How High Are We?
What we learned from Pak to create the Zero Contact Movie NFT, starring Anthony Hopkins
Imagine you’re in a nightclub (pre-covid I don’t want Libs attacking me). Your favorite music is blaring through the speakers, the strobe lights are trance-inducing, and, if you’re into this sort of thing, you’re on MDMA. The night is, as party goers say, peaking.
Congratulations, you've reached party-nirvana.
Now, imagine that while you’re in nirvana, someone suddenly enters the club and goes up to every person and tells them they should be careful because there’s a man-eating monster outside the club that will soon enter, satiating his desire to eat.
However, the music is too loud, the lights are too bright, and the drugs are too good, so none of the party goers can hear Paul Revere on his midnight ride. Anyone in a rational state of mind would run for the hills or gear up for battle. No one likes a buzz kill, hence, euphoria continues, until the beast gets in…
This is the current state of the NFT market as described by Mondoir to me over the phone when I asked him why he purchased the highest priced Zero Contact NFT for 20 ETH (~$84,000 USD at the time of writing this). He said it represents something real in an environment where everything seems to be a fugazzi, levitating at unsustainable heights.
Peak Euphoria
This unbridled exuberance in the general NFT market is what brought my business partner and me to co-found En Passant Digital.
We felt that the order of operations was wrong: hype shouldn’t drive value before value drives hype, which in turn drives more value… right?
We saw countless offerings where big celebrities from every vertical wanted to wield their reputation to drive high numbers but refused to put in the work to create something that people actually wanted to own for more than 5 seconds.
Hence, we wanted to create an NFT agency that built NFTs people want to buy because they actually liked the idea of owning them, and in extreme cases, where owning our NFTs could actually help them think about the world differently, or help them realize something about their own identity.
This brings me to Murat Pak, a shining light in the NFT space, the king of narrative who builds NFTs that pull you in like a fire on a cold December night.
Who is Pak?
Pak is a pseudonym for an anonymous artist who gained popularity after building Archillect, an AI-Powered Twitter profile with 2.6 Million followers that scrapes the internet for images the algorithm predicts will be popular and posts them every 15 minutes.
Archillect is designed by Pak to decipher what could go viral, before it goes viral.
When Sotheby’s ran an auction featuring his artwork earlier this year that fetched $17M, and they asked him for details about his persona, he responded “when I see a name of an artist, I see a face, not the work—so I’m trying to separate the two.” No one has proven his identity.
Earlier this year, the NFT space was slingshotted to new heights by Beeple’s $69M Christie's sale, which brought NFTs into the public eye. Significantly fewer people discuss Pak, who’s first run of his last collection, The Lost Poets, brought in $70M+ in the primary sale. Maybe it’s because Beeple has been highly active in talking to the CNBCs and WSJs of the world to engrain himself in NFT superstardom. Pak’s sales figures speak for themselves, but his recognizability is still a fraction of Beeple’s.
Pak has achieved his goal of being “gray.”
The Lost Poets - Work, Thinking, and Engagement
The Lost Poets is not just a run of static pieces of art, but a year long game that requires collectors to make a series of choices about their NFT. For those of you who need a “real world” comparison, it’s similar to Bandersnatch, the Black Mirror episode which requires viewers to choose their own adventure to change the outcome of the episode.
Part I - Work
First, the subject matter of his collections and the references in his project description inspire collectors to do some level of research on what Pak feels are majorly important concepts / historical figures that should be known by his collectors.
For example, in The Lost Poets, he references the Library of Babel, a short story which sets up a fictional library in which the books inside it contain every possible ordering of the 25 basic characters: the 22 letters of the alphabet, the period, the comma, and space. This means that most of these books will be an illegible word salad; however, the library will also contain every coherent sentence and story ever written, that ever will be written, and every possible permutation of every one of those stories. This means every prediction of the future and every person that has not yet existed, already exists in these pages, somewhere.
Ergo, every inhabitant of the Library of Babel simply has to separate the signal from the noise, because all the answers to any question they may already have or ever will have are literally right in front of them. They just have to spend the time to find their optimal story, as it’s already written.
Part II - Thinking
I won’t belabor the details of the Lost Poet’s collection, but at a high level, collectors have to make a series of choices at various stages of the game.
While most NFT projects tell the collector exactly what they need to do to be a “good collector” (e.g., buy x amount of y, receive z), Pak makes you decide what a “good collector” should do. He presents you with a series of “good” options, and you have to choose what’s most optimal for you.
There’s no right or wrong, just you. The more reading you do from his Twitter breadcrumbs, the more data you will have at your disposal to come to the best answer.
Part III - Engagement
Make your choices. There will always be some level of regret / FOMO that you made the wrong move. This means collectors will be tempted to buy more editions, more chances to not “mess up”. The funny part is that there’s no winning just as much as there’s no losing.
Pak’s grand design is a combination of puzzles and interactivity, encouraging collectors to do their own research. While his artwork for the most part is generally monochromatic and simple, holistically, with the context he wraps his artwork in, his art is far from simple… it’s simple only to the lazy eye.
En Passant Digital had to own a few of these, here’s some of our favorites from our collection (yes, we have pages to “feed” them):
En Passant Digital’s Attempt at Puzzles, Interactivity, and Encouraging Research
The utility for the Zero Contact NFTs was a first of its kind: the pieces grant the buyer viewing access to a feature length film starring Anthony Hopkins and are redeemable for a personal reshoot into a private edition of the film.
As a complete coincidence, Pak tweeted about the movie business last week… take it for what it’s worth:
The idea for the Zero Contact NFTs themselves was rooted in creating a series of NFTs that talked to one another, meaning the way someone interacted with one NFT would change the state of another. Each purchaser of the Zero Contact NFT owns a clue which needs to be solved. Once solved, the NFT map, which is a 1/1 art piece, updates as the clues are solved. I don’t want to give anything away here, so I’ll post still images of the pieces to illustrate what I’m referencing (the real art moves):
DC San and Remo are the artists we commissioned to create these pieces, and they went above and beyond with the writers team from the Zero Contact film to design a multi-level puzzle that requires research to solve.
On top of this, we gamified the puzzle itself by delivering the last two clues of the puzzle to the purchaser of the 1/1 privately, so Mondoir has to make the decision whether he wants to:
Solve the puzzle, possibly unlocking other clues / prizes.
Maintain ownership of the unsolved clues and his map, encouraging the community to pressure him to solve the puzzle, driving engagement and a possible value increase of his NFT.
As to which one holds more value to Mondoir, we will have to find out when the final clues are delivered to him. For now, the 10 clues are up and running. Nothing contained in the artwork is accidental, but all of it is subject to some level of randomness, as it was created using code written by DC San & Remo which generated the art based on the properties coded into the algorithm.
Other questions the Zero Contact collection explores:
Is it more valuable to own the key or the door?
What makes one clue more valuable than another?
What happens when different members of a system have competing incentives?
In a market where everyone is obsessed with calculating rarity metrics and adhering to the traditional art market pricing structure where single edition works are inherently better artworks than editions of 10, it’s worth asking:
Why?
All I ask is the next time you click buy, take a moment and ask yourself, are the British coming?
Talk to us!
If you are looking for an expert* opinion on your NFT project, or want to talk generally about the market, please reach out for a no-obligations 20 minute phone call. We have a number of technology partners at En Passant Digital that help us execute layered NFTs, some of which may be helpful for your project.
Let us know what you’d like to read about in our next edition. This is a new initiative, and we want to make sure it’s as useful as possible.
Email: bryce@enpassantdigital.com
*Anyone who claims to be an expert is a charlatan. They are generally snake-oil salesmen who probably also told you to buy OneCoin. From the last 4 years of our experience, we’ve realized that there are no experts in the space, as it changes by the second.
About the author: Bryce Baker is the co-founder of En Passant Digital, an NFT-focused agency bringing innovative market guidance and strategy to top-tier brands & celebrities.
Our other co-founder, John Tabatabai, has led investments for Crypto VCs and consulted for projects across the NFT space. He recently had an active role in advising, designing and creating the mechanics and infrastructure for the famous B20s, aiding in creating more than $250,000,000 of value in less than 45 days.