CryptoPunks

“Every single art movement in history starts with portraits. They always involve the portrait.”

“Definitely the early NFTs, the OG NFTs, and we're talking things like Crypto punks and rare pepes, you know, from 2016, 2017 for the punks. Those are just very rare OG NFTs that are here to stay because Gigantic communities formed around them, and there's been…”

“Now what we're seeing with Bored Ape Yacht Club, which is another NFT project that's similar to CryptoPunks, and that there's only 10,000 of these kind of rare apes, right, is that traditional brands are starting to build interesting things on top of Bored Ape…”

“The reason I went into NFTs more than currency is my theory is if Ethereum loses, I can bridge over my crypto punks, right? So to me, the NFT asset class feels in a lot of ways, like an easier bet. If you feel like you really know which NFTs you want to invest…”

“And so the founder of Figma, which is like a multi-billion dollar design company he is a big NFT collector. He owned one of the most rare CryptoPunks.”

“The challenge with CryptoPunks or so on is that, The cultural base for that is very, very shallow and very, very recent, and you also, it's very hard to unpick how much of this is somebody that genuinely thinks that thing is worth a million dollars of their mo…”

“And just because there's another CryptoPunk competitor, it doesn't necessarily mean that they can just take over through better marketing, because better marketing has a hard, will hit a hard wall against tribalism and a building identity around something that…”

“CryptoPunks, for those of you who aren't familiar, is kind of one of those most famous early NFT projects. I like to call it kind of the first candidate for a true digital antique.”

“I think when we look back in this period and we say what sort of NFTs work and what didn't the key dividing line would be community, right? This is why crypto punks is so strong. This is why NBA top shot is so strong. And I think on contrast, you know, there's…”

“And I think increasingly what we'll see is we'll see more and more services that let you do cool things with them. So maybe you take your crypto punk into a game or you take, you know, a piece of art into the central land, or you do.”

“And the fact that somebody had owned this so early on, it's almost become the status symbol where people want to demonstrate that they can prove their ownership Really early on in this space. And so that ownership history also really matters. Being able to dis…”