NFT spiritual history: 15 minutes of heroic dreams of cans, frogs and ordinary people

Original Author: Shi Zhong

Original Author: Shi Zhong

Original Source: Light Black Technology

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(zero) 9527 and 7523

The avatar below, the guy wearing a melon cap and smoking a cigarette, is the number 9527 among the 10,000 avatars in the world's hottest NFT project - Cryptopunks.

#9527

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Its owner "0x949...b786" just updated its listing price on January 23, 2022, 124ETH, which is equivalent to 340,000 US dollars.

NFT spiritual history: 15 minutes of heroic dreams of cans, frogs and ordinary people

If you are willing to pay so much money, the avatar will be yours in the next second. How about it? It’s a good deal, right?

Did you see that cigarette in his mouth? Only 961 of the 1w people have this attribute. Did you see his little hat? Only 419 people have this property. Did you see that sexy moustache of his? Look carefully, it is the gray line above the mouth, only 288 people have this attribute~~

NFT spiritual history: 15 minutes of heroic dreams of cans, frogs and ordinary people

NFT spiritual history: 15 minutes of heroic dreams of cans, frogs and ordinary people

Just on June 10, 2021, the world-renowned Sotheby's auction house auctioned its "brother", Cryptopunks No. 7523.

#7523

NFT spiritual history: 15 minutes of heroic dreams of cans, frogs and ordinary people

Look at this melon skin hat, it still has the same formula, but the head below has become a so-called "alien", the cigarettes are gone, and it has been replaced with a mask that costs one yuan and seven.

NFT spiritual history: 15 minutes of heroic dreams of cans, frogs and ordinary people

Because among the 1w avatars, only 9 have alien faces, and he happens to be one of the 175 people wearing masks.

NFT spiritual history: 15 minutes of heroic dreams of cans, frogs and ordinary people

An interesting detail: Although masks are an excellent metaphor for the world today, when the 1w avatar of Cryptopunks was born six years ago, there was no new crown virus epidemic in the world.

In four years, 7523 has become the "New Crown Alien Avatar", and the price has increased by more than 7,000 times. It seems to be a better idea than buying a house.

This is Sillytuna's tweet, two days after the auction, and he's still complaining that he doesn't have new shoes to wear. . . The tweet itself was pretty punk, too.

Why would I pay $10000000 for this shit picture?

The question of "Why are NFTs worth money?" I believe countless people have already explained it.

NFT spiritual history: 15 minutes of heroic dreams of cans, frogs and ordinary people

The question of "Why are NFTs worth money?" I believe countless people have already explained it.

But I want to tell you an interesting story from the perspective of "spiritual origin".

(1) Andy Warhol

In the future, everyone will be famous for 15 minutes.

In 1968, this line of typeface appeared on the promotional page of the Moderna Museum in Stockholm.

But the core script that shapes the world today has fully emerged.

Andy Warhol

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In 1961, the fat erotic writer and gallery proprietress Rato said to Andy Warhol who was worrying about what to paint: Is there a possibility that you can paint the canned food you eat at noon every day?

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《Campbell’s Soup Cans》1962

《Flavor Marilyns》1962

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No matter what the painting is, Andy Warhol almost hides a mathematical logic behind it, that is:Repeated subjects + random variables.Notice! Although human artistic creation inherently includes the factor of "repetition", most of it is "repetition".theme repeat”。

"For example, many medieval painters painted Jesus and the Virgin, and elementary school students all painted "house tree people" in school, but Andy Warhol's repetition is very straightforward"

image repetitionRepetition of images requires very little aesthetic ability. I saw the Marilyn Monroe for the first time when I was in the second grade of elementary school, and I could see through the mystery and feel the rhythm at a glance.

It is a repetition that only a machine can produce.Andy Warhol's paintings can be sold as expensive as Van Gogh, I think one of the reasons is:

Industrial AgeIt accurately captures the most common state of mind of the masses in the industrial age.

Industrial Age

What is the state of the public?

Let me tell you an original quote from Andy Warhol, you can experience it:

You know the president drinks Coca-Cola, Elizabeth Taylor drinks Coca-Cola, and when you think about it, you can drink Coca-Cola too.

A Coke is a Coke, and no amount of money can buy you a better Coke than that bum on the corner. All Cokes are the same, Elizabeth Taylor knows it, the President knows it, the bum knows it, you know it.Even Sanhe Dashen can buy a pair of clean pants for 10 yuan.

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NFT spiritual history: 15 minutes of heroic dreams of cans, frogs and ordinary people

Andy Warhol once faced the camera and ate a burger in just over four minutes. This became an excellent metaphor for the industrial age.

But this may not be a good thing for human beings who naturally love to pursue "inequality".

Pay attention, here comes the key point! So far, I have quoted two quotes from Andy Warhol, and these two sentences seem to be contradictory:

If in this era, no matter rich or poor, everyone is drinking Coke, eating McDonald's, using Apple mobile phones, and using vibrato, just like the cans standing side by side in the painting, then what can make you different and make you stand Enjoy the attention of the spotlight, even if it is only 15 minutes?

I'm afraid the trick is in that tiny "variable".

In the environment of industrial production, the simplest and crudest way to artificially control variables is "limited production".

The classmates all wear AJ shoes, but yours are ordinary models, and mine are limited to 500 pairs worldwide. Then, when we meet in class, your attention will inevitably be "stepped under your feet" by me. So, I have "Famous 15 Minutes".

It's a tried-and-true trick, half a century after Andy Warhol pointed it out, and people are still enjoying it.

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Andy Warhol first featured in TIME magazine, May 11, 1962.

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(2) Matt and Pepe

You turn around, your butt is facing me, bend down, yes, just don't move.

Matt Furie

Matt said to his girlfriend Ayana.

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Don't get me wrong, Matt is a cartoonist.

He was drawing a scene: when a person peed, he had to take off his underwear and pants to his ankles. This action is difficult to draw, so I asked my girlfriend to act as a guest model. . .

The cartoon he drew was called "Boy's Club" (Boy's Club), and the protagonists in it were four lazy young people with nothing to do.

One of them has a frog head and a wise face. It's called Pepe.

The image of Pepe comes from Matt's cousin David.

The young Matt stood outside the toilet door and witnessed all this, and he was astonished. A feeling of "Fuck, why is it so cool" suddenly flowed through his heart. . .

So in the later comic stories, he used his cousin as the prototype, and let Pepe say that sentence: Feels good man!

NFT spiritual history: 15 minutes of heroic dreams of cans, frogs and ordinary people

Soon, the "Boys Club" story was an instant hit online.

But the next story began to surprise Matt.

Some people posted photos of their fitness check-in on the Internet, accompanied by the words "Feels good man", and then some people made various emoticons, also accompanied by "Feels good man".

Some sand sculpture anchors even compiled a "Song of Feels good".

Gradually, people discovered that Pepe, a frog, with a dick-like appearance, a passer-by temperament, and a personality of nothing but a gamer, was just like the self reflected in the moment the screen went dark.

In the blink of an eye, people began to dress Pepe in various clothes and into various professions, followed by various broken expressions and extreme emotions.If you ask the "consultant" sitting on the side, Mr. Andy Warhol, he will raise his eyebrows - nothing new, still

Overlay variables on repeated bodies.

NFT spiritual history: 15 minutes of heroic dreams of cans, frogs and ordinary people

Although Andy Warhol passed away as early as 1987, the existence of the Internet has allowed countless unknown creators to form a "distributed Andy Warhol".

This Andy Warhol is tougher, even immortal.

(3) Christopher Poole

Christopher Poole

In 2003, 14-year-old Christopher Poole started the anonymous sticker community 4chan in the basement of his home.

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But soon, the "breath of freedom" pervaded the air. Because of the anonymity and non-archiving, people can speak freely here, which attracts meme masters and sand sculpture netizens. It is like a bay where sea water is gradually boiling.

The time when 4chan exploded quickly coincided with the time when Pepe went out of the circle, so Pepe naturally became the creative material of 4chan netizens.

NFT spiritual history: 15 minutes of heroic dreams of cans, frogs and ordinary people

Everyone will save any interesting meme, and then find a suitable opportunity to use it for themselves.It only takes two clicks to save a picture, which is easier than ordering a hamburger at McDonald's and buying a pair of socks online.

The facts behind it are:

In the Internet age, the cost of copying something is lower than in the industrial age, almost zero.

This leads to a serious problem: a picture, you can use it, and I can use it too. The more people use it, the worse it gets and the rapid depreciation.

This makes the authors of the meme feel uncomfortable - because the meme is popular, but no one knows about it;

It also made the person who first used this meme feel boring-because he discovered the gold mine, but they themselves were not famous.

Well, so to speak. . . Is it possible to make a meme also scarce? Like AJ shoes, it is good to artificially give it scarcity.

The wise men decided to give it a try.

Soon, the author of Pepe memes added a large watermark on the picture in order to prevent "stolen pictures": "Rare Pepe, do not save."

This "rare pepe" is posted in the /r9k/ board.

How does the system know if what you say is original?

You can see that the name of this section, r9k, is actually the abbreviation of "Robot Deduplication Script" Robot9000.

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Version Rules for r9kThe script was written by comic book writer and programmer Randall Munroe.

What if there was a world where once someone said a word, no one else could say it again?

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Randall Monroe

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and his famous stickman comics

Back to "Rare Pepe".

The crazy netizens on the /r9k/ section immediately thought, yes, intellectual property rights must be protected! Therefore, everyone supported the author of Rare Pepe not to post the original picture again. If you want to pretend to be aggressive with Rare Pepe, you have to spend money to buy it.

I have to warn you: at this point, Pepe has absolutely nothing to do with its creator, Matt. Matt can like Pepe created by netizens or not, but because Matt doesn't mix 4chan, no one cares about his opinion.

4chan is a closed universe - no one outside the universe can affect the history of the universe.

Soon, the second-hand website eBay had authors selling their own Pepes, rare ones without watermarks.

At that time, there was a sensation.

Someone packed 1,200 rare Pepes and put them up for auction on eBay, and the price was eventually driven up to $50,000.

Shit pictures, so it has something to do with money.

And everyone thinks it is well-founded, at least 4chan netizens believe it.

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(4) Joe Rooney

Joe Rooney is a code farmer. In 2016, he was developing a digital wallet for a P2P website Counterparty.

That day, in the Telegram group of Counterparty, someone suddenly threw in a poker-like thing with a rare Pepe that looked like Satoshi Nakamoto drawn on it.

The buddy said: I made a whole deck of cards, all of which are rare Pepes, and I am selling them online. In the future, this deck will be worth millions of dollars, right?

Netizens echoed: This is so awesome, I want to buy it.

Then, people start bidding: 1 piece, 5 pieces, 10 pieces. Then everyone went to place an order. . .

"At that moment, I wanted to draw the rare Pepe by myself..." he recalled.

However, he soon came up with a more awesome idea than painting Pepes—to build a platform that can trade rare Pepes, and by the way, use his traditional arts to build a "wallet system" that can store rare Pepes.

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joe rooney

However, even if these Pepes are made to look like playing cards, they are just pictures after all, and pictures can be copied.

So how can everyone agree that someone owns the ownership of a picture?He immediately thought of an ingenious method-using Bitcoin's bookkeeping system.

If you have the password of your own wallet, no matter how many coins there are, it must be yours, and everyone must recognize it.

In this way, it becomes impossible to "make false accounts".

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I tried it, and it created a wallet for me as soon as I entered the website

And this feature was used by Rooney to make a "rare Pepe wallet".

In simple terms, it works like this:

A rare Pepe card is bound to a Bitcoin wallet, and only its owner has the password (that is, the private key) of this wallet. If you want to transfer Pepe to another person, just give him the password.

This trading model has actually been established.

Moreover, Rooney made an interesting setting: if a creator wants to submit a pepe card to the website, he must send a certain amount of bitcoins to an empty address, that is to say, it is equivalent to burning these coins——Rooney can’t take it No one else can get this money.

Why waste money?

This principle is like when you join a gang, you have to take a head as a vote. It doesn't matter whether the person who was killed lay down with a gun or not. The important thing is that it is a "barrier to entry" that prevents someone from opening the drawing software and selling a fake Pepe in five seconds.This setting is significant.

Soon, many Pepes with good ideas and excellent painters were put on the platform, and it seemed that they came from people with certain artistic accomplishment——

Creators are starting to take this seriously.

Later, the website also developed an O2O model—you buy an electronic card, and I will give you a paper card.

At this point in the story, although everything seems crazy, everyone's motives are just fun, money and free expression, and generally good.

But that's what liberalism is. When countless freedoms are added together, it will be so heavy that it will crush the horizon.

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(5) Hillary and Trump

Liberals are free in all aspects. From the messages on 4chan, we can see that most of them say whatever they want, discriminate against women, discriminate against blacks, and self-centered.

Some users on 4chan like to refer to themselves as "NEET", that is, people with no schooling, no job, and no skills.

You know, this kind of people are the main force of "keyboard warriors".

There is a dedicated section on 4chan called "Politically Incorrect" (Politically Incorrect), which is full of white supremacist rhetoric. In their eyes, black people who have no fathers can only rob, and Asians are stingy and evil, and they wish to build a wall to isolate everyone else from the beautiful country.

Anyway, it's an anonymous community, you won't expose yourself, and no one will get in trouble for it.

Over time, this wet soil has bred a worm-like right-wing Internet trend, which is the Alt-Right (Alt-Right).

In 2016, just in time for the US election. From the perspective of the alt-right, Trump’s campaign slogan is to build a wall on the border. This is definitely his own. Trump may be a diving 4chan netizen!

Therefore, the alt-right made Pepe look like Trump and encouraged everyone to vote for Trump.

Innocent Pepe has suddenly gone from meme to political symbol.

The climax of the story happened on August 25, 2016, at the scene of Hillary’s campaign speech. She was seriously criticizing the right-wing trend of thought, but a voice in the crowd shouted: Pepe!

This voice, which most people don't understand, is regarded as a battle song by the alt-right.

After that, the Pepe emoji that appeared out of nowhere became more and more terrifying.

Someone turned Pepe into the Ku Klux Klan, someone put a Nazi symbol on Pepe, and someone asked Pepe to raise the flag of the Crusades.

Some people even found a frog-headed figure named "Kek" from ancient Egyptian stone paintings, and then said that this TM is the apocalypse given to us by the ancient Egyptians, and our god is Keke.

Someone on 4chan immediately made a serious booing: Our group should consider finding a powerful lawyer to help us build a "free" white country-Keckstein.

The most crazy thing is Pepe's author Matt.

If you think about it, Pepe was originally a spirited guy who pulled his pants down to pee, but now he has been used to become a madman of hatred.

He couldn't take it anymore and decided to sue those who publicly linked Pepe to politics.

But it doesn't help.

Later, he could only come out in person to write a sequel to Pepe's story-Pepe died because of racial discrimination, and everyone held a funeral for him.But it still doesn't help.Because from the day Pepe hit the Internet, it has been "

Distributed Andy Warhol

"Hand in hand, not even a single person can decide where Pepe goes.Some people think that Pepe is successful, some people think that Pepe is a failure. Its character design is painted with various colors and becomes extremely complicated.blockchain artwork

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In fact, there are many heart-warming creations about Pepe.

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(6) Watkinson and Hall

In the spring of 2017, Rooney was still working on his thriving Rare Pepe website.

This buddy is Hall.

Hall and his good friend Watkinson both graduated from the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto. In 1999, they came to New York and became New Piao. They both like to use computers to do some silly things, and they have similar tastes, so they formed a moth combination - Larva Lab (Larva Lab).

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In recent years, the pair have been honing a strange art: generating avatars using computer algorithms.

For example, in 2011, they released an app that can generate an avatar that looks like an Android robot for you. Like below.

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Hall on the right, Watkinson on the left.

In 2017, their ability to generate avatars was already at a high level. They chose a punk theme and made an "avatar generation engine".

Just when the pair of friends were chatting, they talked about Watkinson's little niece collecting dolls like crazy, so they thought, didn't they also collect baseball cards and Magic cards when they were young. (It means the same thing as Chinese boys collecting Water Margin cards)

It seems that collection addiction is really a common trait of all human beings traveling through time and space. . .

"Then, is there a possibility that we can produce some avatars in limited quantities, such as 10,000, and let everyone collect them?" Hall said.

So, he went online to collect information and saw the rare Pepe website.

But Rare Pepe has a problem: it uses the Bitcoin network. When the Bitcoin network was designed, it can only be used for Bitcoin bookkeeping, and nothing else can be recorded. Therefore, when Rooney was designing, he could only plug in a "Pepe Wallet" on the Bitcoin ledger.

Is there a network that is both open and transparent and can record more complex ledgers?

They immediately thought of the Ethereum chain (ETH), which had just started to explode.

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This is ETH (bushiThere are many differences between the Ethereum chain and the Bitcoin chain, and here we only pick the most important one.”。

This is support"

non-homogeneous token

You can think of Bitcoin as a dollar, a dollar is a dollar, my dollar and your dollar are dollars, if I exchange a 100 dollar for your 100 dollar, it is the same as not changing .

In other words, Bitcoin is homogeneous.

But on Ethereum, I can create a strange dollar, like drawing different pictures on each hundred-dollar bill, so that the dollar bills everyone gets are not homogeneous. For example, a yellow electric mouse is drawn on my 100 dollar bill, and garlic bastard is drawn on your 100 dollar bill.

At this time, I want to exchange $100 of Pikachu for $100 of your Kodak Duck. You have to think about it. You may prefer garlic bastards to electric mice, so you may not be willing to exchange them.

This "non-fungible token" is called NFT (Non-Fungible Token) for short.

In this way, the entire technical process runs through the heads of the two technical nerds in the Larva Lab.

1. They first used the "generation engine" to generate 10,000 exquisite pixel-style avatars, named Cryptopunks (encrypted punks).

2. Then perform a cryptographic operation on each avatar and condense it into a 64-bit password.

3. Write each password as an NFT into the Ethereum ledger.

They decided to give these NFT avatars to everyone for free.

After working for a long time, I gave it to everyone for free. What benefits do they have?

In fact, they hid their hands: only 9,000 avatars were sent out, and 1,000 more were kept in their hands.

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Avatars used by Hall and Watkinson.

On June 9, 2017, Larval Labs tweeted out the good news, then sat inside and waited for the crowds to flock to it.

However, five days have passed, and there are only a few sporadic people who come to collect hundreds of people. . .

Cryptopunks are different from Pepe. Although each of them has a rebellious face, no one recognizes them when they take it out.

How can I pretend to be aggressive when I take out something that no one knows about?

Everyone thinks so.

Although it is free to receive, you have to pay an Ethereum handling fee equivalent to 11 cents once. No one's money comes from the wind. . . .

Of course, even if they choose, they will choose the rarest avatars first, such as "alien" (9) and "ape" (24), which are all claimed in the first five days.

Among the onlookers, there was a figure who stopped for a long time, and he was Jason Abruze.

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Jason Abbruzzese's Twitter avatar is also very Pop.

He interviewed Hall and wrote an article analyzing Cryptopunks in detail, titled "This Ethereum-based project may change our perception of digital art."

He said.

When people's lives migrate online, status symbols will inevitably follow.

He said.

This article was published on June 19.

Within 24 hours, all remaining avatars were wiped out. There is a buddy who robbed 758 headshots by himself.

(7) Anne Blasegdel

CryptoKitties is a beta version launched on October 19, 2017, which is half a year later than Cryptopunk, but CryptoKitties is obviously more popular than Cryptopunk.

Cryptokitties

This is because Dapper Lab, the creative team of CryptoKitties, has added many game elements, such as two cats can mix genes to give birth to kittens.

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But this property is both an advantage and a disadvantage. Once the "strategy" is emphasized, CryptoKitties is classified as a game, not a collectible.

Games end up in gaming circles, and collectibles end up in collectible circles.

If you look back in history, it was a bull market for cryptocurrencies.

At the beginning of 2018, Bitcoin had just hit a record high at the time, and in New York, an "epic meeting" also took place at the same time.

At the Rare Digital Art Festival on January 13, Hall, founder of Cryptopunks, Mark, product curator at Cryptokitties, and Rooney, founder of Rare Pepe Wallet, came together.

This is a meeting of NFT masters.

At that event, a rare Pepe was auctioned off for $3.90k.

This is the one below, Homer pepe.

Homer (Homer) is the image of the cartoon Simpsons. You may not believe it, this picture is so valuable because it is a "wrong version", and the minute is written as mintue. (WTF...)

This is no ordinary lady, she is Anne Blasegdell, photography specialist at Christie's auction house.

After listening to the speeches of this group of people, she couldn't wait to make an appointment with two technical nerds in the Larva Lab to chat about life.

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Annie's Twitter profile picture

As a photographer, Anne has been plagued by a bug:

A photographer's work is only valuable after death. Because when you are alive, you will shoot new works at any time. The more pieces you have, the less valuable they are. Collectors are willing to pay high prices for your works only when you are sure that you are dead. But at this time, you can no longer enjoy the money.

Seeing Cryptopunks, Annie had an epiphany.

It turns out that the scarcity of a work of art can be guaranteed by using cryptography through blockchain technology:

Once the artwork is on the chain, it is protected by huge computing power. Even the two technical nerds in the Larva Lab can't change any pixel.

She quickly pointed out a clear path: If your artworks want to affect a wider public, you must go to galleries and auction houses.

So Hall and Watkinson started attending art forums and met a lot of gallery owners.

The first stop is to try your luck at a gallery in Zurich.

In order to adapt to the tastes of local tyrants, they decided to "downgrade" the presentation of digital art to traditional art - they selected 12 avatars to print out, framed them magnificently, and then printed the password of the corresponding Ethereum wallet on a piece of paper Tuck it into the envoy and seal it with medieval style wax.

A few days before the launch, the gallery owner invited Watkinson to have a meal with some local tyrants in the financial industry. As a result, the 12 NFTs were almost sold out after the meal.

Watkinson flew back to New York and printed 12 more new NFTs, which were also swept away.

Everything looks very polished.

However, the dream of digital art, which is only supported by local tyrants outside the circle, is a tulip bubble after all.

Sweeping like a wildfire, all you can see is ashes.

However, just before this fire, a small incident happened in a corner of the United States.

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(8) Claire

In 2017, the post-00s female artist "Claire" and the cryptographer "Mr. 703" met by chance online.

Claire is the screen name, and Mr. 703 is also the screen name.

But they both have a common belief that encrypted art must have a bright future.

At that time, Mr. 703 gave Claire three Cryptopunks avatars, and made Claire swear that no matter how valuable these three avatars are in the future, she will not sell them. Because this kind of artwork should be placed in the Museum of Modern Art in New York. . .

Why is Mr. 703 so generous, giving such a big gift to a girl he has never met?

Because, Mr. 703 is the one we mentioned earlier, who grabbed 758 Cryptopunks avatars. After robbing, he gave away and sold 55 avatars (including three for Claire), and there were 703 left, so he called himself "Mr. 703".

But Claire obviously doesn't have such strong beliefs as Mr. 703.

In 2018, seeing that the value of all NFT avatars dropped by 90%, Claire looked in the mirror and saw that she was still the frail and down-and-out artist suffering from depression, and didn't even know where the money for the next meal would be.

She quit various NFT groups, never spoke to "Mr. 703", bought a second-hand iPad, bought a drawing software for $10, and started doing some graffiti to try to make some money.

Under the ashes that no one is watching, new shoots are quietly growing.

If you turn the camera forward, in 2017 when Claire and Mr. 703 met, a website called Opensea was quietly established. Its founders are Alex Atala and Devon Finzer.

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Unlike those code heroes who fight alone, Opensea began to raise financing at the beginning of its establishment and grew up in the way of a formal company.

In 2018, Opensea received a US$120,000 investment from y Combinator, an accelerator owned by Paul Graham, the godfather of technology entrepreneurship. Relying on the power of capital, he gritted his teeth and survived the cold winter.

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Paul Graham, who is also the author of the famous "Hacker and Painter".

In 2021, the once-in-four-year encryption world boom will come back, and Opensea will rake in 1 billion US dollars in financing, and it will grow from a bud to a towering tree in an instant.

This time, the NFT world no longer has to look at the faces of those local tyrants in auction houses and galleries, they have their own native NFT trading market.

It wasn't until this time that the down-and-out Claire remembered that she still had 3 NFT avatars in her hand.

She chose her favorite #1629, the girl with pink hair, and changed it to a Twitter avatar.

NFT spiritual history: 15 minutes of heroic dreams of cans, frogs and ordinary people

With this avatar, her Twitter has gained 1,000 followers a month. The flock of fans brings not only popularity, but also real purchasing power.

A photographer named Justin Aversano reached out to Claire and asked if she could borrow the #1629 avatar, which he had the opportunity to put on a digital display board on the streets of New York.

Justin Aversano

Claire quickly agreed.

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In May 2021, #1629 did appear on a digital screen near the New York Museum of Art.

Mr. 703's prediction seems to have come true - although it has not been placed in the Museum of Modern Art, it is only three blocks away. . .

Claire felt a surge in her heart, and she wanted to see it with her own eyes.

It takes three days and three nights to drive from her small town to New York. She stuffed a mattress into her back seat and started the car. At night, she finds a Wal-Mart parking lot to park her car, sleeps in it, and goes to the Wal-Mart in the morning to go to the bathroom before continuing to drive.

In this way, on June 5, 2021, she finally came to this dizzying international metropolis.

She parked the car and walked quickly to the tall electronic screen. The pixelated girl with pink hair and a black hat sat quietly behind the screen, squinting at the world without saying a word.

It's fucking punk.

Claire took out a piece of soft paper from her bag, wrote her name on it, and solemnly drew a small flower next to it, which was exactly the same as the flower behind her Twitter name, held it up in front of her, and took a picture with her mobile phone photo.

She posted the picture on Twitter, with a sentence: Sleeping in the car for days to get here, it was worth it.

Amid the astonishment and blessings of netizens on Twitter, she made a special detour to the American version of Dalian, which is rich in seafood—the coast of Connecticut, and gave herself a hearty lobster roll.

But Claire didn't keep her promise to Mr. 703.

In the summer of 2021, her mother was hospitalized and required surgery. In order to accompany the bed, she wanted to rent a room near the hospital, so she sold two Cryptopunks avatars, one for $6.80000 and the other for $1.80000.

All she has left is #1629.

NFT is just an illusory picture. But in Claire's life, this "illusory picture" accompanied her years in a strange way. In a calm life, she has her own heroic moments.

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Claire's self portrait

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(nine) Pak

He is a businessman and amateur artist.

Erick Calderon

After the NFT fire, he also founded his own NFT website ArtBlock.

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Therefore, the works of art on ArtBlock have an abstract style.

For example, this one below, called Ringers, is from the artist Dmitri Cherniak.

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Ringers series NFT (1000 pieces in total)

In 2021, a work generated by Ringers was sold for $5.8 million. People call this painting "The Goose".

Of course, it is very likely that this wallet is not used at all, or, even if it is used, its owner will not notice this pie in the sky.

But Dmitry wanted to do just that, tweeting: "See it as a celebration of birth, life and death."

NFT spiritual history: 15 minutes of heroic dreams of cans, frogs and ordinary people

Picasso once deliberately "forgot" his painting on the bus.

There are other stellar art projects on ArtBlock, such as Ana Carreras' Trossets.

Trossets (1000 in total)

Such as Ento's Heavenly Bodies.

Heavenly Bodies (400 in total)

Meebits

Of course, the stars of this NFT movement, the two technical nerds of Larva Lab, are even less likely to be idle. They have launched a new 3D-style NFT called Meebits.

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The 3D style actually reveals their ambition to enter the metaverse.

In the web age, a person's profile picture is just a picture, but in the Metaverse, a person's image is three-dimensional, with a head, a face, and a butt, and the ability to move 360 ​​degrees in all directions without dead ends just like the seven-dimensional space.

So, Cryptopunks is Pixel, and Meebits is Voxel. The two are in the same line.

However, looking at it now, the above stories can only be regarded as prologues in the NFT world.

In any field, there will be a historical moment when "pioneers" give way to "great gods".

In this deep blue sea, real whales began to emerge slowly.

On March 11, 2021, Christie's auction house sold an NFT, which is the work "Everydays: the First 5000 Days" (Everydays: the First 5000 Days) by illustrator Beeple.

He put these 5,000 paintings together into one.

Everydays: the First 5000 Days

The painting sold for $69.3 million.

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This figure properly broke the historical record of the most expensive work in the history of NFT. Moreover, since it is said to be "the first 5,000 days", there must be "the middle 5,000 days" and "the last 5,000 days" after it, which will probably be around 2035.

But what's really scary is that the record set by Beeple didn't even stand for a year.

On December 2, 2021, a 48-hour sale began in a mysterious corner of the Internet.

The thing to sell is called mass.

During these 48 hours, you can buy as much as you want, but after the deadline, there are only so many mass in the world.

The more mass, the bigger your matter.

An interesting way to play is that mass can be traded. If you have 10 mass, I have 20, I buy yours, I have 30, and at the same time, my NFT will become bigger.

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Used "substance" traded on Opensea.

As the mass is passed between different people, the matter in this space will start to move and collide. Just like our universe, no one can accurately predict how these stars will evolve and merge.

It can be said that this is a dynamically changing NFT and also a performance art.

The name of this art is The Merge - Fusion.

This figure is significant, not only because it once again refreshed the highest price for NFT, but also created another historical record: the highest price for a living artist's public auction art.

The previous record was $91.1 million, set in 2019 by Jeff Koons' 1986 sculpture "Rabbit."

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Jeff Koons and his creation Rabbit.

It's like a manifesto:

The Mount Everest of digital art has surpassed physical art.

What's more interesting is that the artist behind The Merge named Pak, no one knows his real name, appearance, male or female.

But his creativity is recognized. (Let's just assume it's "he")

As early as March 2021, the fledgling Pak was noticed by Sotheby's auction house. His two works "The Pixel" and "The Switch" were sold for US$1360,000 and US$1400,000 respectively .

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On September 30, 2021, he developed the first social experiment game "The Lost Poet".

《Lost Poets》

In the game, 65,536 AI-generated poet avatars were sold for a total of $70 million.

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Back to The Merge.

On December 4, 2021, Pak announced the launch of a mysterious website—mass.black.

This website currently has only one home page, and behind it is obviously hidden the deeper gameplay of The Merge that Pak did not disclose. And from here, that auction appears to be just the beginning of a much bigger project.Pak has 330,000 followers on Twitter. In a way, these people's concerns aren't blind because, as Pak says,

He wants to prove that NFT is far from a jpeg picture.

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This is a list of the 10 works with the highest transaction prices in the NFT world as of February 2022.

At least, The Merge has proved that NFT can rely on programs, codes, and philosophical designs to create broader possibilities than traditional art, reaching soul points that traditional art cannot reach.

At the bottom of the NFT website NiftyGateway where The Merge landed, there is this sentence:

We won't rest until 1 billion people collect NFTs.

(10) The Rebels

Many people strongly question whether NFT is art.

Just like back then, people questioned whether the cans painted by Andy Warhol were art.

The reason for the doubters is: these works do not have the traditional sense of "beauty".

But please note that the highest peak of human art has never been achieved by pure "beauty", but by the critical and questioning spirit carried in them.

The reason why "Mona Lisa" is brilliant is that she despises the millennium darkness of the Middle Ages with a pair of gentle human eyes.

The reason why "Starry Night" is eternal is because the branches in full bloom reach the back of the sky. It is a soul with a brush in hand, trying to gather courage to break through suffering.

When art starts to flatter power, it ceases to be art.

From this point of view, although Pepe the Frog is small and the avatars of the Cypherpunks are crude, they observe the era in a distributed manner and try to interact with the era.

When they are upset, they will also unscrupulously raise the middle finger to the era-a middle finger that is distributed, untraceable, and protected by technology.

Even if people are like ants, everyone has the impulse to respond to the times, which proves that we have lived enthusiastically or decadently.

Every joke you tell, every expression you send is the evidence of your life. Everyone wants their life certificate to be different, like the most outstanding canning jar in a side-by-side.

Therefore, with the code, people have separated small universes. In these universes, dreams are priced in the form of NFT, and you can pick them up.