October 15, 2023

By Afzal

PFP Projects, not about Profile Picture Projects but about Proliferation Prime Projects.

A huge part of the NFT Art world is filled with PFP(Profile Picture) Projects, people love to collect art that they can use as their identity. In this essay, we’ll be exploring PFP projects, not Profile Picture Projects but Proliferation Prime Projects. We’ll be talking about two of my favorite Projects Nouns and Opepen, and if you are familiar with them you might know that they are Profile Picture Projects but why Am I calling them Proliferation Prime Projects? because they aren’t just Profile Picture Projects they are more than that, they are unconventional experiments of the new internet art. Let’s define both of them in simple terms:

Nouns: An experimental project that innovates in the domain of on-chain governance, community, and identity. There’s a new Noun PFP generated every 24 hours which is then auctioned, Nouns don’t just give you the PFP but also the authority to vote, yes all the money that comes from PFPs gets into a treasury, and the community members can use that treasury to build amazing stuff, they need to submit a proposal and the Nouns holders can vote and decide which proposal should get funded and which should not. Nouns is a no-copyright CC0 project which has made it very huge the number of Nounish derivative products and communities will blow your mind. It’s been more than 2 years for Nouns and yet every PFP gets sold at an average of 25-30 ETH proving how strong of a community it is.

Opepen: An experimental project that innovates in the domain of community, contribution, and uniqueness. It all started when Jack Butcher tweeted about an Open Edition NFT named Opepen inspired by the Batzdu’s art style, it was free and the mint time was 1 hour, the number of people that minted in an hour was really mind-blowing 16000 people minted in an hour. As time passed Jack Butcher with the legendary developer Jalil turned the NFT into one of the best Internet art communities. So what’s the mechanism, how does it work? As the total number of NFTs is now 16000 Jack and team came up with a really unique concept they divided the NFTs into 200 sets with each set consisting of 80 NFTs as 1, 4, 5, 10, 20 & 40 editions. The 200 sets will be revealed over time, a set can be a collaboration or a mark of an event. The community decides which set should be released by opting in if the opt-in doesn’t reach the threshold the set gets replaced by another. Opepen allows anyone to submit a set giving new artists or craftsmen a chance to get recognised and build their audience.

Now you might have an idea why I call them Proliferation Prime Projects, these projects have proved that being public and not holding any rights doesn’t just benefit the audience but also the artist/craftsmen they have shown us what is true proliferation. If copyright allows prohibition, CC0 allows proliferation.

Thank you!

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