The Story of Chiptopunks.
The story of Chiptopunks begins all the way back in May. This may not seem like a long time ago, but in the NFT space, it feels like years ago. Some of you have may already come across the “OG” Chiptopunk physical piece that GaperArt (@0xGaper) created back then. You may also be familiar with the new 512 Chiptopunks collection that spawned from the concept in May and dropped on August 20th. This is the story of how this entire concept came to be and the journey that GaperArt took with Kwiz1 (@camtaylorart).
Act I — The Creation of the OG Chiptopunks
Gaper has always had a love for computer parts, from a very young age he was always left alone to be on his computer all day while his parents worked. He would later build his own gaming computer and that was an experience that changed his life. “For the first time I felt like computer parts weren’t something that I necessarily had to be careful with” Gaper says. He later would get a job as a computer engineering assistant. For most of his life growing up he was surrounded by these green boards.
Gaper had entered the NFT space with his glitch art at first. His glitch process includes overclocking and stress-testing his GPU to produce glitches. That process is described here. After sometime Gaper wanted to venture into new types of art. He hit up his buddies back at the computer firm he previously worked at and asked if he could come in and buy some parts. Once he got those parts he got to work. “I knew I wanted to make something the NFT space would take notice of, and at the time the #1 symbol of the NFT space was CryptoPunks. So I decided to make a CryptoPunk.” After some time deliberating names, he asked Twitter what should he call his new creation? In the end Chiptopunk was the name he ended up going with.
Once Chipto was made, Gaper knew he had to market this perfectly and to do this he teamed up with Nifty Castle. Gifdead and Woahboy from the Nifty Castle helped Gaper plan and perfectly execute the drop and even host a drop party on Clubhouse that reached hundreds of people. In the end, the 15 gold Chiptopunks were sold and the 3 Silvers were given to community members. However, Chiptopunk did not receive a bid that night. A couple of days later, Gaper accepted an offer of 1ETH for Chiptopunk from CryptoKing (@cryptokingD). That was the story of the OG Chiptopunk, but something magical happened in that Clubhouse drop party room.
Act II — Enter Cam Taylor
After that Clubhouse room, Cam the creator of Rare Diamond Hands, hit up Gaper and said “I know how I can take this concept to the next level.” From there, Cam started showing some of the stuff he had created around the original concept. Gaper instantly fell in love and they got to work ironing out the details, traits, and everything else they needed to do in order to make this project a success. At first, they decided lets do 100 Chiptopunks and have our own contract. As time went on, Cam grew more and more passionate about the idea and really started to see the potential for this becoming something really big. A couple weeks later, Gaper and Cam decided to aim for 256 Chiptopunks, a couple weeks after that, they decided to go for the full 512. They got to work, they knew rendering each one would take months, and they also knew that they had to figure out the smart contract and Web3 for the website. So they both got to work, and put their head down for 3 and a half months.
In the time that Cam was rendering all of these beautiful Chiptopunks, Gaper had got to work learning solidity and went even further and learned how to make generative art scripts. “I just fell in love with everything Ethereum and Solidity and found it to be something I was very passionate about.” Since then, Gaper has been hosting rooms on Solidity and Ethereum basics on Clubhouse to make this information more accessible to the community. With everything taken care of, it was time to plan the drop.
Act III — The Drop
Gaper and Cam had everything ready to go, the MP4 renders, the JPEG preview images, the contract, the website and the metadata. We launched the initial teaser for Chipto on Twitter and it exceeded expectations. The discord grew exponentially and we knew we had gotten real traction. After months, our idea was finally validated by the community and we knew that this had real potential to sell out.
3 weeks after the initial teaser, it came time to drop. The discord grew from 800 members to almost 2000 in just the last 24 hours. With the clock ticking down Cam, Gaper and the rest of the community prepared for the drop on the discord stage. 6 seconds. Chiptopunks sold out in 6 seconds. “My first reaction was to scream with excitement and cheer, only to turn to the general chat to see people spamming F, insulting the team, calling the project a scam and demanding we redo the drop,” Gaper said. One big brained solidity savvy buyer managed to purchase 150 of the 512 supply when the transaction limit was suppose to be 3. This is what caused the uproar. Although it does happen on other projects, it was so much more evident on a smaller line. “The whole night I felt like I couldn’t even celebrate, I was drained, I just wanted to create something cool and share it with the world, we didn’t mean for any of that to happen.” Cam said. The discord was filled with negativity, Twitter was full of tweets accusing the team of being scammers and dumping on their community. It felt like it would never end, but then it did.
Overnight Chiptopunks saw 400+ ETH in volume traded, and the next morning we had peaked at 300 unique wallets. The whale who bought the 150 has sold his entire position for an average cost of 1ETH. The beauty in this that our floor has sustained over 1ETH since the drop and is holding steady. Even more beautiful is the success stories we have seen. Some of those who bought for 1ETH turned around and sold for 10ETH the next day. It was madness, Chiptopunks exploded. The negativity stopped and the community is strong. We even started to host town hall meetings every Sunday at 9PM EST. The community is so strong and it feels like you are able to get to know everyone apart of it.
