A More Diverse and Inclusive Punkverse
By: Jeremy Posvar
Tags: Blockchain, Diversity In Tech, Nft, Nft Collectibles, Cryptopunks

TL:DR

ExpansionPunks is a collection of 10,000 unique, procedurally-generated collectible Punks stored as ERC-721 tokens on the Ethereum blockchain. In the same way “expansion packs” introduce new characters and storylines in traditional tabletop gaming, ExpansionPunks have arrived to expand the Punkverse to be a more diverse and inclusive community by addressing subtle biases in the original CryptoPunks collection that unintentionally lead to exclusion.

Societal Context

In many ways, our decentralized future is still in the starting blocks. Forthcoming innovations in personal identity management, the arts, and financial services (to name a few) will forever alter the arc of our society. The technologies and paradigms that will define this era are in large part still being discovered today. It’s certainly an exciting prospect for those already involved in this space. But what about those not yet involved?

As a society, it’s critically important we ensure everyone feels empowered to join and participate in such a future. If we’re to build resilient, next-generation societal constructs, we must do so free of the inherent biases of our entrenched systems.

The Case for Expanding on CryptoPunks

As the world’s first NFT avatar collection, CryptoPunks has etched its place in history. Punks are the “blue-chip” avatar to signal one’s involvement in this space. As the decentralized movement evolves, more and more individuals (technologists, artists, investors, academics, etc.) will seek association with the CryptoPunks ethos through the CryptoPunks aesthetic. As such, the growth of the Punkverse is inevitable, with or without ExpansionPunks. New “altpunk” collections are emerging to fill this gap, attempting to draft in the wake of CryptoPunks’ momentum. As detailed in our Punk Quadrants article, these collections achieve differentiation in various ways, resulting in a variety of outcomes relative to aesthetic cohesion and trait-rarity coherence with the CryptoPunks collection.

For ExpansionPunks — owning the “expansion” modifier comes with great responsibility to the CryptoPunks community. Much was written in our first article (Creating a 10K NFT Avatar Collection) about the lengths pursued to reverse-engineer the original CryptoPunks DNA as a pre-requisite to generating the ExpansionPunks collection. That rigor results in an ExpansionPunks collection that is unequaled in its aesthetic alignment with the original, while guaranteeing no ExpansionPunk will collide with an original CryptoPunk on a trait-combination basis or on a visual basis (given some hidden traits).

Beyond aesthetic alignment, ExpansionPunks also set out to create greater balance and representation within the aggregate 20K Punkverse (CryptoPunks + ExpansionPunks). Examples of the current imbalances in the original CryptoPunks collection include…

1. Gender skews disproportionately male.

2. Females are excluded from desirable traits like Hoodies and Cowboy Hats. Female Punks can’t even show emotion through a Smile (or Frown) — in fact, the only mouth traits they are permitted is a Lipstick color … in 2021!

3. The 121 rarest (and most valuable) Punks (Aliens, Apes, Zombies) only feature Male traits.

4. Gender is handled as an exclusively binary trait (Male vs. Female) — excluding a growing population of individuals that identify as Non-Binary.

A More Diverse and Inclusive Punkverse

The ExpansionPunks collection features a gender distribution that inverses the disparities in the original CryptoPunks collection, resulting in an aggregate 20K collection (10K CryptoPunks + 10K ExpansionPunks) that better reflects gender proportions of the real world: