“1000EYE” Fungible the NFTs
“1000EYE” is a crypto artwork created by crypto artist CryptoZR in 2019. The artwork consists of a prime number spiral (Ulam Spiral) composed of the eyes of one thousand people who have made an impact on the world. In the real world, no one knows who Satoshi is, however in “1000EYE”, Satoshi is the most significant one. Although everyone in this artwork is promoting the world’s progress, when all eyes are anonymized, it is difficult to correspond to a specific person.
The artist fungible the “non-fungible” characters by concealing the attributes in the metadata to minimize the difference between people. When the differences between NFTs are erased, the currency feature of token will appear. In terms of creative techniques, the artist uses a primitive manpower to draw oil paintings to carry out proof of work (POW), which provides basic monetary value for these EYEs.
“1000EYE” was conceived in the second quarter of 2019. While painting the artworks, the artist also created “1000EYE” NFT contract on August 26, 2019, and completed the minting of all 1,000 EYEs before the opening of Devcon5. According to Nansen’s data, “1000EYE” is ranked 37th among all 1,248 NFT contracts in the order of contract release date. It is an early creation of NFT-based crypto artwork.
Devcon5 was successfully launched in Osaka, Japan in October 2019. Thousands of Ethereum developers, crypto artists, and community members from different regions gathered together. Although Ethereum has entered a temporary downside after the ICO bubble cycle, new concepts including DeFi and NFT were brewing. Including Autoglyphs, Artonomous, Crypko and other generative cryptoArt concepts were promoted during this conference.
Since the community was still trying to find a new direction at that time, there were fewer transactions on Ethereum, and transactions could be successfully packaged under 1 Gwei gasPrice. “1000EYE” NFTs are all minted during these days.
In terms of creative concept, “1000EYE” discusses the severability and composability of NFTs. The artist splits the entire oil painting into 1000 independent NFTs. Each NFT can exist independently, and can be combined and mapped into an oil painting at the same time. The combinable form is not limited to the Ulam Spiral itself. Similar to how people used shells for transactions in ancient times, EYE is closer to currency in design and can be regarded as an ERC20 with a token decimal of zero.
As for the Ulam spiral, it is a structure showing a certain obvious law of prime numbers. Prime number is an important part of cryptography (such as the RSA algorithm), and the entire crypto world is built on the basis of cryptography. The eyes of all the characters in “1000EYE” are placed on prime points by the artist to thank them for their contributions to promoting world progress.
The anonymization of character attributes in the metadata of NFTs also corresponds to the nodes of the public blockchain. If the number of nodes is large enough and hard to be tracked, it will increase the difficulty of the attack. Even if a few of the nodes fail to work, it will not affect the entire safety of the system. Just like the people who promote the progress of the crypto world, hiding in the public through anonymity technology can better ensure their own security.
In May 2021, the artist CryptoZR successfully held the world’s first solo exhibition of cryptoArt at the Guardian Art Center in Beijing, and was named one of the world’s best exhibitions in the summer of 2021 by AMEX Essential. “1000EYE” is one of these artworks in this solo exhibition.
In August 2021, the hot sales of CryptoPunk started the NFT Summer, and the “Fair Mint” allows collectors to participate in NFT mintings at low cost. However, this mechanism also has some problems. For example, pre-judgment based on rarity can allow robots to gain a greater competitive advantage. The text-based native NFT represented by mLoot was robbed of high-quality NFTs by robots due to the design defects of random numbers, which led to the declining of consensus. As for what is rare, collectors often choose the most extreme attributes based on metadata. So how can the aesthetic value of artworks be reflected? After all, famous paintings do not prove their own artistry and value through data.
The artist CryptoZR decided to minimize the Metadata and only retain the image information. Data analysis gives way to aesthetic experience, and at the same time reduces the distinction between these NFTs, strengthens the fungible feature of currency, and smoothing the price difference between each NFT. NFT is essentially a kind of ledger that records the holder’s information to determine the ownership of the assets. They are the RAI Stones of the crypto era. Metadata is the detailed description of the ledger, portraying the external image of these crypto RAI Stones.
Unlike most algorithm generation projects, each one of “1000EYE” is painted by hand and cannot be generated in batches. This is a proof of work (POW) of cryptoArt, and the drawing of the entire work takes more than one year to complete.
NFT (Non Fungible Token) itself, as a Token, can not only carry the media elements of the artwork, but is also a natural social money for artists. For social money, ERC721 is better than ERC20. ERC721 is accompanied by rich media such as text, image, video, etc., which is convenient for sharing and displaying on social media. At the same time, the NFT trading mechanism is close to over-the-counter (OTC), unlike buying or selling in large quantities of ERC20 will cause a larger disturbance to the market price.
The on-chain governance tool Snapshot already supports NFT voting, and CollabLand can also display different levels of member titles in the community based on the user’s NFT holdings. At present, the Discord group of the artist CryptoZR has completed the community identity configuration. After a collector obtains EYE, one can bind personal ETH address and Discord account to obtain the corresponding community identity according to the number of NFTs held.
Artist introduction
CryptoZR, used to be the chief designer of Global SNS in the international business department of Tencent headquarters. In 2016, he was admitted to the Central Academy of Fine Arts for a master’s degree. During the postgraduate period, he focused on using the underlying technology of the crypto and constantly explored the unique artistic language. Obtained a master’s degree from the Central Academy of Fine Arts in 2020. In 2021, the world’s first physical exhibition of cryptoArt was held at Beijing Guardian Art Center.
Artworks sale information
Sale time: September 26, 13:00 (UTC) ~ September 29, 13:00
Official sale website https://1000eye.org
Twitter https://twitter.com/crypto1000eye
Discord https://discord.gg/9TDrYpv2ak
OpenSea https://opensea.io/assets/1000eye
Solo Exhibition https://www.artexb.com/pano/COOKIE_COOKIE
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