01/09/2021 CryptoPunks blasts past $1 billion in lifetime sales as NFT speculation surges

Untitled 8

Hello friends, and welcome back to Week in Review! Last week we dove into Bezos’s Blue Origin suing NASA. This week, I’m writing about the unlikely and triumphant resurgence of the NFT market.

If you’re reading this on the TechCrunch site, you can get this in your inbox from the newsletter page, and follow my tweets @lucasmtny.


The big thing

If I could, I would probably write about NFTs in this newsletter every week. I generally stop myself from actually doing so because I try my best to make this newsletter a snapshot of what’s important to the entire consumer tech sector, not just my niche interests. That said, I’m giving myself free rein this week.

The NFT market is just so hilariously bizarre and the culture surrounding the NFT world is so web-native, I can’t read about it enough. But in the past several days, the market for digital art on the blockchain has completely defied reason.

Back in April, I wrote about a platform called CryptoPunks that — at that point — had banked more than $200 million in lifetime sales since 2017. The little pop art pixel portraits have taken on a life of their own since then. It was pretty much unthinkable back then but in the past 24 hours alone, the platform did $141 million in sales, a new record. By the time you read this, the NFT platform will have likely passed a mind-boggling $1.1 billion in transaction volume according to crypto tracker CryptoSlam. With 10,000 of these digital characters, to buy a single one will cost you at least $450,000 worth of the Ethereum cryptocurrency. (When I sent out this newsletter yesterday that number was $300k)

It’s not just CryptoPunks either; the entire NFT world has exploded in the past week, with several billions of dollars flowing into projects with drawings of monkeys, penguins, dinosaurs and generative art this month alone. After the NFT rally earlier this year — culminating in Beeple’s $69 million Christie’s sale — began to taper off, many wrote off the NFT explosion as a bizarre accident. What triggered this recent frenzy?

Part of it has been a resurgence of cryptocurrency prices toward all-time-highs and a desire among the crypto rich to diversify their stratospheric assets without converting their wealth to fiat currencies. Dumping hundreds of millions of dollars into an NFT project with fewer stakeholders than the currencies that underlie them can make a lot of sense to those whose wealth is already over-indexed in crypto. But a lot of this money is likely FOMO dollars from investors who are dumping real cash into NFTs, bolstered by moves like Visa’s purchase this week of their own CryptoPunk.

I think it’s pretty fair to say that this growth is unsustainable, but how much further along this market growth gets before the pace of investment slows or collapses is completely unknown. There are no signs of slowing down for now, something that can be awfully exciting — and dangerous — for investors looking for something wild to drop their money into… and wild this market truly is.

Here’s some advice from Figma CEO Dylan Field who sold his alien CryptoPunk earlier this year for 4,200 Eth (worth $13.6 million today).


 

 

 

Arts

https://techcrunch.com/2021/08/28/cryptopunks-blast-past-1-billion-in-lifetime-sales-as-nft-market-goes-wild/

Interesting NFTs
Who Is The Creator 2
The idea for this piece was borne out of a tweet of mine that caused a bit of a stir. I’d posted a link to a blog article I’d written a number of months previous titled ‘Who is the Creator’ discussing various types of creative collaborations and why I hire people to work on my animations. It generated a lot of debate around creation and attribution with the community split on whether it’s right or wrong for an artist to hire other professionals to help them realize their art projects. I decided to push the boundaries even further and see how the cryptoart community responded. What if I quite literally had nothing to do with the physical or digital elements of the work other than coming up with the concept and coordinating it? I decided there was one artist in the space who could add huge value to this idea on levels that none other could and so I gathered my courage and contacted the great José Delbo to ask him if he’d be interested in a very unique collaboration. I explained to him that to make this piece ‘work’ he couldn't have any say in what I produced and moreover, he wouldn’t even be allowed to see the animation until it was dropped on MakersPlace. To my surprise, Mr Delbo agreed to my proposal. The animation tells the story of the creative process, which includes my roles as writer, director, and producer working with a team and making edits and changes ‘in real time’. The dialogue between myself and my ‘hired guns’ plays out in front of the viewer. The music written for the piece adds to the nostalgia of the comic book superhero theme but other elements such as the snapping and kicking of the pencil and the signing of my signature at the bottom incorporates further layers and challenges the viewer to ask important questions, such as, is the ‘Art’ the final animation (the creation) or is the ‘Art’ the concept/credit for the creation itself?
https://blog.kotobaza.co
What's up! I'm https://blog.kotobaza.co. I'm a Dogwalker by day, and I like siring for status by night. I would give it all up to be on Oprah. I hope you like kitten around as much as I do!
#79013
By OthersideDeployer
Dreaming at Dusk
More than 15 years ago, Tor onion services were brought to digital life. An ecosystem of onions has been blooming ever since. To commemorate this landmark in the history of privacy, we collaborated with @ixshells to create a one-of-a-kind digital artifact: a generative art piece derived using the private key of the very first onion service, duskgytldkxiuqc6.onion. This auction benefits the Tor Project, the nonprofit protecting your human right to privacy. 1020*1280 / 60fps / .mp4 / RSA1024
The Rare Pearl Moon with Motion
Motion Version Part of my moon series. This super rare pearl moon has just washed ashore on a remote tropical island beach, fining one of these rare Jems is like a total worldly treasure! These moons, only fall to earth once in a few million years! When I found this one I felt the luck that is said to come with this pearl moon.