Chain Punks

Chain Punks: 10,000 on-chain ASCII collectibles. Humans, robots, skulls and aliens. CC0.

[Chain Punks @ChainPunksNFT]

4,000 of you, thank you 🖤

One OG slipped past us: ASCIIPunks.
the true historian @tokenfox1 dug it up.
Now on the list, +2 for holders. Existing points updated.

Applications are still open.
Link in bio

[Monas @0xmonas]

Faces Were Typed First

in 1881, a satirical magazine called Puck set faces in type. brackets, dashes, dots, and suddenly the page was looking back at you.

in 1909, The Strand Magazine went further. whole portraits, built out of the printer's type case.

in 1982, on a Carnegie Mellon message board, Scott Fahlman typed three characters and a face appeared online. :-)

no pixels. no avatar. no image file. just characters, and someone behind them.

long before the image, the face was typed.

i keep coming back to that.

a while ago i finished the last of 10,000 faces.

i didn't expect it to feel like anything. i've shipped a lot of things. but closing that file felt like 2021. like the first time. when you made something just because you wanted it to exist, and wanted people to have it, and that was the whole plan.

i hadn't felt that in a long time.

it started as a small idea and at some point it made its own rule. it had to stay simple.

no staking. no burn. no token. no roadmap.

10,000 faces. humans, robots, skulls, aliens. each one made of characters, the way those first faces were.

the first punks taught all of us that ten thousand small faces could hold a whole culture. this is a love letter to that idea, written in text.

every face lives on the chain. the image, the traits, even the font. there is no server to pay, no link that can break, no company that has to stay alive for your punk to still be there.

i wanted something you could keep. something you could hand to someone later and it would still work, still look the same, still be yours.

the art is CC0. every face belongs to everyone. print it, remix it, put it in a game, make something i'd never think of. no permission needed.

copy it. that's the point.

and nobody picks their face. not you, not me. the 10,000 are already finished, and which one you get is decided by the chain, once the last one is minted. i'll find out the same moment you do.

Chain Punks wouldn't exist without CryptoPunks (@cryptopunks) and ChainFaces (@natealexnft). those two collections shaped how i see faces, collections and the chain itself.

and then Adel Faure. the idea of a face built from typed parts owes a lot to Adel's ASCII Facemaker, and the letters these faces are made of come from Adel's jgs5 font.

and text-mode(dot)org, for keeping more than a century of typed faces in one place.

the drawings are mine. the spark came from all of them, and it should be said.

10,000 faces are finished.

free to mint, on Ethereum.

Chain Punks is soon on @opensea

chainpunks(dot)app

[Chain Punks @ChainPunksNFT]

@BistroGonyu looking into it now, thanks for flagging 🤝

[Chain Punks @ChainPunksNFT]

Chain Punks. 10,000 fully on-chain ASCII punks.
Humans, robots, skulls and aliens. Layer 1, CC0

Whitelist registration is open.
Hold any of 20 collections to score.
(follows + onchain score +1 points)
Top scores get GTD, everyone else goes on the FCFS list.

Link in bio.

[Chain Punks @ChainPunksNFT]

@OnChainHoodies ❤