How Equal is the Distribution of CryptoPunks and Autoglyphs?
Liberté, Egalité, NFT
How well distributed is the NFT space for the 2 famous Larva Labs projects: CryptoPunks and Autoglyphs?
To recap, CryptoPunks were the OG NFTs on Ethereum. Those 24x24 pixel art images you see many people sporting as avatars on Twitter and Discord. I bought one recently and I’ve been watching the space, mainly because of NFTX.
Autoglyphs are my new personal favorites. They’re “the first “on-chain” generative art on the Ethereum blockchain. They are a completely self-contained mechanism for the creation and ownership of an artwork.”
All the information needed to create the artwork is encapsulated on the blockchain in the form of an algorithm. 512 Glyphs were produced. They’re a direct reference to the work of both Piet Mondrian and Sol LeWitt
One exercise, only allowed by the transparent nature of the blockchain, is to see who owns what for both Autoglyphs and Punks.
Of course, this is not precise given a single person can own multiple addresses, but it’s a rough, while incorrect, approximation.
The distribution of CryptoPunks by address currently looks like this:
I would expect exactly that shape for any NFTs.
The Gini Coefficient, a measure of equality/inequality — 0 is complete equality, 1 is complete inequality — for CryptoPunks is 0.7991. This is worst than any country, but better than Bitcoin.
If we only look at Zombie Punks, the picture looks much better, with a Gini coefficient of 0.3779. That’s European equality. Not bad.
What about Autoglyphs?
The devs are still holding more than 20% of the Glyphs, so it’s a bit skewed by them.
Nevertheless, the Glyphs Gini coefficient is not as bad as Punks, 0.68597.
Seeing these changes through time may give us some insights into these markets. A natural next step would be to put everything together, for the major NFT projects.
But that will be work for another day.