This transcript is generated with the help of AI and is lightly edited for clarity.
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Reid:
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.
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Reid:
It is awesome to be here at the opening of the Node Foundation. It is appropriately celebrating the kind of intersection between art and 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 which 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 emotion– what’s the– Ah, this is my favorite because of X. Even though I love all 10,000.
John:
That’s definitely the case. We love all the children, but 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 favorite. You can look at our collection and kind of get a vibe for that.
Reid:
And do the zombies or aliens count as punky as punks?
John:
Yeah, that’s the thing. They can look really punky too. Yeah, there’s a few zombies that, you know, just are wearing the shades and just kind of looking– you know, just looking like kind of cool, punky but dead people. (laughs)
Reid:
(laughs) Dead or alien, depending.
John:
And then, yeah, the apes, the aliens. Yeah, they can all put that out there. So, yep.
Reid:
So one of the things I’ve loved about the punks journey is there’s a number of different museums that have now integrated them in the collection. It’s part of the notion of what is kind of the history of art, what is the story of art, museums being the caretakers and in a sense the network nodes here at the Node Foundation. So what are your reflections on punks entering museums? You know, it ranges everything from MoMA to here at Node.
Matt:
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 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, our convictions got hardened a little bit. And I think maybe you’re going to change your mind. Cause I think there’s something real here and it’s pretty interesting. And it might be a little 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 like, makes sense in sort of an objective way. But still weird, personally.
John:
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. (laughs) It’s like, well, why are we here then? But then a handful of people did kind of almost pitch it back to us, you know, especially people who had a strong interest in digital art. They were saying, you know, this solves a major problem for digital art. It was always so artificial to try to own it, you know, it never felt right. We’d get like a CD-ROM and a certificate, you know, and like, don’t put it on the internet, you know, it’s like, what? You know, that data—that’s not natural for data.
John:
Data needs to be free, you know, I mean, we know we’re in the middle of Silicon Valley. We know that. We were 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 that—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, this world computer. It all just started to make sense.
John:
And so I think, yeah, we kind of got galvanized and I remember even, 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 2, the number 2, MoMA? (laughs)
Matt:
(laughs) It was a big joke
Reid
(laughs) Who knows.
John:
Yeah, exactly.
Reid:
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 important on the art thing. So, you know, back in 2017, when you guys hit publish, what did 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 want a little tiny part (laughs), 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, what—they hit publish, what do you think would happen?
John:
At that time, we were just hoping—It’s like, will people just pick up on this? Will they think that they own it? I mean, that was the hardest thing. And obviously we were using this analogy of, well, people value their Bitcoin, 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. And we just were looking for just enough of a signal there to feel like—that it worked. 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 just some—like, this happens.
John:
And initially it didn’t, right? Like, we’re not the best marketers (laughs). 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 know, you just have to interact with the smart contract. And, you know, a handful of people did, right? But some people, they were like, this is cool. But then, what? 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, you know, maybe we should have said. You know, like, this is the future of digital art, you know, like this could change… whatever, you know, however it was said.
John:
And then all of a sudden this community formed up, seemingly overnight. 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. Aliens sold for three grand. And when they were—it was all just free 24 hours ago, people started making them their profile pictures on social media.
Matt:
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’d prefer that one, I got it for free, a dollars nothing. And then it was like, well, if you’re spending a dollar, I’ll probably send about $10 (laughs).
John:
You know, we might have been on the sell side of that dollar. Because we were just, kind of, trying to be market makers, you know, like if anyone wants to buy one, I’m selling. I don’t even really care what the price is.
Matt:
We’re so happy if anybody just does anything with this.
John:
But we were buying too. You know, someone sold one and tried to sell them for 10 bucks, like, yes, I’ll buy that. You know, you’re just sort of trying to be market makers in those first few days, really. Yeah.
Reid:
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 MoMA— but just like, hey, we’re trying it and we’ll see what happens.
John:
Well, we went through the, kind of, that crypto winter phase, where—and that was really just more about keeping the lights on, you know, like we had that—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, what, kind of like a hardcore fan base, right?
Matt:
A couple hundred people maybe that would just check in and you know, that’s really what kept us going. Kept us going too, because we’re like, oh, they’re into it. I’m still into it. We’ll just keep it going, you know.
John:
Yeah, and there was– There was, in particular, there was this one person who had claimed like, a thousand, and they were just relentlessly dumping them, you know, just as soon as they saw, they would—And just as low as, you know, they were just like 40 bucks, you know, and that happened. That took place over the course of a year. Right. This person just slowly unloading them and– and–
Matt:
We were buying them? (laughs)
John:
Yeah, we bought it.
Matt:
Like, we’re buying our own punk files now?
Reid:
(laughs) We sold it for a dollar. We’re buying it for 40.
Matt:
(laughs) Yeah. This doesn’t seem right.
John:
Yeah, and so we had to get through all that. But, yeah, what—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– 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, 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, but—
Reid:
New Year’s resolutions for Digital Identity?
John:
I know.
Matt:
Yeah.
Matt:
To the day, though. January 1st, it was nuts. And we’d seen, like, there’d been, like, moments, like, a week of excitement and then it would quiet down. So we just sort of, 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.
John:
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 that, you know, this is like a worldwide funnel.
Reid:
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– when did that moment happen?
John:
I feel like kind of early on and 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, you know, we can’t go in and change things, we can’t make more, we can’t assign yours to someone else, you know, 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.
John:
And there are other websites that have all the data and track all the market activities. I think we 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, you know, got a little— Yeah, you know, 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.
Matt:
No, no. Yeah. No, I don’t think so. I think I’m going to blame you (laughs). Yeah, I think I’m more comfortable with that idea. (laughs)
Reid:
Part of, I think, you know, obviously hindsight is always 20/20 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, this is part of—it’s decentralized. It’s part of philosophy, it’s part of, you know—it’s 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, 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 upgradeable? Does every kind of—
John:
Yeah, definitely.
Matt:
I think so, yeah.
John:
Yeah, no regrets, you know, how we did it, yeah.
Matt:
I think— I was sort of like 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 no, like, there’s over 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, we have no—there’s no admin functions, there’s no anything. And so there’s a couple, like, crazy downsides to that.
Matt:
If somebody makes a mistake and they lose their punk, it’s like, sorry, you know, like, nothing I can do. But the upsides are that there’s nothing we can do. You know, like, you can always—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, you don’t—hopefully, hope that gallery is in business to prove that you owned it. It’s all there. It has nothing to do with us, so.
John:
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.
Matt:
I think you said too, like, one nice thing about this mechanism is it’s a way for people not to wish for our death. (laughs)
John:
Yeah. (laughs)
Matt:
You know, like the set size is set. You don’t—we can’t make more of them, you know?
Reid
It’s already a collectible. (laughs)
Matt:
Yeah, like, leave us alone.
John:
I’d like to believe, yeah, that CryptoPunk price wouldn’t move up or down if we died, you know? And I actually want to broadcast that (laughs), take that opportunity.
Reid:
(laughs) It might go down, so.
Matt:
(laughs) Yeah, yeah, good point. Yeah.
Reid:
So, you know, one of the things I always think to myself, and obviously it’s—second guessing an amazing journey and success is always difficult, but like, 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?
Matt:
Yeah, you know, it’s—well then another natural one of that is, like, now that the market’s done 3.9 billion, like, you guys want to take a couple percent there (laughs)? You know? Like, 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’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 so?
John:
Keeps it punk, you know? True. Yeah, yeah.
Matt:
(laughs) Yeah, true, yeah.
John:
Yeah, whenever we talk—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, 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 just its charm and authenticity. And it’s like, this is internet art. This is something that we just put out there and then this happened. And you’re right, if we go back in time and muse 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?
John:
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. Yeah. And even if you had put 1% or something, you don’t know how that could have affected things early on. So I think that’s all sort of hindsight bias, really, to think of all those “what could have been’s”. Yeah.
Reid:
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, that flaw that you had to correct in the [smart] contract. That might be the one thing?
Matt:
That’s true
John:
Oh yeah, for sure.
Matt:
Yeah.
John:
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.
John:
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 a little 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 everyone came back, but they even, kind of, replayed in good faith most of the transactions that they had sort of done but hadn’t worked. And so yeah, 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 bid side of the market. All we had was offer for sale and buy, in the original contract.
John:
But then as part of redoing it, we were like, you know, we should have a bid side of this too.
Matt:
I remember you telling me that, “we should really add bids”. And I was like, dude, we just blew it. Like, you want to make it like, even more complicated? (laughs)
John:
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 much, that many lines of code right? But it’s like, it does have to stand for all time. It is the craziest kind of programming. You know, we’ve been software developers for 30 years and you know, nothing compares to writing a Solidity contract in terms of just the pure—the pressure and everything.
Matt:
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 (laughs). 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.
John:
And in our career up to that point, really, we were rapid prototypers. We used to do a lot of stuff with the Google Creative Lab where they’re like, we need to mock up this product or we want to do this thing for next weekend at an event. So we’re just, sort of run and gun. 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.
Matt:
That was the 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, which works fine elsewhere, but not so much—
Reid:
Immutable, a little harder. Yeah, yeah.
John:
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 how 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– 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, okay, now what is Ethereum? (laughs) How do you actually do this? You know? Yeah.
Reid:
So I want to come back to the community, art, narrative, etc, 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 Claude Code now? Right? How is AI’s code generation intersecting with the way you’re thinking about the world?
Matt:
Yeah, it’s been a real surprise because—well 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 it was like this real sad guy came out and was like, “Well, here’s the textbook and we’re gonna go through it all. But nothing worked. So, yeah. Welcome to the class”.
John:
(laughs) You know, like, the 90s was the absolute low point for AI. It was—yeah, and even, I mean—
Reid
None of this works (laughs).
Matt:
Yeah.
John:
We were at University of Toronto. Hinton was teaching there, and, you know, Geoffrey Hinton—and I remember I almost took his class, and then a grad student was like, “do not go near that guy”. (laughs)
Matt:
(laughs) Like, it didn’t work, man.
John:
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 like—the creative part is the hard part, you know, and we can 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.
John:
It’s just more like, 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—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.
Matt:
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 I’m like, I don’t know. And then, and then around the time the reasoning models happen, 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 and I was like, whoa, you gotta check this out, like—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—like I’m doing some API connection here? Like, this is so boring. Yeah.
John:
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 were Java developers at our, sort of, core, old school 90s Java developers. But then we do a lot of—
Reid:
Some people listening to this still know what Java is (laughs).
John:
(laughs) Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I know. If you’re out there, that one person!
Matt:
(laughs) We see you!
John:
Yeah, exactly, because it’s still amazing. But yeah, then we switch over, 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.
Reid:
One thing I’m curious about, because this is something I do—like I, you know, benefit of first commercial investor in OpenAI, was on the OpenAI board, you know, because I– I got into the AI revolution because what I realized was—by the way, my undergraduate at Stanford was artificial intelligence.
Matt:
Oh, okay.
Reid:
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 like, 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, right? It was the Pong playing itself, it was Go playing itself. It’s like, oh shit, this is now going to turn into something. What?
Reid:
I don’t know. But that’s when I, kind of—that was my realization that turned me from the first couple of years being into Bitcoin. I was so—I’ve always been very positive. But like, oh, I’m going to stop focusing on crypto. I’m going to focus on AI now for it. Now in the creative process, it is definitely a tool, it’s definitely an accelerant, it’s definitely like encoding. But like, for example, for me, when I start approaching like, some line that I’m thinking of, I actually use—it isn’t as a muse, but is as a foil, right? Like, so, for example, I go, oh, I wonder what you would apply Wittgensteinian language games to reinforcement human feedback learning. 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.
Reid:
Do you guys do any of that in your creative process? I’m just curious about also the—not just the tool of accelerant, but the foil.
John:
Yeah, I think so. You can kind of vet ideas, right? You can just sort of 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– 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—
Reid
Because sometimes it’s not right.
John:
Yeah, exactly.
Matt:
Or like, oh, this is an amazing idea. It’s like, no, it’s not. (laughs)
John:
(laughs) Yeah, there’s been some people out there that were like, oh man, I’m making major breakthroughs with quantum mechanics, according to my chatbot!
Matt:
(laughs) My best bud here who is programmed to love me.
John:
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. It allows for, kind of, more ambition in those categories as well.
Matt:
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, oh, you got a null pointer or there’s an error or whatever.
John:
It doesn’t lie to you.
Matt:
Yeah, it doesn’t just be like, I don’t really know, but I’m just going to say something you want to hear (laughs).
Reid:
You want to hear this. Even though it’s completely fiction (laughs).
Matt:
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 that you just—It’s crazy, like seeing some of the models that people are like, oh, this actually is thinking about this. It’s thinking about me. It understands what I’m saying, what I mean. And I’m like, I’m not sure about that. But yeah, it’s a very interesting new thing.
Reid:
So, back to the narrative side. I think this is 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 gonna 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.
John:
Yeah, and I think overall we were pretty hands-off in that, you know, just letting it happen. I know that as—we were—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, like, oh, did you hear about the trade that happened? Did you hear that he has a Gretzky rookie now or whatever? Like, 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 where you can spend a dime on a million dollar transaction basically, that there would just be those stories. And I feel like that is the case now.
John:
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 ENS addresses 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?
Reid:
Presumably now somewhere between 100 and 400,000.
John:
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—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 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 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.
Reid:
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 was also going to become an interesting thing in digital identity or did you?
Matt:
We had a little bit, yeah, 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– or Android was 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.
John:
Like, you put clothes on and you know, accessories, not completely unlike this, where you’re basically dressing up the Android 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 up to this.
Matt:
That went crazy. And it was a Google app, so that had a nice platform to start with, but people really loved it. They made it their profile picture. And we kind of realized, oh, the profile picture is like the most valuable real estate on the internet, basically, 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 the—
John:
Stuck with us.
Matt:
Yeah. And because we—you know, two guys, can’t market worth shit. And then also no budget, no nothing. So we’re like, we gotta think of some way where people get into it and start talking about it as themselves. So that was why the profile picture was, you know—
Reid
The target.
Matt:
Yeah.
John:
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, you know, 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 worth anything, but just as a marketing hit, it was. And so, yeah, it stuck with us to think about that profile picture. 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, you know, do they kind of push it?
John:
And this has been the most extreme version of that, where every next collector becomes– becomes a big marketer of it, you know, like, they love to talk about it, they love to make it their profile picture, you know, and so it—that’s part of this idea of it having moved beyond us.
Matt:
(laughs) You didn’t hear about this from us. You know, somebody else told you, you have to get a crypto book. That’s how this works.
Matt:
That’s why people ask us, like, what’s this? Or, what’s that? And we’re like, I don’t know, like, this thing is doing its own thing now. Like, they don’t—nobody asks me, nobody tells me. (laughs) I feel like sometimes we’re the last to hear about things.
John:
For sure.
Matt:
Yeah. So we definitely underestimated the extent to which that was going to happen. 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.
Reid:
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, Meebits, et cetera. What are some of the principles that you’ve been learning of like, how do I launch these things in interesting ways now? So like, 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.
Matt:
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 of a pure, kind of, art project, but it was related to the feedback and pushback we got for 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.
John:
Tech exploration, kind of almost. Yeah, yeah.
Matt:
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 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, 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.
John:
Yeah, to make a subtler case, yeah. But yeah, I think, yeah, like Matt said, autoglyphs 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. Meebits 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, Qime was about this 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, you know what I mean? We want there to be something new, some twist, some—because we just love that stuff too.
John:
You know, 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 like, product market fit. It’s mostly just sort of like, do we vibe with this? Does this feel right? Then let’s do it.
Reid:
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! It was *imitating buzz noise*.
Matt:
Yeah. And it’s funny because, like, we did, you know, 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 had it like—we started on mobile really early, like on the Sidekick and with Danger, which was like—
Reid:
Some people listening to this probably remember what a Sidekick is (laughs).
John:
(laughs) Exactly. Probably the same guy who remembers Java, remembers the T-Mobile Sidekick.
Matt:
Yeah. And that was working—they had an app store and everything in like 2005 and 6. 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’t 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, you know. So a few of those kind of things. We’ve written some games.
John:
Yeah. Because the whole time we were like, why—we have all these new—we have the completely new platform and yet it’s still kind of like Windows, you know, or Mac OS, where it’s like “click on the icon”, you know? And we just wanted to like, overcome that somehow. But I guess it was just so ingrained, people… yeah. So we had some faithful users on this totally, kind of, more information, notifications and just 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.
Matt:
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– (laughs) And it was just like—people would be like, anybody got any good contacts out there? (laughs)They’d just be like, sending the weirdest—
John:
Yeah. But for some, it was kind of successful. For some games, people would just be talking about the game and sharing ideas. But, yeah, then people would be on a calculator and it’s like, what words can you spell with an upside down calculator? (laughs) 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. 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. It was unhinged what was going on, but I didn’t dare go into, like, the Tinder chat.
John:
(laughs) I did not want to know what was going on there. But there was lots of messages in that one.
Matt:
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 a 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, like, support for developers, for people using the thing. So we tried to turn it into that a little bit. Didn’t quite work, so, yeah, but that was the model were operating under, was like, make anything that anyone would care about and just see if it was anything more than that.
Reid:
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 the natural gravity, and social consensus and how it plays into community dynamics. Is there anything that you guys have thought about, like, what this tension is? What it gives this 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.
John:
Yeah, and that is a real tension, right? And we’ve seen the “Code is Law” kind of break down a few times. With the Ethereum DAO, with the first CryptoPunks launch contract, we said we’re relaunching it because there was a problem, but that’s still—the community can decide what to do. And so that tension does exist. And so we love the Code is Law and like I said, we think it is just such a great, kind of, artistic tool. You know, 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, you know, even just, you know, why are we confident that CryptoPunks will still exist in 10 years, in 50 years, in 100 years?
John:
Because the Ethereum community will keep going. They could just stop tomorrow. But there’s all these reasons, including CryptoPunks, that it won’t. And so, yeah, 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.
Matt:
Yeah. And I think the tension between the laws of the country it operates in and the Code is 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, and that’s the miracle of digital currency being worth something. And that’s why the CryptoPunks are what they are, is there’s a mechanism for you to have to achieve consensus around things and how they work. And sometimes people like, defect from that system and go to like, you know, a court of law and decide like, 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.
John:
Yeah, I mean, this may be varying, getting away from your question a little bit, but we were kind of surprised that the—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’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. 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.
John:
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. 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—maybe 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.
Matt:
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? We’re like, you can run a node and maybe—
John:
Another museum can run another node.
Matt:
Maybe Ethereum just becomes a bunch of museums running Ethereum for the art, that’s possible. You can do that, which is an interesting, kind of, way in which it could persist.
Reid:
In what ways do you look at CryptoPunks as finished art project and which way do you look at them as a evolving art project?
Matt:
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, it’s like, 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.
Reid:
So is there a book, movie or idea that gives you optimism about the future?
Matt:
For me, it’s—I don’t know if it’s any particular book or anything, but it’s, I think, renewable energy, which feel— like, because I was, you know, pretty bummed out about climate change for a long period of time and now I can see, you know, well, we got people that just want to make money working on climate change effectively and at a scale that is on essentially unbelievable, especially for potentially people in our country. So I find that really inspiring and just the idea that, you know, energy might be so available, ubiquitous and, you know, relatively harm free, that I can’t even imagine what that will be like. So that’s optimistic in a way.
Reid:
I’ve made fusion investments. Exactly.
Matt:
Oh, okay.
John:
Yeah, yeah, we’re definitely clean energy nerds, so yeah.
Matt:
Yeah.
Reid:
What’s a question about crypto or AI you wish people would ask more often?
John:
Yeah, I mean, certainly with CryptoPunks, it is about, kind of, the decentralized thing, you know, I feel like so many people just always maybe focus on the art or even maybe just the community, and then part of this show is about, like, this is how it works and that’s so fundamental to it, you know? Once you, kind of, get that feeling of how it all works then. And so that, 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 centralized. It’s like, oh, this new stablecoin started up and everything. It’s like, who cares? The fundamental thing is the decentralization and we’re always preaching that, you know, we’re sort of old school, I guess, or something in that way.
Reid:
Or original.
John:
Original, yeah.
Matt:
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 that you can do that’s amazing about this right now, you know, that is going to change so many things.
John:
Good and bad, right? So rather than radical abundance, like, 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.
Reid:
I think you may have already answered this question because renewable energy, but I’m going to ask it anyway. Where do you see real progress happening outside your industry?
Matt:
Yeah, it is odd in that we’re in a time that does feel, to me, like the future now. I’m like, whoa, that’s great.
John:
A Waymo goes by or something (laughs).
Matt:
Yeah, we’ve seen Waymos drive 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, 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.
John:
Yeah. I think maybe, yeah, the renewable energy. Yeah.
Matt:
Yeah.
Reid:
If everything breaks humanity’s way over the next 15 years, what’s the first or next step for getting there?
John:
Fix, like, 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. So, yeah.
Matt:
Yeah, that’d be nice to, you know, we grew up basically in the era of, like, 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.
Reid:
Bring some light back.
Matt:
Yeah.
Reid:
To the web. Matt and John, it’s been awesome. I look forward to our future conversations.
Matt:
Thank you.
John:
Yeah, thanks so much.
Reid:
Possible is produced by Palette Media. It’s hosted by Aria Finger and me, Reid Hoffman. Our showrunner is Shaun Young. Possible is produced by Thanasi Dilos, Katie Sanders, Spencer Strasmore, Yimu Xiu, Trent Barboza, and Tafadzwa Nemarundwe.
Aria:
Special thanks to Surya Yalamanchili, Saida Sapieva, Ian Alas, Greg Beato, Parth Patil and Ben Relles.
Reid:
A big thanks to the Punks community, Sean Bonner, Natalie Stone, Becky Kleiner, the Node Foundation and its team.