Inspired by the Rare Pepes, and adapting the Cryptopunks smart contract, the Creeps & Weirdos collection was launched by DADA in October 2017, before Cryptokitties and the ERC721 Standard.
In this iconic collection, DADA’s decentralized marketplace introduced an important innovation: automatic royalties coded on smart contracts and distributed on-chain for the first time in NFT history.
The Creeps & Weirdos collection was created at the dawn of what is considered cryptoart today. The collection was featured in Artnome’s article The Blockchain Art Market is Here in December 2017, and became the official image of the seminal Rare Art Festival in January 2018, a milestone event in NFT history.
A hybrid between crypto collectibles and rare digital artworks, C&W possesses the dank aesthetics and the collectible structure of the projects at the time, but they were not intended as trading cards, memes, avatars, or even a game. Instead, they were conceived by DADA as a decentralized marketplace for rare digital art, foreshadowing and thus paving the way for the current cryptoart marketplaces.
DADA is an art creation platform and artist collective, a virtual home to people from all over the world—from a bodybuilder in Argentina to an evangelical pastor in the US, a farmer in Kenya, and a former punk in England, to name just a few. Our decentralized community includes many influential artists, technologists, researchers, and collectors in the blockchain ecosystem.The artists who created the Creeps & Weirdos are among the first in the world to have minted NFTs. Most of them have been part of the DADA community from as early as 2014, and are still very active today.
The DADA Collective has also been at the forefront of the many live events featuring digital art. Our live drawing performances have been featured in art galleries and events around the world, including Soul In The Machine at the Ethereal Summit, and Screens: An Exploration at the Tate Modern in London.
The C&W artworks are truly rare because of the unique way in which they were made. Each artwork belongs to a visual conversation made on DADA, the only platform in the world where people speak to each other through drawings, creating collaborative art.
This curated collection with a Halloween theme officially launched on October 31, 2017. It comprises 108 unique artworks made by 30 artists on DADA. The 2017 ERC20 Creeps have a total of 16,600 digital editions with 5 different levels of scarcity, which represent the significance of the visual conversations that the artworks belong to.
Back in 2017 when we were creating the Creeps & Weirdos collection, it was like working with a blank slate. It was exhilarating to experiment in such an early space, kind of like clearing the jungle with a machete. It was all innovation.
By 2019, we upgraded the C&W smart contract into the then new ERC721 standard. This was during the onset of the Crypto Winter, so we cut the original supply in half. We paused the 2017 contract, airdropped a new ERC721 NFT to every 2017 collector, and retired the collection.
Fast forward to March 2021. While we were hatching our plans to reissue the C&W collection the world finally caught up to NFTs. Some NFT “archaeologists” rediscovered the C&W and beat us to the punch, an event that we affectionately call ”the Apestorm”. Hundreds of people then “aped” on this collection that had been off the market for two years. But there was a catch: these historic NFTs could not be traded on secondary markets, because of the lack of royalty standards on Ethereum.
We spent the 5 months that followed looking into our contracts, searching for ways to unlock our NFTs while preserving their provenance and also reuniting the two tokens that were diverging with every OTC sale. After going down every possible rabbit hole, we realized that the most direct link to provenance was the historic 2017 contract. Unpausing it meant that in order to truly keep it as one collection we had to burn the 2019 contract, but each one of them had its own historical importance and its own quirks.
We therefore decided to honor the history behind this collection with all its experiments and discoveries.
Like fine wine vintages, The Creeps & Weirdos is one collection that has two editions with two historic smart contracts; the same artworks represented in two different tokens, a 2017 ERC20 Creep or a 2019 ERC721 Weirdo, with their different characteristics, stories, and nuances. We are thrilled to introduce them for trading once again.
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. To be able to repurchase the entire collection and pay the gas fees for over 15,000 transactions we needed resources.
Metapurse, the largest NFT fund in the world, purchased a complete set of the historic 2017 Creeps & Weirdos NFT Collection for 500 ETH and an additional curated selection of Creeps & Weirdos for 105 ETH. This purchase was instrumental to pay for the gas required and to make the rescue happen.
DADA anticipated the NFT revolution in a Bitcoin Magazine article published on September 21, 2017. Since then, we’ve actively contributed to the development of the NFT ecosystem and shared our ideas at MIT, Christie’s, NYU, the Hackers Congress and SXSW, among many other prestigious events and conferences. Already in 2018, our keynote presentations at the first Rare Art Fest and the Ethereal Summit demonstrated our commitment to put an end to the myth of the starving artist.
In early 2019 we retired the Creeps & Weirdos collection and focused on exploring possibilities beyond the markets, into the emerging field of token economics. In June 2020 we presented our white paper The Invisible Economy at the RadicaXChange conference.
The Creeps & Weirdos strongly influenced our vision for the Invisible Economy. The return of the C&W marks the beginning of a new era in which 100% of the revenues will go to the DADA Fund and be distributed to the community in the form of basic income.
“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 it with diversity, value distribution, and sheer artistic virtuosity, Creeps & Weirdos have reimagined the collectible movement and done it right.”
Metakovan, Metapurse Founder.
You are about to be part of this history. Join us as we keep exploring and creating community.
