Article reprinted from: Odaily Planet Daily
Original | Odaily Planet Daily
Author: Golem
There is no real day off in the cryptocurrency world. This statement is not only reflected in the 24/7 trading market, but also implies the hot narratives on the chain that emerge regardless of time. The first day of the new year should have been a day of rest, but an Ethereum NFT project called BitmapPunks broke the silence on the chain.
The NFT project announced the opening of free minting at 22:00 on January 1, with a total of 2.1 million pieces. The minting was announced to be completed at 14:00 today. According to etherscan data, the minting of BitmapPunks consumed a total of 1,194.65 ETH, worth more than 4.08 million US dollars, and the Ethereum network Gas once soared to above 50 gwei. So why can BitmapPunks cause FOMO on the chain? What are the gameplay innovations? Odaily Planet Daily will briefly introduce it in this article.
Super large collection + 'token and image combination' deflationary mechanism
BitmapPunks was initially launched as a free random minting of a super large punk collection on the Ethereum chain, with a total of 2.1 million pieces and a single wallet minting limit of 100. However, despite the large total, BitmapPunks also possesses rarity levels, with each punk composed of features of different rarity. Entering the NFT number on the official website allows users to view the feature rarity.
But BitmapPunks is not just a super large NFT collection; it also introduces a deflationary mechanism of 'token and 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 BMP tokens in their wallet, the corresponding number of BitmapPunks will be destroyed, and the wallet receiving the tokens will not mint new NFTs; when players transfer or sell BitmapPunks in their wallet, 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 destroy tokens during the trading process, leading to deflation. According to Blur data, over 140,000 BitmapPunks have already been destroyed. At the same time, BitmapPunks operates quite differently from the ERC404 concept of 'token swapping' that is being 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. At the same time, according to OKX Wallet data, the trading volume of BitmapPunks has exceeded 22 ETH, and the floor price is 0.0008 ETH. Based on the author's personal testing, minting at 30 gwei costs about 1.5 USDT for a single BitmapPunks, and so far, based solely on coin prices, the profit has at least doubled.
Will BitmapPunks spark a new NFT craze for the New Year?
Although BitmapPunks has already been fully minted, its project was launched relatively recently and there is not much public information available for interpretation. The official Twitter has not updated a detailed project introduction, and the latest tweet announced the end of BitmapPunks minting.
However, based on community inference, the founder of the BitmapPunks project is highly likely to be the founder of the NFT liquidity protocol Floor Protocol (Twitter: @FLC_FlooringLab), who published several tweets related to BitmapPunks before and after the minting. The only two followers of BitmapPunks, besides the official CryptoPunks account, seem to confirm this point as well.
With the endorsement of the Floor Protocol founder, BitmapPunks has gained an additional layer of intrigue. The prefix 'Bitmap' in the name has also sparked speculation among some players. Bitmap is originally a metaverse project developed on the Bitcoin ecosystem based on ordinal and bitmap theory, with the core idea of generating 2D plots based on Bitcoin block data. As a super large collection, does the random generation rule of BitmapPunks resemble the Bitmap principle, matching with certain data on the Ethereum chain? If this hypothesis holds, then BitmapPunks may become an NFT collection generated in this way on Ethereum.
However, all of the above is based on community inference and assumptions, and the subsequent performance of BitmapPunks remains to be observed. By the end of 2024, many blue-chip NFTs such as Pudgy Penguins, Azuki, and Doodles have announced plans to issue tokens, with some opinions claiming this to be the 'last dance' of the NFT track, and the NFT space may become even more desolate in 2025. Unexpectedly, on the first day of the New Year, amid the overwhelming narrative of AI Agents, BitmapPunks has opened a door for the NFT space, and how long the hype continues will depend on the project team and market performance.
