The graffiti economy behind Williamsburg’s wall of NFTs

Last year, NFTs began appearing in a three-story brick apartment building in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Located at the intersection of Grand Street and Roebling Street, the murals were made by a graffiti artist named Masnah. Each one is a commission from the token holder, faithfully reproduced. There are almost 60 in total, with more still coming in, a kind of physical proof of the NFT boom.

Based on the graffiti world, Masnah was surprised at how graffiti artists sold NFT versions of their work – and how few tried to take NFT photos to the streets. “All the big names in graffiti only made reproductions of their art as NFTs,” he recalls, “so I wanted to approach NFTs from the graffiti side.”

After talking through the idea in the CryptoPunks controversy, he began taking assignments. “The power of graffiti is that you see it in every corner, right? It lives. It’s part of the public space,” he says. “I thought the physical space would be a good place to make these.”

Masnah’s first mission was a few blocks away, and he painted a cowboy CryptoPunk on North 14th Street between Nassau and Wythe Avenue. The mural itself got some attention, but it really took off when the owner started sharing it online, with the kind of conspicuous consumption that was inevitable during the NFT boom.

“He bent it,” Masnah recalls. “When he posted it on Twitter, it exploded in a way because no one had done it before.”

That summer, NFT owners were flush with cash, and many were willing to pay to see their profile pictures in physical form. Soon, Masnah received dozens of commission requests, so many that he began putting them all in one place: the Roebling apartment building. The building owner was sympathetic to the project, and even put an anti-graffiti coating over the murals in case anyone tried to mark on top of them.

Meanwhile, commissions continued to roll in. For NFT owners, getting a place on the wall was partly flexible and partly an investment. “The owners of these assets saw the value of me painting it on the street,” says Masnah. “If I took the picture, it would get all the attention on Twitter that day.”

Eventually, Masnah put his commission system on the blockchain as well. After getting stiff a few times, he started his own NFT collection, called “Another Flex on the Wall”. To order a mural, token holders buy one of Masnah’s tokenized bricks, priced at 1 ETH, 1.5 ETH and 2.5 ETH depending on the size of the mural. The mural itself also runs on the blockchain, connected back to the original token.

“It’s the first collection of graffiti on the chain. Before NFTs, you could not really own graffiti. You had these pictures from [famous graffiti photographers] Martha Cooper and Henry Chalfant, who documented the graffiti and took these famous pictures of the trains. Their photographs are worth a lot of money, but he who painted the train, his work is not even on the market. He will never get the credit for that. So now with this technology, we as street artists can own that wall. “

While NFTs typically represent digital images, Masnah’s project fits into a recent trend with tokens related to physical objects. In most cases, the item itself is either kept in the custody of the coin or bought and sold independently of the token. The system has been used to sell tungsten cubes, sell a physical painting by Damien Hirst and manage a marketplace with collectibles.

Meanwhile, the mural-for-rent business is spreading. Masnah has heard of an artist named Manny Links who runs a similar business in LA, although prices are lower and he has not found a single building – at least not yet.