Starting from the ternary fusion of NFT, Meme and CC0, explore why Mfers are popular?

Original Author: Jackdaw

Original source: The SeeDAO

Original source: The SeeDAO

After Azuki, Mfers became the PFP project that everyone had to talk about and pay attention to.

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Mfers: A CC0 project that doesn't even have an official twitter

Mfers is a PFP (head portrait) project hand-painted by artist sartoshi. Its style of painting is a minimalist stickman image. As the founder of the project, sartoshi himself is the OG of the CryptoPunks community and has a good influence in the NFT circle. The technical development of the project is done by Westcoastnft, which is also the technical development team of Doodles.

Mfers is a typical CC0 project, that is, the author only reserves the authorship right for the project. "CC" is an abbreviation for "creative commons", which is used to specify a series of permissions related to the work. CC0 means "No Rights Reserved", the work is placed in a public domain without reservation by the creator, and everyone is free to copy, spread, and create secondary creations. This concept has been around for twenty years.

Mfers was officially launched at the end of November last year, and has maintained an average price of 0.2ETH to 0.4ETH for the next two months. As soon as February this year, as soon as the news of Mfers airdropping 3D villains was released, the trading volume of Mfers suddenly increased, and the price rose all the way. On February 21, it reached an average price of 6.03ETH, and now it has fallen back to around 4ETH.

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Figure 2 | OpenSea TOP NFTs (as of February 26)

Another popular NFT project is 3Landers, which is also a PFP project. In Opensea's 7-day trading rankings, 3Landers' trading volume is overwhelming, firmly occupying the first place. Like Mfers, 3Landers also released the CC0 declaration of NFT works.

CrypToadz by Gremplin, NounsNFT, etc. are also CC0-NFT. If we go to coniun to check the mutual holdings between Mfers and blue-chip projects, we can find that the top three Mutual Holders of Mfers are Doodles, Mutant Ape Yacht Club, and CrypToadz. Since it is from the same technology development team WestCoastNFT, it is not surprising that Doodles holds the most Mfers.

In contrast, the mutual support relationship between Mfers and CrypToadz is more due to CC0. The Mfers community has a page of "Event Recaps" on Notion, which contains the minutes of the internal Chat in December last year. Under the topic of "Growth Potential and Goals", there is this sentence:"Carry the flag on CC0"image description

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Meme: From meme to NFT, to CC0

NFT Royalty Operating Mechanism: Why Giving Up Rights Will Make Creators Earn More?In fact, the concept of CC0 existed as early as 20 years ago.

In the classical Internet period when NFT had not yet emerged, CC0 was more like a public welfare act. In replication at zero marginal cost, pictures can be freely distributed. This kind of friendly and open attitude brings non-economic rewards to the original creators. People may try to find the source of the original picture and become the creator’s followers on social media, but they are more likely to be indifferent to the source, which limits The scope of CC0.

Today, when non-homogeneous tokens stipulate on-chain ownership for jpeg, there is an "embedded relationship" between jpeg image content and blockchain smart contracts - a technical environment in which rules are automatically executed through contract coding. There has been a structural change in revenue sources. In the past, if the content of CC0 is not declared, if the content is stolen, the creator will spend high legal fees to maintain his copyright, because the latter is directly linked to the income.

But NFT royalty settings can be encoded into smart contracts and automatically paid to creators in secondary sales. Digital artists obtain continuous income through the circulation of their NFT works in the secondary market. The generation of value has moved down, and it happens in the process of every transaction changing hands. Every time the creator's NFT is sold on the market, the NFT royalty will provide the creator with a certain percentage of the sales price, ranging from 2.5% to 10%.

For an excellent NFT project, the profit generated by such a downward transfer of the value link is huge: for example, "blue chip projects" such as BAYC and Azuki, the secondary royalty rate has exceeded the primary income.Therefore, in terms of economic benefits, the focus of some creators has shifted from "how to keep my copyright profits from being stolen by others" to "how to make my NFT spread and circulate more frequently", which provides a lot for CC0 licensing. Good application scenario.

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Figure 4 | Source：Unsplash

CC0 is more suitable for Meme projects

Although CC0 will better promote the spread of NFT projects, not all projects will adopt CC0.

A type of PFP project represented by BAYC and Azuki often requires high R&D costs. At the same time, the project party itself has strong development and operation capabilities, and has a long-term operation plan. Such projects tend not to use CC0.

why?

why?

For BAYC and Azuki, the communication of the brand relies on the official (that is, the central party) to lead the users who hold NFT to produce and spread together. Since they do not have strong meme attributes visually, it is difficult for them to gain natural communication outside the core interest community (ie project parties and users holding NFT).

Of course, the project party is well aware of this-even if CC0 is opened, it will be difficult to help the project spread. Conversely, if only the right to use NFT images is controlled within the NFT holder community, and at the same time expand brand influence through the project party's own connection with celebrity resources, game development resources, fashion brand development resources, etc., it will promote more and more People are willing to hold the NFT.

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Mfers: After being liberated by CC0, how does Meme translate into price?

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Figure 5 | Mfers Visual Features

The appeal of Meme self-expansion is inversely proportional to the delicacy and realism of the NFT itself - you might as well look down at the panda heads collected in our WeChat. The reputation of "patina"-so the proof that the image quality of countless transmissions has been compressed to the minimum.

The simple painting style of Mfers will remind us of our childhood memories of drawing stick figures in the blank spaces of textbooks. It does not require professional painting skills, and everyone can do it—now, the state of the stick figures sitting at the table wearing headphones is A true portrayal of us as adults. The CC0 license opens the door to creation, and the younger generation of encryption-natives only need to return to their childhood creativity and imagination to jump into the meme crowd.

Meme NFTs are more inclined to use CC0 than art and brand NFTs, because the popularity of Meme NFTs is very dependent on the FOMO sentiment in the encrypted market and the activity of the community. In this process, copyright hinders the spread of Meme symbols and NFT transactions.

Under the economic guarantee of NFT secondary royalties, Meme and CC0 have successfully released the creativity of the community: the group chat of Mfers can generate 3000+ messages in one night; the "officially certified unofficial" (Official Unofficial) Discord server Here, memes are continuously produced from the memecraft channel; mfers not only produced derivatives xmfers, mphers, buttfaced mfers, but also "swallowed" all the favorites in the previous market, from CryptoPunks to Azuki: zuki mfers, ape mfers, punk mfers ………

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CC0 and Popular Culture: Back to Fiske and Rifkin

Finally, I want to talk about Fiske and Rifkin.

Fiske is a scholar who studies media. He developed the theory of "productive audience view" along the path of active audience in Birmingham School of cultural studies.

Fiske believes that in the cultural economy, the circulation process is not the turnover of money, but the dissemination of meaning and pleasure.The audience is transformed from a consumer of commodities into a producer of meaning and pleasure.In an active audience environment, there are no consumers, only the circulation of meaning, and meaning is the only element in the whole process.

Do you think this is very similar to the current NFT market?

NFT is undoubtedly a form of realization of cultural economy, and NFT native is "the public". Compared with memeized Mfers, 3D NFTs undoubtedly have the highest threshold for secondary creation. Because "I don't seem to be able to do much", the community has no choice but to pin the aesthetics of NFT on professional designers and artists, and pin the empowerment of NFT on project operations.

Only in CC0 and memeized NFT, the public can truly get rid of the passive identity of "content recipients", but become producers of meaning and pleasure themselves.

This is crucial. As Fiske points out in Understanding Popular Culture:Mass culture is created by the masses, not imposed on them, it arises from within or from below, not from above.In Rifkin's view, this is the collaborative sharing model in the "zero marginal cost society", and the "productive audience" is what Rifkin called "synergists composed of prosumers". In this mechanism, "property rights give way to open source sharing, ownership gives way to access rights, and markets give way to networks."

This is reminiscent of the web3 concept's respect for the creativity of the masses: Mirror.xyz's project party does not have the right to publish or manage content, but sees the flexibility of web3 tool components—traffic economy and long-tail effects become web2 The "finite game" of the era.

Similarly, "CC0-style rebellion" gave up property rights and copyrights, and saw a broader creative stage: it provides a symbol that "everyone can become a prosumer": if the little ghost is the choice and the artists of weirDAO Cooperation, then sartoshi of Mfers chose to cooperate with all "productive audiences"; as a result, mfer can be freely fermented in the community, and imitation disks that want to gain popularity have become allies whether they are voluntary or not, "Fu Wei If you don't fight, the world will not be able to compete with it."

Summarize

Summarize

"mfers: mourning culture, a new tribe of web 3.0 under the post-subculture"This article discusses the connotation of mfers' cultural community from the standpoint of humanities such as "global network cultural thought trend" and "ideal resonance of postmodernism". This article attempts to explore the possibility of co-creation of Meme, NFT, and CC0: Mfers took over the banner of CC0, and used meme as a medium to mark a rebellious NFT value paradigm.

But as Fiske described, the masses have a "nomadic subjectivity" and will shuttle between layers created by the culture industry. This may also explain why Internet pop culture always undergoes a rapid metabolism. Meme and meme will be like a leek, and a new one will grow after cutting it.

On the cultural level, the subculture of cypherpunk and the modernist "weary attitude" towards reality will still connect the NFT native community in a free and open environment; at the level of NFT value structure, we have seen differences from Mfers Based on the traditional "project party-consumer" relationship, we also see the "public value" in the encrypted narrative - after Mfers and 3Landers, who will take charge of this CC0 banner?