Original author: 0x11
Leibniz said that no two leaves are exactly alike in the world. This sentence is expressed in today's fashionable technology carrier:Each of us is an NFT.
NFT, I believe everyone in today's encrypted world is familiar with it. In the past two years, it has been like a hurricane, blowing through every corner of the encrypted world, and even penetrated through the narrow door to reach the vast physical world. A pixel avatar randomly generated by code was sold for $23.7 million; encryption artist Beeple's work "Everydays: The First 5000 Days" was sold at Christie's for $69.3 million.
image description
NFT historical turnover trend, data source: NFTGo
It would be short-sighted to confuse NFT with the notorious tulip bubble in history. Hegel once said, "To be is to be rational." Discussions and analyzes on the value and prospects of NFT have become commonplace, and the answers are different. Here, we want to go back to the source and connect the development track of NFT with several characters and stories to answer some doubts in your mind.
The development of NFT has obvious phased characteristics.In the first stage, before the birth of Bitcoin, NFT thoughts and concepts sprouted here; in the Bitcoin era, NFT had the soil for experiments and began early exploration; in the last Ethereum era, NFT ushered in a full-scale ecological explosion.Let's turn back the time to 60 years ago and start telling our story.
budding age
Andy Warhol: Spiritual Banner
image description
Campbell's Soup Cans, Andy Warhol, 1962
This is a set of 32 cans neatly arranged, just like the display on a supermarket shelf, each of which looks almost the same, the difference is that each can has a different taste. This seemingly "monotonous and boring" "Campbell's Soup Can" set off an artistic storm in the second half of the 20th century. Its author, Andy Warhol, is known as the Pope of Pop Art, and with a series of Works with similar styles have entered the world's top art halls and become legendary artists comparable to Picasso and Van Gogh.
image description
Andy Warhol's self-portrait, what he didn't expect More than 30 years after his death, these three portraits were made into NFTs and finally sold for $2.8 million
If you carefully observe Andy Warhol's works, it is easy to find that they all have a common logic: simple repeated subjects superimposed random variables. The British "Guardian" once commented: "Warhol is an expert in showing the power of repetition. Through repetition, he adds something, without making us feel boring, and without dissolving the thing itself." His creation and life are both In practicing this kind of repetition, "I like things that keep repeating. I have eaten the same breakfast for twenty years."
This kind of unscrupulous and bold repetition is unique in the history of human art. Some people questioned that his works are not works of art, but industrial prints. Why can this repeated "print" become a treasure of human art?
Art is art, and its value has never come from the visual beauty, but the humanistic spirit behind it. In the words of Andy Warhol:
The great thing about America is that it has started a tradition that the richest consumers buy basically the same things as the poorest.
You can see Coca-Cola on TV, you know the president drinks Coca-Cola, Elizabeth Taylor drinks Coca-Cola, and then you think, you can drink Coca-Cola too. Coca-Cola is Coca-Cola, and no money can buy you a better Coke than the bum on the corner is drinking. All Cokes are the same, and all Coca-Colas are good. Elizabeth Taylor knows it, the President knows it, the homeless man knows it, and you know it too.
This is the general mental state of people in the industrial age revealed by Andy Warhol's works. Any ordinary person can shell out their pockets to enjoy the same Coke and burgers as the president and queen of the country. In a way, you are no different from those who are famous and rich. So, what's different?
Just like the 32 cans arranged neatly, the difference between them is the taste; and the small variables among the masses in the industrial age are the basis for each person to become himself. So, Andy Warhol uttered the classic quote: "In the future, everyone will be famous for 15 minutes." Because everyone is different, it is the characteristics that are repeated a lot that highlight that small difference.
So far, have you found that Andy Warhol's style of repeating subjects plus random variables is exactly the same as the root of thought from FT (homogeneous tokens) to NFT (non-homogeneous tokens),Since one bitcoin is equal to one bitcoin, what should I do if I want to make my bitcoin unique?
But in the era of Andy Warhol, there was no Bitcoin, no NFT, and even the Internet was just in its infancy.
image description
Well-known street artist Banksy's "Fool", created in 2006, is intended to satirize the superficial and over-inflated art market. The painting depicts a crowded auction hall with an ornately framed work next to the auctioneer, which reads: "I can't believe you idiots actually bought this."
In March 2021, street artist Banksy's work "Fool" was burned by a group of art lovers, and then its electronic version was made into an NFT, which was sold for $380,000 (4 times the price of the original work). This group of crazy fans even live-streamed the burning painting on social media, and they also said that burning painting "is an artistic expression in itself."
This is all something later. In the sixth year after Andy Warhol's death, in the field of cryptography that has nothing to do with art, a thought experiment slowly brought the prototype of the NFT concept to the stage of history.
Hal Finney: Pioneer of the NFT concept
In 1993, a cryptographer named Hal Finney mentioned the concept of cryptocurrency trading cards in an email to members of the Cypherpunks.
Finney explained in the email:
I thought a little more about my idea of buying and selling digital cash and I came up with a way to showcase it. We are buying and selling "crypto trading cards". Enthusiasts of cryptography will love these fascinating examples of cryptographic art. Notice how it's perfectly combined - a mix of one-way functions and digital signatures, and random blinding. What a perfect piece to treasure and show off to your friends and family.
He also described the scarcity of cryptocurrency trading cards, “They come in all sorts of attributes, from the common 1, to the rare 50, all the way up to the extremely rare 1,000.”
This passage basically outlines the prototype of today's NFT - digital collections. Unfortunately, due to technical limitations, this idea was not realized at the time.
When fate closes a door, it opens another window. Finney's continued efforts in the field of cryptography ultimately paid off. On January 3, 2009, a whole new world opened up, because on this day, Bitcoin was born.
Hal Finney became one of the earliest open source contributors to Bitcoin, and he was also the first person in the world to receive a Bitcoin transfer. Even, he is considered to be one of the actual inventors of Bitcoin under the pseudonym "Satoshi Nakamoto", but this claim was denied by him.
As for the idea mentioned in the email sixteen years ago, I don't know whether it was forgotten by him, or it was not realized due to the deterioration of his physical condition. In October 2009, Hal Finney announced that he was suffering from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, and finally in August 2014, he said goodbye for good to the new world that was just unfolding.
In the world of Bitcoin, new and old things collide, sprout and grow here. Finney's unfinished vision was later realized on Bitcoin.
bitcoin era
In March 2012, a man named Yoni Assia wrote "bitcoin 2.X (aka Colored Bitcoin) – initial specs" article, introducing his ideas on Colored Bitcoin.
In this article, Colored Coins envisages the creation of new tokens on the Bitcoin network. This novel idea immediately attracted the interest of a group of people in the Bitcoin community, who participated in the discussion and perfection of this idea. As more and more people join, the functions of colored coins are continuously expanded, from a simple idea to a complete white paper. Vitalik Buterin, the genius boy who later created the Ethereum Empire, was one of them.
The core idea of the perfected colored coins is:
“If bitcoins can be tokenized, and those tokens can be traced, then there are many other uses for these particular bitcoins.”
Technically, colored coins are small denomination bitcoins, but they are tagged with additional data to represent a variety of assets and have a variety of uses, including property, coupons, shares of issuing companies, etc.
But the limitation of colored coins is also quite obvious, which is to bring catastrophic performance pressure to the otherwise unsatisfactory Bitcoin network.In the protracted debate in the community, the colored coins have not been expected to be put into practice for a long time.
Until early 2014, three young people named Robert Dermody, Adam Krellenstein and Evan Wagner founded a project called Counterparty. It quickly implements the idea of colored coins, and completes functions that cannot be realized by general bitcoin software by writing data in bitcoin transaction scripts. CounterpartySupport asset creation, with decentralized exchange, XCP contract currency and many projects and assets, including card games and meme transactions.What really promotes the emergence of NFT is the "Rare Pepes" created on Counterparty-making the popular meme Sad Frog into an NFT application.
So far, those names that have flashed across the river of cryptocurrency history, whether it is cryptocurrency trading cards, colored coins or Counterparty, have become ancient monuments in the minds of crypto users who flocked years later, and never even heard. Their first exposure to NFT may have to wait until CryptoPunks in 2017, or the famous encrypted cat after that.
Era of Ethereum
"If you don't have to, don't add entities." Bitcoin is a model of the successful application of Occam's razor principle. As a peer-to-peer electronic cash system, its achievements are beyond doubt; but to lead the entire online world into the encrypted world, it has to work hard. If not, the task of becoming a "world computer" has to be handed over to its follower, Ethereum.
In 2013, Vitalik Buterin, one of the many authors of the white paper on colored coins, met two companies that were trying to develop smart contracts based on Bitcoin while traveling in Israel. Vitalik was attracted by this idea, and he proposed an idea to the Mastercoin community, which was studying the scalability of Bitcoin at the time: to develop a smart contract platform for Bitcoin, allowing users to write scripts conveniently and quickly. Unfortunately, Vitalik's proposal was not accepted. Disappointed, he turned to research a new smart contract platform, so in November of that year, the Ethereum white paper was born. By July 2015, the Ethereum mainnet was launched, and a new era kicked off.
The reason why Ethereum has become a paradise for decentralized applications is that Fabian Vogelsteller proposed the ERC-20 standard in November 2015. ERC-20 provides a series of standard interfaces, allowing developers to build token applications that can interoperate with other products and services, giving birth to the first encryption application boom, followed by the brutal ICO bull market in 2017 relation. EthereumOfficial website documentThe standard is described as follows:
ERC-20 introduced the standard for fungible tokens, in other words, they have properties that make each token identical (in type and value) to another token. For example, ETH is an ERC-20 token, and 1 ETH is always equal to another 1 ETH.
The core of this description: one token is equal to another token, it is easy for people to think in the opposite direction:What can a token be used for if it is not equal to another token?The first to answer this question was the NFT pioneer on Ethereum: CryptoPunks.
CryptoPunks: Where History Meets
This is an era of turmoil, and it is also a meeting point of science and art. The script of "Campbell's Soup Cans" from more than fifty years ago is being re-enacted on Ethereum.
Does this group of neatly arranged avatars exude a similar charm to "Campbell's Soup Cans" more than fifty years ago: repeated subjects superimpose random variables, but the variables are more abundant: skin color, hairstyle, hat, glasses...
Even if you are a newcomer to NFT for the first time, you must have seen the stern faces in the picture above. No. 5822 among the 10,000 different avatars was sold for $23.7 million on February 12 this year.
That's right, it's the avatar above, CryptoPunks#5822. What, why is it so valuable, you ask?
If you are lucky enough to own a CryptoPunks and set it as the avatar of your social media account, it will definitely attract the envy and onlookers of many people. Because there are only 10,000 such avatars, with it, you have the same capital as Shopify founder Tobi Lutk and Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban. Isn't that enough?
As one of the most expensive NFTs, CryptoPunks has rich and diverse sources of value. One of the most important aspects is its historical status. To understand the pioneering value of CryptoPunks and its impact on later NFTs, you need to read the following paragraph first story.
In 2005, two Canadians named Matt Hall and John Watkinson established Larva labs in the United States, which translates into Chinese as Larva Labs. It was they who later created the godfather of NFT on Ethereum: CryptoPunks.
image description
Matt Hall on the left, John Watkinson on the right
Larva labs was not born for NFT. For a long time, this is a small software company that develops mobile applications for iPhone and Android. The company has always only had two people, Matt Hall and John Watkinson.
Among the many applications they have developed is an app that can help you randomly generate Android robot avatars.
By the beginning of 2017, they had been thinking about digital avatars all the year round and figured out an avatar generator. But what to do with this generator?
Great works of art often come from a moment of inspiration. At this time, John's little niece, who is obsessed with collecting dolls, gave them inspiration: Since collection is the nature of all human beings, why not make a digital collection? However, a new problem has arisen, how to ensure the scarcity of digital collectibles?
The two immediately went to find the answer, but unexpectedly discovered a new continent. Earlier we mentioned the NFT solution on Bitcoin, Matt and John were not satisfied with the limitations reflected on Counterparty. They set their sights on the young but dynamic Ethereum.
At that time, there was no ERC-721 standard, and issuing NFT on Ethereum was far from as simple as it is today. Matt and John can onlyWith ERC-20, add some functions on top of it, so the earliest NFT of Ethereum was born.
In homage to the spirit of cypherpunk, Matt and John decided to give away these highly personalized avatars for free, and of course they kept 1,000 for themselves. When the application was first opened, there were very few people, until a technology reporter named Jason Abbruzzese noticed this interesting new experiment and wrote an article reporting, "This Ethereum-based project may change our understanding of digital art." Known". Subsequently, CryptoPunks became famous, and the remaining NFTs were quickly collected. Although it is sought after by collectors, it is still a long time before CryptoPunks reached the peak of history.
At the first NFT meeting in 2018, two technical nerds, Matt and John, met a photographer named Annie, who suggested to them: To make CryptoPunks gain wider influence, they should cooperate with galleries and auctions. cooperation. Matt and John were so convinced that 24 NFTs were swept away in the first auction. Traditional collectors have shown unexpected interest in this new species of digital art collection.
Then, the cold winter that many encrypted OGs will never forget came, and CryptoPunks could not escape the fall, waiting for the moment when the king returns.
CryptoKitties: The Powder Keg That Detonates Crypto Collectibles
While CryptoPunks attracted a lot of attention, they paled in comparison to the CryptoKitties that took the crypto world by storm a few months later. The earliest Gas war on Ethereum was started by it.
In 2012, three years after graduating from Stanford, Roham Gharegozlou founded Axiom Zen, a studio focused on new technologies such as blockchain and artificial intelligence. At the Money 20/20 Hackathon in Las Vegas in 2014, Axiom Zen led by Roham won the grand prize, and 2 of the 3 entries submitted by the team were Bitcoin Apps.
In 2016, he successfully persuaded Dete, the chief software architect of Axiom Zen, to develop a practical, interesting and even a little clumsy thing based on Ethereum to eliminate platform risks for developers. At the same time, Roham's high school classmate Mik Naayem had just sold his mobile game platform start-up to Animoca Brands. After Roham's persistent "brainwashing" and invitation, Mik quickly joined the new venture. At this time, the team is still thinking about how to explore the decentralized world.
Stablecoins, privacy blockchains... After briefly conceiving these ideas, they decisively gave up, because these technologies are difficult to penetrate into the lives of ordinary people.
"One day, after another brainstorming session where nothing came of it, a colleague named Mack Flavelle said, we needPut cats on the blockchain.」
Just like that, a butterfly in Latin America flapped its wings, and the countdown to a storm sweeping the crypto world began.
The 2017 ETH Waterloo Hackathon, like all hackathons, was a feast for tech nerds. Eight new projects emerged, including Axiom Zen's CryptoKitties.
The reason why they chose to put cats on the blockchain instead of dogs or other animals is so clear and simple: the Internet loves cats. For many cat-loving and exploratory Internet residents, this reason is enough for them to rush into the novel world of encryption.
By the end of 2017,There has been a long-term congestion phenomenon on the Ethereum network. In order to compete for priority transaction rights, users are willing to submit high fees.This phenomenon has since acquired a notorious name: Gas Wars. Although the Gas war has long been accustomed to Ethereum users a few years later, it was the first time that the Ethereum network continued to be congested at that time.
datadataimage description
CryptoKitties No. 40 was traded at 225ETH, the highest price in the history of CryptoKitties
CryptoKitties is a digital collectible game, not a simple collectible like CryptoPunks. As a game, CryptoKitties provides new ways to play, such as two cats can mix genes to give birth to kittens. However, just because it is a game, Encryption Kitties has the same fate as many popular small games, like a short-lived fireworks, it will soon fade out of the stage of history.
But CryptoKitties is not just an NFT game, or not just an NFT collectible game, it also has another far-reaching identity: the first ERC-721 NFT project. That's right, the most extensive token standard in the NFT world later came from Axiom Zen, and the term "NFT" was born here. In fact, before the release of CryptoKitties, Axiom Zen's CTO Dieter Shirley proposed the original version of the ERC-721 protocol inspired by CryptoPunks.
At this point, you may be wondering: why is Axiom Zen, which has made such outstanding achievements, so little-known? Because they later changed another name: Dapper Labs. As for the reason for the name change, you can definitely guess: separate CryptoKitties and open up new businesses.
The well-known Dapper Labs quickly announced a $12 million financing led by a16z and USV in March 2018, and then contacted the NBA, hoping that the two parties will cooperate to launch sports NFT collections on the blockchain.
The lessons learned from the congestion of CryptoKitties on Ethereum is just now. This cooperation has not progressed smoothly, but Dapper Labs has realized a new problem: bringing the new technology of NFT to hundreds of millions of users, Ethereum is no longer reliable. A new idea was born: Flow.
When Dapper Labs shifted its focus to Flow, the long crypto winter came quietly. By the end of the year, the price of Ethereum had dropped from $1,300 at the beginning of the year to $140. With dramatic changes in the market, CryptoKitties continued to cool down, and Dapper Labs’ account was once short of funds. In the next two years, three more rounds of financing were conducted.
The turning point came in September 2020, when Flow’s token sale on Coinlist was a huge success. More than 12,500 users from 100 countries invested nearly $9 million, breaking CoinList’s record at the time. In the second week, Dapper took out another 25 million FLOW for auction and raised another $9.5 million.
Subsequently, the Flow network was launched, and NBA Top Shot, an NFT collectible project that records the shooting moments of NBA stars, became the first experimenter on this public chain tailored for NFN. This is also what Dapper Labs previously sought to cooperate with NBA officials results. NBA Top Shot also lived up to expectations, continuing the legend of Dapper Labs' explosive factory.
2021 is off to a good start, and the NBA Top Shot competition continues to soar. On February 21, the single-day transaction volume reached a peak of 47.9 million US dollars, and on May 7, the number of users reached a maximum of 186,000.
After NBA Top Shot, NFT popularity began to soar. Let’s review the market background at that time: DeFi set off a wave of frenzy in the summer of 2020, igniting the enthusiasm of the entire encryption world. The horn of a new round of bull market has already sounded before many people noticed it. Perhaps it is a group of belated trendsetters who missed the first wave of huge dividends in DeFi and are looking for new wealth narratives in this market. NFT becomes the lucky one who gets selected.
Our narrative skips over the dark period between 2018 and the first half of 2020, in which the dark night sky was not without its star-studded moments. OpenSea, which occupies an absolute dominant position in the NFT trading market today, was born during that time.
OpenSea: The absolute ruler of the NFT market
The birth of Opensea is also the story of two technical male fortune-tellers. The rare encryption bull market in 2017 attracted Devin Finzer and Alex Atallah with computer backgrounds. The two demonstrated their first encryption project Wificoin at the Techcrunch Hackathon in September of that year, encouraging users to share Wifi routes in exchange for corresponding incentives . Wificoin was honored to be selected by Y Combinator, the top incubator in Silicon Valley, who hoped to include Wificoin in the incubation plan to promote the further development of the project.
During the transition period between Wificoin's acceptance of the program and its launch in January 2018, the cryptocurrency market underwent dramatic changes. Ethereum has reached the pinnacle of that round of bull market. The madness not only reflects the rapid rise of Ethereum, but also the CryptoKitties mentioned above that just came out at that time. There is no need to describe the grand occasion. Most people are surprised by the energy of NFT , and Finzer and Atallah smelled new business opportunities: since CryptoKitties is built on ERC-721, if a trading market is built on the basis of ERC-721, it can support a variety of NFT.
Finzer and Atallah are market-savvy entrepreneurs, but they're not the only ones who sense an opportunity. Their competitor started an NFT marketplace called Rare Bits around the same time.
On the same day in February 2018, OpenSea and Rare Bits were launched on Product Hunt. OpenSea describes itself as "the eBay for crypto goods." Rare Bits is positioned as "an eBay-like zero-fee encrypted asset marketplace." Both are aiming at the direction of eBay in the NFT world, but their operating strategies are different. OpenSea insists on charging commissions from user transactions, while Rare Bits offers a free transaction model. History has concluded that the strategy of subsidizing users and relying on traffic to build a moat in the Internet era has failed here. Today's NFT market has long been dominated by OpenSea, but Rare Bits has long since disappeared in the dust of history.
One of the earliest investors in OpenSea, Richard Chen, general partner of 1confirmation, once summarized and reviewed the competition between the two:
Rare Bits is an on-paper team of ex-Zynga employees who have raised far more money from traditional VCs than OpenSea. But the OpenSea team is leaner, and Devin and Alex have done a great job of discovering new NFT projects and supporting them to trade on OpenSea, where most of the trading volume on OpenSea comes from. When we invested in April 2018, OpenSea's trading volume was already 4 times that of Rare Bits.
OpenSea's road to the bear market in 2018 was not smooth. Fortunately, they raised $2.1 million in investment from Animoca Brands in November 2019 and passed the difficult time smoothly. By March 2020, when the new crown virus epidemic spread globally, OpenSea had only 5 employees. At that time, the monthly transaction volume was 1.1 million US dollars. Calculated according to the 2.5% sales commission, OpenSea’s monthly income at this time was only a negligible 28,000 Dollar.
By 2021, the NFT market will recover, and OpenSea will enter a high-speed growth channel. In January 2022, OpenSea's monthly transaction volume will reach its peak$5.86 billion, with monthly revenue of $146 million based on a 2.5% sales commission. At the same time, OpenSea announced a C-round financing of up to US$300 million, and its valuation soared to US$13 billion, making it a well-deserved giant in the NFT world.
So far, the pioneers who created the NFT prosperity have all appeared on the stage. If the experience of DeFi is copied, the emergence of ERC-20 and Uniswap laid the foundation for the summer of DeFi; then we have reason to infer that after NFT has ERC-721 and OpenSea, it is only one fuse away from the explosion.
If you look at it from a high perspective and look at the historical trend of the entire cryptocurrency, NFT is just an episode. NFT can usher in its outbreak in 2021, but it is just in accordance with the weather. At the beginning of 2021, the DeFi frenzy that lasted for half a year attracted fresh blood to the encryption market. butThe pace of innovation in the DeFi market is gradually declining, and the market is looking for new growth points.
According to NFT data company Nonfungible.com, NFT transactions totaled $82 million in 2020 and $17.6 billion in 2021. There is no doubt that 2021 is the first year of the NFT explosion. And at the time point in early 2021, the outing of the NBA Top shot may be the powder keg that detonates the entire NFT market.
In the following year, encryption art and PFP avatars appeared one after another, becoming the most eye-catching melody in the bull market symphony.
Crypto Art: Beeple and Pak
image description
Beeple has published paintings on the Internet every day since May 1, 2007. After drawing 5,000 paintings, he used NFT technology to combine them together to generate a new work "Everydays: The First 5000 Days"
Beeple is his name in the encrypted world. In the real world, he has another name, Mike Winkelmann. Mike, born in 1981, is a graphic designer from the United States who is well-known in his field of work. He has designed for companies such as Nike, Apple, Coca-Cola, Louis Vuitton and Space X.
As a graphic designer, Mike found a British artist who drew sketches every day and put them on his social networking site while browsing the web, attracting many fans.
image description
Beeple's first painting on May 1, 2017, depicting his uncle nicknamed "Uber Jay"
One painting a day, Mike persisted for 13 years and more than 5,000 days. He made a huge collection of all the paintings of the daily painting, named "EVERYDAYS: THE FIRST 5000 DAYS". The next thing is well known, at the Christie's auction on March 11, 2021, the piece "Everydays: The First 5000 Days" was sold for $69.3 million, making it the most expensive encrypted artwork at the time. This is the moment when encrypted art is a blockbuster in the entire art world, and it is also the moment when NFT, as a new carrier of art, shows unlimited potential.
As Beeple stated, he is not a pure cryptographer. After subtracting auction fees and taxes, Beeple received $53 million worth of Ethereum from the auction. At the end of March, shortly after the auction, Beeple told The New Yorker that he was frightened by the price fluctuations of Ethereum, and immediately exchanged all Ethereum for US dollars, and threw away the argument that "NFT is a bubble" and go. Beeple said, “I was doing digital art long before I did these things, and if all these NFTs disappeared tomorrow, I would still be doing digital art.”
Beeple's achievements cannot be denied because of his pessimism about the NFT market at that time, and encrypted art will not be dimmed because of Beeple's departure. In fact, encryption art has had a fantastic start, but a more exciting story is yet to come.
Beeple's record wasn't even held for a year before it was broken by another artist.
On December 2, 2021, on the NFT marketplace Nifty Gateway, a 48-hour auction began. The auctioned work is called The Merge, which consists of small balls of mass. During the auction, collectors can buy any number of mass, but each wallet can only have one small ball. When buying a second ball, the two balls will be merged into one, and the color and volume will also change. After the auction is over, small balls will no longer be produced, and "annexation" will continue to occur with secondary market transactions, and the number of balls will become less and less.
The auction event eventually attracted more than 28,000 collectors to participate, with a total auction value of 91.8 million US dollars, and the creator behind this work, Pak, also ascended to the altar and was praised as the Satoshi Nakamoto of the NFT world.
Unlike Beeple, who has a real identity in the physical world, Pak remains an artist whose identity remains a mystery. No one knows his name, what he looks like, or even his gender. What people know is that he is the founder of Undream Studio and the chief designer of Archillect, an AI curation event. He has been engaged in digital art creation for more than 25 years and has cooperated with hundreds of major brands and studios.
Not only did Pak shape a new pinnacle of crypto art, he also set the highest price ever paid for a work of art at public auction by a living artist.The previous record was set by Jeff Koons in the work "Rabbit" in 2019. People were amazed to discover that the pinnacle of physical art has been surpassed by encrypted art.
PFP: main theme
image description
CryptoPunks' historical transaction data, the yellow is the transaction volume, and the white is the transaction amount. The transaction volume of CryptoPunks ushered in a significant increase in February 2021 and reached its peak in August. Data Sources:NonFungible
The return of the CryptoPunks king opened the door to "PFP" NFT at the same time. PFP is the abbreviation of "profile picture", which is a copyrighted avatar in the form of NFT.
image description
As of the current NFT total transaction volume ranking, PFP occupies most of the top ten seats, data source: NFTGo
The stage spotlight won't stay on the CryptoPunks forever, this time it's someone else, a group of futuristic crypto hit apes who hang out at secret clubs in the swamp, dressed in a variety of skin tones, but with faces They all had a bored look on their faces. They are called Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC).
As for what these boring apes did? Set your sights on their highlight moments first.
On March 12, 2022, Yuga Labs, the parent company of BAYC, announced the acquisition of the CryptoPunks and Meebits NFT series developed by Larva Labs. On March 23, Yuga Labs completed a financing of US$450 million at a valuation of US$4 billion.
This is a story of a latecomer’s counterattack, and the script of the story almost follows CryptoPunks. The early sales were sluggish, and the team was unknown, but BAYC was born at the beginning of the NFT craze. There is also a more critical difference. BAYC Open strategy and marketing ideas.
According to The New Yorker, BAYC has four anonymous creators who are real-life friends, Gargamel is a writer and editor, Goner is a cryptocurrency day trader, and Tomato and Sass are programmers.
BAYC was inspired by an NFT project called Hashmasks. They realized that the focus of NFT is not technology, but cultural innovation is the key. So they hoped to create a club that would bridge the gap between mainstream culture and Web3.
Originally, BAYC was a collaborative artwork with a canvas that allowed multiple people to change one of the pixels to their favorite color every 15 minutes. The founding team told Nicole Muniz about the idea. So what started as a simple idea for a collaborative project turned into a picture with a story: a futuristic Miami swamp inhabited by a bunch of bored apes. Gargamel wanted them to be punk apes with "a sort of existential boredom."
The team then hired a professional illustrator for $40,000. Lead designer Seneca imagined himself as a neighbor of an ape in a scruffy city where the apes roamed freely as citizens. Seneca describes this group of citizens as "apes who are bored with life but have all the money and time in the world hanging out in metal bars". Thus, the BAYC Boring Ape as we know it today was born.
On April 23, 2021, BAYC opened the pre-sale. After 7 days, 500 NFTs were sold out. However, by May 1st, the remaining 9,500 BAYC were wiped out.
At that time, the casting price of each BAYC was 0.08ETH, and less than a year later, on March 17, 2022, the floor price of BAYC on OpenSea had exceeded 100ETH.
The difference in the attitudes of BAYC and CryptoPunks towards NFT copyrights is considered to be the key to the success of the former over the latter.CryptoPunks' opening of NFT copyrights is quite restrained, which has aroused strong dissatisfaction from the community. One of the holders, Dom Hofman, dumped all the CryptoPunks in his hands and created a new NFT project, Nounce, which is the first NFT to adopt the open copyright CC0 model, opening all copyrights to the community.
BAYC endows its holders with almost complete commercial copyrights and encourages holders to create secondary works. Each holder can create brands or products based on BAYC and sell them independently.
As BAYC gradually grew, the team also upgraded from an anonymous group of four to Yuga Labs with more than 40 people. Yuga is actually the main villain in The Legend of Zelda: A Triangle Force of Gods 2. It has a special ability to turn itself and others into paintings. According to the founder of BAYC, the name "Yuga" implies the extraordinary creativity of the team.
The turning point that made BAYC really famous came from the celebrity effect. Billionaire Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban is the first celebrity to hold a BAYC. In May 2021, Mark Cuban received BAYC and exhibited it in his Lazy.com NFT gallery. Subsequently, many celebrities poured in, including NBA star Stephen Curry and Youtube big V KSI.
BAYC has started to go to the top, but if there are only BAYC or CryptoPunks, it is not enough to describe the grand occasion of PFP NFT. Most of the NFTs we call blue chips today are among them.
In June 2021, three former members of Dapper Labs, Evan Keast, Jordan Castro, and Scott Martin jointly launched Doodles, of which Evan Keast and Jordan Castro are the core developers of Cryptokitties.
In January 2022, Chiru Labs, led by former tech entrepreneur Zagabond, launched Azuki. Interestingly, Zagabond revealed in May this year that he had created copycat versions of CryptoPunks such as CryptoPhunks, CryptoZunks, etc., and failed, which caused Azuki to fall into a crisis of trust.
In April 2022, the PROOF Collective, a community led by NFT collector and technology entrepreneur Kevin Rose, launched Moonbirds, which also attracted the attention of the NFT community.
The glory of PFP has continued to this day. However, after May today, the once mighty crypto empires Terra and Three Arrows collapsed one after another, the entire crypto market was involved in a liquidity vortex, and NFT also cooled down.
NFT has shown remarkable continuity in its short history. From the enlightenment of literature and art, to technical practice, and finally to the application, all have the same origin. Just as the literary critic Harold Bloom explained in the work "Western Canon" that Western literature originated from Shakespeare, there is also a similar role in NFT history: CryptoPunks. Whether Dapp Labs drafted ERC-721, or later traffic stars such as BAYC and Azuki, they were all influenced by CryptoPunks without exception. So how to understand the value of CryptoPunks mentioned earlier, the answer is self-evident.
Looking Ahead: The Age of Democracy
Countless years are always needed to pass meaninglessly before a truly historic moment--a moment when the stars of mankind shine.
Zweig's words are also suitable for NFT.
We reviewed in detail those pivotal projects, teams and their shining moments in the history of NFT. Such bright moments are rare in any history, and it is they that clearly engrave the skeleton of historical development.
Aside from these main themes and highlight moments, we also skipped a lot of people and things that have made achievements in the NFT field. For example, the once massive blockchain games Axie Infinity and STEPN have incorporated the token economics design of NFT; another example is the NFTFi track that combines DeFi and NFT, and many innovative figures have emerged: NIFTEX, Unicly and Fractional have pioneered NFT fragmentation experiments, and NFTfi, BenDAO, etc. have made great efforts in the field of NFT lending. They converge into the flesh and blood of NFT development.
All these stories sum up the experience and direction for the latecomers in the NFT world.
Finally, back to the question that everyone cares about,Where will the historical river of NFT go?No one can give a definite answer. However, we can learn from the ideas of the sages to peek into one or two.
Vico once proposed three stages of the historical cycle in "New Science", namely the age of theocracy, the age of aristocracy, and the age of democracy. History always rhymes with the same rhyme. From a higher-dimensional historical perspective, the history of NFT development also basically conforms to the characteristics of Vico's historical syllogism. nowReference link:
Reference link:
https://www.notboring.co/p/flow-the-normie-blockchain
IOS
Android