CryptoPunks, the pixelated NFT collection that sparked the 2021 NFT art craze, is now the subject of a documentary five years in the making.
Indie filmmaker Sherone Rabinovitz has been working on a CryptoPunks film since March 2018, when he sat down for an interview with the collection’s founders John Watkinson and Matt Hall. Rabinovitz released an extended trailer for the upcoming documentary on Thursday, which includes a four-minute clip from the 2018 interview and previews the film’s other themes.
In the trailer, Watkinson talks about how he created the punks’ accessories over the course of a month before launching the project. According to Watkinson, CryptoPunks were not a finished product when they launched.
“I still had a few things [to change] and suddenly I thought, ‘Oh wait, we’re kind of through a one-way door here. We have already implemented the contract,” Watkinson said in the 2018 interview.
The trailer then nods to the cultural phenomenon that would come just a few years later: the conferences, celebrity adoptions, spin-off projects, and auction house machinations that fueled the rise of CryptoPunks.
Yuga Labs, the company behind Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs, acquired the CryptoPunks intellectual property from Watkinson and Hall in 2022, with the pair writing at the time that they were not well suited for the “day-to-day management that these types of projects require and deserve.”
CryptoPunks’ floor price has been trending sideways since April this year and at the time of writing is 45.19 ether (ETH), or approximately $75,000.
Rabinovitz’s documentary doesn’t have an official release date yet, and that comes as early interest in NFT-inspired films has cooled: Coinbase’s Bored Apes film is currently on hold and Reese Witherspoon’s World of Women collaboration has yet to be released. deliver release. .
Rabinovitz’s documentary aims to take the CryptoPunks story beyond the cryptosphere.
“[W]While many of you crypto natives may know a little about it, the rest of the ‘normie’ population out there *still* doesn’t,” the filmmaker wrote on X.