Here’s Why Anonymous NFT And Crypto Founders Continue To Gain Popularity
Portrait of artist H. R. Giger w. mask over face. (Photo by Dana Frank/Getty Images)
After the rapid growth of Friend.tech, internet users and the media started pointing out the choice of the founding team of staying anonymous as a red flag. Friend.tech is a new social media platform where users follow others by buying their profile shares. The team, led by developers who go by the aliases 0xracer and Shrimpepe, have partnered with the venture capital firm Paradigm.
Anonymous creators are nothing new. Historically, Victorian-era female authors often published under pseudonyms. It is, however, considered unusually controversial by crypto critics. While journalists at the New York Times
NYT
If we want to protect others from wrongdoing and scams, perhaps the emphasis should be on financial literacy and education, not on compulsively revealing identities. The choice to adopt a different identity should not inherently be a red flag. After all, famed fraudsters Bernie Madoff and Sam Bankman-Fried used their given names to run some of the largest scale scams ever known to Wall Street.
Anonymity has been vital for the emergence of user-controlled, alternative decentralized cryptocurrencies. The pseudonymous figure who invented Bitcoin
BTC
The right to communicate via encrypted channels and preserve anonymity have been long advocated for by the Association for Progressive Communications and the Electronic Frontiers Foundation. The right to publish anonymously is so important that the APC urged United Nations representative David Kaye, who was presenting a report to the Human Rights Council in 2015, to include information on anonymity as key for freedom of expression.
It should then come as no surprise that in the crypto scene, the choice to stay anonymous is protected and “doxxing” a person is frowned upon. In July, Arkham Intelligence, a company seeking to deanonymize blockchain users, sparked controversy by creating a doxx to earn program, through which people could report on the identities of others in exchange for bounties.
The NFT artist known as Shl0ms was among the outspoken critics of the vigilante doxxing program. “Anonymity offers an artist the rare opportunity to craft a character that is pure and reflects a deep, fundamental part of them, without any of the perceptional baggage that comes with the banal characteristics of human identity. It allows you to loom larger than life.” mentioned Shl0ms in an interview. The artist is best known for blowing up a $250,000 Lamborghini and creating 999 NFTs with videos of the rotating pieces of the destroyed vehicle. This collection offered a scathing commentary on greed in the crypto industry. In a similarly outspoken move, Shl0ms responded to Arkham’s program by launching a campaign revealing details about the company and its founders, using their own platform. On the topic of bounties Shl0ms commented that while their initial whitepaper included no protections against it becoming a free-for-all doxxing, Arkham Intelligence has since “implemented some controls which will supposedly not allow for bounties to be placed on non-criminal or institutional entities”.
It’s commonplace for NFT artists to launch their careers using pseudonyms. Yuga Labs, the creators of the world-famous Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT project, started off as anons as well. Buzzfeed revealed two of the founders’ identities against their will in 2022, in an article alleging there was hidden extremist symbolism within the NFT collection. In spite of this, Yuga Labs continued to grow, professionalizing the team, launching a lifestyle brand, a metaverse, and an ERC-20 token, on top of acquiring the most valuable project in the NFT space: CryptoPunks. Currently, Yuga Labs is valued at $4 billion, after their last financing round led by Andreessen Horowitz.
Being anon, or semi-anon, doesn’t prevent people in the blockchain industry from interacting with others in the real world, either. During my time at FWBFest, I had the opportunity to hang out with many people I admire, like the Brazil-born artist Godmin, a pseudonymous artist I’ve been following for more than two years. A one-woman show, Godmin has single-handedly developed the code and visuals for two NFT projects while running her own NFT community.
Another notable anonymous artist, 0x113d, creator of the ambitious NFT expansive project Mathcastles by Terraforms, told me in an interview that creating an artistic pseudonym “helped me genuinely immerse myself. Through this, I could shed any attachment to a former pedigree uncorrelated to success in this new art world.” 0x113d also runs a free education program for aspiring NFT artists wanting to learn creative coding and smart contract development.
Some other founders have elected to break off their anon veneers as part of their company’s roadmap. One such example is the Franco-Iranian artist Sassan Behnam Bakhtiar, who is a recognized painter, a leading figure in the Middle Eastern art market. When he entered the crypto industry, he originally worked on his project , called The Futures (alongside his co-founder) under the name Kensho Kenji for two years. Now The Futures has been released to the public through a high-profile mint on NFT marketplace Magic Eden. Bakhtiar and co-founder Kevin Benharbon (aka Moses) chose to start as an anon-led project while setting up a legal entity in Monaco.
Sassan Behnam-Bahktiar and Kevin Benharbon, founders of The Futures before and after revealing their … [+]
Meanwhile, in 2021, Bakhtiar was simultaneously working on the first NFT residency program alongside the NFT platform Nifty Gateway, in collaboration with the rapper Tiny Tempah.
“‘Coming from a politically charged family, one which brought me pain, torture and trauma throughout my childhood and youth, ultimately formed in me a rebel mentality,” Bakhtiar told me in an interview about why he choose to temporarily work on The Futures under a pseudonym. ‘Through my younger teen years, I realized a valuable lesson – to give the minimum information possible. I implemented the same mindset in my career as a contemporary artist, and in working on The Futures.”
Since the The Guardian reported that Bakhtiar was previously held in state custody in Iran, it should come as no surprise that he chose working in the shadows for a while. Anonymity is a form of preservation and protection, an effective way to quench the outside noise and to look towards the future without baggage.
Human resource departments in crypto companies have learned to respect anonymity as well – just because you chose to preserve your identity from others doesn’t mean you can’t get a job. This is not a charitable undertaking. Anonymous coders are sometimes the most talented of them all, like Paradigm researcher Samczun, whose identity has been well-preserved for years. Samczun started off as a white-hat hacker and he is now better known for having rescued tens of millions of dollars in crypto from malicious hacker attacks by doing constant reviews of open source codebases. Lately, Samczun has been championing the task of creating a way for hackers and lurkers to disclose security vulnerabilities responsibly while preserving their identity – the Seal 911 initiative.
In summary, a society under surveillance is a captive one. It is considered a normal, healthy choice for crypto founders to remain anonymous, even if temporarily, and not a sign of nefarious activity. Perhaps other sectors of the tech industry would benefit from the creativity the NFT market enjoys due to this culture of flexibility. As the Electronic Frontier Foundation affirms in declaring there is a human right to anonymity – respecting the privacy of others is vital to free expression.
