CryptoPunks creators: from art experiment to cultural movement

Before crypto was an industry, before NFTs were a category, two artists were experimenting with code, identity, and digital ownership, mostly just to see what would happen. They released 10,000 characters into the wild. No roadmap, no pitch, no expectations. What followed wasn't just a new kind of art. It was a new kind of belonging, a way that people began to relate to identity, ownership, and culture on the Internet. Today's conversation isn't about markets or prices. It's about how meaning spreads, how movements form without leaders, and what happens when creators step back and let culture take the lead. Matt Hall and John Watkinson are the co-founders of Larva Labs and the creators of CryptoPunks. Let's get to it. It is awesome to be here at the opening of the Node Foundation. It is appropriately celebrating the kind of intersection between art, digital identity with CryptoPunks. And I've actually, unusually, because I was so excited about this, I've actually watched prior interviews with you guys. I normally don't do that, but I was like, no, no, I'm so excited about this. I want to do that. So it's great. So welcome to Possible, and this will be fun. As I was mentioning before, I spent a bunch of time choosing witch punk, weirdly in Bhutan, with a few of our mutual friends, because I was thinking about how this next generation, the continuing evolution of art and digital identity, which we'll get into. And, you know, you never should ask parents what their favorite children are. But, you know, I can't help myself. I gotta ask do each of you have a favorite punk and what's the resonance what's the what's the ah this is my favorite because of x even though I love all 10,000 that's definitely the case we love all the children but I think I think for both of us it's the punkiest punks kind of you know the ones that have like mohawks and are smoking cigarettes the ones that just sort of put out that attitude that punk attitude are probably our our favorite you can look at our collection and kind of get a get a vibe for that yeah and do the zombies or aliens count as punky as punks yeah That's the thing. They can look really punky, too. Yeah, there's a few zombies that just are wearing the shades and just kind of looking like kind of cool, punky, but dead people. Dead or alien, depending on you. Yeah, the apes, the aliens, yeah, they can all put that out there. So one of the things I've loved about the punk's journey is there's a number of different museums that have now integrated them into collection. It's part of the notion of what is, you know, kind of the history of art, what is the story of art, museums being the caretakers and in a sense, the network nodes. You're right here at the Node Foundation. So what are your reflections on punks entering museums? It ranges everything from from MoMA to, you know, here at Node. It's surreal in a way. But I think we did sort of go through a transition like when we first made it, we were like, we don't know what this is. And then there was a period of time where the art world got a little interested in like 2018. And then there was, you know, the majority of people were like, this is dumb. And for these reasons. And I think through that experience, we were like, actually, I don't think it's dumb. You know, we kind of got our like convictions got hardened a little bit. And like, I think maybe you're going to change your mind because I think there's something real here. And like, it's pretty interesting. And it might be a little like hard to grasp if there's a number of leaps to be made from traditional art to this. So in a way, it sort of makes sense in sort of an objective way, but still weird personally. Yeah, I feel like during that maybe first year, year and a half after we launched it, we were catching maybe a lot of shit from the New York art community. But at the same time, they kept inviting us to things. It's like, well, why are we here then? But then a handful of people did kind of almost pitch it back to us, especially people who had a strong interest in digital art. They were saying, this solves a major problem for digital art. It was always so artificial to try to own it. It never felt right. We'd get a CD-ROM and a certificate, and they're like, don't put it on the Internet. It's like, what? That's not natural for data. Data needs to be free. We're in the middle of Silicon Valley. We know that. We're getting increasingly convinced, like, this is a way to, and it's a method of ownership that you need to kind of sign on for, and we weren't sure people would do that. But once you sort of go through that looking glass of, like, oh, this is how you own this stuff, then the ball just kind of starts rolling downhill. It's like, this is great. Everyone can access, everyone can view it. It's available to the entire planet, but here are the owners and that's completely visible and transparent and it's mediated by the blockchain, the world computer, like it all just started to make sense. And so I think, yeah, we kind of got galvanized and I remember even that, yeah, we had like our little catchphrase. I think we even used it as a password on a file for a while. It was punks to the number two MoMA. it was a big joke yeah yeah yeah and literally prediction of the future by the way i think it's a classic pattern in art when it's like the first thing is that's not art and then oh and then some of it goes no no that is art and it's that challenge moment that is actually part important on the art thing so you know back in 2017 when you guys hit publish what do you think would happen I remember having arguments because, you know, even though I was not then, unfortunately, part of the CryptoPunk community, which I now am a little tiny part, right? Like defending to my friends, like, it's got to be more complicated than this number of pixels. And I was like, no, art is a question of perception. So what will you guys, as kind of artists and technologists, hit publish, what do you think would happen? At that time, we were just hoping, it's like, will people just pick up on this? It's like, will they think that they own it? I mean, that was the hardest thing is like, you know, and obviously we were using this analogy of like, well, people value their Bitcoin, you know, and so could that apply to a collectible? Could that apply to art? And so we just hoped people would just grab a few and just kind of start to feel like they own them and trade, you know, and we're looking for just enough of a signal there to feel like, you know, that it worked, you know, and so it really was an experiment. We thought of it as an experiment for sure, and it was something we just kind of fit in between other projects we were doing. But we really loved it, and we just said, let's just hope that this happens. And initially it didn't, right? We're not the best marketers. And so we just sort of wrote kind of a nerdy post in the Ethereum subreddit. And we're like, hey, this is an experiment in digital art and collecting. Come and get one. They're free. You just have to interact with a smart contract. And a handful of people did, right? And some people were like, this is cool. But then maybe like a week later or a few days later, there was a Mashable, was it? Yeah, they posted an article and they kind of said all the right things that maybe we should have said. You know, it's like, this is the future of digital art. You know, like this could change, whatever, you know, however it was said. And then all of a sudden, this community formed up, you know, seemingly overnight. You know, it was overnight because within 24 hours, they had all been claimed. And then just all the dynamics we had hoped for were suddenly happening. You know, aliens sold for three grand, you know. And when they were, it was all just free 24 hours ago, people started making them the profile pictures on social media. I can remember the first time something sold for $1 because it was free. And we were like, well, you'll get them for free. And then someone's like, well, I prefer that one. I got it for free. A dollar's nothing. And then it was like, well, if you're spending a dollar, I'll probably spend up to $10. We might have been on the sell side of that dollar because we were just kind of trying to be market makers. You know, if anyone wants to buy one, I'm selling. I don't even really care what the price is. We're so happy if anybody just does anything with this. But we were buying, too. You know, someone sold one and tried to sell one for $10. Like, yes, I'll buy that. We were just sort of trying to be market makers in those first few days, really. So that was the acceleration point. When did you kind of get to a – this is now part of the firmament of the story of crypto, the story of NFTs, the story of art. Like, when did you kind of go, ah, I have that realization now? And how did you reflect on, huh, started with an experiment, hopeful experiment, you know, to mama. but just like hey we're trying it and we'll see what happens well we went through kind of that crypto winter phase and that was really just more about keeping the lights on we were running the discord and we were keeping the website up and everything and we just sort of there was very little activity but there was sort of this kind of a hardcore fan base yeah a couple hundred people maybe that would just check in and that's really what kept us going too because we were like oh they're into it I'm still into it. We'll just keep it going. Yeah, and in particular, there was this one person who had claimed like $1,000, and they were just relentlessly dumping them. They were just like $40. And that took place over the course of a year. This person just slowly unloading them. We were buying them? Yeah, we bought them. We were like, we're buying our own ping files now? We sold it for $1, we're buying it for $40. Yeah, this doesn't seem right. Yeah, and so we had to get through all that. But, yeah, I feel like the beating heart there was that there was this crew who was so into it for no reason financially. You know, they just loved it now. And we did, too. So we just kept it going, kept the lights on basically during that time. And then right at the end of 2020 or even maybe in the mid-2020, we just started to feel that little pickup, you know, where it's like, oh, wait, there's more people in here, more energy, more excitement. 2021 just started with a bang. I remember just New Year's Day was just the biggest day by far. Just all of a sudden, I don't know what exactly the dynamics were. New Year's resolutions for digital identity. I will get myself, yeah. I don't know, yeah. To the day, though, January 1st, it was nuts. And we'd seen, like, there'd been moments, a week of excitement, and then it would quiet down. So we just were kind of like, whoa, this is bigger than usual, but we'll just ride it out. And it just kept getting crazier and crazier. So, yeah. And so I think during 21, it just became obvious like, oh, this is a going – you know, this is – like all the hopes have been achieved here. You know, this is like a worldwide funnel. And when did it start like going, okay, we've launched the sailboat and now we're kind of like along for the journey just along with everyone else? When did that moment happen? I feel like kind of early on in that. That was always our thesis, you know. Like that was part of what we said was like – that was one of the – you know, we always laid out like what's different about this, you know. And one of them was, it's like, okay, we kept some of these as part of minting them, but otherwise, we're the same now. We don't have any special privilege. We can't go in and change things. We can't make more. We can't assign yours to someone else. None of that stuff. So we always made that claim that it's like this is separate from us now, that we're just collectors with the rest of you. And whatever. At that time, we still ran the website, but really, there's no special permissions. Anyone could run a website like that. And there are other websites that have all the data and track all the market activities. I think we've internalized that pretty quickly, but maybe everyone else didn't. And in 21, it increasingly felt like, oh, we're responsible for a bunch of people's financial decisions here. It started to get very fraught where it's like, okay, the dollar values are extremely high now, and everyone's looking at us for the next step, and we're trying to say this is a decentralized experiment. And that wasn't really holding up anymore. Yeah, no, I don't think so. I think I'm going to blame you. Yeah. I think I'm more comfortable with that idea. Part of I think you know obviously hindsight is always 20 versus like looking through the glass darkly at the future which is experiments and all the rest Part of the magic here was you went no no this is part of it decentralized It part of it part of you know it a collective community No because you know by the way Silicon Valley, we only have dual class stock. We go, okay, we're going to control this more. It's like, no, no, we're going to be more like crypto founders with that kind of launch. Do you think anything would have been lost if CryptoPunks were upgradable? Does it ever come? Yeah, definitely. I think so, yeah. We have no regrets, you know, how we did it, yeah. I think that's a big deal to us, and I think it will be increasingly a big deal. There's a number of people that understand this, too, but it becomes, I think, a little more understandable as you get comfortable with the basics of all this, with the blockchain, all that kind of thing. But we really wanted this to be, like, immutable upon deploy. So there's over on one of the walls in this exhibition, the code is there, and you can just take a look at what we did. And it's the same thing that we did as when we did in 2017. There's no admin functions. There's no anything. And so there's a couple crazy downsides to that. If somebody makes a mistake and they lose their punk, it's like, sorry, nothing I can do. But the upsides are that there's nothing we can do. There's a market there that runs completely out of our control. You can always do anything you want with your punk. You don't have to go find, like John was saying, with the certificate of ownership. I hope that gallery is in business to prove that you owned it. It's all there. It has nothing to do with us. And as we've gotten to know art collectors, I think it's easier for art collectors to collect this kind of work from living artists because these things are such immutable sort of things. You don't have to wonder if someone was making the case that sometimes artists will have a show in New York and then they kind of quietly are selling a bunch of the same thing out the back door in Europe. You know what I mean? It's like you don't get that here. I think you said, too, one nice thing about this mechanism is it's a way for people not to wish for our death. The set size is set. We can't make more of them. It's already a collectible. Leave us alone. I'd like to believe that CryptoPunk price wouldn't move up or down if we died. Actually, I want to broadcast that. It might go down. Good point. So one of the things I always think to myself, and obviously it's a second-guessing and amazing journey and success is always difficult. But if you could call yourselves, your younger selves, 2017, before you hit publish, is there anything you would tell yourself? Do this differently? Ask this question? Yeah. Well, another natural one of that is now that the market's done $3.9 billion, you guys want to take a couple percent there? That might start to add up. But I think, no, it's like surprisingly not many changes. And some of the stuff that probably we might have changed is it's nice that that's sort of like locked in because it has a certain like authenticity to it. You know, like there's such a thing as like polishing it too much. Like in some of the rough edges, because it was something we were just doing for, you know, a small audience are kind of charming now, I think. Keeps it punk. Yeah, true. Yeah. Yeah, whenever we talk about it, and obviously it's a bad mindset anyway just to say what we could have done or what we should have done. It's not good to think through that lens. But whenever we've even joked about like, oh, would we change this in the art and that kind of stuff, now that it's being scrutinized to a degree we never would have imagined. But then you just think, yeah, but this is part of, yeah, just it's charm and authenticity. And it's like this is internet art, like this is something that we just put out there and then this happened. And you're right, if we go back in time and miser over every pixel, would it just feel kind of a little too well-rounded and just kind of polished in a way that just loses that edge? And so I think in general, yeah, we don't spend a lot of time wondering what if. And certainly the royalty stuff, very glad we didn't do that because we just love the purity of it. That it's just, this is pure decentralization. Very crypto, yeah. Yeah, and even if you had put 1% or something, you don't know how that could have affected things early on. Yeah, so I think that's all sort of hindsight bias, really, to think of all those what could have beens, yeah. Which, by the way, I think is the right answer because when I thought about asking you guys this question, I always think, well, how would I answer the question? Very different? Maybe that first flaw that you had to correct in the crypto contract, that might be the one thing. Oh, that's for sure, yeah. Yeah, we had to redeploy immediately basically upon launch because we had a bug. And that felt horrible because there was this excitement from the community. And then we just thought we had sort of snuffed that out. It's like it's going to take us. Now we know we have to do this much more carefully. So we can't just tomorrow put out a new contract and hope it works. We have to now be much more careful with our testing and everything. And so it took us, what, a week or something to get that done or more than a week. And even though that doesn't seem like much time, we just thought, well, that's it. Everyone's going to move on to something else. And we were quite not only were we gratified that kind of everyone came back, but they even kind of replayed in good faith most of the transactions, you know, that they had sort of done but hadn't worked. And so so they are. But you're right. It would have been nice to have that. But, you know, even that there's a difference because we didn't think of the the bid side of the market. All we had was offer for sale and buy in the original contract. But then as part of redoing it, we were like, you know, we should have a bid side of this, too. I remember you telling me that. We should really have bids. And I was like, dude, we just blew it. Like, do you want to make it, like, even more complicated? You want to have more complicated? Yeah. And then now to look at it, too, like, we're looking at it just off camera here, the code, because it's up on the wall. And it's only, like, 246 lines of code. It's like, you can't get that many lines of code right. But it's like, it does have to stand for all time. It does. It is the craziest kind of programming. I mean, you know, we've been software developers for 30 years, and nothing compares to writing a solidity contract in terms of just the pure pressure and everything. And you don't truly understand what immutable software means until you've blown it and you really can't fix it. And then that enters your heart and stays there forever. And then every contract you do after that, you're like, I know what that feels like, so I'm going to do everything I can to not feel that way again. And in our career up to that point, we really were rapid prototypers. We used to do a lot of stuff with the Google Creative Lab where they're like, we need, you know, we're going to mock up this product or we want to do this thing for next weekend, you know, at an event. So we're just sort of run and gun. You know, we can get things done fast. And so all of a sudden we were working on that. The absolute polar opposite kind of work to do. And, yeah, so now anyway, we have a good community of Solidity auditors that we now bring into anything we're doing. That was that first ever Solidity code, too. So that's how we do things, too. We'd be like, oh, we'll learn it by doing it, you know, which works fine elsewhere, but not so much. Immutable, a little harder. Yeah. We only really even learned what Ethereum was in the search of how to do this. You know, we had the idea of a digital collectible. And then you were talking about it should be, you know, it seems like crypto would be the right thing for this. We looked at how some people were trying to do it with Bitcoin. There were some attempts to use colored coins, that kind of stuff. But then we came across Ethereum and it's like, oh, this could work. But then it's like, OK, now what is Ethereum? How do you actually do this? So I want to come back to the community, art, narrative, et cetera, because it's part of, I think, some of the kind of discovery of magic along the journey. But because you're also, in addition to being artists, you're technologists and geeks using cloud code now. Right. How is AI's code generation intersecting with the way you're thinking about the world? Yeah, it's been a real surprise because, you know, when we went to, we did computer science. This is where we met. We did computer science in the 90s, and this was like, you know, we both took an AI class, and this real sad guy came out and was like, well, here's the textbook, and we're going to go through it all, but nothing worked, so welcome to the class. The 90s was the absolute low point for AI. None of this works. We were at University of Toronto. Hinton was teaching there, Jeffrey Hinton, And I remember I almost took his class and then a grad student was like, do not go near that guy. It didn't work, man. Yeah, exactly. He's washed up. None of that stuff worked out, you know, but he's like stuck on it and everything. And it's just so amazing to see that, you know, that how he stuck with it and a handful of others to push it over the top. But in terms of using it ourselves day to day, I mean, it's amazing in that I just feel like now everything we're doing is is like the creative part is that is the hard part, you know, and we can just, you know, just skip over. and just speed through all the kind of grind work that would just sort of slow you down or maybe kill inspiration, you know? And so I don't think either of us think of AI as actually being a creative tool in terms of like it has ideas or we're using it to actually make creative content. It's just more like it allows, it frees us up to be just working on the cool parts, basically, or the really challenging, interesting parts from a tech point of view that are kind of a little beyond it right now. So it's immediately, it went very quickly to just like required, you know, I mean, you can't sit down and start coding without it, really. You just want that sidekick at all times, you know. I think, yeah, around the time of the first reasoning models, we were just keeping an eye on it. We had like, you know, ChatGPT subscriptions or whatever, and I'd ask it some question, but like, I don't know. And then around the time the reasoning models happened, I asked it to write something for me, and then I asked it to change it in natural language, and it made the change, like a fairly subtle change. I was like, whoa, you've got to check this out. And then from there on, it was like, you know, it's radically accelerated our work. And, you know, you couldn't do it without it now, basically. Or it feels so slow and dumb. You'd be like, why am I doing some API connection here? Like, this is so boring. Yeah. And our whole career, we've always been very kind of polyglot. Like, we've done stuff with games, you know, with game engines. We're Java developers at our sort of core, old school 90s Java developers. But then we do a lot of Java. Some people listening to this still know what Java is. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I know. If you're out there, that one person. We see you. Yeah, exactly, because it's still amazing. But yeah, then we switch over and have to do JavaScript because we're doing web stuff or switching to Solidity. So it's just amazing to be able to do that context switch with the AI agents. And now we feel sort of enabled to go further afield. It's like, oh, we can get into anything now because we don't have that huge hill to climb to just get Hello World going, basically. And so I feel like it really enables a wide range. One thing I'm curious about, because this is something I do. I had the benefit of first commercial investor in OpenAI, was on the OpenAI board. I got into the AI revolution because what I realized was – by the way, my undergraduate at Stanford was artificial intelligence. So I'm very much in the, oh, yeah, this is a winner. This is all not going to work. I went to philosophy because they don't understand what thinking or language is. But what I realized, and this is what the first insight for DeepMind is, is, hey, if you can apply scalable compute to learning systems, which also, by the way, having scaled data helps, you can subtly create interesting functions. And it started with self-play. It was the Pong playing itself. It was Go playing itself. It was like, oh, shit, this is now going to turn into something. What? I don't know. But that when I kind of that was my realization that turned me from you know the first couple of years being into Bitcoin I was always very positive It was like oh I going to stop focusing on crypto i gonna focus on ai now for it now in the creative process um it is definitely a tool it's definitely accelerant it's definitely like encoding but like for example for me i when i start approaching a like some line that i'm thinking of i actually use it isn't as a muse but it is a foil right like so for example i go oh i wonder what you would apply Wittgensteinian language games to reinforcement human feedback learning, right? And is there something there? And I'll do a couple of quick posts with asking for citations. Now that there's deep research, I was doing this before deep research. Do you guys do any of that in your creative process? I'm just curious about like the also, not just the tool of accelerant, but the foil. Yeah, I think so. You can kind of vet ideas, right? You can just sort of get, try to pretty quickly figure out what the state of the art is or whether it's possible, whether it's been done before, you know, that kind of stuff. You can kind of quick study on it. And you have to obviously have enough sophistication to know to take it with a grain of salt a little bit. You have to kind of follow up maybe, not just take what it's saying. Because sometimes it's not right. Yeah, exactly. Or like, oh, this is an amazing idea. It's like, no, it's not. Yeah, there's been some people out there who are like, oh man, I'm making major breakthroughs with quantum mechanics according to my chatbot. Yeah, exactly. Who's programmed to love me. Yeah. No, it is good for that, too, just what's possible and just what's the problem space, what's been done. So, yeah, I do feel like it does feed that. You know, it allows for kind of more ambition in those categories as well. It's such an unusual tool having, I mean, I don't know if you had the same experience, but having been in software for so long and software breaks in ways that you are comfortable with. you understand like you got a null pointer or there's an error or whatever it doesn't lie to you yeah it doesn't just be like i don't really know i'm just gonna say something you want to hear you want to hear this even though it's completely fiction yeah yeah yeah so that's been very unusual and seeing people who like we have a pretty good mental model of what it's doing but seeing people who don't have that i mean it's so convincing and uh that you just it's it's crazy like seeing some of like the models that people are like oh this actually is thinking about this is thinking about me it understands what i'm saying what i'm what i mean and i'm like i'm not sure about that but yeah it's a very interesting new thing so um so back to the narrative side i think this is like like perhaps with the experiment an intentionally designed feature not a bug but when you released in 2017 you actually let everyone else write the stories you weren't going like here is the story of CryptoPunks, here's the different groups. It's like, here's a fun, cool thing. But it was deliberately, and there must have been kind of this, like, I hope that interesting stories are going to be written. Like, it's kind of, there must have been an impulse to try to juice it some, and the restraint is an interesting, like, say a little bit about, like, the kind of narrative around it and, like, where you thought, okay, here is okay, and oh my gosh, it was really important to keep the hands off. Yeah. Yeah, and I think overall we were pretty hands-off in that, just letting it happen. I know as nerdy kids, in Canada, we were into collecting hockey cards, and then I was into that magic card game for a while. And the trading was so big in that world, and that was always the big stories. Did you hear about the trade that happened? Did you hear that he has a Gretzky rookie now? All those kind of stories. And so that was sort of our hope is that by having this sort of open marketplace and extremely efficient marketplace, right, you can spend a dime on a million dollar transaction, basically, that that there would just be those stories. And I feel like that is the case now. If you go to the CryptoPunk site and just look at the transaction history for each punk and we put them up on the screen behind us all the time as part of the exhibition. Every one of them is like its own story now. And there's drama. And if you recognize the, you know, the ENS addresses or, you know, or the address or the ENS names and you kind of know who was involved. And, yeah, one popped up. We were talking about how we were just early on, we were just buying or selling. And there was one that I think I had sold. We just saw it pop on the screen yesterday. I sold it for about 100 bucks or something, you know, and it's like, oh, that was a good one. Why did I sell that one? Presumably now somewhere between 100 and 400,000. Yeah, yeah, right. Yeah. And so anyway, it's all those stories, you know, and then, of course, people taking it on as their identity. And then, you know, so I just feel like each CryptoPunk is being kind of is this living entity now that has all these layers to it. And, yeah, there was one that popped up yesterday that had had been sold so many times. Right. I don't know. It was 40 times or something. It's like, is that the record? You know, it probably isn't. There's probably one that's been sold more. But and then there's others that have never been touched. You know, they just someone claimed them still has them. And that's our profile pictures are like that, of course. And, yeah. So you brought up identity, which is the thing I was going to move into next anyway. Presumably, when you launched the experiment, you didn't think this is also going to become an interesting thing in digital identity. I mean, or did you? We had a little bit. Yes. So we had a little bit of an experience. Like a project we made with Google was just an app. Like they were changing their logo to the Android logo. And Android was, you know, sort of centering their marketing around the Android logo. So we made an app with, again, the Google Creative Lab to make yourself, you know, make the Android logo into you. You put clothes on and, you know, accessories. You know, not completely unlike this where you're basically kind of dressing up the Android logo. Yeah, and you had all these different choices of hats and clothes and glasses and everything. So, yeah, definitely some, like, that was part of what led to this. And that went crazy. And it was a Google app, so that had a nice, you know, platform to start with. But people really loved it. they made it their profile picture and we kind of realized like oh the profile picture is like the most valuable real estate on the internet basically you know because it's beside every one of your posts it's not just one post like i like this and it's gone so that really was like stuck with us yeah and because we you know two guys no no can't market worth shit and then like also no budget no nothing so we're like we got to think of some way where people get into it and start talking about it as themselves so that was why the profile picture was uh you know yeah and if you remember at that time, that was kind of the iPhone versus Android kind of like holy wars. Like people really identify with what phone they carried at that time. And so that Androidify really became like people were proud Android users. And so that profile picture thing really took off. And the numbers on that app went crazy, really. That was a big hit for Google, even though not financially or anything, but just as a marketing hit, it was. And so, yeah, stuck with us to think about that profile picture. And yeah, and whenever we thought about stuff we were making, we just kind of knew, it's like, we're never going to be the great marketer, but could we make something that just has that where people end up kind of doing the marketing for us? Do they kind of push it? And then this has been the most extreme version of that, where every next collector becomes a big marketer of it. They They love to talk about it. They love to make it the profile picture. And so that's part of this idea of it having moved beyond us. You didn't hear about this from us. Somebody else told you you have to get a crypto box. That's how this works. That's why people ask us, what's this or what's that? And we're like, I don't know. This thing is doing its own thing now. Nobody asks me. Nobody tells me. I feel like sometimes we're the last to hear about things. For sure. So we definitely underestimated the extent to which that was going to happen. And we kind of hoped like, oh, if you like it, you'll put it as your profile picture. We didn't, you know, I like this one rather than like I am this one. I didn't expect that to happen necessarily. Yeah. Yeah. So one of the kind of great experimental things was make the affordance so that it can become a profile picture. It can be deployed and used this way. And maybe that will become part of people's story. So you've now launched other things too, you know, MeBits, et cetera. What are some of the principles that you've been learning of like, how do I how do I launch these things in interesting ways now? So the profile picture is one. There's probably stuff in digital identity. There's probably stuff in community participation. But like, what are some of the kind of guideposts of like, hey, we think about this when we're creating new projects, new art? I think each project was sort of like a response to something we had learned or a question we had been posed. so Autoglyphs is more a pure kind of art project but it was related to the feedback and pushback we got for the punks that were like where are these images and how were they generated and we're like oh yeah that's actually not fully visible as part of the process so can we make that fully visible and part of the process so that was Autoglyphs and I think that we sort of have alternated a little bit between like an identity sort of interactive thing and then more of like an art side thing. Tech exploration kind of almost, yeah. Yeah, and we have the advantage now that like people care when we launch something. Like Punks was like, we had done, I don't know how many things, 40, 50 things. And you really don't, you know, there's a thing like, one thing, do something good and like people like it. And there's another thing to do something you thought was good and no one even cares. They don't even not like it. They just don't even respond at all. So we really like learned the hard way, like how to just build something in so that people reacted to it at least, you know? So we don't have to do that as much anymore. We get a little more freedom. Yeah, to make a subtler case, yeah. But yeah, I think, yeah, like Matt said, Autogliss was all about can the entire artwork be created on chain in its entirety, so the entire process is visible and permanently on the chain. MiBits was moving into 3D space, and there was a lot of metaverse talk. I still think there's something there of like 3D digital identity is still really cool and interesting. So that was the focus on that. And I think just anything we do, Quime was about the self-referential, the program is in the art. And I think that we always still want there to be a tech challenge there too. We don't just want to just kind of put out content, kind of, you know what I mean? We want there to be something new, some twist, because we just love that stuff too. We are nerds, you know? And we like tech challenges. We like to push ourselves. I feel like that's where our creativity comes from is pushing up against a challenge. And so we always try to build that in. And I think we're still kind of not marketers where we just follow our nose and we don't think a ton about product market fit. It's mostly just sort of like, does this, do we vibe with this? Does this feel right? Then let's do it. So what's the project, and this may be a question for each of you, but what's the project, and it probably is reaching back into those first 40 or 50, that you guys went, I love this one, and it didn't get that much attention. And it's probably more pre-punks than post-punks, but I'm just curious, what's the one that was like, ah, it was creative, like, zzzz. Yeah, and we didn't, it's funny, because we did things that were so impractical that they were probably best understood as art, you know, like ideas that were like, yeah, this is really funny and weird, but like, why, you know? But we started on mobile really early, like on the Sidekick with Danger, which was like… Some people listening to this probably remember what a Sidekick is. Yeah, exactly. Probably the same guy who remembers Java, remembers the T-Mobile Sidekick. Yeah, and that was working. They had an app store and everything in like 2005 and 2006. So that's how we went independent actually was like selling apps. And so we wrote a ton for them had such a great experience with them and then did that with Android So some of our early Android apps we were obsessed with trying to make a new type of home screen that wasn icons We tried this several times. A couple of those I think were really good, but we just couldn't quite get it over the hump. So a few of those kind of things. We've written some games. Yeah, because the whole time we were like, we have a completely new platform, and yet it's still kind of like Windows or Mac OS, where it's like click on the icon. And we just wanted to overcome that somehow. But I guess it was just so ingrained. So we had some faithful users on this totally more information notifications. And everything was just information-driven as opposed to app-driven. And we thought that was really cool and there was something there. But yeah, maybe just the entrenched sort of way of interacting with tech was just too strong there. A good example of a sheer insanity app was back when Android had no, like, very loose permissions. You could just do anything you wanted. We wrote a thing called App Chat, which was a chat room for every app on your phone. And so you could talk to other people using calculator right now or whatever. And people would be like, anybody got any good contacts out there? They'd just be, like, sending the weirdest. Yeah, but for some, it was kind of like some games, people would just be talking about the game, you know, and sharing ideas. But yeah, then people would be over a calculator, and it's like, what words can you spell with an upside-down calculator? And every app had its own little culture. Because you were just in the, you could just basically, it was almost like you could just open up the chat, because you could overlay stuff. Android had no security early on. You could just overlay stuff right on top of other apps. So whatever app you're in, you could just kind of swipe from the corner, and you were now chatting with other users of that app. And it was completely wild. I was unhinged what was going on. But I didn't dare go into the Tinder chat. I did not want to know what was going on there. But there was lots of messages in that one. Yeah, and that was like, we were trying to do a thing then where we were like, I don't want to do the pitching and raise money for startup. We had done that once, and it was a fine experience. But we were like, let's just do weird stuff, and if one of them happens to become big. So this one, it's an insane idea, but then it was like, oh, maybe this could be support for developers, for people using the thing. So we tried to turn it into that a little bit. It didn't quite work. But that was the model we were operating under was make anything that anyone would care about and just see if it was anything more than that. One of the interesting things, which I'm sure you guys have kind of reflected on, is that in Web3, there's kind of a tension between code is law, like a natural gravity, and social consensus. And how it plays in a community dynamics. Is there anything that you guys have thought about, like what this tension is, what it gives as kind of artistic possibility, some of the kind of work you're doing? Because it's one of the things that it's kind of magical, but these human systems is that they're yin and yang together. Yeah, and that is a real tension, right? And we've seen the CODA's law kind of break down a few times, you know, with the Ethereum DAO, with the first CryptoPunks launch contract. You know, we said we're relaunching it because there was a problem, but that still the community can decide what to do, you know. And so that tension does exist. And so we love the CODA's law. And like I said, we think it is just such a great kind of artistic tool. This digital permanence that you get from it is so great, so we love that. But, yeah, there is also this interesting thing where the community does sort of make it happen and keep it going. Even just why are we confident that CryptoPunks will still exist in 10 years, in 50 years, in 100 years? Because the Ethereum community will keep going. It could just stop tomorrow, but there's all these reasons, including CryptoPunks, that it won't. And so, yeah, so I'm not sure if we have any sort of specific. things there, but we acknowledge that tension, and it's interesting and definitely fundamental to all of this, yeah. Yeah, and I think, yeah, the tension between, like, the laws of the country it operates in and the code as law, which is almost more, it is convention, it's mechanical convention, but I sort of think of these things as, like, consensus machines, you know, like, and that's what, you know, that's the miracle of digital currency being worth something, and that's why the CryptoPunks are what they are, is there's, like, a mechanism for you to have, to achieve consensus around things and how they work. And sometimes people defect from that system and go to a court of law and decide, I'm not playing by these rules anymore. But for the most part, that doesn't happen. So in a way, it is pretty interesting and consistent, I think. Yeah. I mean, this may be varying, getting away from your question a little bit, but we were kind of surprised that maybe the actual kind of Ethereum, the core Ethereum community, like the Ethereum devs, the founders, were quite slow to come around to NFT, CryptoPunks, all this stuff. and we never understood that because we were sort of thinking it's like you you've made this system this huge global system but you can't be sure you know you don't know what's going to happen to it you don't know if it'll eventually maybe threaten governments where they might make it illegal and there's been a bit of that and it's like but now this is culture you have culture in this system like that is extremely important you can now make a case that it's not just money it's not just transaction it's not just a tool that drug dealers could use you know it's like no there's culture here. And so I think they've come around to that maybe just in the last year or two even. I feel like we felt more warmth overall from the, you know, yeah, maybe like the hardcore kind of Ethereum dev community or something. But we think that's really important that it's like there's culture on this now. And that might end up being the biggest reason for it to continue when you expand the time horizon out to decades or even centuries. It reminds me of a story we had. We talked to a museum who was acquiring a CryptoPunk and they're like, well, can we have the right if Ethereum were to stop operating? Can we have the right to remint this on another chain? We're like, no. They're like, well, what do we do if Ethereum stopped operating? Like you can run a node and maybe another museum can run another node. Maybe Ethereum just becomes a bunch of museums running Ethereum for the art. You know, that's possible. You can do that, you know, which is an interesting kind of way in which it could persist. In what ways do you look at CryptoPunks as finished art project? And which way do you look at them as an evolving art project? I think an interesting combination of the two. And depending on how much, how you came to it, if you think of it as visual, it's complete. It will never change visually. But we don't think of it as just that. We think of it as an interactive thing. And every transaction that occurs behind us on these screens is adding to the story. Those transactions are stored in that original contract alongside everything else. So really, that's the most interesting thing about it in a way, you know, is what's happening with it now and in the future and in the past. Rapid fire questions. It's questions we ask every guest. You can answer at any length you like, but it just kind of gets a fun through line. It's not quite artistic, but it's a fun through line through all the conversation. So is there a book, movie or idea that gives you optimism about the future? For me, I don't know if it's a particular book or anything, but it's, I think, renewable energy, because I was pretty bummed out about climate change for a long period of time. And now I can see, well, we've got people that just want to make money working on climate change effectively and at a scale that is essentially unbelievable, especially for potentially people in our country. So I find that really inspiring and just the idea that energy might be so available, ubiquitous, and relatively harm-free that I can't even imagine what that will be like. So that's optimistic in a way. I've made fusion investments exactly on that. Oh, okay. Yeah. We're definitely clean energy nerds, so we can tackle that. What's a question about crypto or AI you wish people would ask more often? Certainly with CryptoPunks, it is about kind of the decentralized thing. I feel like so many people just always maybe just focus on the art or even maybe just the community. But just like – and then part of this show is about like this is how it works. And that's so fundamental to it. Once you kind of get that feeling of how it all works then. And so, yeah. And I feel like crypto, because there's so much financial stuff going on and drama, it kind of always gets pulled away from the decentralized. It's like, oh, this new stable coin started up. And it's like, who cares? the fundamental thing is the decentralization and we're always preaching that. We're sort of old school I guess or something in that way. Or original. I think for me on the AI side is a little more of like focus on what we can do with what we've got now. There's a lot of like it's going to be AGI or this thing sucks and it's using all our water or whatever but there's so much amazing that you can do that's amazing about this right now that it's going to change so many things. Good and bad, right? So rather than radical abundance, let's just talk practically and rationally about what it is, what it can do, good and bad, instead of almost like – it almost feels like waving sort of this pie-in-the-sky stuff in everyone's face rather than speaking kind of honestly about it. I think you may have already answered this question because of renewable energy, but I'm going to ask it anyway. Where do you see real progress happening outside your industry? Yeah, it is odd in that we're in a time that does feel to me like the future now. Like, you know, like, whoa, that's great. Yeah, a Waymo goes by or something. Yeah, we've seen Waymos driving around, and we know about Waymos, but then there's like, there's nobody driving that thing. Like, it had that visceral reaction to it. I mean, I think, yeah, we had that feeling, I think, first with smartphones when they rapidly progressed, and we were like, this, knowing where you are in the world at all times and knowing everything about everything, that's incredible. But now we're at another level of all that, you know? So I don't know. Yeah. I think maybe the add-the-renewable energy. Yeah. If everything breaks humanity's way over the next 15 years, what's the first or next step for getting there? Fix how we communicate with each other maybe. You know what I mean? Like that's pretty bad right now. That's pretty horrific. Yeah, I don't know. Yeah, just maybe everyone start thinking more locally and building up from there. rather than getting pulled around by the big global picture that's just so easily accessed and commented on and everything. I feel like that's kind of what we've tried to do when we think of things like philanthropy and everything. It's like, I think you kind of have to start in your own backyard a little bit or else it's just too intractable or something. Yeah, that'd be nice. We grew up basically in the era of techno-optimism, like the Internet's going to change society in all these positive ways. and there's sort of like a darkness to it now that feels like, you know, surprising in a way and would be nice to find a way out of that, I think, back to sort of what we were hoping for a bit more in the web. Bring some light back to the web. Matt and John, it's been awesome. I look forward to our future conversations. Thank you. Yeah, thanks so much. Possible is produced by Pallet Media. It's hosted by Ari Finger and me, Reid Hoffman. Our showrunner is Sean Young. Possible is produced by Tanasi Delos, Katie Sanders, Spencer Strasmoor, Imozu, Trent Barbosa, and Tafadzwa Niemorundwe. Special thanks to Surya Yalamanchili, Sayida Sepieva, Ian Alice, Greg Beato, Parth Patil, and Ben Rallis. A big thanks to the Punks community, Sean Bonner, Natalie Stone, Becky Kleiner, the Node Foundation, and its team.