PridePunks
|
PridePunks is an NFT derivative art project created by Dennison Bertram and deployed on the Ethereum blockchain on June 23, 2018. The project was designed as a celebration of diversity in Web3 and launched exactly one year after CryptoPunks during pride month 2018. PridePunks are believed to potentially be the first derivative NFT collection as well as the first known pride NFT collection.
Early history
In 2018, Dennison Bertram was a budding artist and web developer. Dennison occupied a WeWork office in NYC adjacent to the OpenSea team. This proximity and exposure helped inspire him to create his own NFT collection.
As an NFT enthusiast and CryptoPunks holder, he wanted to create a project to celebrate diversity in Web3. He decided to create a new 10,000 supply collection of CryptoPunks but with a rainbow background. On June 23, 2018 Dennison deployed the PridePunks smart contract and posted a message in the CryptoPunks Discord sharing it with other CryptoPunk holders.
CryptoPunk holders could lock their CryptoPunk inside the PridePunk contract to mint the corresponding PridePunk. The design however was inadequate because at the time it didn’t seem possible to take possession of an NFT and mint a new NFT in a 100% trustless way. This problem would remain unsolved until the CryptoPunk wrapper was released over a year later on September 8, 2020.[1] While imperfect, PridePunks were a very early experiment with wrapping which was quite novel for the time.
Although the PridePunks name was used in all communications at the time, Dennison dubbed the original contract "MetaPunks". The project didn't gain much attention at the time with only two CryptoPunks being wrapped to create two PridePunks leaving 9,998 PridePunks unclaimed. With the lack of interest in the collection Dennison moved on to other things.
Recent events
In late 2021, Dennison began experimenting with a smart contact system that would allow you to mint PridePunks without wrapping a CryptoPunk. Dennison notified his Twitter followers of his progress periodically and several of his followers found the contract he was working on and minted prior to the completion of the updates. As such, those PridePunks do not have numbered asset markers.
The official re-release minting occurred on March, 23, 2022 and 9,640 of the 10,000 PridePunks were minted.
A month later on April 23, 2022 Dennison improperly assigned the MetaPunk Controller contract which essentially locked the contract forever and resulted in the burning of all PridePunks above #9672 including the reserved aliens and apes which had been reserved and were intended to be minted for the PridePunks DAO.
During pride month 2022, M.Shadows, of Avenged Sevenfold used a PridePunk NFT as his Twitter profile picture. [2]
Supply and rarity
There is a trustless hardcap of 9,640 PridePunks forever. Two PridePunks were minted in 2018 by wrapping their corresponding CryptoPunk inside and were later unwrapped. 9,640 PridePunks were minted in 2022 without wrapping the corresponding CryptoPunks inside. Due to the numbered release, some of the rarest assets were withheld to avoid bot manipulation during the mint. This includes token IDs: 635, 2890, 3100, 3443, 5822, 5905, 6089, 7523, 7804, 372, 1021, 2140, 2243, 2386, 2460, 2491, 2711, 2924, 4156, 4178, 4464, 5217, 5314, 5577, 5795, 6145, 6915, 6965, 7191, 8219, 8498, 9265, and 9280. These were mostly aliens and ape. Along with all of the tokens above #9672 they were effectively burned during the improperly assigned MetaPunk Controller incident. The result is that there are a single alien PridePunk and no ape Pridepunks.
References
- ↑ etherscan.io. “Wrapped PUNKS: WPUNKS Token | Address 0xb7f7f6c52f2e2fdb1963eab30438024864c313f6 | Etherscan.” Ethereum (ETH) Blockchain Explorer, 2020, etherscan.io/address/0xb7f7f6c52f2e2fdb1963eab30438024864c313f6. Accessed 26 July 2022.
- ↑ https://twitter.com/shadows_eth/status/1532022595175952384?s=20&t=3G7E1HWRL3v_G376qoJDkA