Round 3 is complete and, in a dream trade, PaperclipDAO has obtained IKB 37 by Mitchell F. Chan from @jgcfyi! @jgcfyi gets our beloved paperclip punk (CryptoPunk #3744) and 9999 DSMB, part of the fractionalized dissected Meebit, plus 300 $CLIP in return. We’ll miss the paperclip punk but are excited to welcome @jgcfyi to PaperclipDAO! 🖇

Mitchell Chan's Digital Zone of Immaterial Pictorial Sensibility (IKB) is a 2017 NFT project that would be mindblowing even if it was released today. It can be thought of as a digital homage to a famous conceptual artwork by Yves Klein. Homage is artistic tradition---Van Gogh’s beloved tributes to Hiroshige’s work were a way to honor and celebrate the connection he saw between Japanese art and Impressionism. Chan saw the striking connection between Yves Klein and NFTs and created IKB.

IKB draws on an exhibition by Yves Klein in 1958, in which patrons paid in pure gold to view empty spaces (Zones) that Yves imbued with the sensibility (but not the physical appearance) of the color blue. That an artist can “imbue” a space with their art was a radical concept in 1958, but here in 2021’s NFT Summer we are happy to let artists imbue even a digital space with value.[1] Digital Zones understood and predicted this in 2017 and it took the rest of us four years to get it.

In Klein’s 1958 exhibition, a collector who wished to purchase a Zone had to pay in solid gold. They were then issued a paper receipt to serve as proof of transaction. Klein also designed a ritual meant to empower the purchaser to obtain the true immaterial sense of the artwork, enabling the sensibility of the artwork to become part of the owner in a spiritual sense. During this ritual, the purchaser would burn this receipt and Klein would throw half the gold into the River Seine. There are three documented instances of this ritual being performed.

The 101 IKBs represent a fascinating extension of Klein’s ritual on-chain (including a smart contract function that will reproduce the effects of the ritual…) across 7 series, minted starting in 2017. There’s much more to this project than we can cover here--for instance, IKB’s contract is a very early instance of a bonding curve. But you can learn more about this fascinating series by reading the Blue Paper or watching this short video series.

Needless to say, we were floored to receive an offer for an IKB, a historic NFT and trade for Paperclip.

The ones that got away: Round 3 Edition

We received many other notable offers, and as in previous rounds, we were sad to part with all the NFTs that we couldn’t accept. As always, we weighed several factors in making a final decision on which trade to accept. We care about more than just the economic value of a trade; we value the culture, story, and journey of the NFT as well.

We only have time to highlight a few of our favorites, but you can check out the Round 3 offers to see them all. In no particular order, here is our homage to the ones that got away in Round 3:

• Our first Round 3 offer was for Hand by @aaraalto, which he created for the Break Free artwork from the Brain Vomit collection (@steven__rea). [discord link]
• @MPtherealMVP continues to show off her excellent taste, offering a SALT 60. The SALT series is a collection of 180 images, which revolve on a 180 day cycle. Each image is unique and no image appears simultaneously [twitter link]
• @billyrennekamp offered terra0 Flowertoken 14  [twitter link]. terra0 is a long-running experiment in self-owning resources, i.e. a forest that owns itself. The Flowertokens were 1/100 physical flowers that were grown on a livestream from Trust in Berlin in 2018. Viewers sponsored and speculated on individual flowers, watching them grow in real time. The Flowertokens were recently updated to modern NFT standards by way of an official wrapper contract, and the NFT (“Non-Fungible Token”) now represents a timelapse of each flower’s growth—the remains of a memory of a flower from 2018.
• @bitcoin4bernie offered us an incredible trip through history by offering 16 curio cards.  [twitter link]. Curio Cards is an online art show and permanent gallery that launched on May 9, 2017. It is the oldest known example on Ethereum of what is now called NFT Artwork, featuring 30 unique series of NFT cards from 7 different artists. [curio card docs]
• Esren offered  {PANOPTICON} 0x37cd9b9354 @divergence_art. po{a}w is fully interactive, generative artwork derived from proof of work. Token IDs seed an equation that precisely places millions of points, but aesthetically pleasing IDs are rare and must be found at random. Esren also offered FVCK_CRYSTAL// #3847  from a collection of 4169 precious stones designed by @fvckrender that will allow users to participate in future events, raffles, and exclusive areas of the FVCKRENDERVERSE. A trade representing innovation and the progression of the NFT space in exchange for a classic (our paperclip punk). [discord link]
• @FunkySapienX added Weird Whale 0  to his round 2 offer. @WeirdWhales is an NFT collection created by twelve-year-old programmer Benyamin, which was featured in The New York Times. [discord link]
• We got an offer for another @songadayman classic: That Didn't Work (Vitalik Buterin Remix) | Song A Day #4394 [discord link]
• A tribute to Art Blocks [discord link]
• @CliffVandercave offered a rare three-digit numbered square from @SuSquares, a series that includes the very first ERC-721 token ever, created by one of the authors of the ERC-721 standard, @fulldecent. [discord link] - here is what he is referencing
• ETHoard curated an incredible collection that “one way or another represents failure.” [discord link] Each of these NFTs is iconic… and also rejected, forgotten, or straight up banned. This one deserves its own blog post—so check out ETHoard’s discord post—but the short version is: a fake (or real?) Banksy, banned on OpenSea, an ArtBlocks project swept under the rug, an AI GAN’s chaotic pieces as it learns to paint, and finally a pixel on a map from 2016 that can’t even be traded (lol).
• We received offers for Yats (Five of a kind [discord link], Let’s Make a Deal [discord link]), Playing Arts Cards (7 of Spades and 5 of Hearts; [discord link]), a plot of prime real estate on the digital moon (!) [discord link]
• @blasteasy thought Paperclip should hold a literal moonshot and offered us Hurt Spyware Moonshot Bot. Moonshot Bots are issued on a bonding curve with a max supply of 303. The coolest part is 100% of MoonshotBot Minting Fees go to fund Ethereum Public Goods on Gitcoin Grants. [discord link]
• We also received an offer for Moon,which follows the current lunar phase, shifting every day, without using any external resource (it's 100% on chain) [twitter link]
• We always love the Blitmaps [discord link]
• @collinlafleche offered us a gorgeous Solvency #214, a limited edition series of WebGL artworks created by Ezra Miller. Each artwork is a unique, generative NFT with attributes determined based on randomly seeded values generated by the token hash of the NFT.

Each of these offers adds to the storied history of the PaperclipDAO, and we are honored to add our third trade to the history books. In Round 1, we picked the future; in Round 2, we looked back to the past. In Round 3, we honor the beautiful history of NFTs. You won’t believe what we’ve got in store for Round 4. 🖇🖇🖇🖇

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[1] It should be pretty evident by now that, say, an original 2017 Cryptopunk has something valuable imbued in it that a visually identical 2021 copy does not.

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