The beginning of blockchains? CryptoPunk’s evangelist Noah Davis on why the Center Pompidou NFT show is a game-changer

The brand leader of Yuga Labs – the creators of the very popular Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs (non-fungible tokens) and, since March 2022, owners of one of the much-collected Larva Labs creations, CryptoPunks— says that an exhibition of NFT works that opened at the Center Pompidou in Paris earlier this week signals “at least that the museums are taking this space seriously”. Noah Davis, who left Christie’s last year for Yuga Labs, says museums are starting to “understand the potential of blockchain as a medium and NFTs as a medium to increase what artists can do. So it’s definitely important to have that validation.”

The exhibition at the Beaubourg gallery, NFT: The Poetics of the Immaterial from Certification to Blockchain (until January 22, 2024), includes 18 blockchain-related works recently acquired by the Musée National d’Art Moderne at the Center Pompidou. The acquisition – the first of its kind by a major French public museum – came as a result of a joint effort between scientific and administrative teams from the French Ministry of Culture and Pompidou’s director, Xavier Rey.

“[The show] reflects the diversity of artistic cultures inherent in the Web3 landscape, connecting the digital field of crypto-art with contemporary art. [and] the specificities of a decentralized economy, says a statement from the Center Pompidou. Other NFT works by artists such as Aaajiao, Emilie Brout and Maxime Marion, Fred Forest and Jill Magid are included.

Davis helped bring NFTs out of the metaverse and onto the auction house floor with the sale of Beeple’s digital works Weekdays: The first 5,000 days (2021) in March 2021. The sale marked the first time Christie’s accepted cryptocurrency for a work and the first time a standalone NFT was sold by an auction house. After 353 bids were submitted by 33 bidders, some of whom increased the price in $10 million increments, All days sold for $60.3 million ($69.3 million with fees).

“We took a strange circuitous route to this moment because of course the Beeple sale… that [sort of event] usually does not go before museum validation. So we go backwards, says Davis. The Beeple auction was a “lightbulb moment,” he adds.

“That’s when I realized what it is that NFTs can do as opposed to what they are. There’s a big gap in that understanding. People today know what NFTs are. They say, ‘Oh, it’s jpeg- files.” But they don’t understand that they can also be an immutable public record, that they can contain and communicate information more efficiently than any other technology we’ve ever had, and in a trustless way too.”

One of the first things Davis did when he started as brand manager was to go through the collection and earmark Punks considered “museum quality” which he wanted to donate to institutions. “The founders, I’m honestly grateful that they could see the benefit in it. These are expensive assets that we give away, but they generously agreed, says Davis.

CryptoPunks was minted in 2017. “There were 10,000 of them. There will never be another CryptoPunk. But we still have 400+ in the Yuga Labs collection, says Davis. “The intention is to donate more to important museums.”

Yuga Labs, the creators of Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs, announced last March that they had acquired the intellectual property rights of Larva Labs’ CryptoPunks and Meebits collections. They also picked up 423 CryptoPunks and 1,711 Meebits in the deal for an undisclosed amount, according to Ocula.

The NFT sector has had a bumpy ride since the frenzy of 2021. The volume of NFT sales fell 83% in 2022, according to the NFT sector tracker Inoperable, and by the end of last year, some 18 months after the explosion began, many marketplaces had collapsed or lost almost all value.

So where does the sector go from here? “We are definitely experiencing growing pains. That’s how I define it, says Davis. “But again, I think it all comes back to what the technology is doing. Like [artificial intelligence] becomes more and more powerful, how can we discern the truth? Blockchain solves this. Blockchain is a great way to validate truth. I can imagine a future where there will be NFT-based certificates of authenticity.”

There is also the question of the right of succession. Last year we reported that NFTs would secure secondary sales royalties, providing an opportunity for recurring revenue that has historically eluded artists in many jurisdictions. However, NFT artists and watchdog communities such as crypto ecosystem Immutable X have named and shamed royalty-dodging platforms.

“Resale royalties, you can’t enforce them on a chain. It’s just not something you can do at the contract level. And people being people, we are in a hyper-capitalist, thermodynamic society, says Davis. “So there’s always going to be an incentive for people to figure out how to pay the least amount of royalties to whoever it is, whether it’s the marketplace or the artists involved. That said, even without blockchain-enforceable resale fees itself, this tool is so important for artists to manage their supply in a transparent way, to understand who exactly their collectors are and to be able to reach out and connect with them.”

Meanwhile, other museums may soon receive one CryptoPunk NFT. “We talk to museums from all over the world,” says Davis. “There is a large contingent of Brits CryptoPunks and we’d like to see one CryptoPunk represented in a major institution of contemporary art in the UK.” Last year, Yuga Labs also gave the Institute of Contemporary Art in Miami CryptoPunk#305a nod to Miami’s area code.

• NFT: The Poetics of the Immaterial from Certification to Blockchainuntil 22 January 2024, Center Pompidou, Paris