Simple NFT Stick Figures Are Selling for $13K. Here’s Why

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An mfer.


OpenSea

NFTs are con­found­ing at the best of times, as peo­ple spend­ing five fig­ures on pro­file pic­ture art is nev­er easy to com­pre­hend. Still, most suc­cess­ful non­fun­gi­ble token col­lec­tions have a coher­ent log­ic to them. The cryp­to-rich drop six fig­ures on Cryp­toP­unks because it has his­tor­i­cal val­ue as the first ever NFT col­lec­tion. They spend even more on Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs because it’s become a brand big enough for the likes of Adi­das and Rolling Stone to work with. But even if you con­sid­er your­self open-mind­ed when it comes to NFTs, you may have a hard time accept­ing “mfers.”

Like the pop­u­lar col­lec­tions men­tioned above, mfers is a set of rough­ly 10,000 NFTs (10,021 to be pre­cise). Each art­work in the col­lec­tion is a stick fig­ure wear­ing head­phones typ­ing on an out-of-frame key­board. Since launch­ing on Nov. 30, over $110 mil­lion worth of mfers have been bought and sold by NFT traders, more than most Hol­ly­wood movies make in box office sales. 

If you want to get your hands on one, the cheap­est mfer list­ed on NFT mar­ket­place OpenSea is 3.97 ether. That’s a few bucks short of $14,000.

Even when you fac­tor in the cryp­to-rich back­grounds of most NFT traders — drop­ping 3 ether on a fun­ny jpeg is eas­i­er if you bought ether at $40 instead of $4,000 — the suc­cess of mfers is unusu­al. Dozens of NFT projects are launched every day. Many are scams, more are mon­ey grabs and most of the ones attempt­ing to be legit­i­mate fail quick­ly. A tiny frac­tion reach the heights mfers has achieved in the past four months. It’s ranked 44 on OpenSea’s chart for all-time volume.

And it’s pre­pos­ter­ous. Mfers is every­thing peo­ple hate about NFTs: sim­ple art being sold for insult­ing­ly high prices. Like many suc­cess sto­ries in the cryp­tos­phere, how­ev­er, it’s more complicated. 

Under­ly­ing mfers’ meme art is, hilar­i­ous­ly, an argu­ment about intel­lec­tu­al prop­er­ty. It’s one of a few “CC0″ NFT col­lec­tions, which means it’s in the pub­lic domain. Its cre­ator does­n’t own the imagery, and peo­ple are free to use the mfer brand for what­ev­er they choose. The idea is that mfer own­ers will prof­it if the mfer brand grows, even if no one owns the copy­right for it. In essence, it’s an exper­i­ment to see if it’s pos­si­ble to com­plete­ly crowd­source brand building. 

A collection of mfer artwork as seen on NFT marketplace OpenSea

There are 10,021 mfers, each with slight­ly dif­fer­ent traits. Here are 10 of them as seen on NFT mar­ket­place OpenSea. 


OpenSea

The col­lec­tion was cre­at­ed by a pop­u­lar Twit­ter per­son­al­i­ty who goes by Sar­toshi, an amal­ga­ma­tion of “art” and Bit­coin founder Satoshi Nakamo­to. It was inspired by the “are ya win­ning son?” meme, which accord­ing to Know Your Meme cen­ters on a dad walk­ing in on his son play­ing a VR hen­tai porn game. Sar­toshi drew a stick-fig­ure slouched on a desk chair, cig­a­rette dan­gling from its mouth as he taps away on a key­board, in the same style as the meme. Before it was an NFT col­lec­tion, he used it as his pro­file pic­ture on Twit­ter, where he now has over 160,000 followers.

“I do some paint­ing and ‘real’ art myself and the idea was nev­er to make a Mona Lisa here,” Sar­toshi told me via Twit­ter DMs. Like most peo­ple in the Web3 world, he asked to stay anony­mous. “The idea was to make a cool sketch-feel­ing NFT that peo­ple could iden­ti­fy with… and to free the copy­right over the art to see what the uni­verse decid­ed to do with it.”

The col­lec­tion dripped with inter­net meme cul­ture from the begin­ning. Launch­ing on Nov. 30, the pub­lic sale began at 4:20 p.m. with a price set to 0.069 ether ($230) per mfer. All 10,000 sold out instant­ly thanks in large part to Sar­toshi’s following.

As com­mon­ly hap­pens in the NFT mar­ket though, mfers had a day or two in the spot­light and then fad­ed away as that shine moved on to the next atten­tion-grab­bing project. By the end of Decem­ber, sales slowed down and the floor price (the cheap­est some­one had list­ed on the mar­ket­place) fell to 0.05 ether, below the pub­lic sale price. Mfers began to recov­er in Jan­u­ary and then explod­ed in Feb­ru­ary. Once momen­tum start­ed to build — NFT col­lec­tions large­ly sell based on hype, so momen­tum is par­tic­u­lar­ly pow­er­ful — buy­ers flocked in, push­ing the floor price as high as 6 ether ($18,000). Like all col­lec­tions, mfers have dif­fer­ent traits that make some rar­er than oth­ers: One trad­er dropped 80 ether, a whop­ping $270,000, on this rare mfer

The floor price has since bal­anced out at between 2.5 and 4 ether. That does­n’t yet make mfers a “blue chip” NFT, which typ­i­cal­ly refers to a hand­ful of col­lec­tions that can sus­tain a floor price of over 10 ether, but it does make mfers sig­nif­i­cant­ly more suc­cess­ful than 99% of collections. 

Sar­toshi thinks mfers was able to stand out by eschew­ing the hype that accom­pa­nies most NFT launch­es. With stick-fig­ure draw­ings, no one could pre­tend that the art was rev­o­lu­tion­ary, as many NFT cre­ators breath­less­ly claim their col­lec­tion’s art to be. 

“Most NFT col­lec­tions have art that is quite basic,” Sar­toshi said, “but all these peo­ple spend mon­ey on them and all of a sud­den they’re falling over at their desk say­ing, ‘omg the art is amaz­ing.” I always joked that a lot of it is basi­cal­ly cere­al box characters.”

As with doge­coin, the silli­ness of it all was a major appeal, spread­ing through NFT cir­cles like a good meme goes viral on Twit­ter. Yet the suc­cess of the col­lec­tion can equal­ly be chalked up to its approach to intel­lec­tu­al prop­er­ty — a sen­tence that feels absurd to write. That Sar­toshi made mfers a pub­lic domain col­lec­tion makes it unusu­al. Some cre­ators, like Cryp­toP­unks’ Lar­va Labs, reserve the rights to all of the col­lec­tion’s IP. Oth­ers, like Bored Ape Yacht Club’s Yuga Labs, give rights only to own­ers, and even then only to the spe­cif­ic NFT they own. (Yuga Labs last month bought Cryp­toP­unks from Lar­va Labs and said it will extend the same copy­rights to Cryp­toP­unks hold­ers as the ones afford­ed to Bored Ape Yacht Club own­ers. That one com­pa­ny could buy the IP for anoth­er NFT col­lec­tion is anoth­er argu­ment some make in the favor of CC0 col­lec­tions like mfers, which can’t be pur­chased in the same way.) 

“Instead of just the rails that the NFTs run on being decen­tral­ized, you extend that to the NFT,” explains Gian­car­lo Chuax, a for­mer stock ana­lyst who now runs a YouTube chan­nel ana­lyz­ing NFTs. “Com­pare that to a Bored Ape Yacht Club, where you have a cen­tral­ized fig­ure that con­trols the brand. CC0 [pub­lic domain] projects don’t have that. Any­body can take the brand in any direc­tion they want, and some feel that’s truer to what the inter­net is about.” 

In an indus­try where peo­ple real­ly care about decen­tral­iza­tion, it’s an idea that mfers have clung to — even if they acknowl­edge, as a few did dur­ing a Twit­ter Spaces I was invit­ed to join, that it may end in chaot­ic failure. 

Sar­toshi has tak­en a com­plete­ly hands-off approach, endors­ing the com­mu­ni­ty from afar rather than active­ly par­tic­i­pat­ing, much less lead­ing it. Hold­ers of mfers have busi­ly set out to build the brand, often using their 9‑to‑5 skills to do so. Sev­er­al have designed and pro­duced mer­chan­dise. One of the com­mu­ni­ty mods, Mas­ter­ChanX, runs Mfer­Ra­dio, an online radio sta­tion that among oth­er pro­gram­ming hosts a Shark Tank-style show apprais­ing ideas for mfers deriv­a­tive col­lec­tions like 3D Mfers. One hold­er, Richard Chiu, has expe­ri­ence act­ing and pro­duc­ing in Hol­ly­wood — and so is cre­at­ing an mfer movie. Some­one even paid out of their pock­et to put mfers in Times Square. 

“The sta­tis­ti­cal odds [of suc­cess] are high­er when you have unlim­it­ed cre­ation hap­pen­ing,” one hold­er said to me. 

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A teas­er trail­er for an mfer movie.


Twitter/mfers studios

As friv­o­lous as mfers looks, Chaux says col­lec­tions like it could sig­nif­i­cant­ly change how peo­ple con­sid­er intel­lec­tu­al prop­er­ty. “The idea of some­thing com­ing from the ground up, bub­bling up organ­i­cal­ly with­out the tra­di­tion­al incen­tive of own­ing the copy­right to that imagery, [would be] pret­ty rev­o­lu­tion­ary,” argues Chaux. “There are some inter­est­ing exam­ples that have done well, Cryp­toadz, Nouns, mfers, but they’re all fair­ly new. This exper­i­ment at most is a few months old.”

Sar­toshi has him­self spec­u­lat­ed that the com­bi­na­tion of NFT tech­nol­o­gy and pub­lic domain IP could be pow­er­ful, but to him that’s not the main appeal of mfers.

“What’s the util­i­ty? Well, you can build what­ev­er you want with them. But at the same time I’d also ask what’s the util­i­ty of a Mick­ey Man­tle rook­ie card?” he said, ref­er­enc­ing a base­ball card that recent­ly sold for $5.2 mil­lion

“Answer: They are fuck­ing sweet. I think some might also say mfers are pret­ty fuck­ing sweet.”



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