Ethereum's Earliest Art Market π¨βπ¨οΈ
This is the story of Ethereum Art Market, which Rhea Myers created in 2014!
Metaversal is aΒ Bankless newsletterΒ for weekly level-ups on NFTs, virtual worlds, & collectibles
Dear Bankless Nation,Β
If I asked you, βwhatβs the oldest Ethereum art market,β what would you say?
If your first guess is something after the Ethereum mainnet launch in July 2015, thatβd be totally reasonable. Yet chain historians go back even further, to pre-mainnet Ethereum, for the answer.
Thatβs because artist, hacker, and writer Rhea Myers β the cryptoartistβs cryptoartist, renowned for placing βtechnology and culture in mutual interrogationβ β created the Ethereum Art Market in July 2014 on the proto-testnet preceding the Olympic testnet.Β Howβs that for early!
Myers is an amazing artist and visionary thatβs done much to inspire the modern NFT ecosystem, so I wanted to take a walk down memory lane today and highlight her awesome story and her pioneering art market. Cheers to you, Rhea π¨
-WMP
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βArtworld Ethereumβ
Myersβ first foray as an artist to the world of cryptocurrencies came back when there was still, in fact, just one cryptocurrency, Bitcoin. That was 2011.Β
Next, fast forward to 2014. Vitalik Buterin and co. announced Ethereum at the Miami Bitcoin Conference that January and released the networkβs first alpha testnet that February.Β
Soon after that Myers started experimenting with Ethereum. Sheβs long been a prolific essayist, so fortunately for us she recorded some of her earliest Ethereum work in a May 2014 essay titled βArtworld Ethereum.β
Therein, and unbeknownst to basically everyone else at the time, the seeds for the future of NFTs were being sown.Β
Digital art as smart property
In βArtworld Ethereum,β Myers begins by explaining that Ethereum is a blockchain for smart contracts and how smart contracts could be used to create smart property, i.e. things governed directly by code.
Even in those primordial days, she piercingly noted:
βThere are three cases of digital art as smart property. The first is the conceptual or code art case, where the code of the contract itself is or contains the artwork. The second is the Ethereum storage case, where a small digital artwork is stored in the Ethereum datastore. The third is the stored identifier case, where only an identifier or proxy for the artwork is stored with the contract.β
For each of these three cases, Myers provided sample code written in Serpent, an early Ethereum programming language. This marked the start of Myers exploring the βapplications of Ethereum to the production, exhibition, critique, and institutions of art.βΒ
She would return to this exploratory thread in her next project, the subject of todayβs post β¦Β
Ethereum Art Market
In July 2014, Myers published βEthereum Art Market,β a post outlining a proof-of-concept market of the same name.Β
The smart contract, which Myers wrote in the early Ethereum programming language LLL, allowed users to βregister as the owner of a digital artwork contained in a particular fileβ and βoffer the artwork for saleβ in exchange for ETH.Β
So here we have an Ethereum-based contract system for registering artworks and transacting with them from over 7 years ago! βIf it's prohibitively difficult to experiment in the existing art market, we can make new markets for new kinds of art,β Myers wrote at the time.
This early achievement has proven groundbreaking, and it reminds us once more that the current NFT boom has hardly arrived in a vacuum β itβs blossomed atop the shoulders of pioneers like Myers.Β
Thatβs why itβs been great to see her gain newfound respect this year as more people have started digging into the rich history of early blockchain art. For example, Myersβ Secret Artwork NFT was curated for Sothebyβs Natively Digital auction earlier this year. The fine art broker hailed the artist:
βRhea Myers stands out as perhaps the most important and overlooked artist in the crypto art movement; few have quietly offered more to the medium. Myers was one of the earliest creatives to adopt blockchain technology as an instrument for artistic creation. With her unquestionable influence, conveyed through her explorative and educational research, Myersβ pioneering role in the digital art space is yet to be fully recognised.β
I think thatβs a great description, and I certainly agree that Myers deserves more recognition. So I say letβs remember her work and follow her lead β letβs be creative, letβs experiment, letβs use our own work to also explore what it means, and what we might do, at this great crossroads of culture and tech.Β
Action steps
πΊ Watch βHow OG Crypto Artist Rhea Myers Sold a Never-Seen Artwork at Sotheby'sβ by Unchained Podcast
πΊ Watch βDefining the Metaverseβ by Bankless
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