Author: Golem, Odaily Planet Daily
There are no real rest days in the crypto world; this saying is reflected not only in the 7*24H trading market but also in the on-chain hot narratives that emerge regardless of the time period. On the first day of the new year, which should have been a day of rest, an Ethereum NFT project called BitmapPunks broke the silence on the chain.
This NFT project announced the opening of free minting at 22:00 on January 1, with a total of 2.1 million pieces, and announced the end of minting today at 14:00. According to Etherscan data, minting BitmapPunks consumed a total of 1194.65 ETH, worth over 4.08 million USD, and Ethereum network gas prices once soared above 50 gwei. So why could BitmapPunks trigger on-chain FOMO? What innovative gameplay does it offer? Odaily Planet Daily will provide a brief introduction in this article.
Super-large collection + 'token & image combination' deflationary mechanism
BitmapPunks is primarily a super-large punk collection on the Ethereum chain, minted for free with a total of 2.1 million pieces, with a minting limit of 100 per wallet. However, despite the large total quantity, BitmapPunks also has rarity levels, with each punk composed of features of different rarity levels, which can be viewed by entering the NFT number on the official website.
But BitmapPunks is not just a super-large NFT collection; it also introduces a deflationary mechanism called 'token & image combination'. The rule is that when players mint BitmapPunks, they will receive a 1:1 airdrop of BMP tokens (token contract: 0xBBBB2D4d765c1e455E4896A64BA3883e914ABBBB). However, when transferring or selling the BMP tokens in a wallet, the corresponding number of BitmapPunks in that wallet will be destroyed, and wallets receiving the tokens will not mint new NFTs; when players transfer or sell BitmapPunks from their wallets, the BMP tokens will also be automatically transferred to the receiving wallet.
Therefore, essentially, the total supply of BMP tokens will not change, with a total of 2.1 million, but BitmapPunks will continuously be destroyed in the process of BMP token trading, according to Blur data, more than 140,000 BitmapPunks have been destroyed so far. Additionally, BitmapPunks operates quite differently from the 'token exchange' concept of ERC 404 that was hyped at the beginning of 2024.
According to DEXscreener data, the current price of BMP is 3.48 USDT, with a market cap of 7.3 million USD. Meanwhile, according to OKX Wallet data, the trading volume of BitmapPunks has exceeded 22 ETH, with a floor price of 0.0008 ETH. Based on the author's personal test, minting at 30 gwei costs about 1.5 USDT per BitmapPunk, and so far, just based on the coin price, the profit is at least doubled.
Will BitmapPunks ignite a new year's NFT craze?
Although BitmapPunks has already been completely minted, its project was born recently, and there is not much public information available for interpretation. The official Twitter has also not updated detailed project information, with the latest tweet announcing the end of minting for BitmapPunks.
However, according to community inference, the founder of the BitmapPunks project is most likely the founder of the NFT liquidity protocol Floor Protocol (X: @FLC_FlooringLab), who posted multiple tweets related to it before and after the minting of BitmapPunks. The only two followers of BitmapPunks, besides the official CryptoPunks account, seem to confirm this.
With the backing of the founder of Floor Protocol, BitmapPunks has gained an additional layer of mystery. At the same time, the prefix Bitmap in the name BitmapPunks has led to speculation among some players. Bitmap was originally a metaverse project developed on the Bitcoin ecosystem based on ordinal theory and bitmap theory, with the core idea of generating 2D plots based on Bitcoin block data. As a super-large collection, does its random generation rule resemble the Bitmap principle, matching with certain data on the Ethereum chain? If this assumption holds, then BitmapPunks may become an NFT collection generated in this manner on Ethereum.
However, the above is based on community inference and assumptions, and the future performance of BitmapPunks remains to be observed. By the end of 2024, many blue-chip NFTs like Pudgy Penguins, Azuki, and Doodles have announced plans to issue tokens, leading some to call it the 'last dance' of the NFT track, and the NFT market may become even more desolate in 2025. However, unexpectedly, on the first day of the new year, amidst the narrative of AI Agents sweeping across, BitmapPunks tore open a gap for the NFT track. How long this heat will last depends on the project's team and market performance.
