PUNKS: NFTs and the Misfits Who Made Art Ownable

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What is PUNKS about?

PUNKS is Ryan Bethencourt’s history of NFTs, from the colored coins and Rare Pepes of 2012 to 2016 to CryptoPunks, Beeple, Art Blocks, Solana Summer and the museum era of 2025 and 2026. It tells the Ethereum and Solana stories side by side, from on-chain records, and ends with who keeps the art when the market leaves.

Title	PUNKS: NFTs and the Misfits Who Made Art Ownable
Author	Ryan Bethencourt
Series	Book Four of The Decentralized Revolution Series, after ZERO, TAO and LIGHT
Edition	First edition, October 2026
Formats	Paperback (ISBN 9798163672646; ASIN B0HNMFBLMP) and Kindle ebook (ASIN B0HNL6WGX3)
Years covered	2012 to 2026
Chains covered	Ethereum and Solana, with Bitcoin (Rare Pepes and Ordinals) and Namecoin (Quantum)
Structure	Author’s Prologue, 22 chapters in five parts, Epilogue, two appendices, ten Key Concept boxes and a Sources section
Current as of	October 2026
License	CC BY-SA 4.0 (Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0)
AI disclosure	Co-written with AI, as the book’s Author’s Note discloses

The book description

In June 2017, two Canadian software developers in New York released 10,000 pixelated faces on Ethereum and gave 9,000 of them away to anyone willing to pay a network fee the project put at around 11 cents. About two days after a news story found them, the last free Punk was gone. Four years later a single Punk sold for $11.8 million at Sotheby’s, a JPEG by Beeple made $69 million at Christie’s, and “NFT” became Collins Dictionary’s word of the year. Then the market fell by roughly 90 percent, the marketplaces went to war over artists’ royalties, and many of the platforms closed.

PUNKS tells both halves of the story. On Ethereum: CryptoPunks, CryptoKitties, XCOPY, Beeple, Art Blocks and the Bored Apes. On Solana: the first ten collections of 2021, Solana Summer, Exchange Art, on-chain generative art, Degen Poet’s typewriter works and the Avant Gay underground, told by a co-founder of the Solana Historical Society.

It ends where the speculation could not reach: museums, foundations, and the public record of who made what.

Book Four of The Decentralized Revolution Series, after ZERO, TAO and LIGHT. Co-written with AI. Current as of October 2026.

What you will learn

PUNKS is a narrative history, and it is also a field guide to how NFTs work. Among other things, you will learn:

• Why “the first NFT” is a contested title. Kevin McCoy’s Quantum, registered on Namecoin through Monegraph in May 2014, held a web address rather than the animation, and almost every NFT first has a rival (Chapter One).
• Why Rare Pepes on Bitcoin, from September 2016, showed that scarcity and uniqueness are different things: RAREPEPE was issued in 298 copies, HOMERPEPE in exactly one (Chapter One).
• How CryptoPunks launched in June 2017: 10,000 faces, 9,000 of them free for a network fee Larva Labs put at around 11 cents, and a SHA-256 fingerprint of the images written into the contract that still matches the file in October 2026 (Chapter Two).
• How the word NFT entered Ethereum: Dieter Shirley’s September 2017 draft, “Non-fungible Token Standard,” went up on GitHub as issue 721 and gave the standard its number; ERC-721 reached final status on June 22, 2018 (Chapter Three).
• What an NFT buyer actually owns: the token, not the file and not the copyright, explained through Beeple’s Everydays: The First 5000 Days, sold at Christie’s on March 11, 2021 for $69,346,250 with fees (Chapter Six).
• How long-form generative art works, from Larva Labs’ Autoglyphs (April 2019), whose contract draws the art, to Art Blocks’ Chromie Squiggles and Tyler Hobbs’ Fidenza (Chapters Five and Eight).
• How the Solana Historical Society decides what came first, and its First Ten Solana NFT collections, from Kreechures on March 26, 2021 to Solana Mees on August 3, 2021 (Chapters Ten and Eleven, Appendix I).
• Where NFT art actually lives (a company server, IPFS, Arweave or the chain itself), the three meanings of “on-chain,” and why Exchange Art’s works outlived the marketplace (Chapters Thirteen and Fourteen).
• How the boom broke: Yuga Labs’ Otherdeed mint of April 30 to May 1, 2022 took in about $317 million while buyers spent about $172 million more on gas, creator royalties became optional across the major marketplaces in 2022 and 2023, and BONK’s Christmas 2022 airdrop, keyed to about 297,000 Solana NFTs, followed the FTX collapse (Chapters Seventeen to Nineteen).
• What survived: the CryptoPunks IP in the hands of the nonprofit NODE Foundation since May 2025, eight Punks and eight Chromie Squiggles in MoMA’s collection since December 2025, and NFT trading down from more than $50 billion at the 2022 peak to about $5.5 billion in 2025 on The Block’s data (Chapters Twenty-One and Twenty-Two).

Who this NFT history book is for

• Collectors who want to know what they own, where the art is stored and what happens when a marketplace closes.
• Artists and generative coders who want the history of their medium, from Autoglyphs and Art Blocks to fully on-chain work on Solana.
• Solana builders and collectors who want the 2021 Solana NFT year told from the on-chain record, with the Solana Historical Society’s order of the first collections.
• Skeptics who want the costs counted: the gas wars, a fall of roughly 90 percent in yearly trading, the royalty fights and the platforms that closed.
• Journalists, students and researchers who need dated, sourced facts they can quote under an open license.
• Readers of ZERO: The Zcash Revolution, who will recognize the cypherpunk thread that runs from Hal Finney’s January 1993 idea of digital cash as collectible cryptographic trading cards to the Punks.

No technical background is needed. The book explains each idea the first time it appears, and Appendix II is a glossary.

What’s inside: the table of contents

PUNKS opens with an Author’s Prologue, runs through twenty-two chapters in five parts, and closes with an Epilogue, two appendices and a Sources section. The one-line summary under each part is the book’s own.

Author’s Prologue. The Pixels on My Feed

Part I: Before the Word (2012 to 2019)

How artists and hackers spent seven years trying to make a digital file ownable, before anyone called it an NFT, 2012 to 2019.

• Chapter One. Colored Coins, Quantum, and the Rare Pepe Economy
• Chapter Two. Two Guys in New York and 10,000 Misfits
• Chapter Three. The Cats That Broke the World Computer
• Chapter Four. The Glitch in the Dark: XCOPY, SuperRare, and the First CryptoArtists
• Chapter Five. Snowfro’s Obsession and the Quiet Marketplace

Part II: The Year Everything Sold (2020 to 2021)

How auction houses, generative code and ten thousand profile pictures turned digital art into a market worth billions, 2020 to 2021.

• Chapter Six. 5,000 Days and the $69 Million Hammer
• Chapter Seven. Sotheby’s, Natively Digital, and XCOPY’s Canonization
• Chapter Eight. Fidenza, Art Blocks, and the PROOF Podcast
• Chapter Nine. Apes, Toadz, and On-Chain Monkeys

Part III: The Solana Renaissance (2021 to 2024)

How cheap, fast minting on Solana built a second culture of collections, galleries, coders, typewriters and a maximalist underground, and what survived of it, 2021 to 2024.

• Chapter Ten. The Joy of the Mint and the Solana Historical Society
• Chapter Eleven. The First Ten
• Chapter Twelve. Solana Summer
• Chapter Thirteen. Exchange Art and the Fine Art Revolution on Solana
• Chapter Fourteen. On-Chain Purism: From Hyperglyphs to Code Canvas
• Chapter Fifteen. Degen Poet, Typewriter Alchemy, and the Artists of Solana
• Chapter Sixteen. Avant Gay Art and the Internet Maximalist Aesthetic

Part IV: The Crash, the Marketplace Wars, and Survival (2022 to 2024)

How a record mint, a long collapse, a fight over royalties and the fall of FTX tested who would stay, 2022 to 2024.

• Chapter Seventeen. The Night of the Otherdeeds
• Chapter Eighteen. The Marketplace Wars: OpenSea Versus Blur, Magic Eden Versus Tensor
• Chapter Nineteen. November 2022: Surviving the FTX Extinction Event
• Chapter Twenty. Penguins in Walmart and Ordinals on Bitcoin

Part V: Beyond the Acronym (2025 to 2026)

How the word NFT faded while museums, foundations and a smaller market kept the art and its record, 2025 to 2026.

• Chapter Twenty-One. The Punks Enter the Museum
• Chapter Twenty-Two. The Post-NFT Renaissance

Epilogue, appendices and sources

• Epilogue. The Deed to the Digital World
• Appendix I. The First Ten
• Appendix II. Glossary
• Sources. The book’s source list

Ten Key Concept boxes

Short boxes explain the mechanics in plain language: Fungible and Non-Fungible (Chapter One); Token Standards: ERC-20 and ERC-721 (Chapter Three); Long-Form Generative Art (Chapter Five); What a Buyer Actually Owns (Chapter Six); Gas, Base Fees, and the Gas War (Chapter Nine); Pre-Metaplex Tokens and the Metadata Standard (Chapter Eleven); Where the Art Lives (Chapter Fourteen); Why Royalties Are Hard to Enforce (Chapter Eighteen); State Compression (Chapter Nineteen); Ordinals and Inscriptions (Chapter Twenty).

Read an excerpt free (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Every book in The Decentralized Revolution Series is licensed CC BY-SA 4.0, so you can read, quote and share these passages with credit. Here are two: the Author’s Prologue, nearly in full, and the opening of the Epilogue.

From the Author’s Prologue: “The Pixels on My Feed”

The Prologue is Ryan Bethencourt’s own account of how he came to NFTs: the pixel faces on his feed in spring 2021, the gas fees that sent him to Solana, and the archive he helped build there. It appears here with two small cuts, each marked […].

In the spring of 2021, something strange began happening to my social feed on Twitter (now X). One by one, grown, battle-tested entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, and deep-tech founders started replacing their professional headshots with tiny, pixelated cartoons. They were 24-by-24-pixel faces: green-skinned zombies, smoking apes, and deadpan punks wearing 3D glasses or knitted beanies. At first, it was […] funny to me. I looked at people who had built hundred-million-dollar biotech companies and managed massive capital allocators, and I wondered why on earth they were masquerading as low-resolution video game sprites from 1993.

Then I stopped laughing and started reading the code.

What looked from the outside like an absurd status game was, under the hood, a fundamental breakthrough in the architecture of human culture. For the entire history of the internet, digital files were infinitely copyable and therefore impossible to own. If you made a piece of digital art, the moment you posted it online, everyone had the exact same file you had. There was no original. There was no provenance. When I dove down the rabbit hole, I realized that Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) were not about the pixels; they were about digital provenance. For the first time, a public cryptographic ledger could establish scarcity, lineage, and verifiable ownership of an intangible creative work. It was clear to me that this would permanently transform fine art, and eventually, the entire global apparatus of property.

I had missed buying a CryptoPunk at the start, though I loved their cypherpunk ethos. To understand the mechanics firsthand, I waded into the Ethereum ecosystem. I collected CrypToadz by Gremplin, drawn to their irreverent, amphibious nod to the pixel-art lineage. I also collected OnChainMonkey, fascinated that a single smart contract, deployed in one transaction, could draw every monkey without relying on external servers. Yet for all the intellectual brilliance on Ethereum, something felt broken in the user experience. Minting a single piece of art often cost hundreds of dollars in network gas fees. If a mint became popular, the network choked, transactions failed, and collectors, between them, burned thousands of dollars paying miners for nothing.

My true personal transformation happened when I bridged over to Solana.

On Solana, the friction vanished. A transaction cost a fraction of a penny […] and it confirmed in about the time it takes to blink. For the first time, I experienced the pure, unadulterated joy of minting without financial terror. What started for me as collecting early Profile Pictures (PFPs) rapidly evolved into a deep obsession with digital fine art and on-chain generative algorithms. I watched a parallel Renaissance unfold in real time: one that Ethereum-centric histories too often overlooked because it did not start at Christie’s.

I wanted to help build the infrastructure for this new art world. I became an early investor in Exchange Art and watched it grow into one of Solana’s leading fine-art galleries and auction houses, a place where one-of-one artists and generative coders could actually make a living without losing much of their work’s value to gas fees. It closed its doors in the summer of 2026; the art it helped put on-chain is still there. As the ecosystem exploded at breakneck speed, I realized that our own history was moving so fast it risked being lost. Alongside the founder of the Meerkat Millionaires Country Club (MMCC), and with a council of other original Solana founders and builders, I co-founded the Solana Historical Society. Our mission was simple: to document, preserve, and archive the rise of CryptoArt on Solana, the earliest on-chain experiments like Solarians and, later, Hyperglyphs, and the ten foundational collections that led into Solana Summer.

This book is the story of that revolution. It spans the two great poles of digital ownership: the iconic Ethereum titans like Larva Labs, XCOPY, Beeple, and Tyler Hobbs who stormed Sotheby’s and Christie’s, and the high-speed, punk-rock insurgency on Solana that democratized digital art, birthed new movements like Avant Gay Art and typewriter art on-chain, and proved that the future of technology-forward art belongs to the chains where culture can move at the speed of light.

Excerpted from PUNKS: NFTs and the Misfits Who Made Art Ownable by Ryan Bethencourt, Author’s Prologue, CC BY-SA 4.0. [lightly edited for accuracy]

Editor’s note: the first […] removes one word; the second removes the clause “a whole mint cost pennies.” Chapter Ten’s audit puts a 2021 Solana signature at 5,000 lamports, about $0.00025 at $50 a SOL, but a standard NFT also needed account deposits of about 0.012 SOL, so the accurate figure is fractions of a cent per transaction and tens of cents to a few dollars per NFT. Solarians, named above, took their randomness from the chain while their images were stored elsewhere; Chapter Fourteen sets out the three meanings of “on-chain.”

Two ideas in this opening carry the whole book. The first is that an NFT matters as a record of provenance, who made a work and who holds it, more than as a picture. The second is that the NFT story has two centers, Ethereum’s auction-house canon and Solana’s cheaper and faster scene, and the author collected on both.

From the Epilogue: “The Deed to the Digital World”

The Epilogue tests the book’s argument against a sale from September 2026, in which a graded trading card changed hands without leaving its vault.

The Epilogue opens on a graded Charizard card that sold for $825,000 on Collector Crypt, a Solana marketplace, in September 2026. The buyer received a token, not cardboard: the card sits in an insured vault, and whoever holds the on-chain record can trade it or redeem the card, which retires the token. The book calls that record a deed and sets it beside Solana Monkey Business #1355, the crowned pixel skeleton that sold for 13,027 SOL on October 1, 2021, where the token was the artwork itself. From there the Epilogue traces the idea back through Monegraph’s 2014 “digital deed,” Larva Labs’ 2017 hash of the CryptoPunks image, the cartoon cats that carried the token standard into the world, the auction-house canon, Solana’s cheap mints and, when the money left, the keepers of the record.

The Epilogue ties nine years together. A 2017 hash, a 2021 skeleton and a 2026 trading card rest on the same thing, a public record anyone can check. What changed at each step, as the Epilogue puts it, was who controlled the image and who got paid.

How to cite PUNKS: Bethencourt, Ryan. PUNKS: NFTs and the Misfits Who Made Art Ownable. The Decentralized Revolution Series, 2026. ISBN 9798163672646.

The full story runs through twenty-two chapters, from the 2014 Quantum record to the Punks’ arrival at MoMA and the tokenized cards of 2026. Get PUNKS in paperback on Amazon, or read the Kindle edition.

Why Ryan Bethencourt wrote PUNKS

Ryan Bethencourt wrote PUNKS because he wanted one book that told both halves of the NFT story, and he could not find it. The book’s Author’s Note puts it in his words:

The Author’s Prologue tells the longer story of how I got here: the pixel faces that took over my feed in the spring of 2021, the CryptoPunk I missed, the gas fees that sent me to Solana, and the art I found there. The short version is that I wanted one book that told both halves of the NFT story, Ethereum’s canon and Solana’s renaissance, and I couldn’t find it. As a co-founder of the Solana Historical Society, I had also seen how fast our own history was moving, and how easily it could be lost. This book is my attempt to write it down while the record is still there to read.

From the Author’s Note to PUNKS: NFTs and the Misfits Who Made Art Ownable by Ryan Bethencourt, CC BY-SA 4.0.

He wrote it as a participant, and the book says so. These are the documented facts:

• In the spring of 2021 he watched founders and venture capitalists on his feed swap their headshots for 24 by 24 pixel faces.
• He missed buying a CryptoPunk early, though he loved their cypherpunk ethos.
• He collected CrypToadz by Gremplin and OnChainMonkey on Ethereum and found the gas fees painful: failed transactions, and hundreds of dollars to mint.
• He bridged to Solana in 2021, where a mint cost a small fraction of Ethereum’s gas fees, and moved from profile pictures into digital fine art and on-chain generative art.
• He was an early investor in Exchange Art, the Solana fine-art marketplace that closed in the summer of 2026.
• He co-founded the Solana Historical Society with Timon “The OG,” founder of the Meerkat Millionaires Country Club. The Society’s public catalog documents Solana’s 2021 NFT year, and its About page lists Ryan under his handle, infinitegames.

The research went to the primary record wherever it could: on-chain data, archived web pages, court records and published interviews. The Author’s Note sets the rule plainly: “I have not invented scenes, private moments, or quotations. Where the record is silent, the book says so; where sources disagree, it gives the range.” It also records what the work taught him: “Where my memory and the chain disagreed, the chain won.”

PUNKS is also an experiment in how books get made. Ryan directed the project and reviewed the work, while Anthropic’s Claude directed teams of research, writing and fact-checking agents. The Author’s Note calls the result “a collectible from the earliest era of human-AI collaboration in publishing.”

About the author

Disclosure

The book’s Author’s Note carries this disclosure:

Full disclosure: I hold positions in SOL, ETH, NFTs, and other digital assets mentioned in this book, including pieces from collections it discusses. I co-founded the Solana Historical Society, whose public catalog is a source for Chapters Ten to Twelve, and I was an early investor in Exchange Art, the subject of Chapter Thirteen. I am a participant in this story, not a detached observer, and I believe that transparency serves you better than false neutrality.

This book was co-written with AI, as an experiment in what’s possible on the frontier of AI and writing. The book and this page are for information only. Nothing here is financial advice.

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Frequently asked questions about PUNKS

What is PUNKS about?

PUNKS: NFTs and the Misfits Who Made Art Ownable is Ryan Bethencourt’s history of NFTs, from the colored coins of 2012 and the Rare Pepes of 2016 to CryptoPunks, Beeple, Art Blocks, Solana Summer and the museum era of 2025 and 2026. It tells the Ethereum and Solana stories side by side, from on-chain records. It is Book Four of The Decentralized Revolution Series, published in October 2026 in paperback and on Kindle.

Who wrote PUNKS?

Ryan Bethencourt, an author, biotech investor and founder. He co-founded IndieBio, the world’s largest seed-stage biotech accelerator, and has backed 180+ early-stage companies. In crypto, he has built and collected on Solana since 2021, was an early investor in Exchange Art and co-founded the Solana Historical Society. PUNKS is the fourth book in The Decentralized Revolution Series, after ZERO, TAO and LIGHT.

Why is the book called PUNKS?

PUNKS takes its name from CryptoPunks, the 10,000 pixel characters that Larva Labs released on Ethereum in June 2017. They run through the book from Chapter Two to the last line of its Epilogue, “The Punks made us owners.” Christie’s 2021 guide traces the Punks’ look to London’s punk movement of the 1970s, and Sotheby’s presented them as masks for privacy-minded crypto pioneers, a thread with roots in the cypherpunk history told in ZERO.

Does PUNKS cover Solana NFTs?

Yes. Part III, “The Solana Renaissance,” gives seven chapters to Solana: the first collections of 2021, Solana Summer, Exchange Art, on-chain generative art, Degen Poet’s typewriter works and the Avant Gay scene. Appendix I prints the Solana Historical Society’s order of the earliest collections, dated by first on-chain mint, from Kreechures on March 26, 2021 to Solana Mees, the tenth, on August 3, 2021.

How current is PUNKS?

PUNKS is current to October 2026. Its Author’s Note says prices, statistics and technical details were accurate as of October 2026. The book covers the SEC’s March 17, 2026 interpretation, which named CryptoPunks and Chromie Squiggles among its examples of digital collectibles, Exchange Art’s announced shutdown on August 1, 2026, and the $825,000 sale of a tokenized Charizard card on Collector Crypt in September 2026.

Can I quote or share PUNKS?

Yes. PUNKS is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 (CC BY-SA 4.0), so you may share and adapt it for any purpose, including commercially, as long as you give credit, link to the license and share adaptations under the same license. Use this credit line: Excerpted from PUNKS: NFTs and the Misfits Who Made Art Ownable by Ryan Bethencourt, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Was PUNKS written with AI?

Yes, and the book says so. Its Author’s Note discloses that PUNKS was co-written with AI. The research, writing and fact-checking were done with Anthropic’s Claude, the Opus 5.5 model, directing teams of research, writing and fact-checking agents, while Ryan Bethencourt directed the project and reviewed the work. The synopses were developed with other instances of Claude and with Google’s Gemini.

Read more on Grey Area Labs

Five guides draw on PUNKS and go further, with sources and dated figures:

• The history of NFTs, 2012 to 2026 (publishing October 26): from colored coins, Quantum and Rare Pepes to CryptoPunks, Solana Summer, the crash and MoMA, with every contested first dated.
• CryptoPunks, from the 2017 free claim to MoMA (publishing October 30): Larva Labs, the imageHash, Christie’s and Sotheby’s, Yuga Labs and the NODE Foundation.
• Are NFTs dead? What the market data says in 2026 (publishing November 4): what each tracker measures, which platforms closed and what survived.
• Where NFT art is actually stored (publishing November 9): the four places NFT art lives, the three meanings of on-chain and how to check your own NFT.
• What the buyer of Beeple’s $69 million NFT actually owns (publishing November 13): what Christie’s sold, who kept the copyright, and the most expensive NFTs, dated and attributed.

Hubs and related reading:

• NFTs and crypto art: the Grey Area Labs guide, every guide on NFTs and on-chain art on Ethereum and Solana in one place.
• Solana NFT History, the hub for Solana’s first NFT collections and the people who made them.
• The Rise of the Avant Gay Art/Tech Movement on Solana, Ryan’s essay of September 3, 2025, which Chapter Sixteen of PUNKS refers to.
• About Ryan Bethencourt: books, background and how to cite his work.

Also in The Decentralized Revolution Series

• ZERO: The Zcash Revolution: How Privacy Became the Next Bitcoin. How the cypherpunks’ dream of private digital cash became Zcash, from the 2016 ceremony to Grayscale’s Zcash ETF. Second edition, October 2026.
• TAO: The Bittensor Story and the Rise of Decentralized Intelligence. How Bittensor set out to reward machine intelligence on an open network, and what decentralized AI has built so far.
• LIGHT: The Solana Story and the Man Who Turned Time Into Code. How Anatoly Yakovenko’s Proof of History became Solana, through outages, the FTX collapse and the recovery that followed.
• DOGE: Memes and the Joke That Ate Wall Street. How a joke became a currency, and how memecoins went from Dogecoin’s tipping culture to BONK, Pump.fun and politics.
• Coming soon: HYPE: How DeFi Built the Everything Market.

Each book stands alone. Suggested pairings: ZERO with PUNKS for the cypherpunk and privacy thread, LIGHT with Part III of PUNKS for Solana’s 2021, and LIGHT with DOGE for Solana’s memecoin era. All books, free excerpts and how to quote them.

Last updated October 20, 2026.