CryptoPunks

(Crypto)Punks, Clubs, and Finding Belonging in Unlikely Places

Once upon a time on Twitter:

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:

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.

Intentional Communities

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.

  1. ALWAYS OPEN – We strive to make everything we do transparent, public and accessible.
  2. ALWAYS IMPROVING -We can always do better so use agile, iterative design to ensure we’re always refining our work.
  3. ALWAYS ENCOURAGING – We aim to be welcoming and inclusive, and push each other to keep trying.
  4. ALWAYS PUBLISHING – Results are useless behind closed doors, we try to put everything we’re doing out to the world regularly.
  5. ALWAYS QUESTIONING – We don’t have all the answers, and encourage continued learning and critical thinking.
  6. ALWAYS UNCOMPROMISING – Our commitment to our goals keeps us moving closer towards them.
  7. ALWAYS ON – Safecast doesn’t sleep. We’re aware and working somewhere around the world 24/7
  8. ALWAYS CREATING – Our mission doesn’t have a completion date, we can always do more tomorrow.
  9. ALWAYS OBJECTIVE – Politics skews perception, we focus on the data and the questions it presents.
  10. 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.

  1. 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.
  2. We are here to have fun but not at the expense of others.
  3. 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.
  4. We show respect and positivity because we want to be respected by the wider community.
  5. 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.
  6. 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.
  7. 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.
  8. 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.
  9. 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.
  10. 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.

From Ashes to Ether: The Paradox of Burning Cryptopunks

“If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.”

Obi Wan Kenobi, Star Wars

Navigating the intricacies of 21st century life, we find ourselves wedged between the tangible and intangible. This delicate interplay, threading through all aspects of our lives, resonates most significantly in the realm of art. The convergence of physical artworks and their digital counterparts, alongside the rise of novel, purely digital art forms, prompts a reexamination of our deep-seated notions of creativity, ownership, and value.

Burning, a process of sending digital artwork to an inaccessible wallet address, presents an intriguing paradox. The work becomes both present and absent; observable by all, yet owned by none. Destroying a physical artwork is destructive and sometimes an act of violence, but burning an NFT is different as the work isn’t destroyed so much as made immortal. Over the past few years, this duality has come into focus with the burning of several Cryptopunks

For those unfamiliar, Cryptopunks is a genre-defining generative art collection from 2017 consisting of 10,000 individual characters which acted as a catalyst for the Non-Fungible Token (NFT) boom witnessed in 2021. It has spawned innumerable derivatives, causing a cascade of influence across the current artistic vista. Yet, Cryptopunks transcend the realm of mere collectables having been adopted as a form of digital self-expression. 

At one point utilizing a Cryptopunk as a profile picture bore resemblance to wearing a T-shirt from an obscure band–more than a mere fashionable statement, it became a conduit for conveying one’s identity and personal interests, a form of digital street cred. The emotional bond established with certain Cryptopunks is as profound, if not more so, as the deepest reverence we feel for any emotionally charged piece of art. Consider Cryptopunk #3831, now part of the LACMA permanent collection, is this a piece of digital art of a portrait of a famous collector? Depending on your perspective, perhaps both.

Within such a framework, a burned Cryptopunk echoes the poignant loss of other momentous artworks lost throughout history. Picasso’s “Le Peintre” was destroyed in a plane crash; Freud’s “Untitled Oil Painting” fell victim to an accidental garbage crush at Sotheby’s. Many artists have also destroyed their own work intentionally. Both Monet and Richter slashed several of their own canvases, with Richter later expressing regret.  Notably, Banksy’s “Girl With Balloon” was transformed into “Love is in the Bin” after the artist intentionally shredded the piece post-auction. Even more pertinently, the BurntBanksy project sold a video of Banksy’s original 2006 screenprint “Morons” being set on fire as a fractional NFT in early 2021.

The loss of these important art pieces strikes a painful blow to our collective consciousness, as they are irreplaceable fragments of our cultural tapestry. However, unlike these lost treasures, burned Cryptopunks are not compromised in the visual sense. Rather, they transition into a form of digital ‘commons,’ disrupting conventional perceptions of ownership and value. Should financial potential alone dictate value, thereby rendering a non-sellable entity worthless? Contrarily, I would argue that such a shift positions cultural value squarely in the spotlight.

When an NFT, symbolizing some collection of exclusive ‘property rights’ to a digital artifact, is burned, it propels us into a complex discourse on ownership, copyright, reproduction rights, and the overarching legal structure of digital assets. Artist Dmitri Cherniak, for instance, played with this paradox in his “Dead Ringers” collection, where each piece was dispatched to a randomly generated wallet address, rendering the NFT effectively ownerless, and at the same time allowing everyone to view and even print out a copy for themselves. The artist stated he considered this a celebration of “birth, life and death” and we can contextualize this duality of owned/unowned by everyone/no one similarly to Schrodinger’s Cat, simultaneously occupying both states.

Digital ownership, as exemplified with NFTs, lacks a clear historical parallel. Unlike museums that possess certain rights to their displayed works, the digital realm operates under a nuanced, distinct set of rules. With no recognized ‘owner,’ the rights attached to these burned Cryptopunks come into question.

The motives behind burning these Cryptopunks, like physical art, vary: accidental—through erroneous address copying or incomplete transaction submissions; deliberate—as a publicity stunt or conceptual commentary. As these digital assets appreciate in value, so does the weight of these actions, amplifying past actions and errors. 

As collectors, we are custodians of this art and we should consider the responsibility of safeguarding our possessions for future generations. While traditionally, destruction signifies loss and cultural regression, the implications of such ‘loss’ in the digital space are more open to interpretation. What constitutes ownership and possession in the digital realm, and how do these intersect with monetary and cultural value?

Burned Cryptopunks serve as a potent reminder, a warning, and perhaps a promise. As we traverse digital landscapes, we don’t discard the societal and cultural dynamics rooted in the physical world. Instead, these dynamics transform and amplify, their full implications still unfolding before us.

[this article is cross posted from my new site focused on documenting this – burnedpunks.com]

V1 Cryptopunks: Artistic Intention Vs Public Reception, or What Happens When Art Takes On A Life Of Its Own

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 Terrestrial digitally 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.


CryptoPunk #1060

Online Identity & Ownership

Online identity has always been some wild shit.

From the early days of screen names and /nick to usernames and avatars and anons and on and on we’ve continually struggled with (or perhaps played with, depending on who you ask) how best to represent ourselves online. Hell, how we represent ourselves offline is already difficult enough and forever falls back on who you know, who will vouch for you, and your reputation – all of which is easily manipulated. That’s 1000x more complicated online where in most cases you don’t actually have any idea who you are interacting with. The dismissive cliche leading up to the dot com boom was that anyone you spoke to online was really some overweight, socially inept dude still living in his parents basement, especially if they were representing themselves as an attractive woman. This stereotype was largely driven by people who weren’t online and saw no reason to get online and just wanted to poo-poo anyone else who did. But then “being online” got profitable and that made all these other people get interested and suddenly there was a rush and people who had been mocking anyone spending time on the internet needed a way to be on the internet but make it clear they weren’t like those other people on the internet. Proving who you are, while also allowing you to be who you want, has been a struggle ever since.

In Web 2.0 we started to see the desire to have a “single sign on” and transportable identity, as we were starting to build online reputations and social networks, we realized the problems of having a corporate entity control (and know) who communicated with. Having the same identity everywhere online seemed like a dream, but also could be a nightmare, and it wasn’t long before people started exploring ways to express their different interests online safely. Do people from your 9-5 corporate job really need to know which dance clubs you and your friends like to visit on weekends? Probably not. And that’s not even speaking to the problem of trying to connect all the social contacts you’ve ever had into one place. And those are the bigger structural issues, we also started realizing that we projected someone’s identity onto their avatar and if they changed that avatar they suddenly felt like a different person. Combine that with social networks finding new ways to shove “other content” into feeds we expected to be filled only with friends and it got complicated. Point being, it continued to be a mess.

One of the things that I and others have been thinking and talking about is how Web3 has to some extent freed us from the constraints of the avatar and given us some further flexibility as to how we manage our online identities. Almost exactly a year ago I wrote a lot of words about avatars and identities, largely focusing on community membership and how the ability to own an NFT which becomes your access to and identity within a community, and being able to have wallets with multiple NFTs that you can switch between depending on context was both scary and exciting.

One thing I observed was that being able to prove you owned an NFT which you were using as your avatar allowed for some authenticity and reliability, and while of course anyone else could right-click-save that image and use it themselves (and we’ve seen a lot of scams emerge doing just that) the increasing ability to gate some interactions or prove ownership as verification was quite the revolution. I can use my CryptoPunk while interacting in the private CryptoPunk discord and my Bored Ape while interacting in the private Bored Ape discord and in both cases everyone knows it’s me, just kind of wearing a different outfit to fit the occasion. Of course, we’ve also seen that people gravitate to one of their avatars more than others and begin to use that across platforms and that avatar starts being associated with them. This is super interesting for lots of reasons, not the least of which is what happens when an NFT avatar is deeply associated with someone and then they very publicly get rid of it as we saw with Punk #4156, or it becomes so much of who they are they couldn’t part with it? Are these little images now subject to typecasting? So once again a solution presents new complications.

And this is where things get super fascinating, because what if the image that becomes so associated with you and your online identity, isn’t “the real” thing (whatever that means)? Consider for a moment the case of CryptoPunk #1060 vs CryptoPhunk #1060.

I’ve written about CryptoPhunks before and won’t repeat myself here as it’s a complex discussion, but will just note for anyone unfamiliar that the imagery of the CryptoPhunks collection (released in 2021) is a 1:1 mirror image derivative of the CryptoPunks collection (released in 2017). There’s a lot more to it than that, but in this context that’s the important detail. In the case of #1060, one of these is used regularly as an avatar and the other sits dormant in an unused wallet. As an experiment I recently posted CryptoPunk #1060 on Twitter and asked people who first came to mind:

Obviously this is not scientific and is biased by who follows me and what communities they spend time in but the point I was trying to make was pretty obvious. Chopper is a developer who is very active in web3 building open source software and helping to manage several overlapping communities. Chopper does not own CryptoPunk #1060. He does own CryptoPhunk #1060 and has used it as his avatar everywhere for more than a year to the point that this image, regardless of which way it’s facing, reminds people of him. For all intents and purposes, in the world of web3, it is him. This is aided by the fact that the “original” CryptoPunk is sitting unused in a wallet that hasn’t been active in over 3 years. Is it lost forever? Maybe. Could it suddenly be reactivated and sell tomorrow? Maybe. But what does that matter, because the association between the person and the imagery is already so strong. And this is far from the only example, I could easily do the same experiment with the photographer Ruff Draft. This leads to the question how much does authenticity matter, or does the entire notion of authenticity need to be revised in this context. What happens when the derivative becomes more recognizable than the original? What if someone with ill intent bought CryptoPunk #1060 and started using it as their avatar? What if somehow Chopper came into possession of CryptoPunk #1060, would he change his identity to face the other direction? I somehow doubt it. We know that the value of a CryptoPunk can be increased because of how it’s used, so could the value of one also be decreased because it’s not used, or because of how a derivative is being used?

I don’t think the answers to these questions are as cut and dry as many of us would like to believe, and that complicates the relationship between ownership and identity, as well as how much value (financial and social) words and concepts like “original” or “official” or “authentic” hold. If actions speak louder than words, does that apply to avatars as well? Is this a new example of “use it or lose it?” Earlier this week one of the most iconic and recognizable CrytpoPunks sold for $4.5 Million dollars to an anonymous buyer. The previous owner held it for almost 2 years but didn’t use it as his avatar – will the new owner embrace and put to use this newly acquired identity they just spent so much money on, or will they neglect it and let someone else usurp them?

Top 10 Misconceptions About V1 CryptoPunks

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:

Marilyn and Punks and Art, Oh My!

The TL;DR that you need to know before I get into this is that CryptoPunks is a “digital collectable experiment” from 2017 which predates but is also credited with kicking off the whole NFT craze, in fact helping define the standard. I wrote about the different versions of them earlier this year. One could argue, and I do, that most of the biggest and most popular NFTs are derivatives in one way or another of CryptoPunks. Randomly generated from a collection of traits, there are 10K individual CryptoPunks which people often use as avatars. Separately, CryptoPhunks is a 2021 derivative project which literally copied the entire CryptoPunks collection and flipped it horizontally (in either a cash grab or protest, depending on who you talk to and at what point in the story you are referring to – I plan to write more about this in the future), creating a mirror image and kicking off a huge debate about appropriation, fair use and IP rights in this wild west of digital art.

The CryptoPunks collection is incredibly influential, having spawned hundreds/thousands of derivative projects as well as millions of nasty replies from haters on Twitter with accusations of being a “crypto bro” for anyone who dares use one as their avatar. They get referenced all the time in clickbait articles proclaiming shock and awe about how much one of them sold for recently. Point being, people know about them. As a connoisseur of culture with impeccable taste I’ve really enjoyed seeing the creativity they inspire and I’ve collected some of my favorite derivative works in this little virtual gallery if you want to look around. I’ll be expanding that in the near future but it’s still pretty interesting at the moment if you want to follow the thread of inspiration a bit.

Recently I discovered an artist called PIV who has been doing studies of CryptoPunks in relation to fine art, namely Abstract Modernism and work in that orbit. I picked up a piece called “Pablo Picasso” which references the famous 1953 photo of Picasso by André Villers. 

l: Villers 1953 / r: PIV 2022

For the less visual and more musically inclined this is like Johnny Cash covering Nine Inch Nails “Hurt” or Guns N Roses covering Wings “Live And Let Die” or Redman referencing Cypress Hill with “Sawed Off Shotgun, Hand On The Pump.” It’s one artist giving a nod to another artist. If you know the reference it’s an immediate reward, if you don’t and you are curious it’s an invitation to discover work you might have missed. I love this kind of thing so fucking hard. So in this “Punkism” series PIV is very intentional with their work, limiting their palette to colors and pieces of CryptoPunks.

Putting CryptoPunks in this context of Pop Art is kind of brilliant especially when you consider the influence that Pop Art has on contemporary culture it’s hard to argue that CryptoPunks don’t have that same influence on digital art and culture right now. So it’s a fitting comparison. Obvious as it may be, you can’t talk about Pop Art without acknowledging Andy Warhol and indeed PIV did that directly but also almost in passing with an earlier work entitled “Six Marilyns.” This piece inspired a larger collaboration with Tom Lehman (former CEO of Genius.com which itself was previously Rap Genius and focused on annotating song lyrics to help people understand the references artists were making – just to bring that around even further). The pair teamed up to create a collection of “Marilyn Diptychs” which, using code most often used to create generative art like the CryptoPunks themselves, they made endless variations on a single CryptoPunk which itself looks a lot like Warhol’s Marilyn drawing a direct reference to Warhol’s diptych. 

Foundation Supports Him” PIV & Lehman, Generative 2022
A collection of “OC Marilyn Diptychs” by PIV & Lehman, 2022
Marilyn Diptych, Warhol, 1962

Let’s talk about Warhol’s Marilyn Diptych for a second – did you know this was not initially intended to be a diptych? Art collectors Burton and Emily Tremaine were visiting and saw the two pieces displayed next to each other and suggested that they should be paired, which immediately seemed like the obvious choice. But Warhol’s Marilyn image itself is worth spending some time with. I really like Tina Rivers Ryan’s description of the work, she writes:

“Warhol’s use of the silkscreen technique further “flattens” the star’s face. By screening broad planes of unmodulated color, the artist removes the gradual shading that creates a sense of three-dimensional volume, and suspends the actress in an abstract void. Through these choices, Warhol transforms the literal flatness of the paper-thin publicity photo into an emotional “flatness,” and the actress into a kind of automaton. In this way, the painting suggests that “Marilyn Monroe,” a manufactured star with a made-up name, is merely a one-dimensional (sex) symbol—perhaps not the most appropriate object of our almost religious devotion.”

“Shot Sage Blue Marilyn” Warhol, 1962

Like most of Warhol’s portraits he didn’t ask permission which occasionally caused legal issues, but also directly relates to the issues of appropriation and fair use that surround the CryptoPunks and many of their derivative works, and in fact one might say much of the entire NFT market. Warhol’s intentional repetition of his images, which would degrade over time as screens were used slightly changing each one, were meant to both desensitize people to the image, but also reclassify the icons already present in his audience’s cultural awareness. In many ways, a 10k avatar collection does much of the same things, though I’d argue that wasn’t the initial intent.

Coming back to these new Marilyn Diptychs and to play with the tech even further, if you own one of the diptych NFTs you can extract any of the individual Marilyns from the piece into its own profile picture/avatar which is now not only a derivative of Warhol but of the CryptoPunks as well. Again, I love this.

9 examples of “OC Marilyn PFP” by PIV & Lehman, 2022

But as I said before, this is conscious. It’s intentional. It’s humans seeing one thing and taking something else and bending it to look similar to the other thing. Which is the art of it all, but it also got me thinking about the generative aspect more.

As many of you know last year I collaborated with my longtime friend, artist Shepard Fairey, on a generative NFT project called DEGENERATE/REGENERATE where we used scans and elements and details from his previous work as well as some of his better known iconography and using this kind of generative tech came up with 7400 individual pieces that are randomly generated but true to his aesthetic. They looked great, which we expected, but what we didn’t expect was that they would combine some of his work in ways he hadn’t previously considered sparking new inspiration which he’s taking back to his physical work. So you have this cycle of inspiration – human inspiring the computer, the computer then inspiring the human. The ever evolving body of work now has DNA from both going forward. It’s pretty exciting and I expect you’ll hear more directly from him about that in the future. But I’m getting off the point, which is about the ghost in the machine, so to speak.

PIV’s work is intentional. They consciously decided to make art that references other art. But CryptoPunks are not intentionally referencing other art. They are just a collection of individual traits – hair color, style, eyes, mouth, glasses, etc thrown into a generator which was told to spit out a 100×100 grid with 10,000 individual combinations (This is a little known fun fact, unlike most avatar NFT collections today which generate 10,000 individual images, CryptoPunks is just one single image with a grid of the individual punks). It was an art experiment – no one knew how it would work out or where it would lead.

CryptoPunks, LarvaLabs, 2017

This got me curious, without the human hand and intention – could I find a similar but unintentional reference? I narrowed down the traits to sort through and began hunting, eventually landing on CryptoPunk #3725 which is, to my eye, damn close to Warhol’s Marilyn. The only real discrepancy being the green eye shadow. Blue would have been better and there is a blue eye shadow trait but it doesn’t appear with the rest of these traits – the mole, the blond hair, pale skin, etc anywhere in the original 10k CryptoPunks collection. But there was something about it that still wasn’t right. It was facing the wrong way. I immediately thought of CryptoPhunk #3725.

l: CryptoPunk 3725 (2017) / c: Warhol’s Marilyn (1962) / r: CryptoPhunk 3725 (2021)

It’s perfect right?

I get so excited thinking about the randomness that led to its creation. A script blindly and emotionlessly assembles a hodgepodge of traits – essentially a realization of the infinite monkey theorem –  and makes an almost perfect match. Years later a reactionary protest act puts on the finishing touch. Neither of these two actions intend on this result, but we end up here nonetheless.

I knew it was a crazy long shot but I reached out to the owner of Phunk 3725 and made an offer. To my surprise and delight, they accepted and I am now the owner of Phunk 3725. This piece draws a direct, yet accidental, connection between these two eras of art. It’s incredibly important, and I’m psyched to be its caretaker.

Explaining Cryptopunks Versions

Since it’s been a topic I’ve been yapping about recently a few people asked me for a quick explainer on all the Cryptopunks V1/V2 stuff so the other night I did just that in a Twitter thread but I thought I’d turn it into a blog post as well for easier future reference.

If you’ve spent 4 seconds in the NFT space or 4 seconds near the NFT space or just know some people have some crypto art or something you’ve seen Cryptopunks so I’m going to assume you know what I’m talking about when I say “punk” in this context. There’s no questioning the influence and significance of cryptopunks, there are a bazillion derivatives and they have made headlines for selling for bazillions of dollars. Hours ago in fact Punk #5822 sold for 8000Ξ which today converts to just shy of $23 Million USD. So yeah, they are pretty famous, and it’s important to understand that fame happened almost exclusively in 2021. Cryptopunks were actually released in 2017 and for most of that time very few people cared about them. Towards the end of 2020 people really started going after them and in 2021 they went nuts. But the cryptopunks everyone thinks of are actually the second version (V2).

Going back to 2017, a company called Larva Labs put Cryptopunks online as free to claim and promised the ability to trade/buy/sell them after they were all claimed. It took a few days/weeks for that to happen and once they were all claimed people started trying to trade them. But there was a problem. A bug in the code meant that if you tried to sell a punk the buyer got the punk AND the eth from the sale, leaving the seller with nothing. This is obviously a problem and as soon as it was found Larva Labs said “wait! Don’t trade them yet” and started working on a fix. Because things on the blockchain are immutable they couldn’t really “fix” the punk that were already out in the world, so they made new ones. They airdropped the new (V2) punks to everyone who had claimed the original (V1) punks and figured that was that. Potentially important detail: Larva Labs didn’t send the new punks to the the current punk holders – they sent them to the claimers. So if you claimed a V1 punk and gave it to a friend, you got the V2 punk, they didn’t.

Because the V1 punks were not really sellable everyone kind of forgot about them, and all focus was put on the V2 ones that people could easily trade. It’s worth noting that punks predate the ERC-721 NFT standard we know and love today. Cryptopunks are in fact ERC-20 tokens. In order for Cryptopunks (or any other pre-ERC-721 NFT like Mooncat Rescue) tokens to be traded on NFT marketplaces like OpenSea they need to be wrapped inside of an ERC-721 token. Wrapping is confusing but also really straight forward. It’s just putting one token inside of another. You’ve probably seen WETH which is just Wrapped ETH. Here are a bunch of V2 Cryptopunks that have been wrapped for example, and here’s LarvaLabs recognizing them. That’s apparently an important detail as some have suggested that wrapping changes or somehow negates the NFT that is being wrapped, which obviously isn’t the case. The socks your mother bought you for your birthday don’t cease to be socks when she wraps them in wrapping paper – same idea here. Anyway, for years people were happily buying and selling V2 cryptopunks both wrapped and unwrapped. But they just called them “Cryptopunks” and not “V2 Cryptopunks” because they were the only ones being traded so it was obvious what you meant. But in 2021 some people started working on a wrapper for the V1 Cryptopunks so they could be traded as well. This is where things get interesting. If you look at the incredible timeline Leonidas has assembled you’ll note that Cryptopunks is the very first 10k Avatar project on the Ethereum blockchain.

Despite claims made by lots of people, notably Larva Labs themselves, Cryptopunks are not the first NFT, but they are the first 10k avatar project. But now suddenly you have 2 Cryptopunk collections in motion. Both made by the same company, both pointing to the same art. Released within weeks of each other. Fun fact, the V1 contract calls them “cryptopunks” but the “fixed” V2 contract calls them “cryptopunksmarket” – anyway, with V1s being safely wrapped inside an ERC-721 wrapper they can now be traded, and people started trading them. Anyone who has spent any time around collectors knows that an error or a misprint or a fuckup is always super desirable – and that’s how people started to think of the V1s. They are this mostly forgotten mistake, which is appealing to some people.

And especially if you have cryptopunks because they are historically important as a lot of people claim to, then this original version of the cryptopunks released a few weeks earlier is SUPER INTERESTING! (all caps for emphasis). This is where things which are seemingly clear get really messy quickly. LarvaLabs has an unclear relationship with the IP of the Cryptopunks. I wrote a bit about this last year in relation to their reactions to some derivative projects

Long story short on that, when Ryder Ripps made his derivative Cryptopunk LarvaLabs sent a DMCA notice to Foundation, Ryder contested it and LarvaLabs couldn’t support their infringement claim and the DMCA was dropped. That hasn’t stopped them from sending lots of DMCA notices though. Most people never appeal the DMCA so that is the end of it, but since Ryder did and won his appeal, it’s suddenly very interesting and there is question if LarvaLabs could even own the IP at all.

From their end, LarvaLabs didn’t have a license in place before they distributed them and have taken different and conflicting positions on the matter over the years, so there’s just nothing clear to fall back on which is why it’s such a grey area. 19/ Anyway, jumping back to now – V1 and V2 Cryptopunks are now on the market. Anyone with a V1 cryptopunk who couldn’t trade it before can now safely wrap it and then sell it. Guess who had a lot of V1 Cryptopunks? LarvaLabs. In what is now largely seen as a “bad move” LarvaLabs secretly wrapped a bunch of V1 cryptopunks and sold them for a couple hundred ETH. Then went on the attack saying that V1 punks were not legitimate.

As an aside, last year I wrote about how Blockchains have the potential to become social archives, and the documented provenance for each NFT might end up telling interesting stories about the history of specific NFTs and that’s exactly what just happened here. The 39 V1 Cryptopunks that were wrapped and sold by LarvaLabs are already being referred to as the “rainforrest punks” and have become especially desirable among some collectors in what is basically the Streisand Effect for Web3.

So LarvaLabs then sent a DMCA to OpenSea as they have been known to do, and OpenSea complied by taking down the listing for the V1 punks. Now if you’ve been following along this far you know that V1 punks were made by LarvaLabs. So they kind of just DMCA’d themselves. This is akin to Nike making shoes with a white swoosh, selling them and then deciding they want the swoosh to be red and then claiming infringement against someone who bought the white swoosh Nikes trying to resell them on ebay. In other words it makes no sense. V1 punks were made and sold by LarvaLabs. They can’t decide after they are already sold that they don’t like them and then claim they aren’t real, or that the secondary market is infringement. So of course the DMCA notice was appealed

That happened yesterday, so now LarvaLabs has 10 days to respond (or not) until we get to the next chapter in however this plays out. At the moment V1 punks are not being sold on OpenSea but are being sold on their own marketplace and on LooksRare. I don’t know if those sites received DMCAs and just ignored them or if they didn’t receive anything, doesn’t really matter though. What happens next however is going to have very serious implications no matter which way it goes. If the DMCA is upheld the secondary market for almost all NFTs is suddenly in legal question. If the DMCA is dropped LarvaLabs will have to accept that their flagship IP isn’t as locked down as they thought, and that there are now 2x as many cryptopunks out there.

Interestingly enough, V2 punk owners have been complaining about how LarvaLabs has been handling IP for quite a while now leading a number of high profile punk owners to sell theirs in protest. So in some ways V1 & V2 owners have a common foe. Though maybe foe is too strong a word. LarvaLabs did make these cool avatars which everyone loves, even if their community relations/communication has been a bit lacking since then. And a lot of V2 owners actually own V1s as well, so it’s not really 2 different audiences.

March Update: In an unexpected surprise turn of events LarvaLabs announced that they sold the IP for CryptoPunks to Yuga Labs, producers of the Bored Ape Yacht Club, who immediately announced that they would not be pursuing any of the DMCAs filed by LarvaLabs and also that they would be granting commercial rights to CryptoPunk owners. As part of the deal LarvaLabs transferred their CryptoPunks to Yuga, including some 1000 V1 punks. Almost immediately the V1 collection was reinstated on OpenSea.

But what about V3? V3 Punks is a totally unrelated project created by unrelated fans. It’s just a fun nod to the whole project distinguishing itself as different but also promoting unity and joy, which is kind of nice. Personally I’ve really enjoyed the very rich derivative world that Cryptopunks has spawned and I think the project is incredibly significant. I’ve bought pieces from a lot of the so called “shitpunk” derivative projects over the last year. I also really nerd out about the IP stuff which is obvious from last years article. I bought some V3s because I think it’s fun and I recently traded an NFT I received for free for a V1 because I think it’s a cool piece of history. I have no idea where this will go, or how that will impact values of anything. None of what I’m talking about should be seen as endorsements or speculation, but I find it super fascinating and look at it kind of like collector memorabilia. Anyway, that’s my quick catch up. We’ll see what happens next!