This Rare Cryptopunk Was Given Away For Free
A rare Cryptopunk NFT was given away for free with support from Felt Zine and the decentralized NFT community. Explore this blog by Dev Moore of Felt Zine and read more about non-fungible tokens (NFTs) here.
What’s better than buying a Cryptopunk? The opportunity to share it with your friends. Curators of culture are quickly becoming a key component to the reorganization and value of digital culture in the era of Web 3.0.
FELT Zine, an experimental internet art collective (creators of the world’s 1st digital NFT Zine), and Anon Collector EL recently gave away nearly 25% of a Cryptopunk to more than 400 supporters in the form of a free airdrop to digital internet communities that support their work.
Yes, splitting artworks is a thing now.
“We believe that shared ownership offers people a way to feel connected to one another”, says Anon collector El. “Because we should all be able to be a part of a movement at any price point. Because collective goal setting and achievement should be rewarded with equity. Because you risked your ETH to bid, and you should be rewarded for that.”
The power of digital collective bidding inspired Felt Zine to pioneer a brand new cultural distribution model for curatorial impact by rewarding supporters with a risk-free Cryptopunk for initially supporting two other previously crowdfunded sales of Cryptopunks, fractionally owned by an internet community.
Cryptopunks, a collection of 10,000 uniquely generated characters on the Ethereum blockchain, are also quickly becoming some of the highest valued digital collections of all-time. Your average crypto trader/enthusiast doesn’t have a chance to obtain these rare works of art emerging from the depths of underground digital art culture. What’s the answer?
The plan for Cryptopunk #8726, nicknamed $LUPE, was simple. Fractionalize and immediately airdrop 22.5% of the supply back to the GratefulDAO community.
“Jadakiss said it best, ‘I’d rather be, broke together than rich alone.’ Now we can have both.” — Mark Sabb, CEO & Founder of Felt Zine
Fractionalized art, or the concept of collectively owning shares of a single digital NFT artwork, is on the rise and presenting a fresh new lane for the average crypto art collector that isn’t immensely rich, a whale billionaire, or traditionally equivalent to the collective buying power of a powerhouse collector akin to Peggy Guggenheim or Charles Saatchi.
Crowdfunded CryptoPunks are possible using PartyBid, an Ethereum-based protocol that lowers the barrier to this kind of coordination by allowing the everyday individual to own a fraction of an NFT with a party, or group of friends, while later exchanging any tokens for ETH upon a future sale. PartyBid is mainly used for collective bidding on NFTs. Anyone can create or join a PartyBid, trustlessly pool funds with friends, place bids on auctions and have fun.
“With PartyBid, social influence can be leveraged to outperform raw capital”, says Anna Scarroll, protocol engineer at PartyDAO. “Together, a million minnows can eat a whale.”
PartyBid limits contributions to ETH. Anyone who sends ETH to a party which wins a bid will receive ERC-20 tokens representing the NFT and proportional to their contribution. If users’ ETH isn’t spent on the winning bid, or the party doesn’t win the auction, users can reclaim their contribution, minus gas fees.
After the sales of $Tiara and $Halle, anon collector El obtained an entirely different cryptopunk ($Lupe), applied a reserve price of 65 ETH, and Tiara/Halle supporters received a proportional share of the 22.5% in the form of an airdrop. Specifically, any address that executed a Contribute transaction to the two previously crowdfunded Cryptopunks named Tiara and Halle ended up receiving these new Lupe tokens. Tiara? Halle? Lupe?? Parties will often nickname their illustrious punks after a successful auction with culturally significant names such as $Tiara, $Halle, or even $Lupe. The names primarily derived from a viral conversation from mixed media crypto artist Sirsu in which they wanted to obtain cryptopunks that have been susceptible to the “historically low price floor for punks with Black and Brown features.” The thought process behind this concept is ultimately to create greater access to cultural artifacts of high value and present new opportunities for wealth building, while reclaiming (at least temporarily) a culture’s digital and social identities.
Fractionalized token model distribution is currently one of the strongest drivers of change in the crypto space and we’re quickly witnessing the rise of shared value and “implied value” on cultural artifacts, rare digital artworks, and crypto collectible sets. As Qiao Wang said, “Obsession with JPEGs is an easy way to miss the forest for the trees. The forest here is the tokenization of communities.”
What happened next?
As expected, CryptoPunk sales surged in the following weeks following news that financial conglomerate Visa purchased an in-demand Cryptopunk NFT. The trading volume of Punks reached a daily high of $70 million while the floor price for one punk reached more than 90 ETH (at the time around $300,000 USD).
As the punk sat on Fractional.art, a decentralized protocol where NFT owners can mint tokenized fractional ownership of their NFTs, the last 20 minutes of the auction brought nearly 15 bids with the final winning bid reaching well beyond the current floor price of 150 ETH.
Immediately following the auction, tons of users were then able to swap their LUPE tokens (normal ERC20 tokens shared amongst a group of people in which each token presents governance over the NFT) for ETH. The potential to freely navigate between various art collections, art communities, all while navigating each space in a collaborative effort that serves each party is a new form of digital movement that presents anyone in the world with the potential to share cultural value with a global community.
The intersection of fractionalized art and accessible curatorial digital exploration combines when the global underground art scenes of the world are finally able to decide, dictate, and ultimately select the cultural value of their time without the need for a VC-funded organization, outdated auction house, or the backing of a billion-dollar conglomerate deciding which aspects of culture are valuable.
Alongside the rise of the fractionalized NFT, “NFTs can be:
- fractionalized;
- combined into token sets;
- used as collateral for lending and stablecoin protocols; and
- dynamic and interactive, incorporating outside data feeds.” — FLAMINGO DAO
In other words, the future of digital curators and collectors is shining bright.
Written by Dev Moore
Disclaimer: Views of guest bloggers are their own and may differ from the views of MetaMask or ConsenSys.
