Metapurse Acquires A Complete Set of the 2017 Creeps & Weirdos.
The Creeps & Weirdos will be exhibited at Dreamverse, the world’s first NFT-focused music, art, and technology festival organized by Metapurse in New York City.
By Judy Mam
We are thrilled to announce that Metapurse, an NFT production studio and the largest NFT fund in the world, financed by Metakovan and stewarded by Twobadour, has purchased a complete set of the historic 2017 Creeps & Weirdos NFT Collection for 500 ETH.
In addition to the full set, Metapurse also purchased a selection of Creeps & Weirdos for 105 ETH. I was honored to curate this special selection.
In the world of NFTs, the Creeps & Weirdos stand out by their antiquity, their verifiable provenance, as the art is made by artists directly on the DADA visual conversation platform — in itself a unique form of collaborative digital art — and by the originality and soul of each artwork, which was digitally handmade on DADA by artists from different countries. We are thrilled that Metapurse has chosen to steward a complete set.
Metapurse is known for buying Beeple’s Everydays — The First 5000 Days for $69 million. But Metapurse is also committed to creating a truly global art and tech community. We are very much aligned with their mission to increase the visibility of artists who don’t hail from the developed world.
Metakovan, Founder of Metapurse, said: “The NFT space is chock-full of financial and technological innovation, but what truly sets it apart is the unique opportunity to ‘do it right’. By infusing diversity, value distribution, and sheer artistic virtuosity, Creeps & Weirdos have reimagined the collectible movement and done it right — they give voice to artists from regions across the globe that are underrepresented in the area of art, through crypto art and NFTs.”
The historic 2017 ERC20 Creeps & Weirdos are 108 individual drawings made by 30 artists mostly from Latin America in the DADA visual conversation platform between 2014 and 2017. The collection is comprised of 16,600 prints with five levels of scarcity. All of them were minted in 2017.
The Creeps & Weirdos collection was issued on October 31, 2017, making it one of the pioneering NFT projects in the history of crypto art. It was the first time that royalties were coded into the smart contracts and executed on-chain, the first time that limited editions were provably unique, as each token is identifiable and fully non-fungible; and it is also the first collection of NFT art made by artists and launched as a decentralized marketplace on Ethereum.
In order to honor this historic collection and make it available for people to collect, we conducted a complex Rescue Operation of the 2017 ERC20 Creeps. This involved creating our own bots and conducting rescue contracts in order to prevent bots from buying the entire collection at 2017 prices and to ensure that our community, artists, and individual collectors could participate in the sale, not only flippers and whales. To be able to repurchase the entire collection and pay the gas fees for over 15,000 transactions we needed resources. The Metapurse purchase was instrumental in making it happen.
We relaunched this seminal collection with a presale designed so that more people could be able to collect the 2017 ERC20 Creeps. We did it as a rollout to avoid gas wars and limited the purchase of the most affordable Creeps, (commons) so that more people could have access to them. To date, 500 ETH have been sold mostly in commons. Total sales have netted over 1000 ETH so far.
The relaunch of the Creeps & Weirdos is certainly the first time that all the proceeds of a sale of NFTs will go towards the distribution of a basic income to our community of contributing artists and developers. This will happen through DADA’s Invisible Economy, an alternative economic system based on intrinsic motivations in which people do what they love without any pressure to produce.
Now we are ready to bring the Creeps & Weirdos to the entire world. The Creeps & Weirdos marketplace will open to the general public on October 5, in celebration of the fourth anniversary of the deployment of the C&W smart contract on Ethereum.
Join us for a very special Twitter Spaces conversation with DADA and Metapurse, October 1, 2021 at 12:30 pm EST.
The Creeps & Weirdos will make their first official live public appearance at Dreamverse, the world’s first NFT-focused music, art, and technology festival organized by Metapurse in NYC this November 4. Some of the original Creeps & Weirdos artists will be in attendance. DADA will conduct a live drawing performance streaming and on-site at the event.
It’s been a long, strange, wonderful ride and there is so much more to come.
