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"A Brief Talk on the History of Encryption Art You Don't Know (1)"
Author | Jason
Planning | Vincent
The Fertile Ground of Encrypted Art—Ethereum for Applications
Although the emergence of Counterparty in 2014 gave Bitcoin application developers a glimmer of hope, it is only a plug-in of the Bitcoin blockchain (a program that adds some specific functions to the application through interaction with the application) , only those who have installed this plug-in can use the corresponding function.
This makes the application developed by Counterparty encounter many troubles when promoting it in the Bitcoin community: although the data has been written on the Bitcoin blockchain, users must use Counterparty's blockchain browser and wallet to see it. Issued token assets. Not only that, because Counterparty is developed based on the Bitcoin blockchain, it is also subject to the constraints of high transaction fees and slow transaction speeds on the Bitcoin network.
Let's take a look at the situation of the Bitcoin ecosystem at that time. From the day when the Bitcoin blockchain was born, people are like parents who expect their children to become a dragon, and they keep giving more and more expectations to the blockchain. After several years of practice and discussion, these expectations were gradually refined into several key words:
Programmable Money and Smart Contracts
Digital Assets and Smart Property
DAO/DAC (Decentralized Autonomous Organization/Corporation, decentralized autonomous organization/company)
But the Bitcoin network has been unable to meet these requirements of people. So a new term was proposed: Crypto 2.0.
Mastercoin; Colored Coin; Ripple; BitShares; Ethereum; Counterparty and other projects are all projects born under the Crypto 2.0 trend. Some choose to develop on the Bitcoin blockchain, and some start from scratch and build their own blockchain network.
In 2013, 19-year-old Vitalik Buterin hadn't created Ethereum (Ethereum), he spent 6 months traveling around the world, visiting blockchain developers in various countries. Israel, London, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Amsterdam, and Las Vegas are all lands that Vitalik has set foot on during this time. Most of the projects he visited were trying to build new features on top of the Bitcoin blockchain.
Vitalik arrived in Israel in October 2013, stayed with the MasterCoin team for a long time, and put forward suggestions for improvement of the project, trying to make the project more widely applicable.
But the MasterCoin team did not take his advice.
Maybe it's time to try another, more flexible approach.
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Ethereum Initial White Paper
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Vitalik's first public introduction to Ethereum at Miami's Bitcoin Conference
A year and a half later, Ethereum was officially released, allowing Vitalik to become a god in the first battle, and people gave him the nickname "V God".
V God and Ethereum developer Fabian Vogelsteller created the No. 20 Ethereum Improvement Proposals (Ethereum Improvement Proposals 20, referred to as EIP20) in November 2015: the famous ERC-20 token standard (Ethereum Request for Comments 20) .
What is the significance of customizing ERC-20 as a standard? To give a simple example: the reason why Lego blocks can be put together is because the joints are of the same size. In other words, Lego has set various indicators for the blocks. Whether it is round or square, it can be spliced with old Lego at will. These indicators are the standard of LEGO bricks.
This is also the significance of the ERC-20 token standard, which sets various indicators for the issuance of homogeneous tokens on Ethereum. If tokens are issued according to the ERC-20 standard and applications are developed according to this standard, these ERC-20 tokens can be easily used in these applications. This is beneficial to developers and the Ethereum ecosystem.
The reason why Counterparty is embarrassingly regarded as a plug-in is because the standards produced by Counterparty are only followed by Counterparty itself. The ERC-20 standard is different. It has been included in the update iteration of the Ethereum blockchain, and has been accepted and applied by the entire Ethereum community as a set of general indicators.
An environment like Ethereum is fertile ground for developing blockchain applications. ERC-20 tokens have brought prosperity to the Ethereum application ecosystem and also created Ethereum's first digital trading card project.
ERC-20 First Experience of Digital Trading Cards——Curio Cards
In the first two years of the birth of Ethereum, there has been no digital trading card (Trading Card) project like Rare Pepe Wallet. This continued until May 2017, when Curio Cards went live.
Pictures, videos and other media files are the top priority of all encrypted collection items, often accompanied by two major problems, Curio Cards is naturally unavoidable:
How to Prove Its Ownership and Scarcity
How to ensure that it will not be deleted or tampered with
At that time, ERC-721 tokens did not yet exist. For the first problem, Curio Cards had to learn from the experience of the two predecessors, Spells of Genesis and Rare Pepe Wallet-every time a card is issued, an ERC-20 token is issued corresponding to it. The circulation of tokens is the circulation of this card.
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Curio Cards was very characteristic at the time, but unfortunately it was just a hobby project. The website is no longer updated after only three months of being online. The official Twitter also suddenly stopped updating for several months. It can be seen that the developer's heart is no longer on this project.
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Since it's a relatively casual project, we don't have to take it too seriously. But summarizing its experience and lessons is of great benefit to the "back waves" of encryption art.
Curio Cards is not without the participation of well-known artists, such as CryptoGraffiti. Those who know the encryption art circle must know him.
List of Artists Participating in Curio Cards
CryptoGraffiti is a well-known artist who creates on the theme of encryption. His work Nakamoto was once sold for 17 BTC.
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Nakamoto by CryptoGraffiti - 2014
CryptoGraffiti also tweeted Curio Cards to earn money, but the artist is not obliged to help the platform continue to promote, and it is not bad to post a Twitter.
But it has blocked both roads with its own hands. Curio Cards only has a primary market for selling cards to collectors, but has not developed a secondary market for transactions between collectors. The first 10 types of digital trading cards issued by Curio Cards are all sold out, but since there is no secondary market for collectors to trade conveniently, the prices of these sold-out digital trading cards cannot go up. There is no hotspot.
Plus, the site is pretty darn simple: just your average digital trading card platform. There is no IP, no particularly beloved cards, no stories and gameplay to tell. Let people see the head at a glance. How can this attract people?
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In 2005, two good friends John Watkinson and Matt Hall met at the University of Toronto founded Larva Labs.
After 2011, John Watkinson, who likes punk culture, started to fiddle with the pixel generator, and used it to make 10,000 24x24 pixel punk avatars. Each pixel avatar is different, most are human, others look like zombies, aliens or monkeys.
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But the two founders didn't know what to do with these pixel avatars at first. It so happened that they were considering integrating Bitcoin into the project at the time. Later, they came into contact with Ethereum, which was born for applications, and were immediately attracted. They wanted to see if they could realize unique ownership on Ethereum and make these avatars into unique collections.At that time, the ERC-721 standard had not yet come out, and only ERC-20 was available. After thinking for a long time, they can only bite the bullet and carry out transformation on the basis of ERC-20, striving to realize the function of NFT. In order to make ERC-20 represent a single and unique token, Matt Hall modified the ERC-20 standard and added some functions, and the code is as close as possible to the ERC-20 standard. These changes by Matt made CryptoPunks the first project on Ethereum to use NFT.
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Non-Fungible Token (NFT)
Non-Fungible Token (NFT)
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Even if the images bound by NFT are the same, the tokens can still be distinguished by the information in the number or metadata
CryptoPunks were no peace of mind before they were implemented, either. The founders weren't sure if the project was too high a barrier to entry for users, or whether people would psychologically feel like they actually owned a digital collectible.
But the blockchain also has advantages that people cannot give up. Often people resolve ownership issues by issuing title certificates for digital works. Blockchain basically digitizes this process while adding two powerful features:
Make the transaction of art cheap and fast, no longer need to pay insurance, shipping or storage fees
Trust is provided, eliminating the need for lawyers and middlemen.
After much deliberation, there was no idea. In the end, the two developed this project with an experimental mentality.
June 9, 2017 is a Friday. They named the project CryptoPunks and posted it on Twitter, Reddit and other websites, paying tribute to the Cypherpunks of the early 90s. Everyone can receive these pixel avatars (hereinafter referred to as Punks) for free.
Some members of this group of cypherpunks made a lot of contributions to early blockchain technology, including Hal Finney, the creator of the reusable workload proof system (RPoW), Nick Hal, the creator of smart contracts, Sabo (Nick Szabo). There are many other bigwigs in this group: Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, Bram Cohen, the creator of BitTorrent, Zooko Wilcox-O'Hearn, the founder of Zcash, etc.
However, like all small projects, CryptoPunks lacked exposure. Although the project party is full of sincerity, claiming that everyone can receive pixel avatars (hereinafter referred to as Punks) for free, but this has not brought much attention to the project. The two founders were very frustrated, but they did not give up. The pair then got in touch with well-known internet news blog Mashable, who introduced them to CryptoPunks.
Let's take a look at the situation in the currency circle in 2017: At the beginning of 2017, the price of Ethereum was only about 10 US dollars. By the peak of the bull market in early 2018, the price exceeded 1,350 US dollars, far exceeding the 20-fold increase of Bitcoin in the same period. Among them, the chaos of ICO (Initial Coin Offering, which refers to raising funds by issuing cryptocurrencies) raised a total of more than one billion US dollars from the world in 2017, which is the main contributor to this hundred-fold increase.
Thanks to the ERC-20 token standard, it is convenient and fast to issue tokens on Ethereum, making most ICOs choose to be conducted on the Ethereum blockchain. Since it is conducted on the Ethereum blockchain, it is necessary to use the Ethereum cryptocurrency to participate. As a result, people bought a lot of Ethereum, driving up the price of Ethereum. When it is crazy, as long as the project has a concept and a white paper and then pulls a big boss platform, a large number of people will queue up to throw money into it. It is not too incisive to sum up this period with "people are stupid, rich in money, come quickly".
The crazy ICO chaos made seven ministries and commissions issue the "Announcement on Preventing the Risk of Token Issuance and Financing"
Ethereum price on June 9, 2017
Data Sources:https://www.coindesk.com/ICO-tracker
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Data Sources:
Although the environment in the currency circle seems to be very good, the two founders are still immersed in the previous blow at this time, thinking in their hearts, "Will anyone really care about this project?"
As a result, the demand for the secondary market quickly emerged, and the smart Matt has already written the market transaction function into the contract. But then they discovered a very serious problem, the contract has a bug: when the buyer bids to buy the seller's Punk, the contract will actually distribute the funds to the buyer—in other words, the buyer can free the seller's Punk at will.
Due to the immutable nature of the blockchain, Matt and John can only choose to replace the new contract. Fortunately, this turmoil did not cause too much dissatisfaction among Punks holders. After the new contract was changed in June, CryptoPunks were still hot. There were several alien-looking Punks that were sold at a price of 8 or 10 ETH in early July (the price of 1 ETH was about 290 US dollars at the time).
Punk No. 6089
Calculated by ETH, the most expensive CryptoPunks has been fired to 100 ETH (about 146,000 RMB at the time)
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The popularity of CryptoPunks made the two founders famous, and they were reported by the New York Times and the Financial Times in 2018.
So far, the story of CryptoPunks has come to an end. Its success and resulting influence, as well as the efforts made to realize NFT, have had a profound impact on the crypto art circle.
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Unique art community - DADA
DADA is an old website, it was launched as early as November 2012. The website has 3 founders: Beatriz Helena Ramos, Judy Mam and Abraham Milano. Ramos was born in Venezuela, an illustrator by training, and moved to New York in 1996. She has produced TV cartoons for Disney and MTV, and directed more than 100 commercials and short films.
At the beginning of its launch, DADA intends to create an online creative and talent exchange community for artists across multiple art disciplines, starting with visual artists, and then gradually expanding users to musicians, writers, architects and filmmakers. The site back then allowed users to upload their own work, create their own portfolios, and email them to others.
In September 2013, the website launched the creation panel, allowing users to create directly on the website.
DADA's painting page
In August 2014, DADA updated a new function: reply and communicate with drawing. In mainstream social media, the vast majority of people communicate in text. DADA has a different approach: if you want to communicate with others and respond to other people's artistic creations, please use your paintings to express.
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The founders call this type of communication a visual conversation. DADA also deleted the function of uploading pictures, even if you are the reincarnation of Van Gogh, you have to recreate it on the website. These updates drastically changed the website, allowing DADA to focus on serving painting users. Turn this place into a place where people with visual aesthetic literacy create and communicate online.
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Visual Dialogue Branch 1
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Visual Dialogue Branch 2
Changes in website functions have also resulted in changes in the user structure, and the proportion of amateur creators is increasing. By the end of 2015, DADA already had 70,000 users and more than 35,000 works.
In February 2016, Ramos slammed many artists for spending so much time building their personal brands in an article. She believes that in this process, the artist did not create anything of value, and the artist should use their time to create. She hopes to build DADA into a platform that allows people to develop while maintaining their authenticity. On DADA, users will be rewarded based on their contributions, not the number of fans they have.
There is always a distance between reality and dreams. Ramos, who harbors anarchist ideals, has already faced three mountains:
Food and clothing for artists: Less than 1% of artists can make a living from their own works. If artists are required to keep creating and not bother to manage their own brands, then they must provide income protection. After all, food and clothing cannot be solved, so how can we talk about creation? ?
Rights and Interests of Amateur Creators: Although amateurs do not make a living from creation, they provide content and make contributions to the community. How should their creative rights be guaranteed?
In fact, all the above problems boil down to one word: money.
DADA has tried to do this. In June 2016, DADA opened a store on the TeePublic website, artists will receive 20% of the proceeds, and DADA will receive 10%. Artists only need to focus on creation, and everything else is handled by DADA and TeePublic.
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DADA merchandise on Teepublic
In July 2016, the blockchain blog platform Steemit was launched, and content creators can get STEEM tokens in return. A year later, Judy Mam, the co-founder of DADA, opened an account on Steemit and expressed his interest in Steemit, a model that encourages community participation and creation through tokens. This pattern seems to provide a solution to the problem mentioned earlier.
The founders who have been in the traditional art circle for many years have also seen that in recent years, people in the traditional art circle have begun to try to use blockchain technology to provide verification and ownership record services for artworks.
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Verisart Provides Artwork Verification and Ownership Services Using Blockchain
The application of blockchain in the traditional art circle, the incentive mechanism of Steemit, the success of Rare Pepe Wallet and CryptoPunks gave the founders a sense of enlightenment, and seemed to see the hope of solving the problem. From October to November 2017, DADA published three articles to sort out their ideas.
Leverage the blockchain for IP protection and proof of ownership, and put artworks created on the platform on the market;
Establish a point mechanism to prevent low-scorers from creating low-quality works that destroy other people's visual dialogues and ensure the quality of visual dialogues.
However, DADA only realized some of these ideas back then.
Points function of the website
On October 31, 2017, DADA launched the digital art market function on the eve of Halloween, and at the same time released the first set of blockchain-based digital artwork: Creeps & Weirdos series. Like the approach adopted by Curio Cards, they store images of artworks on IPFS, and use ERC20 tokens to solve the problems of proof of ownership and scarcity.
Creeps & Weirdos Series
Since then, DADA has embarked on the road of trying to realize the ideal with blockchain.
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Detonate the powder keg of encrypted collectibles——CryptoKitties
Many people only know that CryptoKitties (encryption cat) was once very popular and expensive, but they don't know its background. Today's achievements of CryptoKitties are inseparable from Axiom Zen, the venture capital company behind it.
Axiom Zen was established in 2012, with company founder Roham Gharegozlou as CEO. In October 2013, CTO Dieter Shirley joined the company. The addition of the tech dude, who received his first bitcoin in 2010, injected the blockchain DNA into the company.
In fact, CryptoKitties is not the first blockchain project of the Axiom Zen team. In 2014, the team won the Money 20/20 Hackathon held in Las Vegas (also known as a programming marathon, which refers to an event where a group of developers gather together to develop creative development projects).
In 2015, Mack Flavelle, known as "Fat Cat", joined Axiom Zen as the chief creative officer. It was this fat guy who had the idea of putting cats on the blockchain. So far, the key figures for the birth of CryptoKitties have gathered together.
Many people must have a question: there are so many animals to choose from, why choose cats? The chief creative officer "Fat Cat" answered this way: "If you want to make products that interest consumers, then don't ask why cats are used, it is better to think about why cats are not used."
CTO Dieter Shirley made a key contribution to the project in September 2017 by publishing the first draft of the ERC-721 token.
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The first draft of the ERC-721 token standard published on September 20, 2017
CryptoPunks are clearly mentioned in the draft, which shows the impact of CryptoPunks on the birth of CryptoKitties.
Among the participants of ETHWaterloo, there are many big names: V God, the founder of Ethereum, Joseph Lubin, the founder of ConsenSys, Will Warren, the co-founder of 0x, and so on.
The CryptoKitties team launched a test version of CryptoKitties in the hackathon, and also gave away 50 CryptoKitties to the participants of ETHWaterloo. Holders of encrypted cats can pair the two kittens in their hands to breed new kittens. By the end of the 36-hour hackathon, the total number of cryptokitties had reached more than 1,500. In the end, the CryptoKitties team successfully became one of the 8 winning teams and won a lot of attention in the circle.
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CryptoKitties team participating in ETHWaterloo
CryptoKitties not only has excellent technicians and good products, it also has good luck.
The launch of Encryption Kitties is like throwing a nuclear bomb, and staggering situations ensued:
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Genesis Cat No. 1
Cryptokitties Price Ranking
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The first and third places are contracts of CryptoKitties
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The number of pending transactions on Ethereum has soared since CryptoKitties went live
On December 6, the 8th day of launch, the total number of cryptokitties exceeded 100,000.
So far, the story of CryptoKitties has basically come to an end, but the story of ERC-721 continues.
A buddy named William Entriken saw related reports just when Bitcoin reached the peak of the bull market. So he decided to develop an application himself. If you want to develop, you must first learn programming. He started looking for smart contract teaching videos on YouTube. Soon he found that the content of these videos was incomplete and there was no way to learn.
Then he found a blockchain developer to teach him programming, and gave him $3,000 for tuition. However, just a few days before the programming class was due to start, the developer contacted him saying that the market was too hot and teaching programming class was too distracting, and refunded the tuition. William Entriken was dumbfounded at once, and in desperation, he was forced to teach himself.
Unexpectedly, this website became popular on the Internet after it was launched in August 2005. The traffic ranking of the website once ranked 127th in the world. You must know that CoinMarketCap, which has the highest traffic in the blockchain circle, ranks in the hundreds of traffic when the market is hottest. One can imagine how popular The Million Dollar Homepage was at that time.
The Million Dollar Homepage has such high traffic, and the advertising fee is so cheap, the cost performance of advertising here is simply too high.
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The Million Dollar Homepage
The pixels sold out in January 2006, raising a total of $1,037,100 (the last 1,000 pixels were auctioned off on eBay for $38,100).
But he ignored the most crucial thing: In a bear market, people are all focused on the sharp drop in currency prices, and they all want to keep their own money instead of throwing money into projects. Bear markets also don't have the right environment for speculation. Excuse me, how is this project going to be popular?
In order to realize this project, William Entriken needs to distinguish each pixel on the blockchain. In order to save time, he wanted to find out if there was any ready-to-use code, so Dieter Shirley's ERC-721 standard came into his eyes. At that time, ERC-721 still needed to be perfected, but Dieter Shirley was busy working on the encrypted cat project. So William perfected the ERC-721 standard and launched this project called Su Squares.
Few Pixels Sold
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William Entriken becomes lead author of ERC-721 standard
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The establishment of the encryption art circle - Rare Digital Art Festival
Perhaps it is seeing the growing prosperity of the encrypted art circle. On December 3, 2017, Joe Looney, the founder of Rare Pepe Wallet, suggested on Twitter: Maybe it’s time for those of us who engage in encrypted collections to come out and meet.
In the end, a group that was planning to establish a digital art market at the time: RARE Art Labs hosted the event. The event was named Rare Digital Art Festival and was held in New York on January 13, 2018.
The organizer team originally thought that there would only be 20 or 30 people attending the meeting, but they did not expect more than 300 people to attend in the end.
People from the crypto art/collectibles/games team, Sotheby's Art Institute students concerned about blockchain technology, artists and supporters of crypto collectibles gathered here. This gathering allowed the originally independent development teams and artists to really get acquainted with each other, making encrypted art truly a circle.
The popularity of CryptoKitties and the bull market in the currency circle have brought a group of new encrypted art projects and artists into the encrypted art circle:
DADA
After the party, DADA, CryptoPunks and CryptoKitties also continued to cultivate in the blockchain field.
In May 2018, DADA was invested by ConsenSys Labs, a well-known venture capital department of Ethereum
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In February 2019, a set of 40 visual dialogue works created by 11 artists was released on the DADA Art Market: Descontrol Series. Each work is limited to 1 and issued using ERC-721 tokens.
Descontrol series
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CryptoPunks
Descontrol series
On July 11, 2018, together with DADA, we participated in the Art + Tech Summit held by Christie's, a world-renowned auction house. Afterwards, CryptoPunks was exhibited at the Kate Vass Galerie in Zurich.
The two founders of Larva Labs also developed the first Ethereum-based on-chain generative art: Autoglyphs. Started their new blockchain exploration journey.
CryptoKitties
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