Preserving the long-term independence of the zero-fee, permissionless Cryptopunks Market.
The Cryptopunks are a 4.5 year old experiment in generative, decentralized digital art. We originally gave the Cryptopunks away for free and have since been running the front-end of the decentralized marketplace that’s built into the contract. The market charges no fees, and as creators of the project, we claim no share of secondary sales. We also put the punk images themselves https://www.larvalabs.com/blog/2021-8-18-18-0/on-chain-cryptopunks earlier this fall. So the Cryptopunks (together with its market) are a purely decentralized project, with no reliance on corporate marketplaces, no fees, and no risk of censorship or regulation from centralized authorities.
In the past year as NFTs have exploded in popularity and value, the demands of hosting a marketplace that has seen over $1.8B in transaction volume are such that it has outgrown our two-person creative team. We also strive to think very long-term about this project, and so need to plan for how this project will eventually outlive us. That all being said, anything we do should retain the decentralized purity described above as its primary purpose.
So, with those goals in mind, today we are releasing a new open source codebase to form the basis of a Cryptopunks Market interface 2.0. It will address some of the shortcomings of the current UI, but more importantly will also allow for community input and code contributions as we together tackle problems with increasingly difficult tradeoffs, such as bid acceptance front-running. Anybody will be able to fork and run a marketplace interface of their own, and users can choose the trading experience they prefer, in the true spirit of the decentralized blockchain.
Below is a screenshot of the new marketplace in progress, and the project is on https://github.com/larvalabs/cryptopunksmarket.