CHAPTER 4
As with the history of anything, it’s challenging to point to an exact moment in time and say, “This is what started that.” Rather, there are moments that precipitate a change. These small moments run parallel to each other until they converge to create something special.
With regard to non‐fungible tokens (NFTs), the history can be quite blurry. It wouldn’t be correct to start talking about NFTs at the moment that the first blockchain was built in 2008, because that would ignore the decades of digital art up to that point that provided a reason for NFTs to exist. It also wouldn’t be fair to cover only digital art and overlook other art movements that would change the profile of art collectors and thus expand the group of people collecting art.
The story of Andy Warhol and Pop Art, the legend of Mike Winkelmann and his Cyberpunk creations, and of course, the rich history of digital art innovators have all played a crucial role in the history of NFTs.
Andy Warhol Presents Pop Art
Throughout the 1950s, years before the creation of Campbell’s Soup Cans or the Marilyn Diptych, you could find Andy Warhol at a New York City café called Serendipity. Here, he would trade his drawings for pastries and ice cream, while getting to glance at the celebrity elite of New York City.
A stone’s throw away from Madison Avenue, Warhol had his sights set on the advertising industry. Having grown up a poor Slovakian immigrant during the Great Depression—a time when his mother might replace a basic can of tomato soup for ketchup and water—Warhol was enthralled by the Post‐War capitalist boom. Factories rolled out products allowing access to quality goods for even the least fortunate.
Later, Warhol would say:
“What’s great about this country is America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca‐Cola, and you can know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke, too. A Coke is a Coke, and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good.”
Consumerism was taking shape. And Warhol wanted in.
Warhol found great success on Madison Avenue providing illustrations in magazines and advertisements for clientele such as Glamour magazine and Tiffany & Co. His portfolio of commercial art gained him a lot of respect among ad men and consumers, and it even spanned large enough for an entire posthumous exhibition titled Warhol Before Pop.
But as his bank account grew, so did his ambitions. He wanted respect in the fine art world—not just as a commercial illustrator.
Despite the name he had made for himself, Warhol didn’t explode as an artist to start. His first exhibition at the Ferus Gallery in West Hollywood, California, featured the now iconic 32‐piece collection of Campbell’s Soup Cans. He managed to sell only one piece and receive holds on four other pieces. Call it foresight or call it luck, one of the gallery owners, Irving Blum, decided to cancel the four holds and buy back the fifth work. He then came to an agreement with Warhol to buy the entire lot on layaway at the price of $100 a month for 10 months. (About 26 years later, the Museum of Modern Art purchased the collection for $15 million.)
Following the showcase, Warhol continued honing his craft and leaning into the Pop Art movement that was well underway.
Pop Art was unique in that it was the first aesthetic that invited everyone to participate and appreciate. Pop Art threw its nose up at elitist culture and replaced it with popular culture as its muse. Comic book characters, popular ads, and mass‐produced products were the main fixtures in Pop Art.
Pop Art was the first art movement accessible to the average person. And this was something that Warhol knew all too well.
Warhol continued creating art that reflected this emerging society of consumerism. He took images from commercial art and pop culture, focusing on some of the most familiar or banal components of the American environment, and he changed them slightly to showcase them in another light.
Campbell’s Soup Cans, Marilyn Diptych, Coca‐Cola 3, Triple Elvis, Brillo Box, and many others all contributed to this “accessible” art. He magnified his artwork by building a reserved and mysterious celebrity persona. He surrounded himself with artists and celebrities. All of this helped him grow into a living icon, and thus a Pop Art piece himself.
Although Pop Art was largely defined by its ironic approach, you don’t get the sense Andy was trying to be ironic with his art. Rather, his aim was to expand the appreciation of art by highlighting the images that we encounter daily but don’t actually take the time to look at. Packaging labels, celebrities, photos of disasters—these were his subjects.
Warhol’s style succeeded Marcel Duchamp’s readymade, a style of art created from undisguised, but often modified, everyday objects or products not normally considered materials from which art is made. Similarly, Warhol’s Pop Art reminded us of the art around us, giving us no choice but to look at the products of society as art. Whether the subject of his art was a recognizable person, a household product, or an image that everyone saw in the news, Warhol became an art remixer. He took images of what we consumed, duplicated the image, added popping color, and ultimately created something familiar enough that you recognized its subject immediately but also fresh enough where you had to look deeper because there was something else there. By highlighting consumerism, he put us all, as cogs in the machine of capitalism, into the artwork, thus lifting the veil so that we could look closer at our environments.
Decades later, Warhol’s aesthetic still provides an easy foray into art appreciation for many newcomers. He stripped away technical detail and depth, replacing it with simplicity—almost as if an homage to his early days in the advertising industry.
Warhol’s legacy spans many different innovations:
· He helped change the perception of the artist from the ideator and creator into simply the designer of the art, whether or not the artist actually puts the pen to paper or brush to canvas.
· Many point to him as the earliest visionary of the coming reality TV and personal branding movement.
In our mind, however, the legacy that we owe most to Warhol, and the legacy for which NFTs owe a lot of thanks, is his refreshing and renewed understanding in what can pass as art.
While not the originator of Pop Art, Warhol quickly became the champion, the figurehead of this motif.
Pop Art is responsible for democratizing the appreciation of art. Because the subject matter of Pop Art pieces included some element of popular culture, the average consumer was able to recognize instantly who or what was in the artwork. There was no prior knowledge needed other than being a person who consumed things. By simply buying Brillo soap pads, reading the daily comics, or going to the movies, you were able to appreciate Pop Art.
Without this movement, there wouldn’t be nearly as many art collectors at all levels of income as we have today. Our idea of what passes as an artwork that can appreciate in value would not be nearly as expansive. As a result, we can make the connection that there wouldn’t be an emerging community for NFTs and digital art collectibles such as NBA Top Shot, Logan Paul Box Breakers, CryptoKitties, and even Beeple’s NFTs—all of which could be classified as Pop Art.
Undoubtedly, we owe a debt of gratitude to Warhol for his ideas and his vision. Never confined by the medium, Warhol made art with everything from silkscreens to printmaking to photography, video cameras, and even Xerox machines. But a lesser‐known technique of his that doesn’t quite get the coverage it deserves was his dabbling in early digital art technology.
The year was 1985. The computing company Commodore was announcing its new Amiga 1000 personal computer at New York City’s Lincoln Center. To one‐up Apple’s paramount Macintosh commercial in 1984, Commodore enlisted Warhol and Debbie Harry to show off the computer’s ProPaint feature in action.
About three‐quarters of the way through the event, Andy sat down at an Amiga, snapped a digital photo of Debbie, uploaded it into the Amiga, and began digitally altering the portrait of Debbie in a style similar to the Marilyn Diptych. After a minute or so, the digital portrait was done.
Resident Amiga artist, Jack Hager, then asked Warhol, “What computers have you worked on before?” To which Warhol replied, “Oh, I haven’t worked on anything. I’ve waited for this one.”
Unbeknownst to the viewer, it appeared to be a typical celebrity endorsement. But it wasn’t. Not only was Warhol enlisted to market this new technology, he actually used it in his free time.
Warhol created a short film with the Amiga 1000 entitled You Are The One. The film featured 20 digitized images of Marilyn Monroe from 1950s newsreel footage, which Warhol manipulated with the Amiga and set to music.
After his death, Warhol’s Amiga computer and floppy discs were stored in the archives of the Warhol Museum. Forgotten, but not gone. Nearly three decades later, the Carnegie Museum of Art was sparked by inspiration to actually recover Warhol’s digital artwork. With some careful reverse‐engineering, the team unearthed somewhere around 20 never‐before‐seen digital artworks by Warhol.
Although, unfortunately, Warhol wasn’t around long enough to see digital art take center stage in the art world, his contribution is but one small story in the canon of digital art.
Had Warhol been born a lifetime later, we could certainly see him taking a similar path in digital art that Mike Winkelmann, also known as Beeple or Beeple_Crap, has done for the past decade and a half.
Beeple’s Cyberpunk World Meets NFTs
It’s rare for an artist to receive their flowers before they’ve passed away. It’s even rarer for a prototypical, unassuming computer science nerd with a potty mouth to become the face of an entire art movement known as digital art, let alone sell an art piece for more than $69 million at a high‐society Christie’s auction.
“What can one person and a computer do? That has always been a really cool concept to me, because it’s the equalizer, in a way,” Mike Winkelmann said in an interview with The New Yorker.
Born to humble, Midwestern roots in Wisconsin, Winkelmann was on the computer science track from an early age. He attended Purdue University with the goal of learning to program video games, but quickly found himself working on his own endeavors in lieu of school. He slogged through the degree, was released into the world with computer skills, and got a job as a web designer.
His fascination with computers and art collided in his free time. One of his first areas of success in the motion graphics space was creating video loops for DJ sets. Think of abstract shapes and lights that you find at an EDM concert today. As an aspiring DJ, he designed them for himself but eventually allowed others to download and experiment with them for free.
Just a man and his computer, Winkelmann was mesmerized by the virtual worlds and digital creations that one could create on the computer with modeling and visual effects software such as Cinema 4D. He had the technical prowess to dive headfirst into these tools, but he lacked the artistic ability. He needed to learn how to draw.
Around 2007, Winkelmann got the idea, from a sketch artist named Tom Judd, of creating something every single day: the concept of getting better incrementally by going from zero to completion in a day was exactly what he wanted.
And so, Beeple’s Everydays were born.
The first year of Everydays mostly consisted of sketches, self‐portraits, and doodles. Then the Beeple_Crap we know today started taking shape. He began learning Cinema 4D before the eyes of his audience, improving day over day.
Cyberpunk became the main motif of his Everydays—building utopian and dystopian still images with the best motion graphic software on the market.
The Cyberpunk aesthetic has a thriving community of supporters with roots dating back to the 1960s. As a clear‐cut antithesis to many of the utopian dreams early technology proponents envisioned, Cyberpunk looked at dystopian futuristic settings—often juxtaposing high technological achievements with a radical breakdown of social order.
Rooted in the unstoppable progress of technology, Cyberpunk was made for the society we live in today, and it will only continue to feel closer to reality as we progress. Furthermore, Cyberpunk has benefitted from its many decades of artistry and has therefore, built a great audience for its themes.
From the early beginnings of Philip K. Dick and Isaac Asimov novels to Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, the paramount manga film Akira, The Matrix Trilogy, Minority Report, Netflix’s Black Mirror series, and thousands of more works, our society cannot get enough Cyberpunk. It’s as if we prefer consuming the dystopian nightmares that seem so close to our reality, as opposed to utopian visions.
Beeple couldn’t have chosen a better aesthetic around which to build his Everydays.
No matter the circumstances, Winkelmann continued creating a piece every day from scratch. No pre‐planning or pre‐creating his Everydays. No archive of work that he could lean on when he felt lazy. Just a man and his computer. Chris Do of the media brand The Futur likened Winkelmann’s process to that of Michael Shattuck—the man who runs 365 marathons a year.
Winkelmann, 5000+ Everydays later, has created one of the most prolific archives of digital artwork known to man. And he’s built an incredible audience of Cyberpunk lovers in the process of sharing Everydays. Never one to brag or boast about his work (as is customary for Wisconsin‐bred residents), Beeple still claims to “suck ass” at motion design. But glancing through his archive of work, you can see the growth of an artist.
Winkelmann’s Everydays made him popular as a designer for commercial work—SpaceX, Apple, Nike, Louis Vuitton, Super Bowls, concerts—you name it. Beeple has created a career for himself, simply by doing what he loved.
Before NFTs, this was the livelihood of a digital artist: make incredible work to get recognized by the corporate world for campaigns.
In the past few years or so, Beeple’s Everydays started getting weirder than ever, for lack of a better term (see Figure 4.1). His works included Donald Trump lactating, Mickey Mouse being sucked of his innards, and a giant naked Elon Musk riding a giant Shiba Inu, the dog of the Dogecoin logo. He didn’t stray from the Cyberpunk aesthetic; however, he mixed it with pop culture characters to create a sort of nightmare reality for viewers.
FIGURE 4.1 Three works by Beeple: Birth of a Nation, Disneyworld 2020, and Non‐Fungible Elon
In an interview with Kara Swisher of The New York Times’ Sway podcast, Beeple describes his art:
“The thing I’m trying to reflect is there are some very weird things happening with technology. Some very unintended consequences. And I believe that is only going to accelerate. I think Donald Trump was a very weird unintended consequence of technology that we did not see.”
The Cyberpunk subtleties that commanded his work were now transposed over the world we all inhabited. In much the same way that Warhol’s Pop Art examined consumerism as it was being established, Beeple’s Cyberpunk art examines technocentrism as it’s taking shape in all facets of life.
Beeple was not ahead of the curve on cryptocurrency, blockchain, or NFTs. He was right on time.
In October 2020, Beeple released his first NFT, which sold for $66,666.66 (and was resold for 100x at $6.6 million a few months later). In December 2020, he followed this up with a series of works that were sold for $3.5 million. Then just a few months later, working with MakersPlace (an NFT marketplace), the Christie’s auction house approached Mike to do an NFT drop. Christie’s convinced him to package the first 5,000 Everydays into an NFT, which then sold for more than $69 million.
In our minds, Beeple’s Everydays were the perfect collection for a transaction of this magnitude. Why? The fact that Beeple is a digital‐native artist who leaned into technology to create art, then focused his art on examining technology, and finally benefitted from a groundbreaking technology to sell his work…is the perfect story. Would it have been as eye‐opening if the largest NFT transaction was from an established artist like Jeff Koons? Certainly not.
Cyberpunk is likely the perfect motif to usher in the era of NFTs, given that it’s a style of art that directly examines many of the technologies used to create, market, and sell NFTs. The aesthetic is more relevant than ever, given that nearly all of our behaviors are influenced by algorithms, and not a minute goes by where we aren’t aided by (or addicted to) technology.
Beeple’s foresight to stick with Cyberpunk was ideal. He ultimately benefited from staying motivated for more than 13 years and creating an immense archive of work.
Whether he likes it or not, Beeple is now the poster child for NFTs, in the same way that Warhol was the poster child for Pop Art. Ideally, his continued work will raise the tide for digital‐native artists everywhere, who much like Winkelmann, have relied on client work or printing their digital art into physical media to make money.
While Beeple has the largest digital art transaction to date, it’s unfair to gloss over the rich history of digital art and all of the disrespect artists in this medium had to endure for decades, being told that their medium wasn’t “real art.” The story of digital art goes way back, long before Winkelmann decided to make his first Everyday.
The Story of Digital Art
What is art? A quick Google search will populate a million different answers, actually 13 billion to be exact. The simple fact is that not a single one of those 13 billion answers does the scope of art justice because every time it is defined, we pigeonhole art and leave something out. It’s as if by defining art, we leave the door open for an individual to come through and expose us to a form of art that we hadn’t thought of.
For centuries, art meant paintings, frescoes, sculptures, music, and poetry. A looser definition might have included immaculate buildings like the Parthenon or the Pyramids at Giza.
Then, Marcel Duchamp flipped the world on its head and said that an artist is someone who can point a finger and say “that’s art.” And he demonstrated this by putting a toilet in a gallery. Later, Warhol flipped it again by pointing the finger at ourselves, more or less claiming that our collective human behavior is a form of art. He elaborated on this by saying that art is what you can get away with. And just when we thought we encompassed everything, food became art. Michelin star restaurants began showing how food could be a medium for creative expression.
Artists throughout time have done their best to break barriers and bring society into uncomfortable spaces—places we hadn’t recognized as art before. Even though entire cultures sprang up out of graffiti, namely, hip‐hop culture and skate culture, graffiti wasn’t respected holistically until Art Basel hired graffiti artists to tag the entire city of Miami.
The story of art is the story of breaking barriers. One visionary does something different and calls it art. The art world either respects it, copies it, or pushes it aside. But eventually, all forms of artistic expression, no matter how outlandish, find a following.
For digital art, it didn’t take long to find its community of supporters. But to this day, it still struggles to convince many of its value to society. Nonetheless, the story of digital art is a prehistory to NFTs. Because without digital artists, there’s largely no reason for NFTs to exist.
Digital Art Emerges
In the early 1950s at an army surplus warehouse in Manchester, England, a man by the name of Desmond Paul Henry stumbled upon a mint‐condition Sperry bombsight computer. One of the many computers developed during WWII, the Sperry was fixed onto bomber aircraft and used to determine the exact moment to release a bomb in order to hit the target. By the 1950s, it was an outdated technology in war, but a fresh tool for the art world. At least, that’s what Henry believed.
Henry would tinker with the Sperry throughout the 1950s, marveling at its construction. Ultimately, though, he wanted to find some way to visualize its abilities. So, he fastened a plotter (basically a pen at the end of an arm) onto the machine and began tweaking the mechanics to see what it could draw.
Unlike the algorithmically generated art that followed throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Henry’s drawing machine relied entirely on the “mechanics of chance,” in other words, the relationship between the plotter and the machine’s mechanical components. For example, a loosened screw could dramatically change the final result.
Because his computer could not be preprogrammed nor store information, each drawing was entirely random. He could tweak the machine’s mechanical components, but he had no clue how it would affect the drawing. This imprecise construction meant that Henry’s creations could never be replicated or mass‐produced. Each one was entirely unique. The first artwork the Henry Drawing Machine came back with is pictured in Figure 4.2.
FIGURE 4.2 First artwork from the Henry Drawing Machine
Doesn’t it look like an abstract painting that you might find in a gallery somewhere, with dozens of connoisseurs surrounding it, analyzing the meaning behind the artist’s vision?
Unfortunately, this wasn’t the case. Computer art, as it was referred to back in those times, was not particularly respected by the art world. Perhaps this was because computers were lifeless machines that crunched numbers all day, or they resembled the machines that churned out Coca‐Colas on a factory line. Or, perhaps it was because their creators were nerds who obsessed over the minutiae of something no one understood, not eccentric and lively artists with whom you’d love to have a conversation.
Regardless of the reasons, computer art remained the distant step‐cousin of the art world for decades. “It’s not real art” was the popular and entirely ridiculous response to this style of creation.
Despite the hate, believers in computer art chugged along and formed their own communities of support.
In 1967, the nonprofit Experiments in Art and Technology was formed following a series of performances the previous year called “9 Evenings: Theatre and Engineering,” where 10 contemporary artists joined forces with 30 engineers and scientists from Bell Labs to showcase the use of new technologies in art.
In 1968, the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London hosted one of the most influential early exhibitions of computer art, called “Cybernetic Serendipity.” Also in 1968, the Computer Arts Society was founded to promote the use of computers in artwork.
Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, much of the digital art created was dependent on the use of mathematics, using early algorithms and math to generate abstract art. Digital art was almost entirely siloed to the engineers interested in pushing the limits of technology or the few artists who had the foresight to test this new form of creation.
Artistry has always required a technical understanding of the medium used, along with an understanding of art composition. Whether the medium is pastel on canvas, graphite on paper, or chisel against marble, the technical understanding of how the materials react with the surface wasn’t insurmountable. It just took practice.
Early digital art was no different in that you had to understand the medium, which at the time meant understanding how computers operated. For this reason, many of the early digital artists were computer programmers.
Then a tectonic shift happened in 1984 that would change not only “how” computer art was created but more importantly “who” could create it.
Steve Jobs was on the scene at Apple, and his first major release was the Macintosh computer, whose main advantage was the graphical user interface (GUI). GUIs were paramount in that they presented computing through icons and windows, allowing the average person to interact with computers. Not to mention, for just $195, Mac users could purchase MacPaint and have the ability to create their own digital art. Personal computers gave every artist the ability to create digital art. As we discussed earlier in this chapter, Commodore followed up Apple the following year with its Amiga 1000 computer and the Deluxe Paint software.
In the decade that followed, iconic software developed specifically for the purposes of creating digital art began popping up: Adobe Photoshop in 1988 and Corel Painter in 1990, for example. And then in 1992, Wacom created one of the first tablet computers where users interacted with the computer through a cordless stylus—a digital artist’s dream.
Because software made the creation of digital art easier, more artists began using the tools and forming communities to share their experiences. Recognizing that digital art was taking off but had no central place to display, the Austin Museum of Digital Art was launched in 1997, entirely for the display and promotion of digital creations. A couple of years later, the Digital Art Museum launched the first online museum for digital art. (And a little over a decade later, the Museum of Modern Art came to its senses and created a Digital Art Vault containing more than 4,000 works of digital art.)
Coupling these emerging digital art communities with the increasing use of visual effects in movies and complex virtual worlds in video games meant that more of society was being exposed to digital art throughout the 1980s and 1990s, whether they recognized it or not.
When Henry was building his Henry Drawing Machine in the 1950s, he wasn’t concerned with the art world not respecting his creations. He believed it to be art. Early digital artists were breaking barriers and taking the brunt of the hate for it. Just a few decades later, digital art was taking over the world. And people were finally beginning to appreciate it.
Digital Art Starts to Sell
Unsurprisingly, the Internet lent a major hand to the growth of digital art. Launched in 2005, Behance.net became the de facto place to share one’s portfolio of digital art and land commercial projects. Emi Haze, for example, built a strong following on Behance and landed projects with Apple and Wacom and even became one of the few digital artists honored during Adobe’s 25th Anniversary.
Flash‐forward to 2013 when one of the most monumental moments in digital art history took place. The Phillips Auction House and Tumblr teamed up to hold the first‐ever digital art auction, selling 16 pieces of digital art for a total of $90,600. Although various blockchains existed at the time, they didn’t employ the technology to secure the rights of this digital artwork. Rather, they simply delivered to each buyer a hard drive containing a file of the work.
Just a year later, though, blockchain and art would finally collide for the first‐ever NFT, or, as they referred to it at the time, monetized graphics.
In 2014, an event called Seven on Seven was held in New York City. Designed much like a hackathon, where artists and technologists are brought together to collaborate and spark ideas, one of the random pairings occurred between Kevin McCoy and Anil Dash. Dash was working as a consultant to auction houses; McCoy, as a digital artist and professor at New York University.
This was during Tumblr’s heyday, when digital assets of all kinds were shared far and wide, often without any attribution at all. McCoy was one of the many digital artists whose works went viral on Tumblr, but he didn’t receive very much credit, or any remuneration. Needless to say, he was already looking into the application of blockchain to digital art.
In an article in The Atlantic, Dash outlined the event:
“By the wee hours of the night, McCoy and I had hacked together a first version of a blockchain‐backed means of asserting ownership over an original digital work. Exhausted and a little loopy, we gave our creation an ironic name: monetized graphics. Our first live demonstration was at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York City, where the mere phrase monetized graphics prompted knowing laughter from an audience wary of corporate‐sounding intrusions into the creative arts. McCoy used a blockchain called Namecoin to register a video clip that his wife had previously made, and I bought it with the four bucks in my wallet…But the NFT prototype we created in a one‐night hackathon had some shortcomings. You couldn’t store the actual digital artwork in a blockchain; because of technical limits, records in most blockchains are too small to hold an entire image…Seven years later, all of today’s popular NFT platforms still use the same shortcut.”
Although McCoy and Dash didn’t pursue the idea further, they demonstrated the possibilities. And that was enough for the time being.
Just a year later, QuHarrison Terry and Ryan Cowdrey co‐founded 23VIVI, the world’s first digital art marketplace using the Bitcoin blockchain to create certificates of authenticity.
Cowdrey recalls:
“Selling digital art in 2015 was no laughing matter. First of all, we were using the Bitcoin blockchain to create proof of ownership. This was super slow. Especially when compared to the Ethereum blockchain that is used for most NFTs today. But the other main roadblock was the market. People didn’t understand digital art, let alone consider purchasing it. So, we leaned on our connections. More than half of all our sales started with our friends and family. And even then, it was a challenge convincing a friend to spend $20 on a digital file.”
Find any early digital art dealer, and they’ll tell you a similar story about selling their first pieces to friends and family.
In an interview with Gary Vaynerchuk, the cofounder of CryptoKitties, Mik Naayem said the following:
“When we created CryptoKitties, I was trying to get all of my friends to buy CryptoKitties. And I couldn’t. Like they’d look at me, they’d look at the cats and be like ‘this is complicated.’”
Little did they know that CryptoKitties would catch on and become one of the first instances of NFT success. So, what are CryptoKitties?
The Internet has a unique relationship with cats to say the least. The Internet has famous cats such as Grumpy Cat, Lil Bub, Nyan Cat, and Colonel Meow. In 2015, CNN estimated that there were more than 6.5 billion pictures of cats on the Internet. One of the earliest reasons for people to go on YouTube was to watch funny cat videos, and it’s estimated that today YouTube videos featuring felines as the main subject have racked up more than 26 billion views. ThoughtCatalog has even coined them the official mascot of the Internet.
Therefore, it should come as no surprise that the first NFTs to reach a critical mass were a collection of NFTs featuring digital cat artworks. Launched in November 2017 by Dapper Labs, CryptoKitties are an Ethereum blockchain game where users can buy, collect, breed, and sell virtual cats. The game was launched with 100 “Founder Kitties,” with one “Gen 0” cat released every 15 minutes. The game was a nearly instant hit.
TechCrunch reported a few days after the launch that more than $1.3 million had already been transacted for CryptoKitties. The blockchain game had such a demand that it accounted for more than 15 percent of Ethereum’s network traffic at the end of 2017. Three CryptoKitties are pictured in Figure 4.3.
FIGURE 4.3 Three CryptoKitties: #1, Genesis; #222, Koshkat; and #1992771, Holly
These were more than a Beanie Baby–like collectible, though. The game offered a unique breeding (or as they refer to it, siring) feature. Basically, an owner puts their CryptoKitty up to sire for a specified amount of Ethereum (ETH). When someone agrees to that price, the two CryptoKitties breed. The person who put their kitty up for sire gets the Ethereum, and the other owner receives the resulting CryptoKitty.
Coded into each kitten is a 256‐bit genome that holds the genetic sequence to all of the different combinations that kittens can have. Background color, cooldown time, whiskers, beards, stripes, and so on are all of the “genes” that these CryptoKitties can have.
The demand for certain “cattributes” grew in the community of collectors. Dapper Labs never set a rarity on the different features. What collectors wanted grew entirely organically.
Less than four months later, with an Internet commerce phenomenon on their hands, the team behind CryptoKitties raised $12 million from acclaimed investors such as Union Square Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz. Since then, Dapper Labs has rolled out NBA Top Shots, has its own blockchain called Flow, and has UFC‐themed digital collectibles in the works.
Undoubtedly, CryptoKitties has played a massive role in raising the awareness of owning digital assets. Who knows where we’d be today without them?
We cannot talk about digital art hits without mentioning Curio Cards or CryptoPunks, the first and second (respectively) NFT projects to store proof of ownership on the Ethereum blockchain.
Curio Cards, launched on May 9, 2017, feature 30 unique series of NFT cards from 7 different artists. The project was largely created to show a new model for digital art ownership, in many ways, as an example for others to follow. To show its age, Curio Cards were developed before the ERC‐721 NFT standard was proposed (the standard used on marketplaces like OpenSea today)—making them somewhat obsolete. However, they developed a token contract that allows owners to “wrap” their Curio Card in another token, thus making them functional on modern NFT marketplaces.
Artistically, Curio Cards took this revolutionary technology to heart and designed the series of cards to tell the story of mankind up to digital art. Starting with #1, featuring an apple that represents the creation story, and ending with #30, featuring the first GIF ever created.
And then there were CryptoPunks. Launched in June 2017 by Larva Labs, CryptoPunks are 10,000 unique collectible characters created in the style of Pixel Art, which has a rich history dating back to games like Space Invaders and Pac‐Man. When they launched, Larva Labs literally gave CryptoPunks away to anyone who’d accept them. In 2021, OpenSea estimates the total volume of CryptoPunks transacted at more than 172,000 ETH, with nine CryptoPunks being sold for a collective $17 million in May 2021.
While many digital artists and collectors have found success over the past few years in NFTs and the headline‐grabbing transaction sizes seem to be getting bigger and more absurd, they wouldn’t be here without the rich history of digital artists before them.
The pioneers who experimented with technology to create digital art, the early adopters who started events and galleries to promote digital art, and the first innovators in blockchain‐backed digital art who pushed digital art ownership into the foreground laid the foundation for the Beeples, the Gronkowskis, and the CryptoKitties to thrive.
In the words of Isaac Newton, “If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” The giants in the world of digital art had to put up with droves of people saying that their art wasn’t “real art.” And while they may never receive the credit (nor the dollars) that they deserve, they made it possible for digital artists of all kinds to monetize their creations in the medium for which they intended it.