In 2017, Larva Labs released The CryptoPunks-an online project started by two Canadian coders Matt Hall and John Watkinson. The CryptoPunks consists of 10.000 unique collectible characters which can be tracked on the Ethereum blockchain. They called the characters ‘punk’. Each punk is a 24 by 24-pixel avatar that is generated algorithmically, none of them are exactly alike. Larva Labs claimed that The Cyptopunks is an inspiration for the recent digital crypto art movement.
The Cryptopunks by Larva Labs https://www.wired.com/
The punks have various characters, like a blond woman wearing a VR headset, a bearded man, bearded zombies, a woman with green clown-eye makeup and red lipstick, a sporty headband woman, aliens, curly hair woman with an eye patch, and many others. As described on Cryptopunks’ website, most of them are punky-looking guys and girls, but a few of them are mixed, such as apes, zombies, and odd aliens.
The Cryptopunks by Larva Labs https://www.wired.com/
Quoted from artnet.com, in June 2021, a single punk sold at Sotheby’s for $11.75 million. Two months after that, Visa buys a CryptoPunk for $150,000 for its corporate collection. The Hollywood agency UTA agree to represent the CryptoPunks in mainstream content deals. Alexis Ohanian attends the Met Gala wearing a badge of a CryptoPunks that resembles his wife, Serena Williams.
The two creators of CryptoPunks, John Watkinson and Matt Hall never supposed that they would spark a new digital art movement. Both of them are classmates in the computer science major at the University of Toronto. They became friendly with each other since working on the same class project, but they didn’t start hanging out until after graduation. One day they met and shared their interest in creating creative programming. Afterward, they always meet every Tuesday night at Hall’s apartment to code for fun.
They got the idea for CryptoPunks while talking about their childhood in Ontario. Although they weren’t friends yet when they were kids, they shared similar memories: both collected hockey cards, and Magic: The Gathering cards.
After being stuck with their established tech jobs in Toronto, they both move from job to job but remain keeping their habit of coding for fun. When smartphones have emerged, they found a niche developing apps for an early handset. They named their company, Larva Labs.
Up to now, Cryptopunks being one of the NFTs (non-fungible token) arts that results in multimillions. It’s simple and creative design in the NFTs world has influenced many digital arts today.
NFTs Arts’ Future
Michael Maizels–an art historian and multidisciplinary researcher says, at the present moment, the growth of NFT usage is almost inevitable, including NFT in the art world. NFT has changed the digital art market, probably more than the dramatic rise of pop art in the early 1960s. However, as Hannah M. Mayer writes in Forbes, some issues need special attention for the development of NFT, such as the safety of NFT from hackers, scammers, and other impostors; environmental issues regarding the enormous electricity that is consumed during the mining process; and some investments which aim to bolster their larger stakes into cryptocurrencies that will make the system harder to break into for smaller-scale NFT players. Further improvement on these challenges, will bring the NFT and NFT arts to become more mainstream.