It is intended to solve the problem of TRUST.

Money is about trust. Many people on our planet enjoy trust in their money and financial systems. We trust our central banks not to devalue our currency overnight. We trust our governments to avoid hyperinflation so our money retains purchasing power. We trust banks to secure our money and not loan it recklessly, and private companies to help us safely use our money for commerce and other financial services. We pay for the privilege of this trust in taxes and fees to financial services companies (a multi-trillion dollar industry). This foundation of trust has been an essential bedrock of our economic progress over the last few centuries.

Yet, many do not enjoy this level of trust in their financial systems, if they can access them at all. This is true even in some of the most prosperous and populous countries. Recent events, especially the Great Financial Crisis of ‘08–09, eroded trust even in the US. Global monetary stimulus in response to COVID has many questioning again whether their trust is well‐placed.

It is unlikely a coincidence that the Bitcoin whitepaper which ignited the crypto industry was published October 31, 2008, just six weeks after Lehman Brothers collapsed in the Great Financial Crisis. Titled “Bitcoin: A Peer‐to‐Peer Electronic Cash System,” it described the solution to a holy‐grail problem in cryptography: using a distributed network to validate the authenticity of a digital file. This introduced a new phenomenon on the Internet: verifiable scarcity, and enabled the direct transfer of value online without intermediaries. To exchange Bitcoin, all we need is internet access and trust in Bitcoin’s open source code. Just as billions now trust the Internet for the global free exchange of information, 220M and counting now trust a blockchain for the global free exchange of value.

A mis-step or an ineluctable step to get enough attention. Time will tell

While it seems Bitcoin was intended to solve a payments problem, inventions rarely go as their inventors planned. As demand for Bitcoin grew, its price and transaction fees increased, making it more useful for many as an investment vehicle (or store of value) than a payment mechanism (medium of exchange). Most interestingly, new inventors built on the concepts of Bitcoin in new ways. Ethereum’s contribution was using a distributed ledger not just for currency but for computation.

I am wondering if “Better money” or “Better internet” is tenable? The complexity of human and society validate my argument.

There are patterns in history

While these are the goals, we still have a long way to go. Some point to crypto’s shortcomings as evidence the entire effort is a scam, but this misses the point.

Historically, when technological innovation has led to financial innovation ahead of regulation, we have seen world-changing innovation, then mania, fraud, a crash, a regulatory framework and then a slow build toward lasting value (see: early stock markets of 1600s Amsterdam). Crypto appears no different. There are tokens of dubious quality. There are pockets of over-hype. But as with all other technology revolutions, there will also be enduring companies created in this time.

The big transformation is coming

What is the middle ground between traditional fiat and crypto?

Digital currencies are fundamentally useful to 220M people and counting, whether as capped‐supply inflation hedges, censorship‐resistant stores of value, borderless mediums of exchange and/or investment vehicles. This has created a new asset class.

Example:

Digital renminbi (Chinese: 数字人民币; also abbreviated as digital RMB and e-CNY),[1] or Digital Currency Electronic Payment (DCEP), is a central bank digital currency issued by China’s central bank, the People’s Bank of China. It is the first digital currency to be issued by a major economy, undergoing public testing as of April 2021. The digital RMB is legal tender and has equivalent value with other forms of renminbi, also known as the Chinese yuan (CNY), such as bills and coins.

**The digital yuan is designed to move instantaneously in both domestic and international transactions. It aims to be cheaper and faster than existing financial transactions.The technology enables transactions to take place between two offline devices; **and certainly prevent money laundry because e-CNY’s traceability.

The digital renminbi is seen by some commentators as a form of Chinese government surveillance and control over users and their financial transactions.

Build the infrastructures and tools, keep iterating them, to enable mass adoption, otherwise crypto goes nowhere, despite how much potential it holds to improve the operation efficiency of the world

This new asset class is creating a market for financial services, both centralized and decentralized (DeFi). As with any asset class, owners want to be able to buy, hold, sell, trade, lend, hedge, swap, fractionalize, insure and more. With crypto, they also want to do it freely across borders and time zones, 24/7. This is likely to be expansionary to current financial systems, creating more consumer choice.

The rise of crypto necessitates a new crypto stack. From core infrastructure to developer tools, some of the traditional stack will translate and some won’t. Custody, nodes, fiat<>crypto on/off ramps and both on and off-chain data are just a few areas of the emerging crypto stack. In this era, value may accrue to new layers. In traditional software, more value accrued to the application layer (Google ~$2T market cap, TCP/IP/SMTP arguably $0) whereas in crypto, core protocols are monetizable via tokens (BTC+ETH ~$2T market cap vs. crypto apps ~$200B so far).

Mental Model for Crypto — the fundamental principle of an exchange ecosystem

Where are we now?

Phase 1: Isolation. Crypto as an island, disconnected from the non‐crypto world. Core protocols are built out (think TCP/IP for internet, and layer 1 blockchains like Bitcoin, Ethereum and Solana for crypto). Protocols are inextricable from their native coins. A variety of coins creates demand for exchanges and additional financial services. Most incumbents lack the tech and regulatory appetite to serve this demand, allowing crypto‐natives to fill the void. Crypto‐native analogs of every financial service arise roughly in their historical order: currency, foreign exchange, lending, derivatives, insurance, options, ETFs, etc.

Phase 2: Connectivity. Bridging the crypto and non‐crypto worlds. The non‐crypto world sees value in crypto and builds/buys the infrastructure to access it. Custody/wallets, crypto<>fiat on/off ramps, data feeds, blockchain‐specific infrastructure and developer tools grow exponentially in this time. New use cases from NFT art communities to gaming to web3 social networks draw in new users. As the mass-market starts to engage in crypto, competitive pressure dramatically simplifies the user experience and lowers barriers to access. The number of users and developers with access to crypto increases by 10–100x over this next decade. We’d argue we are just starting Phase 2.

Phase 3: Maturation. Fusion of crypto and non‐crypto worlds so they are no longer distinct. Like mobile, once crypto access is sufficiently ubiquitous, applications will have the foundation they need to reach their full potential. They will cross the chasm from crypto‐niche to commonplace. To be clear, founders are already building across consumer finance, DeFi, NFT, web3 and more, but only a few hundred million people and institutions have the tools to access them. As access spreads, applications will see an order of magnitude increase in user engagement.

Are we now building the FUTURE?

Crypto is still in its early innings. Though it is rife with volatility, it’s also ripe with innovation. To dismiss crypto as purely speculative is to ignore the history that every financial innovation has had its misusers and to miss the tremendous potential crypto holds to create better financial systems.

To dismiss crypto as too slow, expensive, or confusing to ever be useful is like dismissing the Internet in its dial-up phase. While criticisms of crypto’s user experience, cost, speed or environmental impact are all valid, these aren’t doomsday signals for the movement — they are opportunities to build.

The bottom line is: billions of people want a better financial system and a better internet and a new generation of developers is motivated to build that for them.

Original: https://www.sequoiacap.com/article/ask-not-wen-moon-ask-why-moon/

From my understanding, NFT will be more for “creators”. More specifically, it will be more for “value creators” who can create “value” and have a certain amount of existing followers and a certain level of influence in this society. Creators could be artists, content creators, inventors, community builders, curators, and could also be business owners.

Practically speaking, an NFT (non-fungible token) is some mix of a deed, a certificate of authenticity, and a membership card. It can confer “ownership” of digital art (typically, ownership is recorded on the blockchain and a link points to an image somewhere) or rights of access to a group. NFTs can operate on a smaller scale than coins because they create their own ecosystems and require nothing more than a community of people who find value in the project. For example, baseball cards are valuable only to certain collectors, but that group *really *believes in their value.

NFT is a solution to the problems almost all creators have: 1) copycats, 2) content stealing, 3) high dependency on ads revenue sharing and brand sponsorship.

**An anecdote: **A few years ago, I worked with a visual artist and her team to produce a short film for a company, it took us nearly 6 months to film it, and many days and nights to produce it. We were super excited to launch it. After about a month post-launch, a TV show stole about 10 seconds of scenes from the film for one of their show trailers. We were shocked and full of indignation. We tried to contact the show to ask them to remove that trailer, we tried to use social media to backlash against them. But, the counter-party remained silent and neglected our request, as we were just a small startup with little power.

It is undeniable that NFT right now is not friendly to every creator. More tools and infrastructures are to be built as on-ramps for creators’ adoption, and truly produce more values of “creator economy”.

Here is why…

NFT is a solution to a problem, that’s the strongest reason for its existence and potential to further grow.

NFTs now are symbolic building blocks for the future internet. NFTs are digital assets with smart contracts in various forms. However, NFT is far beyond its current forms.

Current NFTs include:

• visual art/content in the form of pictures (e.g. PFP), GIFs, videos, audio, and texts.

• utilities in the form of tickets, memberships, tradable in-game assets, etc.

🪐WHY does it exist with huge VALUE?

🌟Because it is a SOLUTION to a problem that long existed when the internet was born.

It is magnified and exaggerated through the form of visual art at the very beginning of the NFT era. Such virality attracts enough attention from the world and enables larger adoption and application, so as to unleash its infinite value as a solution.

Analogically speaking, it’s like NFTs are having this HYPE PERFORMANCE ART on the internet now in collaboration with humans to tell the world, “Hey, here I am!”

— —

NFTs are not scams, NFTs are not fad.

In fact, NFTs are the building blocks of the internet of the future.

But, in order for us to see this future clearly, we first need to go back into the past.

The year is 1992, the World Wide Web(www) is only 3 years old. This is what it looks like 👇

For the first time in human history, we share a global commons, where, irrespective of where we are in the physical world, we can convene and share information freely.

Most people at that time couldn’t see what it meant to be connected by a network of computers. In fact, many people thought the internet itself was a scam or fad. (🌍 History is strikingly similar)

But a few early internet pioneers saw the potential in this burgeoning technology. One of those internet pioneers, John Perry Barlow, saw both the opportunities and pitfalls inherent in our new digital world.

And of early cyberspace, he posed a prescient riddle, all the way back in 1992 that I will paraphrase for you:

“If our property can be infinitely produced, and instantaneously distributed across the planet without cost, how are we going to protect it? how are going to get paid for the work we do with our minds? and if we can’t get paid, what would assure the continued creation and distribution of such work?”

A lot has changed since 1992. The internet itself is an alive and evolving technology. And as predicted by its earliest champions, the internet has increasingly become our default context. Today, one’s job, wealth, relationship, and sense of self, are all often more mediated through our digital contexts than our physical ones.** 🚨Yet, Barlow’s riddle has remained vexingly unsolved. Concepts like property and ownership, ideas that have been with us for centuries in the physical world have evaded us in our digital spaces. We’ve tried to foist copyright, DMCA, DRM, and watermarks onto the internet to protect our ideas and restrain their distribution. None of these approaches has worked. WHY? ❓**

Because, as Steward Brand, another early internet pioneer, famously coined: “ Information wants to be free. It wants to travel effortlessly without hindrance, without encumbrance. This is what allowed the internet to succeed in the first place.”

Since 1992, we’ve uploaded trillions of photos and videos and even cat memes to the internet for free. And what business model has allowed this information for free? Advertising.

Advertising is the internet’s default business model. Not because that’s what we want, but because it's what pays the bills. Right now, the few large corporations that run the most effective ad networks control MOST OF THE VALUE on today’s internet, NOT the people creating its content.

On today’s internet, we don’t get paid for the work we do with our minds.

And what’s more, the content we upload to these services is trapped there. These services not only make money from our content, but they also control it.

Until NFTs.

NFTs are a technological breakthrough. They offer us the opportunity to break away from that broken system.

So you’re asking yourself: what is an NFT?

It is a certificate of ownership registered on the blockchain for everyone to see. It is not dissimilar to the deed you get when you buy a house in the physical world. But instead of a house, an NFT denotes ownership of a file on the internet.

And unlike copyright or watermarks, which are ancient technologies rooted in bygone eras,

NFTs are internet native. They are born of the internet for the internet.

And NFTs don’t simply port our existing model of ownership from the physical world, they improve it. In the physical world, ownership actually fences people out. It precludes others from enjoying what you own. I wouldn’t expect to feel welcome in your home uninvited. Digital space, however, is expansive. It’s home to the infinite, the exponential, the instantaneous, NFTs offer a system of ownership that reflects this expansiveness.

With NFTs, my owning something doesn’t preclude others from enjoying it. In fact, it’s the opposite. **The more an NFT is seen, appreciated and understood. The more possibilities it has to increase in value. **(NFT success flywheel)

Let’s take an example:

Nyan Cat, a wildly popular instantly recognizable cat meme. Since it was uploaded to the internet a decade ago. It has accumulated hundreds of millions of views. And precisely because of that virality when it was auctioned as an NFT, it sold for 300ETH or the equivalent of over 600,000 dollars. And the person who now owns this NFT, they are not preventing anyone from liking, resharing or remixing Nyan cat. Nyan Cat is free to travel the internet as it always has, what’s different now is that as Nyan Cat’s popularity continues to grow, so can the value of the NFT. Because of NFTs, Chris Torres, Nyan Cat’s creator, has received direct compensation for his creation. But what’s more is he’ll continue to receive compensation, every single time the NFT is resold. This is because of the royalty system baked into the smart contracts that govern NFTs.

NFTs are software, they can be programmed. And with something as complicated as royalties, which require enormous amounts of legal and manual labor to implement, in our analog world, we can now express them in a few simple lines of code.

This represents a breakthrough innovation.

For any industry predicted on royalty payments, such as publishing or music, and just as blogs and MP3s re-architected, these industries in decades past, NFTs will catalyze their next evolution.

The internet dissolved our geographical boundaries. NFTs dissolve economic boundaries.

Yathreda, an Ethiopian artist collective, created these beautiful portraits of heroines from Ethiopia’s past. They sold them as NFTs. And in one weekend, they made 13 ETH or the equivalent of over 40,000 dollars. And they were paid out instantly. No customs, no foreign exchange, no international wire transfers. An artist collective based out of Addis Ababa, has the same economic tools at their disposal now as an artist in LA, NYC or London.

And while the NFTs for Nyan Cat and Yatreda were created and sold on the same platform. They are not confined there — remember: information wants to be free.

Unlike the current internet where information is made available through proprietary apps and platforms, NFTs are portable. Instead of living on a company’s private servers, they live on decentralized infrastructure that is peer to peer, open and transparent. But understanding this complex, decentralized infrastructure, is not a prerequisite to understand what NFTs unlock for the human experience.

Once digital value and ownership are no longer the sole domain of a few corporations, radical new responsibilities emerge.

In other words, 30 years later, NFTs finally solved John Perry Barlow’s riddle.

And this isn’t science fiction. The technology already works. NFTs are already being used by the next generation of the internet pioneers. And in the coming decades, NFTs will reshape the internet as we know it with property rights baked into its code.

So what does the internet of the future look like with NFTs as its building blocks?

An internet where economic control rests in the hands of creators, not platforms. An internet where our ideas and creativity can be directly supported.

An internet where information can be free, but where we get paid for the work we do with our minds.

Highly recommend this TED TALK: Kayvon Tehranian: How NFTs are building the internet of the future | TED

“Why did you give up your music career?”

“Because I need to make a living, I cannot make money by making music.”

“Music shouldn’t be your career, it should be just a hobby.”

I’ve heard this conversation many times. It seems a norm for lots of talented musicians struggling with financials. It’s not their fault. According to statistics, as of the end of 2020, the total global music industry revenue reached 21.6 billion USD, and since 2019, the industry has grown at a compound annual growth rate of 7.4% for the sixth consecutive year. Despite the industry’s seemingly successful track record, it still faces a bunch of problems. It is difficult for many music artists to get traffic in this industry, talented musicians are not paid fairly, and more importantly, there is a scarcity of quality content. It is not an efficient and fast-moving wheel if the creators are not motivated. Only if all the stakeholders of the whole music value chain are motivated, the wheel could run at its full speed.

From this article on Insider How much does Spotify pay per stream? What you’ll earn per song, and how to get paid more for your music, we can see how unfair artists are paid for their music. “Yet, Insider found that Spotify has paid artists as little as $.0033 per stream, with other sites reporting upwards of $.0054. Translated, you’ll need about 250 streams to earn a dollar…This hasn’t always been the case — Spotify’s payout rates have changed over time. In 2014, they paid $.00521 on average, but two years later, the average rate dropped to $.00437. By 2017, the average pay rate had been reduced again to around $.00397, according to artist-rights site The Trichordist.”

Artists could have more opportunities to earn a living by making music if there is a technology that can empower them. Music NFT is a certificate of ownership of unique musical works. The owner has the exclusive right to determine how the composition is used. The term “NFT” applies to all kinds of fungible (multiple copies exist and are held by different parties) tokens secured on a blockchain that grants the owner the right to the music, album art, or videos created to accompany the music, or other exclusive access to content. The concept of “Play to Earn, Create to earn, Listen to earn” is to make the value exchange more visible in the exchange of NFT among different stakeholders such as creators, minters, engineers, designers, managers, distributors, and collectors, etc.

Beyond the ownership feature of NFT, music NFTs help music composers, bands and artists connect and interact with their listeners in a more community-oriented and direct way.

As a huge music fan, I often think music is like air to me. Sometimes some music really can lift up my mood, comfort me, energize me when I am working out, and give me additional happiness which is a blessing I am super grateful for.

The reasons why I started to collect music NFTs are:

1. I want to be a supporter of the musicians directly. His/her music gives me happiness, why shouldn’t I pay the musician directly by buying his/her music NFT? There is just too little left for the artist to be paid if we just pay to the music streaming platform.

2. I want to be an early investor in a music project and an artist I like. Buying the NFT from this project or this artist gives me a chance to be a stakeholder in this project. I can either watch how it grows or help it grow by sharing with more people about this music project or this artist. For example, I just bought Kamaal Williams’ fan token $KMLW on Bolero. According to Bolero, “a Fan Token is a unique object, issued in limited quantities by each artist on the platform. Each token is authentic and unalterable thanks to the blockchain. You can consider these tokens as digital membership cards that materialize a tangible link between the artist and his fanbase. A token has two virtues: 1 — They allow access to the rewards offered by each artist, exclusively to his community that holds the tokens. 2 — They can increase in value over time, depending on the exchanges and the development of the artist’s career.”

Boleramusic.com

3. As written in the press release of KOLO NFT — a classical music NFT marketplace launched in Jan 2022, “NFT brings music rights into the retail era, where fans can share revenues with music creators by buying Copyright NFT. Non-fungible means the underlying assets cannot be divided and exchanged freely, but NFT can verify the uniqueness of underlying physical or digital assets.” I do have the expectation and hope the artists I support could grow big. Being his/her fans, we all could be rewarded for our support. However, it is important all the supports have more intentions in collecting the NFT for the music itself in the first place, rather purely for the return of investment. Music NFT takes time to grow along with the artist’s self-development, which highly depends on if the artist has a long-term plan in this industry, if he/she can produce high-quality work consistently, if he/she can foster a supporter community and grow his/her fan base continuously.

4. For classical music, the value of high-quality scarce classical music can be magnified by NFT. In two days when KOLO NFT launched, its first NFT auction fetched a total of 10,395.37 BUSD, which was about nine times the opening bid. Recent NFT sales have exceeded estimates and are performing strongly. As a big fan of Shumann, the piece of “Piano Concerto in A Minor, Op.54 played by Claudio Arrau” listed on KOLO NFT was a pure surprise to me. I absolutely want to collect it, since we are no longer in the CD era.

KOLO NFT MAREKTPLACE

NFT eco-system is still at its infant stage. The experiences for collectors and music fans are not the best yet. As I complained before “The awkward situation I have now is: I own music NFT from http://Sound.xyz, and I still need to listen to the ads on Spotify to enjoy this music smoothly with other music…the current market might be good for musicians, but not very friendly to fans/collectors yet.”

I currently use the following platforms to buy music NFT.

1. OpenSea(purchased music NFT)

2. Sound.xyz (purchased music NFT)

3. Boleramusic.com (I bought an artist token from Bolero)

4. Crypto.com (purchased music NFT)

5. KOLO.Market (waiting for its new version of NFT minting to launch)

The best is yet to come!

NFT ART BERLIN AT KRAFTWERK

In the first place, I know if it is Kraftwerk, it couldn’t be a bad event. In its first life, the building was used to supply the people of Berlin with heating. Since then, it has been part of the techno scene and is now known to music fans and art enthusiasts alike.

In Real Life (IRL) NFT experience has always been on my top list of NFT applications. I went there with a medium level of expectation. I missed the onsite minting experience, so I can’t talk about it. After walking around to view a bunch of digital screens which showcase different digital art pieces, we were guided to the second floor.

Then, a very exceptional experience starts: all people are walking toward the light at the end of a bridge…like we are evacuating to another world, and the light is where the new world is, along with the pipe organ music…the event suddenly goes up to the next level. I assume the event organizer Bright Moments trying to convey a message through this experience design — we are stepping into a new era? NFT is ahead.

Everyone stopped in front of the big light bar, some sat down, some stood, some lay down. Everyone is quiet, watching the light turns slowly in a clockwise motion. We are witnessing TIME ⌚️ and LIGHT 💡.

That time was not waiting for me, but a highlight of the event. It’s like a ritual to worship time and light.

It is an art work by itself — Einstein on the Beach by Philip Glass / Robert Wilson. It is also an NFT piece. “Since it was first performed at the Metropolitan Opera in 1976, Philip Glass and Robert Wilson’s Einstein on the Beach has become widely regarded as the cornerstone work of the American Avant Garde, and one of the greatest artistic achievements of the 20th century. At the beginning of the final act, set against Glass’s sonic masterpiece, a single horizontal light bar rises until fully vertical, and then floats out of the frame. This is the moment that Wilson and Glass chose to tokenize as the first NFT of Bright Moments icon series.”

After that, CRYPTO BERLIN’s showtime:

Sometimes the magic of an event reveals when you make connections with people. I met someone at the event who happens to be a good friend of my mentor and life-long friend, and we lived in the same city for 10 years, we even found out that I actually attended his event 5 years ago. What a small world!

What I wish could be better at the IRL NFT event:

1. More educational / new user friendly guide experience: for example, I took a friend of mine who never bought any crypto and NFT before, but came to the event with an interest to know more. If I didn’t explain her little by little at the event, she’d just see the event as a dope party.

2. More friendly community experience, i.e. can there be a QR code for all the people who are there to join the event Discord channel or Telegram group?

3. Offline-to-online experience: the huge LED screen showcasing each piece of CRYPTO BERLIN is super super cool. But, when I think about the Sotheby’s auction event, the smooth transaction experience is something missing at this IRL NFT event. Another BUT: maybe Bright Moments tried to avoid this commercial activity to keep this event more art?

4. If there are only 10 IRL events, why not sell us NFT ticket of this event?:)

I want to quote @Phil.m.eth — one of the founding members of Bright Moments DAO as the ending of this article:

“This allows visitors to focus on the EXPERIENCE instead of the TECH. Better for collectors. Better for artists. If NFTs are going to succeed as an asset class, they need to do so on their own merit, outside of being “the new thing”. We’re here to make that happen.”

1. A creator with success credentials

Kevin Rose, one of the creators of Moonbirds has also created multiple ventures with proven success records.

2. The creator shows himself to the audience

There are more than 130 Twitter posts where Kevin Rose showed his face, which is rare for people to see real people behind the scene, especially with NFT projects. That definitely helps build trust.

It’s important for collectors to know who is behind the project

3. Incentives for holding the project long term, the longer you hold it the more benefits to being unlocked. Explicit communication about long-term rewards at the very beginning of the project, for instance: membership, meet-ups, events, etc.

All these long-term incentives are relevant to 💰“social currency”💰, which is fundamental to VALUE CREATION.

Source: https://mint.intuit.com/blog/early-career/social-currency/

4. Create expectations by a waiting list to show its rarity.

5. Proof.xyz** credit **(which aims to be the best proof academy)

6. PR & influencer marketing

• Celebrity’s endorsement

• There are more than 100 YouTubers who talked about Moonbirds.

6. Community

• Early collectors: who made big money before

• New collectors: people follow those who make money before.

7. Mint price (reference: The NFT Mint ‘Sweet Spot’: Data on Early Decisions)

Extensive effect: The Moonbirds hype has benefitted a previous NFT collection created by the same artist, Justin Mezzell, a co-founder and chief product officer at PROOF. His earlier Solana NFT collection Grim Syndicate has recently surged in value, jumping from a floor price of about 2 SOL — the cheapest available listed NFT — to a current floor price of 18 SOL as of this writing.

👉More reading: What makes an NFT project successful?

While we are so accustomed to the current Web 2.0 and know how to play around with its ecosystem, the buzzwords like metaverse, crypto, NFT and Web 3.0 interrupted our routine and always appear in the headlines of our news feed. I think, as a marketer, it is good to have some FOMOs.The healthy FOMO will drive us to continuously upgrade our paradigm and learn new things. That’s how we grow our lives and careers.

What is Web 3.0 and how different it is from Web 2.0

What we are using now is Web 2.0. Smartphones, the app economy, the rise of subscriptions, the rise of scalable platforms, streaming media and sharing economy are the key representative business models on Web 2.0.

Web 3.0 is decentralized, open, and of greater utility by leveraging blockchain technology. Its representative features include dapps, ESG friendly eCommerce, AR & metaverse as a new OS, the decentralized web, the rise of privacy, local experiences and commerce, creator economy and anonymity.

Why we need to get prepared for Web 3.0

According to Crypto.com, Global crypto owners are near 300 Million, it’s predicted to hit 1 Billion by the end of 2022, and over 18,000 businesses are already accepting cryptocurrency payments. My intuition is that it’s never a losing game for marketers to keep an eye on where the people go and where the money goes. And highly possible the current latest generation and the next generation will spend most of their time on Web 3.0. By marketing on Web 3.0 at its infant stage, we are building our infrastructure there as well as contributing to its development.

It’s never comfortable to learn something new, especially when there are both positive and skeptical views about Web 3.0.

It confuses you, demotivates you and hinders you. I started to work on virtual reality content marketing in 2015, I still remember all day and night my boss and the team spent on research and design about how to make a cardboard goggle so we could reduce our cost and make the project more distributable and scalable. As a result, the tremendous opportunities we earned for our company in this pioneer VR project was the best reward of all the hard works. I assume the journey of exploring Web 3.0 for all of us will be similar to my VR project experience. Through research, brainstorming, communications, different initiatives and partnerships, there will be newly-forged paths, broken barriers, accelerated timelines, and groundbreaking discoveries.

I started casual investment in crypto a few years ago, and in 2021 my interests in Web 3.0, DeFi and NFT quickly went up. In order to really get a quick insight about Web 3.0, I believe the best way to learn is by doing it.

In Jan 2022, I got a chance to work as a part-time marketing contributor at a DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organization). As an observer and practitioner on both Web 2.0 and Web 3.0, I am trying to summarize some ideas about marketing in the two ecosystems to share with my fellow like-minded marketers who never stop learning new things. These ideas are not 100% right, and it depends on how you define right and wrong, also there are no “one-size fits all” approach. Marketing strategies vary from industry to industry, and from ecosystem to ecosystem. Therefore, this article only serves as a personal sharing.

Marketing is a dynamic process in which you can reach your target audiences through different methodologies and mediums. Web 3.0 at its infant stage could be a method or a mean for marketing, depending on what your marketing objectives are.

**Stay agile and nimble in marketing practice, as someday you might need to make a quick adjustment either on your objective or your approach. **What I meant by that is marketing could or might be a way to discover a new business model for your brand, especially with Web 3.0. A good example of that: Ralph Lauren Is Now Selling Digital Apparel For Avatars Inside Of Zepeto.

I am a Web 2.0 Native Brand, what can I do?

As Dr. Marcus Collins introduced in the STEPPS formula the “S” which stands for Social Currency, it is about the idea that a person’s social status is dependent on the information they have. Everybody wants to be the in-the-know friend who always has great recommendations. Because of this, the most valuable content is content which can be shared. You can use social currency to create quality and innovative content that excites your readers or even to become a trendsetter in your industry. As a Web 2.0 native brand, use these Web 3.0 buzzwords and create social currency for your customers, to make them feel good and most importantly exclusive.

• In short term, some experimental campaigns might be a good way to start. Web 3.0, blockchain, DAO, NFT, DeFi and Crypto are buzz words on social media that you cannot ignore at all. Buzz words sometimes imply opportunities for marketing. Even though you missed the chance to be creators of these words, you can ride on them in collaboration with some of their creators to attract the attention of the wide public. How:

• Mint your existing digital assets into NFTs and airdrop or sell them to your customers. i.e..: your brand’s original design manuscript

• Mint new NFTs of your brand by working with big-name artists and NFT marketplaces. Make it a limited edition or exclusive for a certain period. Remember that owning an NFT right now is a symbol of social status, thus NFT is indeed a type of social currency. Case studies:

Gucci Launches First NFT, a Film Inspired by Recent Aria Collection

Paris Fashion Week NFT

LOUIS VUITTON’S NEW GAME IS BETTER THAN ‘FORTNITE’

Dolce & Gabbana Just Set a $6 Million Record for Fashion NFTs

• Organize metaverse events: e.g.: events at Dencentraland

• Leverage Web 2.0 platforms’ NFT initiatives/features: Twitter’s NFT profile picture, Meta’s metaverse, Shopify’s NFT marketplace.

• If your leadership team has strong faith and clear insights into Web 3.0 and crypto, then you may try the following ways, which could be a heavy investment and serious initiative:

• Tokenization: create your own token either by yourself or adopt a widely recognized cryptocurrency to be your token.

• Allow your customers to buy your tokens and use them for your products as payment.

• Membership NFT

• Set your feet on Web 3.0 social media. None of these social media is mega-popular yet, and the user experience of these platforms is not at their optimal level yet. Picking a few platforms and studying them if they suit your brand might be worth a try. Top Web 3.0 social media: Hive (2.3M accounts by end of 2021), Odysee, Mirror.xyz, creation.io, subsocial.network, onlyfans.com, Peepeth, and Dapps ranking

I am a Web 3.0 native brand, what can I do?

As a Web 3.0 native brand, there are some ideas on how to market your brand on Web 2.0 and Web 3.0. Again, the essential step is to define your success metrics of marketing initiatives.

Crypto, NFT and Web 3.0 are still new to most internet users, I found lots of Web 3.0 native brands have been making lots of efforts in educational content marketing. I know some DeFi brand only wants to target crypto veteran, so their primary goal is not to convert users from Web 2.0 to Web 3.0 but acquire users who are already on Web 3.0, which they call as crypto natives.

One of the key concepts on Web 3.0 is that users can be investors and stakeholders of the Web 3.0 native brand, this concept has been adopted mainly by some DAOs, but not really by centralized companies on Web 3.0 such as Coinbase, OpenSea, etc. While that could tell us the mindset of most of the crypto natives, they are either investment-oriented or out of curiosity, they have lots of doubts or questions, and they constantly seek answers and tips. With this understanding, marketers of Web 3.0 native brands could consider:

• community marketing. Use the SPACES model to run community marketing and design metrics to make it measurable and efficient.

• Storytelling existing testimonials. i.e.: how crypto / DAOs/ Web 3.0 / NFT are changing his/her life, career, etc.

• Educational content series: the pioneers are the builders of Web 3.0, they are engineers and entrepreneurs, they are also investors, stakeholders, and users of your product and service, target them by creating technical tutorial content. Case study: Whiteboard Series with NEAR

• Organize competitions such as Hackathon: Metabuidl Hackathon by NEAR

• Leverage collective wisdom for content creation and content marketing: run $WRITE campaign.

• Meme marketing: As Dr. Marcus Collins taught in the STEPPS formula, “ Not surprisingly, people share things that they care about. Emotions of awe and excitement drive people to share content. Choosing your audience — and knowing them — is important in your quest to create viral content. What will excite your readers? Creating audience-centric pieces that they care about is the best way to engage them.” And among all types of emotions, humour always stands out in emotion-related marketing content. Example: For Web 3.0 native brands, it’s highly encouraged to use meme to create this emotional connection with your user.

• Influencer marketing

• Position yourself as a contributor to the development of Web 3.0, so issuing reports about your learnings at Web 3.0 and your prediction about the future would strengthen your positioning and brand in this ecosystem. Case studies:

Biggest Web3 Social Media Blockchain: Hive Reflecting on 2021

2022 New Value Report by Ripple

Tracking and attribution are the key challenges of marketing on Web 3.0, they exist for both Web 2.0 native brands and Web 3.0 native brands. Thus, defining success metrics for your marketing campaign on Web 3.0 is the first step to win. Otherwise, it is easy to get lost or fly blind. Another important reminder is to be careful of scams and fraud.

Last but not least, for both Web 2.0 native brands and Web 3.0 native brands, try to avoid jargon in your marketing communication. Prepare your marketing communication messages like speaking to your grandmother. I heard more than 100 times people came to ask WTH is NFT and Web 3.0…if you interpret NFT into ownership certification on blockchain for your digital assets such as photos, videos, posts and articles, they will thank you very much.

Looking back at the development of Web 2.0, it took nearly 10 years for it to reach its peak time. For Web 3.0, it is hard to tell when it will become more mature with wider adoption and utilities. Regulation remains as a high ladder to climb for every Web 3.0 native brand.

It is highly possible that there might be a version of Web 2.5 to bridge the gap between 2.0 and 3.0. We marketers together with all the innovators such as engineers, PMs, designers, visioners, etc. will help build the bridge for more and more people to step on and go across time and space.

References:

1. Future of Metaverse and Web3 by Goldman Sachs

2. Web 2.0 and Web 3.0 by Investopedia

3. Difference Between Web 2.0 And Web 3.0 by 101bockchain.com

About the author:

Cecret is a marketer with over 10 years of diverse experience in brand marketing, influencer marketing, partnership marketing, social media marketing, community marketing, performance marketing, and product marketing. She used to be a marketing contributor at a DAO, she is also a crypto owner and NFT collector. She likes to write about NFT and Web 3.0. She served brands such as Amazon, TripAdvisor, and a B2C startup where she started experimenting virtual reality content marketing in 2015. Brands/events/celebrities/artists she collaborated with: Lady Gaga, Karen Mok, Chen Man, China-Italy Biennale, Burning Man, LinkedIn, Turkish Airline, Air New Zealand, BMW, MINI COOPER, WoW World Championship, etc.

It is a Friday morning, she walked into the living room, wearing a tranquil and sweet smile, carrying a bouquet of white tulips on her arm. She said to me, “This is to show my gratitude.”

“Life is never a plan, it is a journey of discovery.”

AG, a girl from Ukraine, whom I got to know via a DAO. We happened to join the same workstream almost the same time. I’ve never thought I would have such an acquaintance and story.

She is such a resilient and strong young girl with maturity beyond her age.

Thanks to the DAO

Because of the pandemic, I started to notice crypto, and always wanted to explore it further. Since September of 2021, I dived into crypto. This documentary directed by Tim Delmastro on Youtube Gold & Dollar: How Money Became Worthless | Currencies Explained | Documentary | Fiat Currency just changed my life. Then, not sure if this is the law of attraction. I started to help an entrepreneur friend on his BP of a P2E company. Also, I got a chance to work on a consultancy project about blockchain for sustainability. The more information I received, the more my paradigm has been challenged, and the further I went in this way. I started to research DAO, and landed on ShapeShift is Decentralizing by Erik Voorhees. This is the moment I embarked on a DAO journey. With faith in learning by doing, I wrote a short email with my intention to ShapeShift in December. And I almost forgot it after that. In Jan 2022, I received a reply and interview invitation. One day, I had an interview with ShapeShift, and also officially started to be a contributor in the marketing workstream.

Where I started to get to know a new girl called A, who takes care of social media operations such as Hive and Odysee. And every week we had chances to do zoom/google meetings. On the day of ShapeShift V2 launch, both of us went to the wrong meeting link, and it was our first time seeing each other virtually. I thought she is just a young and passionate social media savvy, maybe at an age of 25 or 26. Sometimes, we would collaborate on some projects and exchange thoughts. She also showed her artistic skills and creativity multiple times.

If it is not a decentralised ShapeShift, I’d never have had a chance to meet a Ukrainian friend like her. Thanks to the DAO.

The War

On the 24th of Feb, I woke up at 6 am in London, and was shocked by the news on my phone screen, it was about the war. All of a sudden, I was not sure if I was still in a nightmare or I was in reality.

I saw a posted AG sent in our Discord channel:

We were all deeply concerned about her situation. We also didn’t know how we could help. In a moment, I felt so helpless and hopeless.

In the following weeks, she kept working and attended weekly meetings. I wasn’t sure how she managed to do so. We would sometimes see messages from her like this:

On Mar 8th International Women’s Day, we two initiated a call to collaborate on the IWD poster for ShapeShift. She wrote the copy and I did a quick design. On the call we spontaneously called, she told me she finally got a bus ticket to evacuate from Western Ukraine to Warsaw, then take a bus from Warsaw to Berlin, then go to Luxemburge where her family’s friends live and can offer her a room to stay for a while. When I heard about Berlin, I intuitively asked her for a meet-up and offered to host her for a week, as there is an empty room in the apartment I am living. She agreed to stay in Berlin for a week.

The beautiful acquaintance

The day before she left Ukraine, she sent me a photo of her dog on WhatsApp and shared with me that she couldn’t take her beloved dog with her, as her mom wants to keep it as an emotional company at such a difficult time. Also, she couldn’t convince her parents to leave the country with her, so they might still be in potential danger. Her dad was legally not allowed to leave, and her mom would’t want to leave her dad alone. But her parents wanted to send her away. I cannot imagine how heartbreaking as well as comforting when they had to see their daughter off on the evacuation trip.

After nearly 2 days on the evacuation bus, she arrived at the central bus station of Berlin. I got in a car to pick her up, I remember the sunset glow on the way, which led me in the direction to meet her. She walked towards me with a volunteer who was speaking in Russian with her. There are lots of volunteers in Berlin to receive people from Ukraine.

We got home by car. After I learned she is only 18 years old, I thought I’d better give her some personal space. Before she came, I have concerns on how I should talk to her, I was afraid what I say or do would hurt her. I started to cook dinner and she went to take a shower.

During dinner, she started to talk, and even tried to make fun of the experiences she had. No one can believe her age. The way how she talks and the way how she reacts to things is just so mature. I believe it is exactly the experience that shaped her.

We went out to Hillsong Berlin church together on Sunday, I was very moved when I saw her praying and singing praise and worship songs. I wanted to pray for her badly. The burden she carried is so heavy, it is something she cannot control, nor can she understand. War is really far beyond our understanding. I cannot imagine the damages she had internally. She got to meet other Ukrainian friends in the church community, and she often slightly bowed down to thank people. She has the rare politeness and gentleness in her European genes.

Then we had the best pizza in a 60 seconds to Napoli restaurant. The meal brought us closer, then we had a long walk to Berliner Dom. She navigated the direction and I just followed her.

The first few days, I also sensed her fears and carefulness in daily life when we were at home. She has a very kind and grateful heart. I cooked a few meals for her, and one day I was working on something, she came to my room with a cup of candies and a cup of hot tea which I needed the most.

The young power and the unknown

On Wed evening, I was cooking dinner in the kitchen, and she came to me with tears in her eyes. She just lost her childhood friend, and all her friend’s family died from an attack. I really didn’t know what to say and what to do but hugged her tightly. I decided not to ask for more details, just asked if she wants to have dinner with me. I was preparing some soup and noodles. Only food can comfort her maybe. She is super skinny, I often remind her to eat food and keep a healthy diet.

In the past week, she explored different ways to apply for a media art major in a German university, but it’s not so easy. She is still waiting for a response from a university. She wants to continue studying, that’s the only way could probably change her life to be a better place. I saw her determination and struggles.

On Wed evening, I took her to a dinner with my friends in Berlin. Almost everyone on the table was impressed by her maturity and smartness. Same as I thought, we all tried to think back to our 18-year old, none of us could imagine having experiences and wisdom like she had. Undoubtedly, the internet really changed this generation by giving unlimited access to information from all around the world. And we are often shaped by the information/knowledge we receive.

On the evening before she leaves, I had an idea to do a video interview for her. I want to make this video as a memory of her 18-year old at such a special time and also a gift to her when she turns 30. She sat in the blue velvet chair wearing cosy grey hoodies, the scene is like a movie. The questions I asked her included (I improvised quite some of them):

1. what is your motivation to study media art?

2. what are the two schools you want to apply for?

3. Travel to a day in future at your age of 25, imagine what the day is like?

4. What are the top 3 things you want to do or achieve in university?

5. Describe a moment in the past when you were the happiest

6. Share two things you enjoy the most

7. What are your feelings about the past few weeks?

8. What do you think about the connection between money and life?

9. Imagine the future of crypto in 12 years

10. What kind of partner could be the perfect partner for you? above love:)

—

When I watch her and listen to her, I felt like sometimes I am looking in a mirror, we share some of our thoughts. Even though we have a huge age difference. I wonder how I would think about the above questions when I was 18, did I change? I think I’ve changed a lot.

On Friday, I sent her to the train station. On the way, she told me she was very nervous. I asked her why, she said she didn’t know. It reminded me of the time at my 18-year old when my cousin sent me to my university in the suburb of the city where the campus was still under construction, and the feelings of uncertainty and fear I had. The girl standing behind me with two big bags is about to step on a journey unknown. It’s intimidating.

“What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” I constantly encourage her to be strong and tried to get the most out of this journey. Only when we are stronger, we can help others.

I decided to leave her alone while she waited for her train. Like a tough sister, I thought she would have to face this journey by herself. It is the step of growth.

There is nothing else I could probably do, so I wrote her a letter and gave her a pair of astronaut earrings as a farewell gift.

I believe that “God has a good plan for her, not to harm her, but to prosper her.”

(8) Claire

In 2017, post-00s female artist “Claire” and cryptography expert “Mr. 703” met online by chance. Claire is the screen name, and so is Mr. 703.

But they both share a belief that crypto art must have a bright future. At that time, Mr. 703 gave Claire three Cryptopunks, and made Claire swear that no matter how valuable these three avatars are in the future, she will not sell them. Because this kind of art should be in the Museum of Modern Art in New York. . .

Why is Mr. 703 so generous, giving such a big gift to a girl he has never met before? Because, Mr. 703 is the one we mentioned earlier, who bought 758 Cryptopunks avatars. After that, he even sold them with gifts, and distributed 55 avatars (including the three for Claire), and there were 703 left, so he called himself “Mr. 703”.

But Claire clearly doesn’t have as much conviction as Mr. 703. In 2018, seeing that the value of all NFTs had dropped by 90%, Claire looked in the mirror, and she was still the frail artist suffering from depression, and she didn’t even know where the money for the next meal would be.

She quit various NFT groups, stopped talking to “Mr. 703”, bought a second-hand iPad, and spent $10 on a drawing software, started doing some graffiti, and tried to make some money. She was so busy making a living that she didn’t have time to look back.

Under the unseen ashes, new shoots are quietly growing.

If you turn the camera forward, in 2017, when Claire and Mr. 703 met, a website called OpenSea was quietly established. Its founders are Alex Attala and Devin Finzer.

Alex Attala and Devin Finzer

Unlike those code heroes who work alone, OpenSea began to raise financing at the beginning of its establishment and grew in the way of a formal company.

In 2018, OpenSea received a $120K investment from Y Combinator, an accelerator owned by Paul Graham, the godfather of technology entrepreneurship. Relying on the power of capital, he gritted his teeth and survived the cold winter.

Paul Graham, who is also the author of the famous book Hackers and Painters.

In 2021, the quadrennial craze in the crypto world is making a comeback. OpenSea has raised $1 billion in financing and instantly grew from a bud to a towering tree.

This time, the NFT world no longer has to look at the faces of the local tyrants in auction houses and galleries, they have their own native NFT trading market. The Cryptopunks have naturally become popular on OpnSea.

It wasn’t until this time that the down-and-out Claire remembered that she still had 3 NFTs in her hand. She chose her favorite #1629, the girl with pink hair, and replaced it to be her Twitter PFP.

With this PFP alone, her Twitter gained 1,000 followers a month. The influx of fans brings not only popularity, but also real purchasing power.

Claire put her work on OpenSea for sale, and someone actually placed an order, sold several paintings, and earned more than $6,000 worth of ETH. One of the buyers was Mr. 703.

A photographer named Justin Aversano reached out to Claire and asked if she could borrow head #1629, which he had the chance to put on an electronic display board on the streets of New York. Claire quickly agreed.

Justin Aversano

In May 2021, #1629 did appear on a digital screen near the New York Museum of Art.

Mr. 703’s prediction seems to have come true — although it has not been placed in the Museum of Modern Art, it is three blocks away. . .

Claire felt her heart pounding, and she wanted to see it with her own eyes.

It took three days and three nights to drive from her small town to New York. She tucked a mattress into her back seat and started the car. At night, she parked her car in a Wal-Mart parking lot, slept in it, went to the Wal-Mart in the morning to go to the toilet, and then drove again.

In this way, on June 5, 2021, she finally came to this dizzying international metropolis.

She parked the car and walked quickly to the tall electronic screen. The pixel girl with pink hair and a black hat sat quietly behind the screen, squinting at the world without saying a word.

It’s fucking punk.

Claire pulled out a piece of soft paper from her bag, wrote her name, and solemnly drew a small flower beside her, exactly the same as the flower behind her Twitter name, held it up in front of her, and took a picture with her phone photo.

She posted the picture on Twitter, accompanied by a sentence: It was worth it after sleeping in the car for several days to get here.

In the surprise and blessings of Twitter netizens, she made a detour to the coast of Connecticut, where is rich in seafood, , and gave herself a sumptuous lobster roll.

But Claire didn’t keep her promise to Mr. 703.

In the summer of 2021, her mother was hospitalized and required surgery. In order to accompany her mom, she wanted to rent a room near the hospital, so she sold two Cryptopunks NFTs, one for $68,000, and the other for $18,000. All she has left is #1629.

After hesitating for a long time, she bought a pink wig. It’s hard to say whether #1629 became her or she became #1629.

NFTs are just an illusory picture. But in Claire’s life, this “illusory picture” accompanied her years in a strange way. In her peaceful life, she had her own heroic moments.

Nothing is more real than this.

Claire’s self-portrait

(9) Pak

One of the first people to claim Cryptopunks was a man named Erick Calderon.

He is a businessman and amateur artist.

After the NFT fire, he also founded his own NFT website ArtBlock.

Erick Calderon

His website is interesting, all the artists in it can’t paint the work themselves and have to use an automatic art generation technology like Cryptopunks. Therefore, the artwork on ArtBlock has an abstract style. Like the one below, called Ringers, from artist Dmitri Cherniak.

Ringers NFT (1000 pieces)

In 2021, a work generated by Ringers sold for $5.8 million. People call this painting “Goose”.

RINGS#879

Money no longer gave Dmitri any special feeling. In 2022, he decided to do something more performance art. Every day in January, he used Ringers to generate a piece and sent it to a random Ethereum wallet. Of course, it is very likely that the wallet is not used at all, or, even if it is used, its owner will not notice the pie falling from the sky. But Dmitry wanted to do just that, tweeting: “Look at it as a celebration of birth, life and death.”

In fact, this trick has been played by another person. Picasso once deliberately “forgot” his paintings on the bus. There are other star art projects on ArtBlock, like Ana Carreras’ Trossets.

Trossets (1000 pieces)

Like Ento’s Heavenly Bodies.

Heavenly Bodies ( 400 pieces)

Of course, the stars of this NFT movement, the two tech nerds of Larvae Labs, are more likely to be idle, and they have launched a new 3D-style NFT called Meebits.

Meebits

The 3D style actually shows their ambition to enter the metaverse. In the era of web pages, a person’s avatar is a picture, but in the metaverse, a person’s image is three-dimensional, with a head, a face, and buttocks, and a 360-degree movement without dead ends like a seven-dimensional space. Therefore, Cryptopunks are Pixels, and Meebits are Voxels. The two are in the same vein.

However, now, these stories can only be regarded as the prologue in the NFT world.

In any field, there will be a historical moment when a “pioneer” gives way to a “great god”. In this deep blue sea, real whales began to emerge slowly.

On March 11, 2021, Christie’s auction house sold an NFT, which is “Everydays: the First 5000 Days” by illustrator Beeple. Unlike other artworks generated by electronic algorithms, Beeple is considered a model worker. Since May 1st Labor Day in 2007, he has been insisting on painting one painting every day. By 2021, he has finally collected 5,000 works.

He put these 5,000 paintings together into one. The painting sold for $69.3 million.

Everydays: the First 5000 days

This number properly broke the historical record for the most expensive work in NFT history. Moreover, since it is said to be “the first 5000 days”, there must be “the middle 5000 days” and “the last 5000 days” and so on, which is probably around 2035.

But what’s really crazy is that the record set by Beeple didn’t even hold for a year. On December 2, 2021, a mysterious corner of the Internet started a 48-hour sale.

The thing they sell is called mass. During these 48 hours, you can buy as much as you want, but after the deadline, there is only so much mass in the world. And according to the amount of mass each person has, the system on the blockchain will generate a piece of material for you in real time, which is your NFT.

The more mass, the bigger your substance.

The interesting gameplay is that mass can be traded. If you have 10 mass, I have 20, and I buy yours, I have 30, and at the same time, my NFT gets bigger.

Second-hand ‘substance’ traded on OpenSea

As the mass is passed into the hands of different people, the matter in this space will start to move and collide. Just like our universe, no one can accurately predict how these stars will evolve and merge. It can be said that this is a dynamically changing NFT and performance art. The name of this art is The Merge — fusion.

In that auction, a total of 28,983 buyers bought the mass, with a total amount equivalent to $9,180.

This number is significant, not only because it once again set the highest price for an NFT, but also set another all-time record: the highest price for a living artist to publicly auction an artwork.

The previous record was $91.1 million, set in 2019 by Jeff Koons’ 1986 sculpture “The Rabbit.”

Jeff Koons and his work Rabbit

It’s like a declaration:

The Everest of digital art has surpassed physical art.

What’s more interesting is that the artist named Pak behind The Merge, no one knows his real name, appearance, male or female. No one even knew whether he was a person or an organization.

But his creativity is recognized. (Let’s just assume it’s “him”)

As early as March 2021, the fledgling Pak was noticed by Sotheby’s auction house, and his two works “The Pixel” and “The Switch” were sold for $1.36M and $1.4M respectively. .

This isn’t a picture that didn’t load, it’s The Pixel.

On September 30, 2021, he developed the first social experiment game “The Lost Poet”.

In the game, 65,536 AI-generated poet portraits sold for a total of $70 million.

Lost Poets

Back to The Merge. On December 4, 2021, Pak announced the launch of a mysterious website — mass.black.

The site currently has only one front page, and behind it apparently hides a deeper level of The Merge gameplay that Pak has not revealed. From here, that auction appears to be just the beginning of a larger project.

As a result, Pak gradually became a god, and he was called “Satoshi Nakamoto in the NFT world”.

Pak has 370K followers on Twitter. In a way, these people’s attention is not blind, because as Pak said,

he wants to prove that NFTs are far from a jpeg picture.

This is a list of the 10 most expensive works in the NFT world as of February 2022. (click to see larger image)

At least, The Merge has proved that NFTs can rely on program, code and philosophical design to create wider possibilities than traditional art, and reach the soul point that traditional art cannot reach. At the bottom of the NFT website NiftyGateway where The Merge has landed, there is this sentence:

We won’t stop until 1 billion people collect NFTs.

(10) The rebels

Many people fiercely question whether NFTs are art at all.

Just like when people questioned whether Andy Warhol’s cans were art.

The reason of the doubters is that these works do not have the traditional sense of “beauty”.

But please note that the highest peak of human art is never achieved by pure “beauty”, but by the critical and questioning spirit carried by them.

The reason why “Mona Lisa” is bright is because she defied the millennium darkness of the Middle Ages with a pair of gentle eyes that belonged to human beings.

The reason why “Starry Night” is eternal is because the blossoming branches reach the back of the sky. It is a soul holding a paintbrush, trying to gather the courage to break through the suffering.

When art begins to flatter power, it ceases to be art.

From this point of view, even though the frog Pepe is small and the cypherpunk are simple, they observe the times in a distributed way and try to interact with the times.

When they are unhappy, they will also raise the middle finger to the times without hesitation — a distributed, untraceable middle finger protected by technology.

Even if people are like ants, everyone has the urge to respond to the times to prove that we have lived enthusiastically or decadently.

Every joke you tell, every expression you make is a testimony of your life. Everyone wants their life proof to be different, like the one that stands out from the side-by-side cans.

Therefore, with the help of codes, people have separated small universes. In these universes, dreams are priced in the form of NFTs, and you can pick them up.

At least in our own small universe, you and I have the opportunity to have a 15-minute heroic dream.

I am afraid this is an era when machines are piled up like mountains and codes are surging, and the best thing can be given to its people.

The end

This article is translated from《NFT精神史：罐头、青蛙和平凡人的15分钟英雄梦想》written by a Chinese tech journalist Max Shi ZHONG and published on Qianhei.net. I translated it to pay my tribute to the author, it’s a legendary piece about NFT, even could be recorded in a history book. It is quite long, but 10000% worth reading it.

(6) Watkinson and Hall

In the spring of 2017, Rooney was still working on his thriving Rare Pepe website. What he didn’t know was that just across the network cable, there was another geek looking at him. This guy is Hall.

Hall and his good friend Watkinson both graduated from the University of Toronto’s Department of Computer Science. In 1999, they came to New York and became New York drifters. They both like to use computers to do some stupid things, and they have similar smells, so they formed a silly team — Larva Lab.

Hall on the left, Right is Watkinson

In recent years, the two have been honing a strange skill: using computer algorithms to generate avatars. For example, in 2011, they released an app that can generate an avatar that looks like an Android robot for you. Like below.

Hall on the left, Right is Watkinson

In 2017, their ability to generate avatars was already perfect. They chose a punk theme and made an “avatar generation engine”. It happened that when the pair of friends were chatting, they talked about Watkinson’s little niece collecting dolls like crazy, and they remembered that they also collected baseball cards and Magic: The Gathering when they were children.

It seems that collectivism is a common trait of all human beings across time and space. . .

“Then, is there a possibility that we will produce some avatars in limited quantities, such as 10K, and let everyone collect them?” Hall said.

So he went online to collect information and saw the rare Pepe website. But Rare Pepe has a problem: it uses the Bitcoin network. When the Bitcoin network was designed, it can only be used for Bitcoin bookkeeping, not for other things. So when Rooney was designing, he could only add a “Pepe Wallet” to the Bitcoin ledger. However, the rounding of “Pepe Wallet” is controlled by Rooney, and it is not very open and transparent. Is there a network that is both open and transparent, and can record more complex ledgers? They immediately thought of the Ethereum chain (ETH), which was just starting to be popular at the time.

There are many differences between the Ethereum chain and the Bitcoin chain, and here we will only pick the most important ones. This is what supports “non-fungible tokens”.

You can think of bitcoin as a dollar bill, dollar is dollar, my dollar and your dollar are dollar, if I exchange a 100 dollar for your 100 dollar, it is the same as no exchange . That is, Bitcoin is homogeneous.

But on Ethereum, I can create a weird dollar, like a different picture on each hundred-dollar bill, so that the dollar bills everyone gets are not homogenous. For example, my 100-dollar bill has a yellow-skinned electric mouse, and your 100 dollar bill has a garlic head. If I’m going to exchange $100 for Pikachu for $100 for your Duck. You have to think about it. You may prefer garlic head, but you don’t like electricity mice, so you may not be willing to change. This “non-fungible token”, referred to as NFT (Non-Fungible Token).

In this way, the entire technical process ran through the heads of the two technical nerds of the Larvae Lab.

1. They first used the “Generation Engine” to generate 1w exquisite pixel wind heads, named Cryptopunks.

2. Then perform a password operation on each avatar to condense it into a 64-bit password.

3. Write each password as an NFT and write it into the Ethereum ledger.

They decided to give these NFT avatars to everyone for free. You read that right, it’s free. You’ve been busy on it for a long time, give it to everyone for free, what are the benefits of them? In fact, they hid a hand: only 9,000 NFTs were sent out, and 1,000 were left in their own hands.

On June 9, 2017, Larvae Labs tweeted the good news, and sat in the house waiting for the crowd to flock.

However, five days have passed, only a few sporadic people have come to pick up a few hundred. . .

Cryptopunks are different from Pepe. Although they each have a rebellious face, no one knows them when they take them out. I take out something that no one knows about, how can I pretend? Everyone thinks so.

Although it is free, but you have to pay an Ethereum fee equivalent to 11 cents for one time. No one’s money comes from the wind. . . .

Only those who really think these avatars look good and are willing to spend a few cents will apply for these suspicious punk avatars. Of course, even if they choose, they will choose the rarest avatars first, such as “Alien” (9) and “Ape” (24), which are all picked up in the first five days.

Among these onlookers, there was a figure who stopped for a long time, and he was Jason Abruzzi.

Jason Abruzzi was a reporter for the tech site Mashable at the time. He interviewed Hall and wrote an article analyzing Cryptopunks in detail, titled

“This Ethereum-based project may change our perception of digital art.”

When people’s lives move online, status symbols will inevitably follow, he said.

This article was published on June 19. Within 24 hours, all remaining avatars were swept away. There is a guy who grabbed 758 pieces by himself.

(7) Anne Blasegder

In fact, more people haven’t noticed Cryptopunks in 2017, but many people have heard of “Cryptokitties”.

CryptoKitties is a beta version launched on October 19, 2017, which is half a year later than Cypherpunk, but CryptoKitties are obviously more out of the circle than Cypherpunk.

This is because Dapper Lab, the creative team of CryptoKitties, has added many game elements. For example, two cats can mix genes to give birth to kittens.

But this nature is both an advantage and a disadvantage. Once “strategy” is emphasized, CryptoKitties is classified as a game, not a collectible. Games end up in the gaming circle, and collectibles end up in the collectible circle.

If you look back at history, there was a bull market in cryptocurrencies at the time. At the beginning of 2018, Bitcoin had just hit its then all-time high, and in New York, an “epic meeting” happened at the same time. At the Rare Digital Arts Festival on January 13th, Hall, founder of Cryptopunks, Mark, product curator of Cryptokitties, and Rooney, founder of Rare Pepe Wallet, came together. This is a meeting of NFT gods. At that event, a rare Pepe was auctioned for $39,000.

Homer is a character in the cartoon The Simpsons. If you say it, you may not believe it. This picture is so valuable because it is a “wrong version”, and minute is written as mintue. (WTF…)

At this party, a woman sat downstairs, holding her camera in her hand.

This is no ordinary lady, she is Anne Brassegder, a photography expert at Christie’s.

After listening to this group of people’s speeches, she couldn’t wait to make an appointment with two technical nerds in the Larvae Lab to talk about life.

As a photographer, Annie has been plagued by a bug: A photographer’s work is only valuable after death. Because while you are alive, new works will be made at any time. The more works you have, the less valuable they are. Collectors are only willing to pay a high price for your work during your lifetime if you are sure that you are dead. But at this point, you can no longer enjoy the money. . .

Seeing Cryptopunks, Annie had an epiphany. It turns out that the scarcity of an artwork can be guaranteed by cryptography through the technical means of blockchain: Once the artwork is on the chain, it is protected by huge computing power. Even the two tech nerds in the Larvae Lab couldn’t change a single pixel. She quickly pointed the way: if your art is to reach the wider public, it must go to galleries and auction houses.

So Hall and Watkinson started attending art forums and met a lot of gallery owners.

The first stop was to try my luck at a gallery in Zurich.

In order to adapt to the tastes of the local tyrants, they decided to “downgrade” the way of displaying digital art to traditional art — selected 12 avatars and printed them out, mounted them magnificently, and then printed the password of the corresponding Ethereum wallet on a piece of paper. Top tucked into Confession, sealed with medieval-style wax.

A few days before the launch, the gallery owner invited Watkinson and some local tycoons in the financial world to have a meal, and after a meal, the 12 NFTs were almost sold out.

Watkinson hurried back to New York and printed 12 new NFTs, which were also sold out.

Everything looks bright.

However, the digital art dream only blessed by local tyrants outside the circle is a tulip bubble after all.

This group of people is in full swing, and in the future, they will not realize that the cold winter of cryptocurrencies has come unexpectedly. The prices of all NFTs plummeted, and even Cryptopunks went unnoticed.

Like a wildfire swept away, there are only ashes in the eyes. Just before this fire, though, a little thing happened somewhere in America.

🚀Read the next chapter

This article is translated from《NFT精神史：罐头、青蛙和平凡人的15分钟英雄梦想》written by a Chinese tech journalist Max Shi ZHONG and published on Qianhei.net. I translated it to pay my tribute to the author, it’s a legendary piece about NFT, even could be recorded in a history book. It is quite long, but 10000% worth reading it.

(4) Joe Rooney

Joe Rooney is a code farmer. In 2016, he was developing a digital wallet for Counterparty, a P2P website. That day, in Counterparty’s Telegram group, someone suddenly threw in a poker-like thing with a rare Pepe in the shape of Satoshi Nakamoto painted on it.

The dude said: I made a whole deck of cards, all of them are rare Pepe, I am selling them online, this deck will be worth millions in the future, right? People there started to agree: This is too awesome, I want to buy it.

Then, people started bidding: 1 bucks a piece, 5 bucks a piece, 10 bucks a piece. Then everyone went to place an order. . .

Rooney held up his phone and was stunned for a long time. “At that moment, I wanted to paint the rare Pepe by myself…” he recalled. However, he soon came up with an idea that was even more awesome than painting Pepe — to make a platform that can trade rare Pepe, and by the way, use his traditional skills to make a “wallet system” that can store rare Pepe.

However, even if these Pepe are made like playing cards, they are only pictures after all, and pictures can be copied. So how do you get everyone to agree that someone owns a picture?

He immediately thought of an ingenious method — using Bitcoin’s bookkeeping system.

One of the features of Bitcoin’s bookkeeping system is that it is a distributed ledger, and the same account is recorded by thousands of nodes around the world. That is to say, as long as you have the password of your wallet, no matter how many coins there are, it must be yours, and everyone must recognize it. In this way, it becomes impossible to “make false accounts”.

I tried it and it set up a wallet for me as soon as I entered the website. And this feature was used by Rooney to make a** “rare Pepe wallet”.** Simply put, it works like this:

A rare Pepe card is bound to a bitcoin wallet, and only its owner has the wallet’s password (that is, the private key). If you want to transfer Pepe to another person, just give him the password.

This trading model has surprisingly been established. Moreover, Rooney made an interesting setting: if a creator wants to submit a Pepe card to the website, he must send a certain amount of Bitcoin to an empty address, that is to say, it is equivalent to burning these coins — Rooney can’t take it, and no one else can get this money.

Why waste money?

This principle is like when you join a gang, you must first devote yourself with someone’s head. It doesn’t matter whether the person who was killed is lying down or not, the important thing is that it is an “entry threshold” that prevents someone from opening the drawing software and drawing a parallel Pepe in five seconds and selling it.

This setting is significant.

Soon, many creative and well-painted Pepes were put up on the platform, and at first glance, they came from people with a certain artistic accomplishment — the creators began to take this matter seriously.

This is the website for the display of works that go with the wallet, the Rare Pepe Directory.

Later, the website also developed an O2O model — you buy an electronic card, and I will send a paper card. But all buyers know: the paper card is worthless; it is the picture of the certificate on the Internet that is valuable. . .

At this point in the story, although everything seems crazy, everyone’s motives are just fun, money, and free expression, and they are generally kind.

But that’s what liberalism is, and when so many freedoms stack up, it weighs down the horizon.

(5) Hillary and Trump

Liberals are free in every way, as you can see from the 4chan messages, most of them say whatever they want, misogynistic, black, and self-centered. Some users on 4chan like to refer to themselves as “NEET”, that is, a person with no schooling, no job, and no skills.

You know, these kinds of people are the main team of “trolls”.

Life advice from “NEET”

There is a section on 4chan called “Politically Incorrect,” which is full of white supremacist rhetoric. In their eyes, black people can only rob without a father, and Asians are stingy and evil. They can’t wait to build a wall to isolate everyone else from the beautiful country.

It’s an anonymous community anyway, it won’t expose itself, and no one will get into trouble because of it.

Over time, this wet soil gave birth to a worm-like right-wing Internet trend, which is Alt-Right.

In 2016, just in time for the US election. From the alt-right, Trump’s campaign slogan is to build a wall at the border. This is his own person. Trump may still be a diving 4chan netizen!

As a result, the alt-rights made Pepe look like Trump and encouraged everyone to vote for Trump.

The innocent Pepe suddenly changed from a meme to a political symbol. . .

The climax of the story happened on August 25, 2016, at the scene of Hillary’s campaign speech. She was seriously criticizing the right-wing ideology, but a voice in the crowd shouted: Pepe!

This voice, which most people do not know, is regarded as a battle song by the alt-right.

After that, the Pepe expression pack that appeared inexplicably became more and more terrifying. Some people turned Pepe into the Ku Klux Klan, some put Nazi symbols on Pepe, and some asked Pepe to raise the flag of the Crusades.

Some people even found a frog-headed man named “Kek” from the stone paintings of ancient Egypt, and then said that this TM was the apocalypse given to us by the ancient Egyptians, and our god was Kek. Someone on 4chan immediately started booing seriously: We should consider finding a good lawyer to help us build a “free” white nation — Keckstein. . .

The nosy parker also painted a flag for Keckstein with 4chan’s logo clover on it. .

The most pissed-off in this incident is Matt, the author of Pepe.

Think about it, Pepe was originally a spiritual boy who pulled down his pants to pee, but now he has been used to becoming a madman of hatred.

One of Alt-Right’s offline leaders was beaten.

Unable to bear it, he decided to prosecute those who publicly associated Pepe with politics.

But it doesn’t help.

Later, he could only come out in person to write a sequel to Pepe’s story — Pepe died because of racial discrimination, and everyone held a funeral for him. . .

But that still doesn’t help.

Because from the day Pepe hit the Internet, it has been caught in the hands of “distributed Andy Warhol”, and no single person can even decide Pepe’s direction.

Some people think that Pepe is successful, some people think that Pepe is a failure, and its characters are painted with various colors of paint, making it extremely complicated.

But in the field of blockchain, Pepe has undoubtedly become a radiant “pioneer” who has identified the “safety zone” and “minefield” of blockchain artwork.

In fact, there are also many heartwarming creations about Pepe.

🚀Read the next chapter

This article is translated from《NFT精神史：罐头、青蛙和平凡人的15分钟英雄梦想》written by a Chinese tech journalist Max Shi ZHONG and published on Qianhei.net. I translated it to pay my tribute to the author, it’s a legendary piece about NFT, even could be recorded in a history book. It is quite long, but 10000% worth reading it.

(3) Christopher Poole

In 2003, 14-year-old Christopher Poole started the anonymous sticker community 4chan in his basement.

Christopher Poole

Originally, 4chan had only one section, where the juniors posted Japanese comics.

But soon, the “breath of freedom” permeated. Due to the anonymity and no archives, people can speak freely here, attracting masters of memes and sand sculpture netizens. It is like the sea of ​​a bay gradually boiling. The time when 4chan quickly exploded coincided with the time when Pepe came out of the circle, so Pepe naturally became the creative material of 4chan netizens.

Everyone encounters interesting meme pictures and saves them, and then finds a suitable opportunity to use them. Save a picture, just two clicks, it’s easier than going to McDonald’s and ordering a hamburger and buying a pair of socks online. The fact behind it is: in the Internet age, the cost of copying a thing is lower than in the industrial age, as low as almost zero. This leads to a serious problem: a picture, you use it, and I use it too. The more people use it, the more rotten it will become, and its value will quickly depreciate.

This makes meme writers uncomfortable — because the pictures are popular, but no one knows about them; It also made the people who first used this meme feel boring — because he discovered a gold mine, but they were not famous themselves. Well, so to speak. . . Is it possible to make a meme picture also scarce? Like AJ shoes, artificial scarcity is good.

The wise men decided to give it a try. Soon, the author of the Pepe Terrier picture added a large watermark to the picture in order to prevent it from being “stolen”: “Rare Pepe, not allowed to be saved”. This “rare Pepe” was posted in the /r9k/ section.

One more thing, /r9k/ is originally a section on 4chan that encourages originality, and its rules are as follows: here, you must post original things. Whenever someone posts a sentence here, and you repeat it again, you will be banned for a period of time as a punishment. How does the system know if what you say is original? Look at the name of this section, r9k, which is actually the abbreviation of Robot9000, the “robot deduplication script”.

This script was written by comics writer and programmer Randall Monroe. At that time, Monroe was fed up with people on the Internet copying, pouring water, and sticking words that were not his own, so he wanted to build a “utopia” — if in a world, once someone said a word, everyone else I can’t say that anymore, what will happen? Hence the Robot9000 script and his famous stickman comics.

Randall Monroe

Back to “rare pepe”.

The foolish netizens in the /r9k/ section immediately felt that, yes, intellectual property rights must be protected! Therefore, everyone supported the author of the rare Pepe not to post the original picture anymore. If you want to use the rare Pepe to pretend, you have to spend money to buy it. I have to warn you: at this point, Pepe has absolutely nothing to do with its original creator, Matt. Matt can like or dislike Pepe created by netizens, but since Matt doesn’t mix with 4chan, no one cares about his opinion.

4chan is a closed universe — no one outside the universe can influence the history within the universe.

Soon, on the second-hand website eBay, some people began to sell their own Pepe, rare and without watermarks. And there are people who actually buy them. Because they think they will be the coolest on 4chan to have Pepe. . . At that time, there was a sensational event.

Someone packaged up 1200 rare Pepe for auction on ebay, and the price was eventually bid up to $50,000. Bullshit pictures, so it has something to do with money like this?? And everyone thinks it is justified, at least 4chan netizens are convinced.

🚀Read the next chapter

This article is translated from《NFT精神史：罐头、青蛙和平凡人的15分钟英雄梦想》written by a Chinese tech journalist Max Shi ZHONG and published on Qianhei.net. I translated it to pay my tribute to the author, it’s a legendary piece about NFT, even could be recorded in a history book. It is quite long, but 10000% worth reading it.

(2) Matt and Pepe

It all started in one day in 2005. You turn around, your butt is facing me, and you bend over, yes, just don’t move. Matt said to his girlfriend Ayana.

Matt Furie

Don’t get me wrong, Matt is a cartoonist. He was drawing a scene at the time: when a person urinates, he has to take off his underwear and outer pants to his ankles. This action is difficult to draw, so I asked my girlfriend to play a cameo as a model. . .

He drew a cartoon called “Boy’s Club,” which featured four lazy young men doing nothing.

One of them had a frog head and a wise face, and it was called Pepe.

The image of Pepe comes from Matt’s cousin David. Back then, David took off his trousers and urinated like this, and he looked like a fool.

The young Matt stood outside the toilet door and witnessed all this, and was shocked. A feeling of “why is it so cool” suddenly flowed in his heart. . .So in the later comic stories, he used his cousin as the prototype and asked Pepe to say that sentence: Feels good man!

Soon, the “Boys Club” story became an instant hit online.

But the next story began to exceed Matt’s expectations.

Some people posted photos of their fitness punch cards online, accompanied by the text “Feels good man”, and then some people made various emoji packs with “Feels good man”.

There is even a silly guy who compiled a “Song of Feels good”.

Gradually, people discovered that Pepe, the frog, the appearance of cockplayer, the temperament of passers-by, and the character of having nothing but let me game the world, is just like the reflection of one’s self on the screen when it goes dark.

In the blink of an eye, people began to dress Pepe in various clothes and become various occupations, followed by various broken expressions and extreme emotions. Of course, now we know that this is a standard meme popularity process.

Ask the “consultant” sitting on the side, Mr. Andy Warhol, and he’ll raise an eyebrow — nothing new, still superimposing variables on repeating subjects.

So, you can understand it like this: Although Andy Warhol died as early as 1987, the existence of the Internet has allowed countless anonymous creators to form a “distributed Andy Warhol”. This Andy Warhol is tougher, even immortal.

🚀Read the next chapter

This article is translated from《NFT精神史：罐头、青蛙和平凡人的15分钟英雄梦想》written by a Chinese tech journalist Max Shi ZHONG and published on Qianhei.net. I translated it to pay my tribute to the author, it’s a legendary piece about NFT, even could be recorded in a history book. It is quite long, but 10000% worth reading it.

(1) Andy Warhol

“In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes.”

In 1968, the line appeared on a promotional page for the Museum of Modern Art in Stockholm. That year, there was no internet, no iPhone, no TikTok, no Bitcoin, no Telegram.

But the core script that shapes today’s world has fully emerged. The person who said this was the “Pop Art Pope”, Andy Warhol.

Andy Warhol

In 1961, Lato, a fat erotic writer and gallery owner, said to Andy Warhol, who was worrying about what to draw: Is there a possibility that you can draw the canned food you eat at noon every day?

Andy Warhol thought the idea was way too rad and cool, so he gave Lato a “creative fee” of $50. Since then, he has been out of control, painting soup cans, Coke bottles, Marilyn Monroe, and the head of a certain country. (The $50 creative fee was worth it, as one of his later paintings would sell for $100 million.)

Campbell’s Soup Cans 1962

Flavor Marilyns 1962

No matter what he draws, Andy Warhol almost always hides a mathematical logic behind it, that is: repeating subjects + random variables.

Notice! Although human artistic creation contains the element of “repetition”, most of them are “repetition of themes”. For example, many medieval painters painted Jesus and the Virgin, and elementary school students each painted “House Tree People” in school, but Andy Warhol’s repetition was a very straightforward “image repetition”.

Image repetition requires very little aesthetic ability. When I first saw the Marilyn Monroe picture when I was in the second grade of elementary school, I could see the mystery and feel the rhythm at a glance. This is a repetition that only a machine can produce. (In fact, his method of painting is also industrial “screen printing”.)

Andy Warhol’s paintings can sell for as much as Van Gogh, and I think one of the reasons is that it captures the most pervasive mass mentality of the industrial age.

What is the state of the masses in the industrial age?

Let me tell you a piece of Andy Warhol’s original words, you can experience it: You know the president drinks Coca-Cola, Elizabeth Taylor drinks Coca-Cola, and you think about it, you can drink Coca-Cola too. A Coke is a Coke, and no amount of money can buy a better Coke than the homeless man on the corner. All Cokes are the same, Elizabeth Taylor knows it, the president knows it, the tramp knows it, you know it. You replace Coca-Cola with “iPhone”, “Tik Tok”, and Elizabeth Taylor with Dilireba, and the statement stands still. Gone are the days when the rich daughter of a rich family wore a patch and the poor girl wore a patch. Even Sanhe God the homeless can buy a pair of clean pants for 2 dollars.

Andy Warhol once faced the camera and ate a hamburger in over four minutes. It became a great metaphor for the industrial age. But this may not be a good thing for human beings who naturally pursue “inequality”.

Attention, here comes the point! So far, I have quoted two Andy Warhol quotes that seem to contradict themselves:

If in this era, no matter the rich or the poor, everyone is drinking Coke, eating McDonald’s, using iPhones, and swiping TikTok, just like cans standing side by side in a painting, then what can make you different and make you stand What about enjoying the crowd in the spotlight, even if it’s only for 15 minutes? I’m afraid the trick is in that tiny “variable”. In the environment of industrial production, the simplest and crudest way to artificially control variables is “limited production”.

All my classmates wear AJ shoes, but yours are ordinary, mine are limited to 500 pairs worldwide. Then, when we meet in class, your attention must be “stepped on” by me. So, I have “Famous 15 Minutes”.

Although we are legally equal, a variable in me is scarier than your variable, and I create an artificial inequality. It’s a tried-and-true trick, and half a century since Andy Warhol pointed it out, people still enjoy it. And it’s getting worse.

Andy Warhol debuts in TIME magazine, May 11, 1962

🚀Read the next chapter

This article is translated from《NFT精神史：罐头、青蛙和平凡人的15分钟英雄梦想》written by a Chinese tech journalist Max Shi ZHONG and published on Qianhei.net. I translated it to pay my tribute to the author, it’s a legendary piece about NFT, even could be recorded in a history book. It is quite long, but 10000% worth reading it.

In the world of Flirting Scholar — a Hong Kong comedy film directed by Lee Lik-Chi, 9527 is just a domestic slave. But in a cyberworld, 9527 equals $340,000. The avatar below, the guy with the melon hat and smoking a cigarette, is the #9527 of the 10,000 avatars in the world’s hottest NFT project — Cryptopunks.

Cryptopunks #9527

Its owner “0x949…b786” just updated its listing price on January 23, 2022, 124ETH, equivalent to $340,000.

If you are willing to pay so much money, this avatar will be yours in the next second, how about it, it’s a good deal, right?

What? do you think it’s nonsense?

That’s because you don’t understand the rarity behind this avatar. Did you see that cigarette in his mouth? Only 961 of 10,000 people have this attribute. Did you see his little hat? Only 419 individuals had this attribute. Did you see his sexy moustache? Look carefully, it is the gray one above the mouth, only 288 people have this attribute.

Oh, even so, you aren’t moved to buy it? It doesn’t matter, you are not moved, someone is moved. On June 10, 2021, the world-renowned auction house Sotheby’s auctioned its “brother”, Cryptopunks #7523.

Cryptopunks #7523

Looking at this melon cap, it’s still the same formula, except that the head below has become a so-called “alien”, and the cigarettes are gone, replaced by a mask with seven dollars for one dollar. Without further ado, let’s talk about the price first: this item sold for $11.75 million, which is almost a small target in RMB.

Because of the 10,000 avatars, there are only 9 people with alien faces, and he happens to be one of 175 people wearing masks.

An interesting detail is: although masks are an excellent metaphor for the world today, when the 1w avatars of Cryptopunks were born six years ago, there was no new crown virus in the world.

Therefore, the original owner of #7523, who sold it at a cheap price (about $1,646) in 2017, was transferred to the seller of this auction, Sillytuna.

In four years, 7523 has become a “new crown alien avatar”, and the price has increased by more than 7,000 times, which seems to be a better idea than buying a house.

That’s Sillytuna’s tweet, two days after the auction, and he’s still complaining that he doesn’t have any new shoes to wear. . . The tweet itself is pretty punk too.

Maybe some friends are getting impatient. What a mess, with your skill in speaking, it’s enough for me to download the picture, photoshop it to look like wearing a mask and smoking, and then change it to my WeChat social media profile picture. . .Why am I paying $1000w for this shit picture?

“Why is NFT valuable?”, I believe that countless people have already explained it.

But I want to tell you an interesting story from the perspective of “spiritual source”.

🚀Read the next chapter

This article is translated from《NFT精神史：罐头、青蛙和平凡人的15分钟英雄梦想》written by a Chinese tech journalist Max Shi ZHONG and published on Qianhei.net. I translated it to pay my tribute to the author, it’s a legendary piece about NFT, even could be recorded in a history book. It is quite long, but 10000% worth reading it.