| What drives a person to spend $11.75 million on a tiny JPEG drawing of an alien in a surgical mask? What makes a fine-art specialist invoke Andy Warhol? What reshapes the lives of two Canadian programmers, a tile salesman from Houston, and a disabled artist from the Midwest? What conjures a vibrant community from nothing and helps turn "non-fungible token" into a household term? The CryptoPunks do. In her latest feature for WIRED, senior editor Sandra Upson traces the fevered history of these digital collectibles, the 10,000 algorithmically generated faces that sparked a cultural craze. As she follows them from their quiet appearance on the Ethereum blockchain in 2017 to their breakout pandemic moment, she ponders some of the questions that the Punks raise—on the meaning of art, ownership, personal identity, and, Upson writes, "how a group of people came to believe that a bunch of images and a rough-edged technology could be worth such staggering sums." Anthony Lydgate | Senior Editor, WIRED |
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