GM

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Programming note: Mint or Skip will be off Monday and Tuesday, back on Wednesday

Links for the Top 25 drops are HERE.

I can’t stop thinking about this

Context

Crypto artist Proportio announced an upcoming drop called Perfect Imitation, an impressively technical follow-up to her Eternal Harmony collection from last year. 

What we know: 

• Mint date: January 4th 

• Supply: 250 

• Price: TBD (but less than 0.15 ETH) 

Our take

Proportio just made something that I’ve never seen before. She calls it:

In other words, it’s an algorithm that copies her style and can run on its own as long as Ethereum continues to exist. 

It’s an example of Blockchain Art, a growing genre of dynamic autonomous works that can only exist on a public blockchain.

This art often relies on time as a mechanic – think 0xDEAFBEEF, Mathcastles, or Gazers by Matt Kane – and Perfect Imitation is no different. 

Here’s how it works: 

1. You begin with an NFT of a white canvas

2. A painting begins to emerge over the course of 7 days 

3. The painting is finished on the 7th day and can be kept that way

4. But you can also re-run the process an infinite number of times 

She intends to turn the art process into the art object itself. It’s less about the final piece and more about watching something emerge out of nothing. 

It’s deeply technical, yet combines analog aesthetics by using elements that were physically painted with real watercolors. 

But, beyond all that…

I can’t stop thinking about how this is also a sign of where we’re heading

We now know that the future of the internet looks like a world filled with AI agents running around dutifully mimicking our behaviors and actions online, especially on the blockchain. 

We’ll tell them to mint this and that, but only if this other specific person minted it first, and then we’ll order them to make a tweet hyping it up, but only if the floor price looks good today, and do it in my style of prose, with more emojis, always more emojis. 

And then, oh, someone replied to your tweet.

In the past, this meant getting an alert from your bot to see how you wished to respond, but now it's done this enough to know exactly what to say, and all these conversations are happening in parallel with your account, autonomously, without you even being aware (and you like it this way). 

We’re all going to be creating extensions of ourselves that, in some cases, will continue to be “you” long after you’re gone. 

It reminds me of all those deceased facebook accounts, except they’ll still be commenting happy birthday on your page like some sort of digital ghoul haunting you. 

Will artists be immune to this?

In the physical world, some already use teams to produce their works like a factory line, even at the top of the food chain, like Damien Hirst, or Andy Warhol before him. 

How is that different from a replication bot? 

~~ curious questions indeed ~~

✨ Added to Top 25 ✨

NOTE: These drops are lightly curated. Our only requirement is that they have recognizable founders. As usual, DYOR. To learn more go here.

Starbucks Odyssey Achievement Stamp

Hope you drank your fair share of industrial bean water this year, anon. Otherwise, you might have trouble qualifying for this upcoming Starbucks Odyssey airdrop.

It’s a tradeable NFT stamp that rewards you with points inside of the program (still US-only) depending on how much you engaged with it in 2023.

A freebie for the fans.

ittybits

We already have Punks. But what about smol punks? In fairness, ittybits is more than that.

Created by Jeremy Posvar, these 10,000 PFPs reduce the original PFP of PFPs to its essence in a 12x12 pixel canvas, encoding (or “minting”) the image using Ethscriptions (which we covered here) while also matching these mints to their original Punk IDs via file hashes.

It’s an impressive technical feat and the resulting PFPs look good, but it’s a tricky proposal at the same time, given the drop’s derivative nature and the relative immaturity of the Ethscriptions protocol.

bitsCrunch Free Mint

NFT data platform bitsCrunch, founded by Vijay Pravin and backed by big names like Coinbase and Animoca Brands, is set to launch a free mint soon (details very limited for now).

A free mint name-dropping Animoca Brands as a backer, though? Bah gawd, that’s the degen Bat-Signal!