Connecting the Dots Behind “THE FIRST 5000 DAYS”
The NFT work, “THE FIRST 5000 DAYS” was sold last week on Christie’s for a whopping $69.3m. This lead many people, including myself, to ask: why would anyone pay this much money for an image that anyone can download in full and enjoy themselves? Today we will take a deeper dive into this topic and try to explain from top-to-bottom what exactly was purchased.
The smart contract that this work was purchased on: 0x2a46f2ffd99e19a89476e2f62270e0a35bbf0756
The token itself has an ID of: 40913
The smart contract and its underlying code can be viewed on etherscan.io:
https://etherscan.io/address/0x2a46f2ffd99e19a89476e2f62270e0a35bbf0756#code
At the above link, if you click “Contract” you can see the underlying code and actually run the read and write functions of the contract. The read functions allow us to see freely view the tokens themselves and corresponding properties. In this case, we care about token ID 40913 and its URI (URI is an acronym for Uniform Resource Identifier). By passing the value “40913” into the read function “tokenURI”, it will return a hash that identifies metadata for the work.
Token URI: ipfs://ipfs/QmPAg1mjxcEQPPtqsLoEcauVedaeMH81WXDPvPx3VC5zUz
The metadata is stored on IPFS, which is a distributed file sharing platform that can permanently cement files at a specific path. In this case, the path is given from the token URI, which returns the following metadata:
Metadata: {“title”: “EVERYDAYS: THE FIRST 5000 DAYS”, “name”: “EVERYDAYS: THE FIRST 5000 DAYS”, “type”: “object”, “imageUrl”: “https://ipfsgateway.makersplace.com/ipfs/QmZ15eQX8FPjfrtdX3QYbrhZxJpbLpvDpsgb2p3VEH8Bqq", “description”: “I made a picture from start to finish every single day from May 1st, 2007 — January 7th, 2021. This is every motherfucking one of those pictures.”, “attributes”: [{“trait_type”: “Creator”, “value”: “beeple”}], “properties”: {“name”: {“type”: “string”, “description”: “EVERYDAYS: THE FIRST 5000 DAYS”}, “description”: {“type”: “string”, “description”: “I made a picture from start to finish every single day from May 1st, 2007 — January 7th, 2021. This is every motherfucking one of those pictures.”}, “preview_media_file”: {“type”: “string”, “description”: “https://ipfsgateway.makersplace.com/ipfs/QmZ15eQX8FPjfrtdX3QYbrhZxJpbLpvDpsgb2p3VEH8Bqq"}, “preview_media_file_type”: {“type”: “string”, “description”: “jpg”}, “created_at”: {“type”: “datetime”, “description”: “2021–02–16T00:07:31.674688+00:00”}, “total_supply”: {“type”: “int”, “description”: 1}, “digital_media_signature_type”: {“type”: “string”, “description”: “SHA-256”}, “digital_media_signature”: {“type”: “string”, “description”: “6314b55cc6ff34f67a18e1ccc977234b803f7a5497b94f1f994ac9d1b896a017”}, “raw_media_file”: {“type”: “string”, “description”: “https://ipfsgateway.makersplace.com/ipfs/QmXkxpwAHCtDXbbZHUwqtFucG1RMS6T87vi1CdvadfL7qA"}}}
I bolded the two key links in the metadata that actually point to the image itself and its raw media, both of which also sit on IPFS. The fact that IPFS can store files permanently at a fixed location is the key ingredient to make this all possible. So that’s the finish line! We’ve made it all of the way to the image itself!
So that was quite a journey from smart contract to token to URI to metadata then finally to the images themselves, but seeing this path from start-to-finish hopefully reveals that it was more than just a JPEG that was sold for $69.3m. OR you might be questioning the topic of NFT art even more. Why would anyone pay for something (a token) that points to something (metadata) that finally points to the work itself that can be downloaded and copied by anyone?
NFT art is still in its early stages and while there are many unknowns, the future is right around the corner.
