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From CryptoPunk to HashMasks: Why Digital Identity Artworks Are Exploding

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People just want to find their unique, irreplaceable, and most iconic things in the blockchain world, and find their own personality.

Original Author: Tang Han

Original Source: CryptoC

Editor's Note||

We are in an era of great migration. More and more people began to migrate to the blockchain, where they gained their wealth and friends, reshaped their values, found their beliefs and their careers. Such an experience is hard to imagine for anyone in any other industry. This is a brand new world, so they also need a brand new face to separate themselves from their heavy, trivial and difficult-to-change identities offline. The explosion of CryptoPunk and HashMasks all originated from this.

New legends are being born in the field of encryption art every day, and HashMasks is the most dazzling one recently.

On January 28th, Suum Cuique Labs from Zug, Switzerland launched the digital art collection HashMasks . Created by more than 70 artists around the world, the work is a collection of 16,384 unique digital portraits. Although each digital portrait is different, the most basic structural frame of the picture is similar, but the various elements on the frame are different. For example, a human face is fixed in the middle of the picture, and the human face can be a man, a woman, or a robot; almost all of them have masks on their faces, and the masks can be tigers, elephants, skulls, etc. Including the clothes on their bodies, the props in their hands, and the background they are in, there are also corresponding different elements.

HashMasks

The reprint of CryptoPunk

There is no doubt that Hashmasks is closely related to encryption in terms of the number of works, content theme and expression form of works. The classic work of art CryptoPunks is highly similar. At the beginning of 2017, before the birth of ERC-20 tokens, Larva Labs produced 10,000 "punks" of "24*24" pixels. Their approach is to randomly mix some selected characteristics (such as sunglasses, skin color, hairstyle, etc.) into characterized punk artwork. Sports salute.

CryptoPunk

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No piece of "cypherpunk" art looks alike, and some types of punk seem rarer than others. For example, only nine "cypherpunk" artworks depict "aliens," most of which represent humans, but some of them look like zombies, and a few of them look like orangutans. At this point, HashMasks also borrows from CryptoPunk, such as robot avatars are more scarce than male avatars. Even in terms of names, the two projects are very symmetrical.

HashMasks has been as successful as CryptoPunk. As of the morning of February 2nd, Hashmasks sold all 16,384 pieces of digital art collections, raising a total of 10,243 Ethereum, currently worth nearly 14.2 million US dollars.

HashMasks has taken a new step in open art

Different from CryptoPunk, in NFT Today, with technology and DeFi gameplay so developed, and open art practices becoming more mature, HashMasks has introduced more gameplay. First of all, in terms of the form of the work, the content of HashMasks is richer, and it is no longer a 24*24" pixel "punk" avatar (obviously the project is not led by programmers). Secondly, HashMasks distributes part of the creation rights of the works to the collector community. After the collectors purchase the artwork, they can add new content to the work, and this content also determines the future value of the artwork to some extent . Finally, HashMasks introduced the auction of creation rights and designed the operation mechanism of creation rights tokens. The second and third points are the most commendable features of HashMasks.

As early as two months ago, the author pointed out in the article "Blockchain: The Road to "Open Art"" that the most remarkable thing about encryption art It is to lead art to openness. One of the characteristics of open art is communityization, which blurs the boundaries between creators and collectors. From the moment the artwork is put on the market by the creator, it seems to be completed, but in fact it is in an unfinished state. It just goes from one person to another group of people, and the community will participate in its new processing, reinterpret the core of the work, and even change the core of the work. Therefore, the work does not flow in the market rigidly; in the process of flowing, it also changes itself openly. As a result, more and more people are willing to participate, and the right to speak in the art market has also been transferred from a small group of people to the hands of the public.

Here at HashMasks, they open up the naming rights of their works. Each NFT work has no name when it is created, and the buyer of the work has the right to name it, such as Trump, Satoshi, etc. The name of the work cannot be repeated, and each name is unique, marking the identity of the digital portrait in the encrypted world.

A good name can increase the value of the work, but a bad name can depreciate it, and collectors’ actions also affect the subsequent performance of the artwork in the market . Artist CryptoCobain, a popular figure in the crypto community with 220,000 followers, certainly sees the importance of this. He said:

"If you can think of a good name, name it. If you can't suggest selling NCT to buy more Hashmasks, or keep NCT don't Naming, because NCT itself has value."

NCT is the named token of HashMasks. Here, the author prefers to call it a creation token, which marks the collector's right to modify the work. With the deepening of open art practice, the author believes that the probability of creating tokens will increase in the future, and it will not be limited to naming, but will extend to the core of the work.

According to the rules formulated by Suum Cuique Labs, every rename of a work needs to consume 1,830 NCT. Auctioneers who participate in the 14-day initial sale can obtain 3,660 NCT at the same time after obtaining the NFT work, that is, the right to change the name of the work twice. In addition, each Hashmask work will be distributed to collectors according to the amount of 10 NCT per day. If a collector holds a work for one year, he can get 3650 NCT, which is equivalent to two naming rights.

It is worth mentioning that the total amount of NCT is limited, even deflationary. After 10 years, NCT will stop producing, and the tokens can only be destroyed until there are no NCT tokens in circulation in the market. By that time, no one will be able to change the name of the work in hand.

What if someone wants to change the name of the work immediately, and at the same time lacks NCT tokens? He can buy it from the market. Since NCT itself corresponds to a right to modify the work, and this right may increase the value of the work itself, the token itself is valuable. Coupled with its own deflationary attributes, NCT itself will form a hyped buying and selling market. In this way, the NFT (non-fungible token) ownership market of the work and the FT (fungible token) creation right market behind the work are established at the same time.

HashMasks is highly similar to CryptoPunk in the category of works, if it is not for the creative rights market it introduces, there is nothing innovative. However, the introduction of this new design of the creative rights market is enough for HashMasks to leave a mark on the history of open art.

Looking for an identity coat in the encrypted world

From the subject matter point of view, the explosion of HashMasks is related to There is a certain consistency between CryptoPunks, they all construct a set of digital portraits. The theme of digital portraits is sought after by crypto players, and there are deep internal reasons. Let's start with the practice of CryptoPunk.

Larva Labs launched CryptoPunk as a tribute to the cypherpunk movement that Timothy May co-founded in the early 1990s. At first, they had no idea which punk avatars would be more popular, nor did they know what their buyer base would look like.

At the beginning of 2019, some people conducted a survey and found that the punk images that many people choose to buy are very similar to someone. This "someone" can be themselves, they family members, or celebrities.

CryptoPunk collector Jason Bailey once said that although the avatar in his collection has gold earrings and a top, it is very similar to himself, which has become Profile picture of his Twitter account. Another collector, who didn't want to be named, but owns three cypherpunks, said two of his collection looked like his daughter and another looked like his wife.

Andrei Alexin, CEO of Snark.art, is a loyal buyer of CryptoPunk. His strategy is to collect "cypherpunk" artwork that looks like celebrities, because this kind of cypherpunk is more valuable in the long run. One of his punk avatars looks a lot like German artist Joseph Beuys. In the buyer community, many people have adopted the same buying strategy as Andre. In case CryptoPunk explodes and these celebrities want to have a new identity image in the digital world, the person who has a collection of punk avatars similar to celebrities is undoubtedly the biggest winner.

CryptoPunk has no intentions. But their practice shows that people are keen to find a spiritual anchor in the encrypted world, a new skin to mark their identity in the new world. Just like in the world of Glory of Kings, you need to choose a character and a favorite skin for yourself.

On this point, Hashmasks further explained on Medium:

"NFT is not just Digital art is also a digital identity. Especially in the younger generation, sometimes the digital identity has surpassed the physical identity in importance, and nowadays it seems more important to have a photo of a moment worth sharing on social media Instagram itself is more important, and this trend will only accelerate, not reverse. In the near future, identity is likely to be completely digital, and your identity online will be more important than at home and in the real world. Digital identity will become the gateway to the outside world. The window to the soul of the world, that's the first thing people think of you. Hashmasks are designed to be portraits of digital identities, and as long as the Internet and Ethereum continue to exist, your name will be engraved on the contract."

Whether it is CryptoPunk or HashMasks, they are essentially providing them with such a skin. However, CryptoPunk was the earliest and most classic in the industry. It has stood the test of time like the classic Hermès models in the crypto art world skins. Whether HashMasks can become a work like CryptoPunk will take time to test.

Summary

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The era of FT has reached its youth, while the era of NFT has just begun. Three years ago, the artist Kevin Arbosh once created a sentence: "I am a coin". Now we can say to change it to: "I am a NFT."

I am a NFT, not a FT, this is what human beings do in the blockchain world ultimate quest. People just want to find their unique, irreplaceable, and most iconic things in the blockchain world, and find their own personality. What Bitcoin once could be a symbol of a niche group is losing that role. It can be seen that NFT is meeting this demand, and the artwork of digital identity in the future will go further.