I never really gave much thought to Banksy.

Until I did.

Until he arrived, vicariously and unannounced, at a party in December 2021, in the form of a bloke collectively know as bansky_dave.

“Oi bansky_dave, tell him why you’re called bansky_dave”.

So bansky_dave told me.

A story of how he became the owner of one of the best-preserved pieces of Banksy street art on the planet.

Why he decided to keep it on the wall of his house, where Banksy had left it a few months earlier, forgoing the fortune he was being offered to cut it out sell it at auction.

A decision that left him with a heavy responsibility and a sense of quiet confusion.

He finished his story and looked at me, uttering the words that would define the passage of my life to this day.

“WTF Would You Do?”

So I told him.

A magical story of Ethereum, NFT’s and the Metaverse.

Of Digital Archiving, Phygitals and Worldbuilding.

Of onchain art communities, collective governance and a growing blockchain-enabled internet culture that was spreading across the world, bringing with it unbridled hope and opportunity (it was 2021).

And of a plan I had been hatching in my over-crowded head for the previous six months.

Two hours later we shook hands.

We had a plan.

We’d move The Banksy House to blockchain, opening the front door to the crypto glitterati.

We’d swim with whales and bounce seamlessly between the real world, the metaverse and blockchain.

Safe in The Knowledge That We Were Doing The Right Thing.

The Banksy would stay on the wall.

Rewind to the Summer of ‘21, four months earlier.

As the good citizens of the UK were released from their second COVID lockdown, Banksy dropped 10 pieces around the East coast of England.

And one of them was on bansky_dave’s house, a battered Victorian dwelling, opposite a disused gasworks, in the forgotten corner of a historic old seaside town, on the furthest tip of The East of England, called Great Yarmouth.

At the time no one was sure it was Banksy, until, a week later, he dropped a video that confirmed we was indeed the artist.

All hell broke loose.

The brick-cutter-wielding art establishment, vandals and the council descended.

The Banksy was encased in a frame.

Pieces were cut from walls.

Hype. Destruction. Greed.

Millions swapped hands.

Same Old Story.

At the time, the onchain digital art market was already wobbling under the weight of several questionable Banksy-related projects, that had sucked millions out of collector’s pockets, and by the time I stood outside The Banksy House in the Spring of ‘22, you could feel the tide changing.

Which brings us back to banksy_daves's original question.

WTF Would You Do?

Right away it became clear that this was not going to be as simple as the two drunk Londoners, who shook hands on that fateful day, hoped it would be.

The legal complexities of an onchain community governing UK real estate alone meant we would need to fork out hundreds of thousand of pounds to teams of lawyers who clearly knew less about the complexities of crypto law in the UK than I did.

And then Terra Luna happened and FTX collapsed and the wave of market optimism and opportunity unravelled.

So we changed the plan, a few times, as the onchain art market spasmed it’s way towards zero.

Which in retrospect was the best thing that could ever have happened to the project.

With the carnival of 2021 in the rear view mirror, and The Bear at the steering wheel, we kept driving towards an unknown destination.

A vision quest.

And we discovered this vision in an old Banksy quote, a proto-manifesto, encoded into the art that Banksy left on the side of bansky_dave’s House.

In an instant it was clear WTF We Would Do.

To be continued…

FInd out more at - https:// www.thebanksy.house