NFTs
‘What The Punk’ film traces the history of Ethereum’s iconic NFT CryptoPunks
The story of crypto art’s most iconic project begins in a gritty neighborhood in Brooklyn. “The most polluted waterway in the entire country,” says Matt Hall of the surroundings that inspired his work with Larva Labs co-founder John Watkinson in the new documentary “What the Punk.”
This 80-minute counterculture tale follows two humble Canadian programmers who began experimenting with technology and art in 2005 and are now on display at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, where CryptoPunk #110, donated by the current owner of the intellectual property, Yuga Labs, has been on display since 2023.
In the late 2000s, while developing mobile apps, Hall and Watkinson began working on the Pixel Character Generator, a fun feature for creating unique profile pictures with overlays of basic pixelated elements.
Then came the rise of Ethereum. As longtime sports card collectors, they realized that blockchain offered huge development potential that could help them create a digital equivalent to their childhood passion: a new kind of collectible.
Composed of 10,000 algorithmically generated pixel images with 87 unique attributes, CryptoPunks inspired the ERC-721 standard and gave rise to the profile picture (PFP) movement that later spread throughout Yuga Bored Ape Yacht Club and countless other spiritual successors.
Matt Hall and John Watkinson launched CryptoPunks in June 2017. For the first week, the launch went largely unnoticed in the protoart-tech community. But a Mashable article drew attention to the free claim. Within days, the entire supply was minted.
Secondary sales gradually gained momentum, eventually generating a sales figure of over $10 million worth of ETH. The hype and influx of money would help boost the emerging ETH scene. NFTs.
“What The Punk” brings together some of the most prominent figures who have helped drive blockchain momentum in art history: former head of digital art at Christie’s Noah Davis (who went on to lead CryptoPunks under Yuga), art specialist Yehudit Mam in givencollector Dan Polkoand longtime moderator of the Punk Discord Tschuuuly.
Erick “Snowfro” Calderon also acknowledges how his experience as a punk collector and active community member helped him imagine Art Blocksthe successful Ethereum generative art platform.
As a counterpoint, “What The Punk” highlights the practice of RobnessOne of the first crypto artists, Robness disapproved of the hype surrounding CryptoPunks, which took away attention from the artistic aspect of the project to fuel speculative investments. So in 2021, he bought Punk #2317 and immediately burned it as a gesture of art.
Still enamored with the artistic core of the project, Robness coined Punks as “the Warhol of crypto art,” adding that he represented “a movement—we’re just at the beginning of it.”
Behind the movie
Captivated by the CryptoPunks’ story, director Hervé Martin-Delpierre — who previously helmed “Daft Punk Unchained” — and producer Marc Lustigman spent three years uncovering the secrets behind the Punks and interviewing leading figures in crypto art. From artists to gallery owners, collectors to auctioneers, they captured a rich tapestry of voices that reveal how this collection revolutionized the art world.
Lustigman said Decipher that the concept for the documentary came about amid the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, before the NFT craze of 2021 that Punks supercharged prices.
“A friend said to me, ‘This is the future of art; you should buy some.’ At first, I thought he was joking,” Lustigman recalled. “I was just focused on the visuals. Gradually, something started to draw me in, even obsess me! Six months later, I understood the genius behind it, and the story I discovered was so wild that I wanted to make a movie about it.”
“It was the Punks who introduced us to crypto art,” Martin-Delpierre added, noting that their use of smart contracts to enable on-chain art projects “allowed digital art to flourish. They are behind the genesis of what followed: the development of an entire artistic ecosystem.”
The filmmakers purposefully avoided getting bogged down in the technical details of blockchain, focusing instead on the impact of CryptoPunks, both the voices of support and dissent, and the collection’s growing reach within the traditional art world. Even so, there were some peculiar elements to explain, such as the “V1 Punks” with glitches that have been abandoned and replaced, but continue to exist on the blockchain.
“The challenge was explaining extremely complex things — like the V1 Punks — to people unfamiliar with [the crypto] world,” Martin-Delpierre said. “We look for the right narrative form to do this because these key moments help [people] to better understand how art works on the blockchain. This is not a film about the Punks; it is about the journey of three contemporary artists.”
“From the beginning, we wanted to go beyond a simple success story to delve deeper into the development of art on the blockchain,” Lustigman added. “Robness joined along the way and echoed Matt and John’s journey as artists struggling to get their art seen and recognized. He acts as a catalyst.”
CryptoPunks were launched before most people knew what NFTs were, then exploded and generated billions of dollars in trading volume, but have seen a cooling trading momentum over the past two years despite the occasional big sale that still turns heads and makes headlines. The documentary covers the ups and downs amidst this rollercoaster journey.
As filmmakers, they were also tasked with telling the story of a relatively specific project, with the goal of honoring and satisfying that community of fans, while also expanding their reach and bringing that story to a much wider audience.
“As documentarians, we take a broad view and ask questions,” they said in a joint response. “We are neither for nor against NFTs. We simply want to provide this material to the general public — so they can form their own opinions without cultural biases. This film is a snapshot of our time: creative, somewhat naive people being swallowed up or struggling against overwhelming forces.”
“What the Punk” was released internationally on June 11th on VIMEO OTT for a limited 3-month period and on ARTE in France and Germany. The European premiere was held on June 11th during Art Basel 2024, as part of the Digital Art Mile, a new digital art fair format in Basel.
Edited by Andre Hayward