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.
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.
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.
I was on the road and groggy with cold meds when this conversation happened, so I told my friend Rushkoff I’d get back to him when I was home and rested up. I thought that would be a week or so later. It’s been 2 months and I haven’t stopped thinking about it, in fact I’m still not entirely sure how to answer it. That complexity on its own is kind of interesting so I thought maybe exploring it in public might get a little closer to an answer, or if nothing else relieve my guilt of taking so long to respond.
I think the main question here is “is this replicable?” – that is, could another group look at what is happening in the cryptopunks community and mimic/apply/encourage something, and get similar results. But to answer that we need to answer another much more difficult question first – what is “community?” And that requires accepting that the word “community” has become a completely worthless buzzword in web3 thrown around by marketers who don’t know shit about what community is. Community comes from human relationships and shared experiences and camaraderie and giving a shit about each other. Community is not about profits, floor prices or bag holders.
So I first need to define what I think about when I think of community, and in thinking about how to do that, I tried to think of other places where I’ve observed or experienced something similar and what those relationships are. At the core, it’s a trusted familiarity that comes when you’ve known someone for a long time, or you’ve been through a difficult situation together. There’s a feeling of being able to depend on each other, and a little bit of understanding who the other person is that doesn’t happen overnight. I have a small group of friends who I’ve known since high school and we all still talk regularly. We’ve taken different paths in life but we know where we all came from, and no matter today’s differences we know we can count on each other. I think in many ways this is the idea of “family” that is so idealistic but is rarely attainable, at least in my experience. We have the family we were given and the family we choose. Or more accurately in today’s global always online world – the families we choose.
As a kid I moved around a lot and never had the chance to build strong bonds with other kids. It wasn’t until high school and finding punk rock that I found people I clicked with and related to. I had a very lonely childhood when I finally found a place where I fit in, I never let it go. Ironically the place where I fit in is legendary for preaching independence, being yourself, and standing up for what you know to be right regardless of what others might think of you. I like to think I’ve taken those ideals to heart. That could seem unrelated, but it’s not. Keep reading.
I’ve written before about this and how it’s certainly driven my lifelong fascination with communities and subcultures and how people relate to each other. So any discussion of what an awesome community is will be informed by those experiences. People are diverse, but the commonality that they share lets them understand something about each other, and this creates a higher level of baseline trust that you’d find in just some random gathering.
This is a kind of intangible idea so it’s hard to quantify, but it manifests in different ways: supporting each other’s businesses and projects is obvious, openly sharing connections and networks is another. Looking out for each other, in public and private. That could mean professional services, or personal advice. It’s something like… “If you need something, I’m here for you.” That seems overly simplified, and maybe it is, but sometimes simple things are the most powerful.
So how do you get that familiarity? Time. Time is the answer in 99% of situations. Put in the hours, prove yourself, and eventually the people who are still around have built something with each other. And when applying that to a group, when you put that time in is important. In most situations, most communities, you join and then work your way up or earn trust over time. Your cred in the group is tied directly to how long you’ve been there. However even though this is the most common I would argue that this isn’t always ideal. The well worn stereotype of the elder community member trying to squash the actions of the newer member comes directly from this. Sometimes the people who have been there the longest are also the most jaded and critical of anything they didn’t come up with themselves. Lots of ‘get off my lawn’ going in communities with age based seniority.
The other way provides some insulation against this, which is that a potential member has to prove themselves before being able to join. There’s a number of different ways this can happen which I’ll get to in a minute, but the result is attaining membership in the group itself becomes the vetting mechanism, so members can fast track through all the ‘getting to know you’ business and skip right to familiarity and trust with any other member they meet.
An example of this from pop culture is the scene in Chuck Palahniuk’s “Fight Club,” where Tyler Durden makes wannabe members of Project Mayhem wait outside of the Paper Street house for several days while constantly and repeatedly being insulted and told to go away. The idea being that anyone who wasn’t really committed to the cause would give up and leave, while the ones who remain despite the abuse would eventually be welcomed as family. The (factually questionable) story says this comes from ancient Buddhist traditions where a potential monk’s dedication was tested by forcing them to wait outside of a temple for 3 days before being allowed to enter. Entry isn’t about participation but commitment. The friction ensures that those who join aren’t mere onlookers. And the people on the inside know that the new arrivals are serious.
But this idea exists outside of the realm of fiction, one well known example is the culture of motorcycle clubs. Potential members go through a prospecting phase before receiving their full set of membership patches. During this time, a prospect is both under the protection of the club but subordinate to all members of the club and expected to do anything asked of them, immediately, without question. The severity of this fluctuates wildly depending on the club and the chapter, but in any case this lengthy trust building phase is designed to weed out people who aren’t serious, and ensure that once someone is officially welcomed in any other member can trust them completely the second they meet them just by seeing their patches.
A friend of mine, a full patched member of a well known 1%er club once described the experience simply – “once you’re in, you’re in.” The bond was immediate, and like family. And while the ritual of it all obviously plays a role, at the end of the day it’s not just about the jackets or the bikes; it’s about the shared experiences, the ethos, the passion. This dynamic is echoed, perhaps surprisingly, in niche communities like Cryptopunks. Despite the obvious different stakes, the essence of belonging is strikingly similar. Ask anyone who, after first getting a cryptopunk, was bombarded with welcome messages and a flood of “one of us” gifs in one of the gated chat groups what that felt like.
(As an aside, “one of us” is a reference to the controversial 1932 film FREAKS which, at its core, is a film about a group of people, carnival workers, who built their own community, having been ostracized by mainstream society.)
And yes I recognize the hilarity in drawing parallels between gritty, underground subcultures and a community centered around digital art collecting. And no, I’m not implying that owning a Cryptopunk turns you into a knife wielding badass. But I am highlighting a common dynamic that prioritizes a sense of belonging through shared experiences.
And it’s not just bikers or carnies, for almost 25 years now I’ve practiced an esoteric Japanese martial art which involves training with old, very senior instructors often at their own private dojos or groups. These locations and schedules are not published openly, by design. The only way you get there is by having trained with the right people, built trust and earned rank. So if you are there (and there often is someone’s home), it’s because you know enough to be there – so some level of trust is implied. Again, this isn’t unique. There was a time in various surf/skate/punk cultures where being in the wrong place at the wrong time – a beach, a ramp, a venue – could result in a trip to the hospital. You had to earn the ability to be there, prove yourself in the scene to get access. While these places were technically open to the public, the public was in no way welcome. But for those who had earned the right to avoid harassment, you also knew anyone else there had your back.
I’m belaboring the point here and you may be thinking I’m an idiot drawing this connection because all of these things require time and potentially blood, sweat and tears to earn your way in, but consider this: There are no accidental Cryptopunk owners.
As we approach the end of 2023, if you are holding a Cryptopunk that almost certainly means one of a few things:
You were very early to all of this, you saw the importance and potential and jumped at it. But even more, you didn’t sell and walk away when these things were going for $150k each. That you are still here means you believe, even with everything that has happened, this is still just the beginning.
You weren’t early enough to get in when these were free, but you understand the importance, and paid the very high price of entry because you didn’t want to miss out.
Or, someone in one of those first two categories believed in you so much that they felt you needed to be in as well, and gave you one (or a big discount on one).
The process may be different but the end result is similar: If you are here, you are here for a reason – and just the act of being here tells the other members something about you.
And this brings me to another important similarity. Most of these groups – bikers, skaters, punks, (even the fictional Project Mayhem devotees) experienced stigmatization. These people were viewed with suspicion or even disdain by mainstream culture. And we all know that NFT enthusiasts, with their “expensive JPEGs,” face sneers and scorn from skeptics who are still in the vast majority.
Being mocked or stigmatized for your interest can be painful. But at the same time these negative labels, when embraced by a community, become a badge of honor. It’s in the face of external social judgment that the true strength of a community shines. Finding solace among like-minded individuals can be empowering. Keeping this in mind, that FREAKS reference hits even harder.
Another example – the fiercely individualist Church of Satan describes its membership as a “mutual admiration society.” I love this phrasing. It underscores a base level of respect extended to each other automatically, especially poignant in a group that is totally diverse by design. These aren’t mere social clubs; they’re support systems. Strip away the surface differences, you find at the heart of each community the notion of mutual respect. This is huge, especially for people who may not experience that anywhere else.
And this gets back to one of the “awesome” things I was referring to in my original comment – unlike most interactions today, where disagreements almost immediately devolve into traded insults, communities built on mutual respect facilitate enriching discussions. Intellectual discourse allows people to disagree and still maintain a level of civility. In an increasingly polarized world, the comfort found in these communities becomes ever more attractive.
Don’t get me wrong – nothing is perfect. Bad actors exist everywhere and no community is immune to extractive leeches. And for sure there are some real goddamn assholes who own cryptopunks – but the high barrier to entry serves as a filter which keeps those to a minimum. Perhaps if you spend $100k to walk in the door, you aren’t likely to want to shit on the carpet. Conversely, if the cost of entry is only $10, there’s a certain kind of person who will happily pay up, then gleefully shit all over the place just to see the reaction.
Also, yes anyone with deep enough pockets could just buy a Cryptopunk tomorrow, but the opaque community structure and confusing web of unconnected chat groups almost requires a guide, some introductions and a bit of social vetting from within the community. It’s not exactly like being invited to a private dojo, an MC clubhouse, or a well protected surf spot – but it’s not entirely different either.
And similarly, there’s not just one thing. Just as Hell’s Angels have a different culture than the Mongols, and an SF chapter will have a different culture than a Venice chapter, just as skaters in New York have a different culture than skaters in Dallas, it would be silly to think all Cryptopunk owners are the same. And the community reflects this – the culture in the Discord is different from the culture in the Telegram group which is different from the culture in a local city group which is different from the culture in a private twitter group. There are subsections and they are drastically different by design, but it’s the commonality that they share which brings them together.freaks
So to find my way back to the original question of whether one needs to own a Cryptopunk to experience a similar community, the answer is as complex as the community itself. Two things I want to call out: Owning a punk doesn’t guarantee the same community experience, and similar experiences can be found in other communities. It’s also important to understand that none of this is static, people are ever changing and their communities with them – a community today is different from that community yesterday, and tomorrow’s will be different still.
While all communities have unique structures, I recognize some patterns – bottom up organization, mutual respect among members, and some barriers to entry. Having skin in the game, be it financial or sweat equity, feels important. It’s not explicit, but in a way we are talking about secret societies. Simply owning a punk isn’t an all access pass. The opacity of community channels and social vetting echo characteristics found in more traditional “closed” communities. Can’t ignore the irony there for a community built on a foundation championing indelible openness and transparency.
Cryptopunks aren’t the only multi-gated online community, and any number of other collections, open-source projects and even traditional social groups also offer pathways to similar experiences. So, while the Cryptopunks community cannot be copied, its core ethos is not unreplicable. As communities continue to evolve in the digital age, perhaps the more important question we should be asking ourselves is not how to get in, but what we, as members or hopefuls, bring to these spaces to make them more meaningful.
When thinking about community, I always stress the value of intentionality. Often people first think of rules and what they don’t want in their community because that’s easy, but I always try to encourage moderators and community managers to reframe that and instead try to identify what they do what. Try to describe the community that you want, that you want to hang out in, by what it is, not what it isn’t. Try to write every point as a positive not a negative. It’s actually harder than you think to do this, but I believe it makes a powerful statement and attracts people who want the same thing as you as well as helping you fine tune your own intentions.
Two guiding documents I helped write that I’m really proud of are the Safecast Code and the Cryptopunks V1 Discord server etiquette.
For Safecast, the environmental non-profit I helped start in 2011, we wanted something for our volunteer community to act as our guiding principals, so in 2014 we published this:
We’ve been thinking about what describes the Safecast project as a whole, and came up with a list of 10 things that we try to incorporate into all of our efforts. This is something like our code of conduct, what are we doing, what we should be doing. We try to check ourselves against this list and encourage others to do the same.
ALWAYS OPEN – We strive to make everything we do transparent, public and accessible.
ALWAYS IMPROVING -We can always do better so use agile, iterative design to ensure we’re always refining our work.
ALWAYS ENCOURAGING – We aim to be welcoming and inclusive, and push each other to keep trying.
ALWAYS PUBLISHING – Results are useless behind closed doors, we try to put everything we’re doing out to the world regularly.
ALWAYS QUESTIONING – We don’t have all the answers, and encourage continued learning and critical thinking.
ALWAYS UNCOMPROMISING – Our commitment to our goals keeps us moving closer towards them.
ALWAYS ON – Safecast doesn’t sleep. We’re aware and working somewhere around the world 24/7
ALWAYS CREATING – Our mission doesn’t have a completion date, we can always do more tomorrow.
ALWAYS OBJECTIVE – Politics skews perception, we focus on the data and the questions it presents.
ALWAYS INDEPENDENT – This speaks for itself.
I’ve written before about the overuse and redundancy of Discord servers in the web3 space so with for the Cryptopunks V1 Discord I asked that we think of what didn’t already exist, but that we wanted to exist, and explicitly try to create that. I’m proud of these guidelines and think they’ve helped shape a friendly and welcoming community.
We are inclusionary and you’re welcome here. No matter what you look like, where you come from, what you have or your beliefs; you’ll be treated with respect.
We are here to have fun but not at the expense of others.
We celebrate CryptoPunks and Web3 Punk culture in its entirety. We recognise the visionary of our creators, LarvaLabs; the current owners of the brand, Yuga Labs; and all of the wonderful Punk derivatives. We reject repeated, intentionally divisive or derogatory comments towards any in the Punk ecosystem.
We show respect and positivity because we want to be respected by the wider community.
We share our interests, achievements and current projects without incessant shilling. In general, if you’re repeatedly bringing up a particular topic without prompt, that could be considered shilling.
We’re all at different stages of our journey and continuously learning. Teach others about your experiences, learn from others about theirs. All questions are good questions and our chat is an open forum.
We recommend you turn off DMs and be extremely careful in the interactions you have here. Phishing, impersonation and all manner of trickery are persistent threats.
If you post a suspicious link, NSFW/NSFL content our mods might act to ban or mute you immediately. If in doubt about whether something is acceptable, it’s better not to post.
Mods are here to clear away bad actors and facilitate positive discussion. If a mod asks for a discussion to move on, or to an alternate channel, or reminds you of these guidelines; please heed their advice.
We Punks are ultimately the moderators of our peers. If you see something that isn’t constructive to the community we’re building, say something.
While I’m not trying to suggest these are perfect or pat myself on the back too much, I think these are two really good examples of directional documents that can help a community shape itself rather than just leaving things up to chance. If you are a community steward, manager, curator or janitor I can’t recommend doing something like this enough.
