The History of CryptoArt

Transcript

foreign [Music] let's get started um so today I'm going to be giving a presentation on the history of crypto art I actually have an hour-long lecture uh where I've uh given a very in-depth history on crypto art uh but now I have to condense this to 15 minutes so uh let's just jump right in um it's a brief intro about myself uh so I run a fund called one confirmation uh we were the seed investors in open C and super rare you know back in 2018 uh so been investing in nfts and art for a very long time I also built a website called cryptoart.io which is actually

like really one of the first art aggregators that Aggregates uh sales across different our marketplaces um so I guess before we get into uh crypto let's talk a little bit about the early history of nfts um so before we talk about ethereum uh nfts really started on bitcoin um you know back in 2012 2013 with colored coins uh as a concept of like how do you make these fungible assets Bitcoin non-fungible by tracing uh cryptocurrencies back to the Genesis block um and then back in 2014 um counterparty emerged as uh one of the side chains of Bitcoin that enabled uh early smart contract functionality so you had a lot of early nft collections

like spells of Genesis uh more trading cards rare Pepes that were built on uh counterparty this Bitcoin side chain but um it was only until 2017 before uh rare pet base bridged onto ethereum as really uh one of the first ethereum nft projects um and then fast forward to Summer of 2017 when larva Labs launched crypto punks which I'm sure all of you know what punks are but I guess one interesting I'll say thing I'll say about punks is uh they were built uh back on the erc20 token standards the fungible token standards so this was before uh the nft token standard was invented and Lara Labs found a clever hack of uh using the fungible token

standard uh to create these uh 10 000 uh edition of 10 000 pfps uh that we know today as like the first or one of the first pfp projects uh considered one of the Grails of pfps um and then you know fast forward to uh beginning of 2018 and that was when Dapper Labs the company behind cryptokitties it finally invented the 720-1 nft standard and uh this is the standard this alongside with um 1155 are the two standards that uh Power nfts and really after um gapper Labs crypto kitties invented uh 721s this really kind of pioneered

the early explosion of nfts and you know this was around the time that's openc launched and um it was really mainly like early passionate community of cryptokitties holders and people who are minting breeding flipping uh cryptokitties that were some of the early nft users um but like a lot of the early use cases for nfts were around uh pfps and you know in-game assets and it wasn't until um I say around April 2018 when uh you know the idea of art on the blockchain really took off and now I want to make a distinction between uh crypto arts and nfts broadly where you know nfts can um comprises of many categories like you know uh Collectibles art

um IP in-game assets uh but art I I consider crypto art uh to be really uh was like Fine Art uh the stuff that you would consider store of value what museums would collect uh and purchase and like putting that on chain and that concept uh really pioneered uh with super rare as the first crypto art Marketplace and gallery um and you know back in 2018 um that was when the very first crypto artwork was sold uh by this artist named Robbie Bharat uh and Robbie brat was actually one of the first artists uh to do uh generative AI art um and he did this around in four or five years uh before now like AI is super uh buzzwordy um so he was really

one of the first uh generative AI artist and you know this artwork sold uh initially for uh 0.46 eth which was about 200 at the time which uh our fund actually bought um in uh early 2021 uh early 20 yeah early 2021 uh for 100 eth um so a 217x increase from initial sale price but um this piece I'd say is worth um probably Millions uh today from being one of the first um uh crypto art on ethereum and it's actually a funny anecdote I want to talk about so um the artist Robbie Bratz actually gave a presentation on crypto art uh back in

uh 2018 uh to Christie's uh when Christie's was kind of learning about the blockchain and getting interested in all this Tech and for all the 300 attendees who attended this conference uh they gave out gift bags with uh QR code where you could claim one of these nfts uh and out of all of this 300 only 12 people decide to scan their nft scan the QR codes to claim their nfts and for those lucky 12 people who did claim uh their nfts um those pieces are worth six figures today so uh and the the others that were thrown away uh are called The Lost Robbies so I guess the moral of the story for this is whenever you go to conferences don't throw away your QR

codes because you never know if these air drops are worth six figures [Music] um and some other early artworks I want to talk about um the x copy 12. so x copy was another early crypto artist um and he minted um 12 uh so like artworks ID 5 to 16. so 12 of the first artworks on super rare um and um X copies or one of the first glitch artists which is also another big genre of crypto art and you know each of these pieces uh will probably sell for six or seven figures today um the most valuable one of the 12 is actually the one in the top right uh a coin for the fairy man uh the character

pieces um the pieces like with the faces are worth uh more than the the other glitch pieces um but these are also considered some of the most uh valuable uh artworks that were minted early on um so I guess one and one other thing I want to talk about say about crypto R is the reason why these pieces are so valuable is uh also uh something has to do with the blockchain because the blockchain provides uh provenance and it also time stamps when these artworks were minted uh so pieces that were minted back in 2018 have the unfair advantage of you know being first to a category and all new artists that come into the space that are minting on new

platforms uh they can't rewind the blockchain back to 2018 and mint these pieces anymore so it's it's really the Lindy effect that you know the longer these pieces have been around uh for the fact that they're refers to a new defining category that's why they're more valuable um so we talked about um you know early you know Fine Art uh oneiform crypto art um and you know a few years later there was a new uh category of art that emerged uh called generative art um so you know in 2019 uh larva Labs which is the same team behind crypto punks uh created the first uh generative art collection uh and you know genitavart in a nutshell is you're really as an artist you're really uh

building uh you're really creating an algorithm rather than the artwork so it's basically a piece of code uh that defines okay given this random number generator uh in a seed uh how is the algorithm going to produce the output of the artwork and the really cool thing about generative Arts is you're using the entropy of the blockchain at the time of that the block that this our uh this collection was minted so basically every time this artist were to create uh this new genitive art collection you get a different output because the entropy the random number uh generator at each time stamp of the blockchain is different each time um so autoglyphs was uh the first gen of art collection and

um this is actually um a snap a screenshot of the code base of the smart contract code so as you can see see here um you see a bunch of uh if else statements and it's basically uh a printing uh ASCII characters based on it's it's uh going it so it gets uh a seed and a random output of a random number generator and it goes through each uh character of the uh the random number outputs and then depending on what the character is a prints a certain piece of ASCII um and as a result of this you get these you know beautiful ASCII art uh like this um which is auto glyph um and this was the first uh genitive art

collection uh minted um and then you know fast forward uh to late 2020 uh when a project called Art blocks came along and you know art blocks was actually founded by an artist um named Snowflake uh he goes by snow fro um Eric Calderon um who really uh popularized the concept with generative Arts by building a platform that made it easy for artists to upload their code and mint all these different art pieces so this is actually the very first um at genovar collection minted on on Art blocks actually created by uh the founder himself um so it's called chromie squiggles so it's basically a bunch of squiggles as you can see

um the entropy uh changes the colors the type of squiggles and you know some uh pieces are more valuable than others because the traits are more rare uh so uh Jennifer I would say is it's an interesting hybrid between you know one of one fine art uh and you know pfps like you know edition of 10 000 monkey pictures um and genovar is kind of this interesting middle ground where uh you have you do have the benefits of you know having a broad uh collect collector base um with having a large collection but it's also like much more high quality art than you know someone just creating a pfp uh and just uh trying to flip it

um and here are two uh other generative Arts collections uh that are um some of the what we consider Blue Chips today so on the left here is uh ringers by Dimitri cherniak um you see it's basically a series of uh pegs and holes um and lines connecting and uh there's certain ringers that are um based on the traits that are more rare than others uh you you might have seen in the news uh how the three arrows auction uh three arrows collection is actually being liquidated right now by Sotheby's and they're slowly auctioning off the collection over time and last month uh the most prized ringer which is called the goose ringer um it's a ringer

that's uh kind of accidentally looked like a goose from the output of the Gen of artwork that sold for uh 6.2 million dollars so there's still uh very high demand for generative art uh from you know high-end art collectors that consider these to be Grails um there's actually another Sotheby's auction coming up later today um where they're going to auction off more ringers and fidenzas uh fidenza's on the right um You Know series of lines and colors um uh by another artist called Tyler Hobbs um I say uh ringers right now the floor is around 48th for a ringer for fidenzas around uh 80 eat so these are some of the most uh valuable genovar collection

um I also want to mention uh Auto glyphs uh the floor for an auto glyph today I think is around 200 eth um so um some of the Blue Chip gen art collections um so crypto R was really kind of a niche crypto native phenomenon where it's mostly eth whales that we're buying art and it didn't really go mainstream until this guy came around so um his name is Mike winkelman he uh popularly goes by people and if you've been in the CGI VFX Community for a long time you've definitely heard of people but he's been one of the most famous uh CGI artists and he's been using uh Cinema 4D which is one of these software

tools to create a piece of artwork for every day for the last 15 years uh without uh ever missing a single day and as a result he was able to build up a huge brand in Instagram following like millions of followers on Instagram for the artworks he's created uh but the issue is like he's never been able to monetize these artworks like he's made a living from doing consulting work with Fortune 500 companies creating visuals for them or with musicians creating visuals for them and it was only until um October 2020 when people learned about nfts and he decided to Mint some of his early nftr work so this is uh one his first uh ever nft collection called uh politics is [ __ ]

um and you did a drop down Nifty Gateway uh where you sold it uh you listed it for a dollar obviously that got sold in less than a second um and today the addition each of these 100 artworks uh the floor is about 85 eth um and then you know fast forward uh to 2021 um this is when um in March 2021 was really when nftr crypto R had its breakout moment uh to the mainstream when uh people partnered with Christie's uh to sell uh this collage of his first 5 000 artworks and this ended up selling for 69 million dollars which at the time was the fifth sixth largest Six highest selling

artwork by a living artist so that puts people up there with uh big names like Damien Hurst Jeff Coons Jasper Johns um and obviously from like such a eye-popping number um people kind of became an instant celebrity uh and got so much uh mainstream press attention he's uh appearing on Joe Rogan Jimmy Fallon uh on the front page of the New York Times uh and this was really uh kind of how a crypto art crossed the chasm to mainstream from emerging as like early uh you know Cypher Punk uh cool toy that people were experimenting on bitcoin side chains uh to now finally uh become a mainstream uh

that you know a lot of people who've like heard of crypto probably know about Bitcoin ethereum and nfts and like not nothing much uh so I I do think uh art nfts is like one of the key drawing points for like onboarding um the massive mainstream audience uh to as next users for crypto um so where we are at Nat uh now so um this is a screenshot from crypto IO showing volumes obviously uh it's down a lot from the bull market um this is also a leaderboard um I've made of like the top selling artists so you can see uh people's number two uh Park um Tyler Hobbs the creator of fidenza

Dimitri trainiac x copy um these are some of the uh most valuable artists uh by the sum of their artwork and I actually have a contrarian bet where I think the total market cap of Art and nfts will be worth more than the market cap of all cryptocurrencies except for Bitcoin and eth in the next 10 years because art is historically um one of the biggest store of value Asset classes and as you know traditional art collectors uh people decide where should they Park their money I think crypto Arts represents like the next um movement of Contemporary Art that represents um kind of the culture of the internet

age today and you can also see um this is slowly happening with traditional our institutions starting to curate crypto R Collection so this is um a gallery at MoMA um in the lobby of momo that's actually been extended indefinitely because it's gotten so much uh popularity and um from talking to the MoMA folks uh they're thrilled with this because it's bringing so many uh young collectors like people in their 20s and 30s uh to the museum for the first time uh and that's like never happened before um there's also other museums that have are slowly acquiring permanent uh art collections so actually I went to the center pompadu here in Paris a few days

ago and they have a punk and an auto glyph that they started acquiring as part of their collection and that was really cool to see them curate that as a part of their Contemporary Arts displays um obviously NF crypto Arts only the beginning of uh nfts uh disrupting all uh entertainment Industries so it goes beyond art to music photography Media Sports um really every Indus uh entertainment industry is a multi-billion dollar industry uh that's ready to be disrupted cool so that's a whirlwind of kind of the history of crypto Arts um if we have a few minutes I can answer some questions

uh yeah I just wanted to say I think like uh crypto Arts predates nfts because crypto art started in with cryptography in 2011. and you know artists like Josie or people who created crypto art on physical before making it into nfts so maybe it's about the vocabulary but it's for me it's a little weird yeah it kind of depends uh like like how you define crypto art um the definition I'm going off of is from Jason Bailey I guess by Art gnome who's uh the first collector on uh super and he's written a lot about uh crypto r

on his blog yeah he's saying that crypto art is predates nfts I think there's one back there uh hey there hey Richard uh this is Rob from hellborn and uh I was curious what your thoughts were it's a bit of a controversial topic which no better so lava labs when they initially launched punks um there was actually a bug in the code

nothing you know about this too right uh so they they released the first edition of uh crypto punks there was a bug and then they released a second version of that so I myself am a you know collector of you know different Collectibles where the first editions are always worth a little bit more less and I'm curious in general of your thoughts of Providence when it comes to sort of first editions and you know sort of revised versions coming out like that yeah I think it's just like kind of a community shelling point of like what they consider to be the uh like the real version

um so yeah it's a social consensus uh among collectors and uh collectors have socially decided that uh the second edition of um uh punks are worth more uh thank you Sean great thanks everyone thank you [Music]