Anatomy of the Cryptopunks. - 0x9c65

The CryptoPunks are a collection of 24x24 pixel art images stored on the Ethereum blockchain as NFTs. There are 10,000 unique Cryptopunks containing a mix of types and attributes.

On first seeing the punks, I was drawn to the color palette of the Cryptopunks. It seemed to be carefully aligned to the features and traits and reflected the aesthetics of the time, the halycon, pre-covid days of inquiry and optimism.

As a computer scientist, I sought to develop a deeper understanding of how colors were used in Cryptopunks through code. I started writing Python to deconstruct the punks by the colors they used. This notebook presents some of my work.

Deconstructing the Cryptopunks

I’ve written a small library that provides utilities for working with the Cryptopunks images. It is open source and available on github. In the code block below, I load up a punk and display it in the notebook.

img = cp.get_punk(7252)
plt.imshow(img)

Displaying the Cryptopunks Color Pallette

Next, we can use the utils to plot each of the 222 unique colors in a matrix ordered by the rarity of each color, that is, the color swatch on the upper left will be the most rare color and that on the lower right will be the least.

(x,y) = (15,15)
fig = plt.figure(figsize=(x,y))
i=1
for k in color_imgs.keys():
    fig.add_subplot(x, y, i)
    plt.imshow(color_imgs[k])
    plt.axis('off')
    i=i+1

Cryptopunks Color Palette

The ColorPunx

Each of the 222 unique colors are used by a set of Cryptopunks. We can use the utility to examine the punks used by each color. First, let’s pick a somewhat rare color. Colorpunk #dcd8a4 is rare and is only used by punks 3747, 6184, 7606 and 9400.

k='#dcd8a4'
cp.show_punks(k)

#dcd8a4 is only used by four punks

Colorpunk #26314a is not so rare and is used by every punk that has the ‘Police Hat’ trait.

100% correlation between use of #26314a and Police Hat trait

Summary

I’ve eternalized my work in understanding the use of colors by Cryptopunks on the Ethereum blockchain. The Colorpunx NFT collection stores a 24*24 monochromatic digital painting signifying the unique color used and the meta data maps the color to the punks in which it is used.

https://opensea.io/collection/colorpunx

Disclaimer: This work is not associated with Larvalabs. It is meant to be in the lineage of quantitative art history and standalone as a study of these very important works.