NFT roundup: digital pets, NFT art, crowdfunding charitable donations, NFT tickets to see NFTs, Degenerate Apes
Buy the rumor, sell the news
Quick programming note: I’m converting this newsletter from a broadly-focused one to one narrowly focused on non-fungible tokens (NFTs). I have become rather obsessed with them as of late, as I think they facilitate the digital fulfillment of mimetic desire. And, as Peter Thiel realized when he made an investment in Facebook, mimetic desire is an extraordinarily powerful human instinct. Further, the world of NFTs (and crypto more broadly) moves extremely quickly. I want to create a curated newsletter of news items and short commentary on them.
The intended audience here is people who are familiar with what NFTs are, but who want a curated source of news about them. This isn’t intended for a technical audience--there will be no auditing of smart contracts, for example. Consider the intended audience to be an informed, non-technical one, interested in keeping up with the rapidly evolving world of NFTs.
That preamble out of the way, let’s look at some interesting news items from the past week.
Gas-Guzzling, Worthless On-Chain Pet Captivates Ethereum Community
Coindesk reports on WAGMIGOTCHI:
Dom Hoffmann, who co-founded the defunct social media video platform Vine, is building a fervent following after the success of a number of Ethereum-based projects and self-described “experiments.” A text-based non-fungible token (NFT) project he released for free last month, Loot (for Adventurers), now accounts for over $200 million in secondary market sales.
While his latest effort appears unlikely to reach the same heights, it does have people paying serious crypto just to interact with it.
On Friday Hofmann announced via tweet the launch of WAGMIGOTCHI, a smart contract without a frontend that allows users to care for a digital pet with various needs. If one of the needs are not met, the pet “dies” and users cannot further interact with the contract.
To understand all of this, we have to understand a couple of things: first, “WAGMI” stands for “we are going [to] make it,” in contrast to “NGMI,” or “[we’re] not going [to] make it.” Second, WAGMIGOTCHI is obviously a play on tamagotchi, the Japanese digital pet toy that was popular in the early 2000s.
What’s interesting here is that if you manage to kill your digital pet, you will no longer be able to access the smart contract tied to that digital pet. Killing a pet means you no longer have access to the pet.
Will this be a success? Is this a mere trifle? It’s easy to be cynical about NFTs and say that they’re mere playthings. But the toy industry is a massive one. If digital, blockchain-based pets are merely the next manifestation in play, surely it behooves us to see what kind of community arises from this.
NFTs Rock the Art World--What’s Next?
Barron’s reports on NFTs and art:
For Refik Anadol, a media artist and visiting research at the University of California at Los Angeles, who works with artificial intelligence and data to create what he calls data paintings--gorgeous, textured, swirls of color and moving images--NFTs are “naturally perfect.” Anadol’s works, displayed through stand-alone computer screens--have been purchased for collections and public art through studios and galleries since at least 2012, and have been exhibited around the world.
Yet NFTs offer “something so fresh,” Anadol says. For an artist who works with data and pixels, and artificial intelligence, the NFT technology was “conceptually connected in my mind--it was a perfect click.”
There are two main issues with NFTs and art that people keep pointing to, as if highlighting these issues constitutes proof that NFTs don’t make sense. First, a lot of art that has been tied to NFTs simply sucks. Second, NFTs are “just JPEGs.”
Neither of these two arguments makes much sense.
First, the entire history of art is one of transgressing boundaries. Georges Seurat, Pablo Picasso, and Jackson Pollock are lauded today, but in their time each of them was viewed as controversial and transgressive. According to established aesthetic practices at the time they did their work, the art that they created was ugly and subversive. Seurat pioneered Pointilism, a kind of pre-cursor to highly-pixelated CryptoPunks. Picasso developed Cubism, in which scenes were rendered in a kind of cube format that appeared far removed to more lifelike recapitulations of human experience. And Jackson Pollock just dripped paint everywhere.
But what most people miss about these three artists is that they’re evidence of survivorship bias. We laud them today but have forgotten about the dozens of their contemporaries whose art no longer captures the imagination. For some ineffable, subjective reason, these artists’ work has survived and that of many of their contemporaries has not.
And that very subjectivity--what makes this painting good and that one bad--makes people uncomfortable. See a highly pixelated CryptoPunk that piques your ire? Then the whole category of NFT art must be a scam.
Second, the “just JPEGs” argument doesn’t hold much water, because NFTs need not only be JPEGs. Tickets, domain names, music, virtual world currency, playing cards--all of this can be represented by NFTs.
Trippy Bunny NFT donates 100% of mint proceeds to suicide prevention foundation
Triple Bunny NFT, a new nonfungible token project built on Solana, has announced that it is donating all of its mint sale proceeds to the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention.
The announcement was made on Suicide Prevention Day, a global awareness event observed globally on Sept. 10. The annual awareness day was first organized in 2003 by the International Association for Suicide Prevention. Today, it has the support of the World Health Organization and the World Federation for Mental Health.
This is interesting for a number of reason, among them being crypto broadly, and NFTs more specifically, is a powerful mechanism to scalably raise a lot of capital very quickly. While this feature has been used for scams in the form of many ICOs, it can also be used for good purposes. Tyler Cowen has written before about how the billions of dollars controlled by crypto advocates will transform philanthropy in the coming decades.
You can now buy a $475 NFT ticket to see Beeple’s $69 million NFT at an IRL party
A ticket is being sold that will allow its buyers access to an in-person party for the first authorized public viewing of Beeple’s The First 5000 Days:
The meaningful twist for this party is that it will feature the first authorized public projection of The First 5000 Days. That means the image’s owner, Metapurse, the crypto fund run by the pseudonymous investor Metakovan, is taking its one-and-only authentic copy of the image (or at the very least, its nominally exclusive display rights) and using them to put this piece of artwork up for a night as though it were being temporarily shown in a gallery.
We can either be cynical here, or we can try to understand what is happening and what it portends.
A common criticism of NFTs (and much of technology) is that it replaces in-person interaction with digital engagement. And, to some extent that’s probably true: human interaction is a vital need for all but the most solitary of hermits. And technology can create a false sense of connection with others.
So, here we have an attempt to solve that problem: buy a ticket to an in-person party. It just so happens that the ticket is instantiated as an NFT on a blockchain. In any event, a lot of people seem to think tickets will exist as NFTs; here’s one company betting on that future.
Solana nets its first million-dollar NFT sale and it’s for a Degenerate Ape
Blockchain advisory firm Moonrock Capital purchased one of the Degenerate Ape Academy NFTs for 5,980 SOL on Saturday, worth $1.1 million.
Moonrock bought Degen Ape #7225, a scarred zombie version of an ape with a halo, a gold tooth and a brain in its mouth. The ape is the 13th rarest in the collection, according to HowRare.is. The firm also picked up the 18th rarest SolPunk — a Solana-themed version of CryptoPunks — for 1,388 SOL ($260,000).
Solana is a relatively new blockchain, and is much more scalable than either bitcoin or ethereum. Venture capitalist Packy McCormick has a long write-up about Solana here.
Here’s a handy comparison of its scalability as compared to other networks:
