sense. Yuga Labs owns a lot of CryptoPunks and is legally obligated to protect that investment. I think if they set up a foundation to house and protect the Cryptopunks IP, similar to to the Warhol Foundation, while keeping their punks as assets, then actions of the foundation would in turn protect their investment.
There’s a huge fear in the Cryptopunks community that Yuga, hard up for cash, will try to commercialize Cryptopunks. Transferring the IP to a foundation resolves that fear instantly. This also allows the foundation to launch initiatives (like In Residence or licensing) without the fear of “cashing in” as they would be under a legal mandate to protect the IP. This could be funded by Yuga, or by other foundations, or even in part by the community which has already had many discussions about what it would take to buy the IP back from Yuga and self manage it. Yuga matching an investment from the community would be a very powerful statement here.
As it stands right now we’ve seen several statements from Yuga about wanting to protect Cryptopunks, but in light of the aforementioned trust issues and potentially backpedaling on the Punks In Residence program, anything they say is being taken with several grains of salt. Taking a step like this I think would be welcomed by almost everyone.
Update: This suggestion has led to several conversations which have come together and a number of people are now working on setting up a foundation independently, if you are interested in joining the discussions please let me know. More on this in the near future.
When we talk about Cryptopunks and the controversy surrounding the V1 contract, there’s always the question of respecting the artist’s wishes. In general I agree that an artist gets to decide what their art is and isn’t as long as they are working on it, but once they release that work to the public it’s out of their hands. Public reception to a piece of art and the artists intention are two wholly separate things. With Cryptopunks this gets a even muddier because we aren’t just talking about a difference between intention and reception, we’re talking about hindsight and ongoing revisions to a narrative. The artist’s intention when the work was released and how they feel about the work several years after the fact may not be the same thing and shouldn’t be conflated. Add to this a healthy dose of misinformation and misunderstanding, even from supposedly authoritative sources, and you have widespread audience confusion. I hope to help clarify some of that a bit with this article.
It would be impossible to address every rumor, however there are two core themes I hear time and time again; Firstly that V1 Cryptopunks were never intended to be released (this takes on various forms: I’ve heard claims that they were a beta release, only a prototype, or as I’ve just heard recently that they were an unreleased experiment, stolen years later by hackers straight from the artists hard drive) and secondly that the “artists wishes” are the end-all-be-all when it comes to art appreciation.
So let’s unpack this. As a refresher Cryptopunks were released to the public on June 9th 2017 as a free claim. They were fully claimed by June 18th which was also when a bug was discovered in the contract, a new contract was published on June 23rd. The “new” Cryptopunks were airdropped to people who had claimed the “old” cryptopunks and with minor exception until 2022 anytime anyone talked about Cryptopunks they were referring to the “new” contract. The primary problem with all iterations of the “they were never intended to be released” story is that it erases everything that happened between June 9th and June 23rd.
On June 16th Mashable published an article about Cryptopunks and both Matt Hall and John Watkinson (collectively Larva Labs) are quoted in it. It’s very clear from the article that they are talking about a project that has already been released, not a project they are planning to release in the future. A quick read of this thread by Matt Hall in the r/ethereum board on Reddit posted on June 9th, 2017 should remove any question that the project was released, Matt even explains how to claim a punk in the comments. It’s entirely safe to say that had a bug not been discovered this would have been the single Cryptopunks collection. Just as a revised or expanded edition of a book doesn’t magically undo the release of the earlier version, the new Cryptopunks contract published on June 23rd doesn’t change the fact that separate contract was released to the public 2 weeks earlier.
I feel like I need to be exceptionally clear here – I’m not arguing about which contract is “the real one” or challenging the fact that the V2 contract is unquestionably the official version, but the often repeated claim that the V1 contract was never intended to be released is entirely false. What is true is that when Larva Labs released the V2 contract they assumed because of the bug in the V1 contract which prevented sales, people would simply lose interest and forget about it. And for a while that is what happened, but the thing about code and bugs is that people often find ways to patch them, and the thing about history is people like the stories. So while it’s fair to say that after the release of the V2 contract the artists did not expect the V1 contact to be traded, it’s incorrect to say that at no point did they intend to release the V1 contract.
Skip ahead a few years to 2022 when people started trading V1 Cryptopunks (thanks to a newly released wrapper that patched the bug), there’s no question at all that the artists did not want this to happen and they stated as much publicly. Surely the artists position on their own art is important, right? Well, kind of… but on some level this is like a parent raising a child, they have hopes and dreams for their children but at some point their children grow up and move out and have their own lives independent of their parents wishes. When an artist puts work into the public, what happens after that is not really something the artist gets to control.
It’s clear from statements Matt & John made in 2017 that they were intentionally publishing something onto the blockchain in a way that was immutable and out of their hands, and part of the “experiment” as they called it was to see what people would do with it. I think there’s a very good argument to be made that the artists intention – part of the art in fact – was very much for the work to have a life of it’s own. The friction arises because the path that work eventually took wasn’t what they’d initially imagined.
Go! Be free! Wait, no! Not like that!!
But let’s abstract this argument a bit and look for other examples in art and culture where a creator made something, released it to the public, and then changed their mind. This happens all the time in fact, but I picked 3 well known examples to illustrate a variety of outcomes and interpretations, and asked my Twitter followers about them.
Blade Runner. In Philip K Dick’s book “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep” the main character Rick Deckard is unquestionably human. For the movie adaptation screenwriter David Peoples made that much more questionable, and in the film itself which famously has several revisions of its own, director Ridley Scott is quite forcefully painting Deckard as a replicant. Public opinion has largely accepted that position, even though it’s distinctly not what the artist intended. Now you could argue that the movie and the book are different in many ways, and given that they were made by different people one is more accurately a derivative, or inspired by the other, rather than being a direct reflection of it and I’d probably agree with you, but I think it’s an important example none the less as it shows that most people aren’t even aware of how the character was originally written.
But what about an artist changing their own work? George Lucas did exactly that with Star Wars. The 1997 “Special Edition” made a number of significant changes to his 1977 film, primarily in the way of visual effect but also to the story itself. The most famous of these is the Cantina scene where Han Solo kills Greedo. In the original film, Han shoots first which casts him in the role of aggressor. In the update, Greedo shoots first and Han dodges and returns fire in self defense. This is a drastic shift in narrative for a beloved character, and while the “official” version has Greedo shooting first, and Lucas, the artist, has disavowed the original storyline, it’s quite clear the public is not on board with that. Even though all currently available versions of the film have this update, (this is an important detail – you can not buy or rent a current day production of Star Wars with Han shooting first) fans still insist Han shooting first is more authentic.
I say fans intentionally here because I’m talking about people who love Star Wars, love the characters and love the universe. These are not haters or critics, they are fans. Fans who love a piece of work created by an artist, and simply disagree with something the artist later changed. This is important to note because I often see people who speak fondly of V1 cryptopunks being accused of hating or trying to fud the V2 or “official” Cryptopunks collection and I don’t believe the to be true. I think these are fans, people who love the art, and simply disagree with the artist’s current position.
Another film example is Steven Spielberg who, for the 20th anniversary of E.T. The Extra Terrestrialdigitally altered some scenes where FBI agents with guns are chasing children. Spielberg said that in modern context that could be interpreted the wrong way, and he replaced the guns with walkie talkies. Again here fans of the work had their own opinions about this change, some welcomed it and others argued this changed the entire feel of the film. They remembered being children themselves and watching these scenes and being terrified for the young characters in the film, a feeling that was lost with the FBI agents suddenly being less threatening. Years of debate raged on and for the 30th anniversary Spielberg actually put the guns back into the film and stated that he was disappointed in himself for making the change in the first place. In my poll this has a less decisive public opinion with an almost even split about which way it happened, and I think this illustrates well the separation between artist and audience.
These are well known examples but history is full of this kind of thing. From J. D. Salinger pulling his writings from publications after the popularity of Catcher In The Rye to Kanye West continuing to change his album Donda after it was released. “Done” is a fairly flexible concept to many creatives.
To belabor the point, artists intentions change over time. And people may connect with one position and object to another, but artists can’t dictate what people will resonate with or how their work is received. They can, as is the case of Star Wars, say “This is the real version now, and this is the only version I like” but even Lucas doesn’t deny the earlier version exists, and Disney who now owns the Star Wars franchise offers officially licensed merchandise embracing the debate.
My argument here is twofold – I maintain that there is no rule fans must agree with an artist’s feelings about their art, and that’s OK. I think people can be dedicated fans and deeply love a work of art while disagreeing with how the artist themselves feel about it. This is not inherently disrespectful, and these differences often create a richer story and fandom.
I also think this history is important. To the timeline, but also to the people who played a role in the story.
Speaking again about Cryptopunks, Matt & John have stated that these were not immediately embraced by the public (it took almost 12 hours for the first Cryptopunk to be claimed) and for several days they thought the experiment was a flop. While a few people had claimed some, by the time the Mashable article ran on June 16th, a week after release, there were still a significant number of punks that hasn’t yet been claimed. The article kicked off a claiming frenzy and a day later they were all spoken for – but this is also part of the story and being able to look at the on-chain history and see if a particular punk was claimed before or after the Mashable article is fascinating. For some of the people who were there and claimed their punks before that article ran, this is a point of pride. That history is lost if you only look at the V2 contract, which shows all 10,000 Cryptopunks were claimed on June 23rd.
Like any of the examples above, this is something that some people might not care about but others care about deeply. And it’s those stories and history which makes things special. The story of V1 Cryptopunks being released, being flawed, being forgotten, and being brought back to life by the fans is powerful and adds another rich layer of texture to what is already the incredible story. As a fan myself, I’m glad others recognize this and I love learning more and talking about it with friends who share my passion.
To end this with a call to action, one that is potentially more important than this footnote makes it out to be – Yuga Labs, who is now the owner of the Cryptopunks brand (they are the Disney to Lucas’s Star Wars) has undertaken the not-insignificant job of placing Cryptopunks into contemporary art museums, with the intention of ensuring punks are protected and regarded as the culturally important artifacts that they are. Sadly, thus far these donations have only included the V2 Cryptopunk even though Yuga Labs is in possession of the V1 punks as well. While I understand they need to maintain a position on what is “official” I’m disappointed by their denial of the “original” and I sincerely hope they will reconsider, as Spielberg did, and donate the matching V1 Cryptopunks to those museums as well. Even Larva Labs kept the V1 & V2 punks together in the same wallet for over 5 years before transferring them to Yuga. This history is important and should be preserved for the next generation of fans to enjoy.
I’ve been a fan of and have written about CryptoPunks for a long time now. Ever since V1s resurfaced in early 2022 there’s been a lot of confusion around the collection. If that first sentence lost you, perhaps read my earlier article explaining CryptoPunk versions before going any further. As I get questions regularly from people and I see the same errors pop up, I thought it would be helpful to address some of the most common misconceptions, with citations, to help everyone better understand both the history and current events. I recognize this is somewhat of a controversial topic but I think everyone is better served by understanding the actual facts, rather than having to make decisions based on rumor. Here are the 10 things I see mixed up most often:
1. “They were never intended to be released” or “They were just a beta release” This is probably the most widespread narrative and it’s incorrect. The V1 CryptoPunks contract was published on June 9th, 2017, and released to the public. Of course it wasn’t called “V1” at the time, it was just called “CryptoPunks” and for several weeks these were the only CryptoPunks that existed. This Mashable article, published on June 16, 2017, discusses the release and notes that they are still being claimed. It’s very clear from this article that this was a real release and not just a beta test or something accidentally published. The marketplace function on the CryptoPunks contract wasn’t enabled until they were all claimed which happened on June 17th, 2017 and it was at that point the marketplace bug was discovered. The V2 contract was published on June 23, 2017. Also telling, On March 4, 2018 Larva Labs filed a visual copyright registration for “CryptoPunks” citing a publication date of June 9th, 2017 – so in 2018 LarvaLabs is on legal record stating that CryptoPunks launched on June 9th, not June 23rd and that registration remains active today.
2. What exactly is “The Bug”? What “The Bug” is: In the marketplace, eth from a sale is withdrawable by the buyer, not the seller. What “The Bug” is not: A problem with the image, a broken token, a broken “picture frame”, an invalid NFT, a non-functional NFT, a backdoor to your wallet, etc etc etc… Two points which need clarification here are 1) if you are not using the marketplace function, there is no problem with the V1 contract and no risk in holding the token; and 2) the marketplace actually functions exactly as it was written. The problem is that they way LarvaLabs wrote it and how they intended to write it, are different. This seems like nit picking but it’s an important detail LarvaLabs have expressed themselves repeatedly – this was the first solidity contract they ever wrote and they simply misunderstood how the code worked. It’s not a “ooops, we put the comma in the wrong place and broke it” kind of bug, it’s the “Well that works, it just works differently than we hoped it would work” kind of bug. If you would like to see exactly what was changed between the V1 & V2 CryptoPunks contracts this difference checker link makes it very easy to understand and see just how much additional code was added in the V2 contract.
Important Note: The marketplace in the V2 contract fixed the bug of the V1 marketplace so Ether from a sale properly goes to the seller now, and it added bidding which is massive new feature that didn’t exist in V1. That said, it also has its own “bug” in that bids can be frontrun and this happens regularly. What this means is Anne has a CryptoPunk but it’s not listed for sale. Billy makes a bid for it. Anne accepts the bid that Billy placed, but Chip was watching and using a script, instantly places a bid on Anne’s CryptoPunk that is a fraction of an eth higher than the bid Billy placed, and so Chip buys the CryptoPunk even though Anne accepted the bid placed by Billy. The marketplace can “accept bid” but it doesn’t specify which bid. This is a real problem that has caused a lot of heartbreak over the years, so it’s not like the V2 marketplace contract is somehow perfect either. This, as well as the lack of ability to place wETH bids on multiple CryptoPunks simultaneously (as is the norm on modern marketplaces) is a frequently discussed pain point.
3. Without a wrapper, V1 CryptoPunks have no image. This one is slightly less straight forward only because most of our expectations are built on how modern NFTs (ERC-721 & ERC-1155 tokens) function. CryptoPunks predate these standards and are actually a modified ERC-20 token (more closely related to wETH, $APE, Matic, etc than to BAYC or CloneX) and unlike modern NFTs that each have their own image, both the V1 & V2 CryptoPunks contracts point to one single image that contains all 10k CryptoPunks. The token references a coordinate on that image and a web front end can then visualize which CryptoPunk in that one image the token is referencing. I must stress that this is the situation with V1 & V2 CryptoPunks. They are identical in this respect. Modern marketplaces like OpenSea or Rarible can display CryptoPunks because they’ve written custom code to handle the requirements of that specific contract function – something they’ve done because of the popularity of CryptoPunks. But this is also why you can’t buy or sell CryptoPunks on OpenSea or Rarible unless you first wrap them into an ERC-721 token. So again to be clear, when it comes to the image both the V1 & the V2 CryptoPunks function exactly the same, and in fact point to the exact same image.
4. What the V1 wrapper actually is/does, or “Wrapping it makes it no longer real” As I mentioned in point 3, CryptoPunks are not ERC-721 tokens so they don’t work natively in environments designed for ERC-721 tokens. If you want them to, then you need to “wrap them” inside an ERC-721. Think of it like a box you might use for shipping something to a friend in another city. The wrapper holds the original CryptoPunk token and gives the holder an ERC-721 token which works natively in those environments. At any point the holder of the ERC-721 token can “unwrap” it and receive their original CryptoPunk token back. Since “the bug” is only in the marketplace function, wrapping it resolves this and allows the CryptoPunk to be traded safely on modern marketplaces. In fact this exact thing has been done for years with V2 CryptoPunks as well to allow them to be traded on other marketplaces. Both V1 & V2 CryptoPunks need to be wrapped in order to trade them on marketplaces like OpenSea, the only technical difference is that V2 CryptoPunks can also be traded on their own built in marketplace as well. A quick search on the CryptoPunks Discord shows that selling CryptoPunks on other marketplaces has been a recurring community ask going back many years.
5. “There was community consensus to migrate away from the V1 contract” At the R.A.R.E. Digital Arts Festival in 2018 Matt Hall from LarvaLabs explicitly states on video that it was a controversial decision to make a V2 contract. Matt states that many people in the community felt that the thing they owned was in the V1 contract and the creation of a new contract would cause problems and complicate things (which it did, as evidence by the fact that I’m even writing this now in 2022), but he says they chose to ignore those concerns and “just hope for the best.” When they published the V2 contract they changed the official Marketplace to interact with the new contract rather than the old one, so the community had no actual choice but to move on with the new contract, for better or worse. A tweet by John during this time suggested they understood this forcing mechanism. This was not the last time Larva Labs would butt heads with their community and in their own statement regarding the recent sale of the CryptoPunks IP to Yuga Labs, they state “as this category of “Profile Picture Projects” (PFP) grew into an industry in itself, we found ourselves less and less suited to the operation of these projects. Our personalities and skill sets aren’t well suited to community management, public relations, and the day-to-day management” suggesting that “community consensus” was never something they were too deeply invested in.
6. Larva Labs (the artist) has disavowed V1s, and the artists intention matters most. Matt & John at Larva Labs are brilliant artists who clearly have visionary foresight and have helped shape the world of digital collectables we know today, arguably more than any other artists. You can argue, as I have, that the entire current genre of 10k pfp collections are directly inspired by CryptoPunks. Another LarvaLabs project, Autoglyphs, is unquestionably the inspiration for a whole other genre of on-chain generative art now most commonly associated with Artblocks. What Matt & John are not is consistent with their statements. For example between 2017 and 2022 they made a number of conflicting and contradictory statements about what rights CryptoPunk owners had to their individual CryptoPunks, eventually resulting in some high profile community members walking away. In the 2018 video I mentioned previously, during the Q&A session at the end someone in the audience informs Matt that his claim that CryptoPunks were the first NFT on Ethereum is inaccurate as CurioCards launched several months earlier. Matt responds saying “Argh! We didn’t know so we just said it and figured if we were wrong someone would tell us, guess I have to change the slides now – so we were the second NFT.” Thanks to blockchain historians we now know that there were at least 8 NFT projects launched on Ethereum prior to CryptoPunks, but LarvaLabs never actually changed those slides, and continued making the claim that they were the first for several years. In fact the claim is still live on the welcome page of the CryptoPunks Discord server today. My point here is that just because an artist says something about their work doesn’t necessarily make that true, nor does that always match what they said about their work before or what they might say about it later. I don’t think anyone would say “Well LarvaLabs intended CryptoPunks to be the first NFT on Ethereum, and they are the artist and intentions matter most, so they are the first even though others did it before them.” We are still bound by the laws of time and intentions don’t supersede that. It is unquestionably clear that statements by LarvaLabs about the V1 CryptoPunks in 2022 do not align with their own statements in 2017. To be perfectly honest, their statements in 2022 don’t even match their other statements in 2022. Early in the year they were found to be selling V1 CryptoPunks from their personal accounts while concurrently stating that they were “not official” from their brand account, and then filed a DMCA against the NFTs they’d just sold penalizing the people they sold them to. They apologized for this and recognized that selling something privately while also disavowing it publicly was problematic to say the least. There are two ways to read this, either they were intentionally committing fraud or they were just artists embarrassed about early work and misstepped while using “artistic license” to massage history a little bit. I tend to believe the later. And that’s fine, an artist can not decide they don’t like early work and that they don’t want to draw attention to it, but they can’t say early work that has already been sold to the public is no longer their work because they decide they don’t like it. Imagine if Damien Hirst said he no longer liked his Spots paintings and didn’t consider them to be official anymore? Would they suddenly no longer be Hirst paintings? No, they would simply be Hirst paintings that he doesn’t like.
7. “Hemba stole 1000 CryptoPunks” or “So many V1s were stolen that LarvaLabs had to start over to rescue them” At this point we are venturing into lore and what is firmly classifiable as “scene drama” but let me try to cut through some of that with facts rather than emotional reactions. LarvaLabs themselves have stated that they don’t consider anything that happened with “the bug” to be theft, the contract worked exactly as they wrote it to work. No one hacked it or found a backdoor, it was not exploited or anything like that, it’s just that what the contract was written to do and what they had hoped it would do were different things. Hemba was the largest single claimer of CryptoPunks, legitimately claiming over 1000 CryptoPunks the same way the every other claimer did between June 9th and June 17th. He was also one of several people who discovered “the bug” on June 17th and used the contract function to “buy” a number of CryptoPunks and then withdraw the ETH they’d just used to buy them. There were approximately 89 transactions where this happened and Hemba was responsible for 63 of them, so he has quite the reputation. However these transactions were reverted with the release of the V2 contract, and since then Hemba has made attempts to return the V1 CryptoPunks that he received without paying for them to the people who were selling them. To date he’s returned 40-something CryptoPunks and continues to actively try to contact people to return the rest.
8. “V1s are just a Hemba grift taking advantage of suckers” or “V1 Punks are just Phunks who…” You may be starting to see a theme here, I don’t think that’s accidental. Controversial characters attract attention, and that leads to gossip but again let’s try to separate that from the facts. Hemba did not make nor commission the wrapper currently being used to trade V1s, it was made in early 2022 by a developer called FrankNFT. Nor is it the first wrapper for V1 CryptoPunks, as there was an earlier wrapper in use in 2021 made by 0xfoobar. Importantly, Hemba has not been selling pieces from his V1 CryptoPunk collection, even when the floor briefly reached 20 eth in early 2022. The majority of V1 holders are either original CryptoPunk claimers, collectors of historical NFTs or fans of CryptoPunks. People who are passionate about a subject often talk about it (as I do here) and this has wrongly been painted as shilling by detractors and sadly that narrative persists. Another related narrative is that somehow the team behind CryptoPhunks or Not Larva Labs is also leading the V1 CryptoPunk community – this is easily debunked but for some reason persists. This assumption likely comes from the fact that V1 CryptoPunks are available to trade on the Phunks’ marketplace Not Larva Labs. This was not a collaboration rather it was a dig by NLL at LarvaLabs that simply took advantage of the blockchain functionality – anyone can make a marketplace and chose to sell any NFTs they want. Some of the people involved with NLL were also behind “ApeMarket” (now part of the Yuga trademark lawsuit) but the fact that BAYC NFTs were planned to be for sale on ApeMarket doesn’t mean BAYC/Yuga was a collaborator. Correlation does not imply causation, it’s just how decentralization works.
9. “V1 Owners can’t use them as their PFP, that violates copyright” This is one many people feel very passionately about though there’s little legal support for this position. While the new license terms provided for CryptoPunks by YugaLabs is much more detailed it does discuss rights which potentially do not exist. It would seem the authors of these terms know that as there are numerous caveats throughout with statements about rights with “if they exist” or “may exist” qualifiers. The hard evidence is that there is only one copyright registration on file for CryptoPunks and it’s for the entire image of all 10k CryptoPunks. Copyright lawyer Brian L. Frye has written a paper which questions if individual CryptoPunks meet the standards to be copyrighted, and a 2012 legal paper by Tyler Ochoa asserts that it’s unlikely that existing copyright law is applicable to avatars anyway. For most of the last 20 years people have used anything they want as an avatar on any number of services only occasionally bumping into an individual platform’s Terms of Use. My read is that if someone could file a copyright violation against someone else for an avatar we would have seen that plenty of times by now, so I think this claim is more wishful thinking than reality. But Twitter is full of people using CryptoPunks that they don’t own as avatars so if someone wants to file a lawsuit I’d be interested to see how it plays out.
10. “V1s aren’t real!” This is easily the most subjective argument on the list, as it ultimately depends on what any individual defines as “real” for themselves. Even LarvaLabs in the height of their criticism and backpedaling stopped short of that claim, instead stating that they were not “official.” I think that the classification of V1 as the original and V2 as the official makes a lot of sense. I also think it’s important to recognize that “official” is a title bestowed by someone else, in theory Yuga Labs could make a wrapper for V2s so that they function natively in ERC-721 ecosystems and then declare that the wrapped version is now the official collection. Not that they would, but the point there is no decisions by companies or investors can change the “original” status, but “official” is a bit more flexible.
So what is “real”? For me, the V1 “CryptoPunks” contract was written by LarvaLabs, published to the Ethereum Blockchain, the tokens were distributed to the public, and they spoke to the press about it. That’s about as real as it possibly gets. One might even argue that’s more “real” than an NFT minted on a platform’s shared smart contract, or something like XCOPY’s Grifters which were minted through Async for example. As a collector who understands the importance of provenance, I always prefer that an artist mints their work from their own wallet (or one they control). In the art world there are two relevant examples that come to mind: The Warhol Foundation and Banksy’s Pest Control. Both organizations are tasked with validating works by the artists. Warhol and Banksy are both incredibly prolific and have a lot of fraudulent copies floating around so having an authoritative body which can say “yes this is real, no that is fake” is really helpful. With Warhol, there is work that was made in The Factory with Warhol’s screens by Warhol’s assistants and The Warhol Foundation needs to definitively say “yes that piece is technically identical to this other piece but it’s not ‘real’.” This gets tricky because in some cases Warhol had his assistants do the work for pieces that are considered “real.” Similarly Pest Control has made it clear that Banksy will not validate any of his street work that has been removed from the street. So Banksy could put a piece up, everyone knows it’s a Banksy, but then someone cuts that part of the wall out and tries to sell it and the official line from Pest Control is that it’s no longer a real Banksy. How will that policy hold up in 100 years? I think it’s hard to believe that will be honored in the long term. If we found a painting by van Gogh in an attic with a note from him saying “this sucks, I never should have painted it, I don’t consider it my work” would the art world collectively say “throw this crap in the trash!” or would they celebrate a “lost” van Gogh that had just been discovered, regardless of what the artist personally thought about it?
Those are extreme cases to illustrate some pretty fantastic grey area, however I think the beauty of the blockchain is that these issues are negated. If Warhol minted all his work there would be no question of something was his or not. If Banksy minted all his work similarly all questions of authenticity would disappear. Luckily with LarvaLabs they did mint their work, and the blockchain evidence is there to document it.
Conclusion and my prediction… At the risk of sounding dismissive I think the argument over what is “THE CRYPTOPUNKS” kind of loses the plot. This is history and culture and all of these things play into the big picture, regardless of what value any individual places on any single element. V1, V2, Larva, Yuga – these are all fascinating chapters in a much more interesting and larger story. I’ve stated publicly long before I ever owned V1 or V2 CryptoPunks that I think these are incredibly important cultural artifacts which have had immense impact on both how we think of digital identity and the concept of collectable art online. I now own both, and I imagine an increasing number of collectors will begin to seek out “pairs” as I have. Having the original and the official feels like a complete set. There’s something like 120-ish wallets right now with the V1 & V2 of the same CryptoPunk and I suspect that number is only going to keep growing. And what about Yuga? In a recent interview on the subject a Yuga representative stated that they have “no current plans” for V1s, but they also own over 1000 of them. They know there’s a vibrant and active V1 community, which has a quietly growing overlap to the V2 community. If nothing else I believe Yuga is interested in building community, not fighting against it the way Larva did and that interest will inform their future steps. My prediction is that this is something they will eventually capitalize on, possibly by creating their own wrapper for V1s and treating them like the Mutants to the BAYC, or maybe they will make their own wrapper for V2s to address the marketplace issues. I think most people still don’t understand what V1s even are, and as more people learn the history and context I can’t see how their popularity won’t continue to grow.
The only one thing I’m 100% sure of however is that no matter what I say about any of this, someone will criticize me for it. Oh well. I hope this you found this article to be helpful and I made this handy chart to help you navigate your own explorations of the NFT space:
After talking about it and thinking about it for months, weekend our family sat down and finished up a 3,333 piece generative NFT project, with my son doing the lion’s share of the art. He’s 12 now and has spent massive chunks of his life building amazing structures in Minecraft and we all really enjoy pixel art so it was natural for him to take the visual lead. Of course Tara and I contributed some art as well. While we love PFPs, we also wanted to do something a little different and based this project on bookshelves and the stories and inspiration they can hold. There’s a lot of fun stuff hidden in this collection as well as some 1/1s that we can’t wait to see who finds.
View the collection directly on OpenSea or check the verified contract on Etherscan or follow the project twitter account for news & updates. We used Bueno (a tool built by the Robotos team) to do the generative build and smart contract work and it was super smooth. We’re so excited to roll this out and see what stories this leads to next!
