(6) Watkinson and Hall
In the spring of 2017, Rooney was still working on his thriving Rare Pepe website. What he didn’t know was that just across the network cable, there was another geek looking at him. This guy is Hall.
Hall and his good friend Watkinson both graduated from the University of Toronto’s Department of Computer Science. In 1999, they came to New York and became New York drifters. They both like to use computers to do some stupid things, and they have similar smells, so they formed a silly team — Larva Lab.
Hall on the left, Right is Watkinson
In recent years, the two have been honing a strange skill: using computer algorithms to generate avatars. For example, in 2011, they released an app that can generate an avatar that looks like an Android robot for you. Like below.
Hall on the left, Right is Watkinson
In 2017, their ability to generate avatars was already perfect. They chose a punk theme and made an “avatar generation engine”. It happened that when the pair of friends were chatting, they talked about Watkinson’s little niece collecting dolls like crazy, and they remembered that they also collected baseball cards and Magic: The Gathering when they were children.
It seems that collectivism is a common trait of all human beings across time and space. . .
“Then, is there a possibility that we will produce some avatars in limited quantities, such as 10K, 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, not for other things. So when Rooney was designing, he could only add a “Pepe Wallet” to the Bitcoin ledger. However, the rounding of “Pepe Wallet” is controlled by Rooney, and it is not very open and transparent. 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 was just starting to be popular at the time.
There are many differences between the Ethereum chain and the Bitcoin chain, and here we will only pick the most important ones. This is what supports “non-fungible tokens”.
You can think of bitcoin as a dollar bill, dollar is dollar, my dollar and your dollar are dollar, if I exchange a 100 dollar for your 100 dollar, it is the same as no exchange . That is, Bitcoin is homogeneous.
But on Ethereum, I can create a weird dollar, like a different picture on each hundred-dollar bill, so that the dollar bills everyone gets are not homogenous. For example, my 100-dollar bill has a yellow-skinned electric mouse, and your 100 dollar bill has a garlic head. If I’m going to exchange $100 for Pikachu for $100 for your Duck. You have to think about it. You may prefer garlic head, but you don’t like electricity mice, so you may not be willing to change. This “non-fungible token”, referred to as NFT (Non-Fungible Token).
In this way, the entire technical process ran through the heads of the two technical nerds of the Larvae Lab.
1. They first used the “Generation Engine” to generate 1w exquisite pixel wind heads, named Cryptopunks.
2. Then perform a password operation on each avatar to condense it into a 64-bit password.
3. Write each password as an NFT and write it into the Ethereum ledger.
They decided to give these NFT avatars to everyone for free. You read that right, it’s free. You’ve been busy on it for a long time, give it to everyone for free, what are the benefits of them? In fact, they hid a hand: only 9,000 NFTs were sent out, and 1,000 were left in their own hands.
On June 9, 2017, Larvae Labs tweeted the good news, and sat in the house waiting for the crowd to flock.
However, five days have passed, only a few sporadic people have come to pick up a few hundred. . .
Cryptopunks are different from Pepe. Although they each have a rebellious face, no one knows them when they take them out. I take out something that no one knows about, how can I pretend? Everyone thinks so.
Although it is free, but you have to pay an Ethereum fee equivalent to 11 cents for one time. No one’s money comes from the wind. . . .
Only those who really think these avatars look good and are willing to spend a few cents will apply for these suspicious punk avatars. Of course, even if they choose, they will choose the rarest avatars first, such as “Alien” (9) and “Ape” (24), which are all picked up in the first five days.
Among these onlookers, there was a figure who stopped for a long time, and he was Jason Abruzzi.
Jason Abruzzi was a reporter for the tech site Mashable at the time. He interviewed Hall and wrote an article analyzing Cryptopunks in detail, titled
“This Ethereum-based project may change our perception of digital art.”
When people’s lives move online, status symbols will inevitably follow, he said.
This article was published on June 19. Within 24 hours, all remaining avatars were swept away. There is a guy who grabbed 758 pieces by himself.
(7) Anne Blasegder
In fact, more people haven’t noticed Cryptopunks in 2017, but many people have heard of “Cryptokitties”.
CryptoKitties is a beta version launched on October 19, 2017, which is half a year later than Cypherpunk, but CryptoKitties are obviously more out of the circle than Cypherpunk.
This is because Dapper Lab, the creative team of CryptoKitties, has added many game elements. For example, two cats can mix genes to give birth to kittens.
But this nature is both an advantage and a disadvantage. Once “strategy” is emphasized, CryptoKitties is classified as a game, not a collectible. Games end up in the gaming circle, and collectibles end up in the collectible circle.
If you look back at history, there was a bull market in cryptocurrencies at the time. At the beginning of 2018, Bitcoin had just hit its then all-time high, and in New York, an “epic meeting” happened at the same time. At the Rare Digital Arts Festival on January 13th, Hall, founder of Cryptopunks, Mark, product curator of Cryptokitties, and Rooney, founder of Rare Pepe Wallet, came together. This is a meeting of NFT gods. At that event, a rare Pepe was auctioned for $39,000.
Homer is a character in the cartoon The Simpsons. If you say it, you may not believe it. This picture is so valuable because it is a “wrong version”, and minute is written as mintue. (WTF…)
At this party, a woman sat downstairs, holding her camera in her hand.
This is no ordinary lady, she is Anne Brassegder, a photography expert at Christie’s.
After listening to this group of people’s speeches, she couldn’t wait to make an appointment with two technical nerds in the Larvae Lab to talk about life.
As a photographer, Annie has been plagued by a bug: A photographer’s work is only valuable after death. Because while you are alive, new works will be made at any time. The more works you have, the less valuable they are. Collectors are only willing to pay a high price for your work during your lifetime if you are sure that you are dead. But at this point, you can no longer enjoy the money. . .
Seeing Cryptopunks, Annie had an epiphany. It turns out that the scarcity of an artwork can be guaranteed by cryptography through the technical means of blockchain: Once the artwork is on the chain, it is protected by huge computing power. Even the two tech nerds in the Larvae Lab couldn’t change a single pixel. She quickly pointed the way: if your art is to reach the wider public, it 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 was to try my luck at a gallery in Zurich.
In order to adapt to the tastes of the local tyrants, they decided to “downgrade” the way of displaying digital art to traditional art — selected 12 avatars and printed them out, mounted them magnificently, and then printed the password of the corresponding Ethereum wallet on a piece of paper. Top tucked into Confession, sealed with medieval-style wax.
A few days before the launch, the gallery owner invited Watkinson and some local tycoons in the financial world to have a meal, and after a meal, the 12 NFTs were almost sold out.
Watkinson hurried back to New York and printed 12 new NFTs, which were also sold out.
Everything looks bright.
However, the digital art dream only blessed by local tyrants outside the circle is a tulip bubble after all.
This group of people is in full swing, and in the future, they will not realize that the cold winter of cryptocurrencies has come unexpectedly. The prices of all NFTs plummeted, and even Cryptopunks went unnoticed.
Like a wildfire swept away, there are only ashes in the eyes. Just before this fire, though, a little thing happened somewhere in America.
🚀Read the next chapter
This article is translated from《NFT精神史：罐头、青蛙和平凡人的15分钟英雄梦想》written by a Chinese tech journalist Max Shi ZHONG and published on Qianhei.net. I translated it to pay my tribute to the author, it’s a legendary piece about NFT, even could be recorded in a history book. It is quite long, but 10000% worth reading it.