BitmapPunks: A New Year NFT Craze?

There is no real day off in the cryptocurrency world. This statement is not only reflected in the 24/7 trading market, but also implies the hot narratives

The cryptocurrency world never truly has a day off. This statement not only rings true for the 24/7 trading market but also applies to the hot on-chain narratives that emerge regardless of the time. The first day of the new year should have been a day of rest, yet an Ethereum NFT project called BitmapPunks broke the silence on-chain.

The NFT project announced the opening of free minting at 10 p.m. on January 1, with a total of 2.1 million pieces. The minting was announced to have been completed at 2 p.m. today. According to etherscan data, the minting of BitmapPunks consumed a total of 1,194.65 ETH, worth more than $4.08 million, and the Ethereum network Gas once soared to above 50 gwei. So why can BitmapPunks cause FOMO on-chain? What are the gameplay innovations? Odaily Planet Daily will briefly introduce it in this article.

Super large collection + "picture-coin combination" deflation mechanism

BitmapPunks is first and foremost a super large collection of punks on the Ethereum chain, minted randomly for free, with a total of 2.1 million pieces and a single wallet minting limit of 100. However, despite the huge total amount, BitmapPunks also has a rarity level. Each punk is composed of characteristic attributes of different rarities. You can view the characteristic rarity by entering the NFT number on the official website.

But BitmapPunks is not just a super-large NFT collection, it also proposes a deflation mechanism of "picture-token combination." The rule is that when players mint BitmapPunks, they will receive a 1:1 token airdrop BMP (token contract: 0xBBBB2D4d765c1e455E4896A64BA3883e914ABBBB), but when the BMP tokens in the wallet are transferred or sold, the corresponding number of BitmapPunks in the wallet will be destroyed, but the wallet that accepts the token will not mint new NFTs; when players transfer or sell BitmapPunks in the wallet, the BMP tokens will also be automatically transferred to the receiving wallet.

Therefore, the total amount of BMP tokens will not change in essence, with a total of 2.1 million, but BitmapPunks will continue to destroy deflation during the BMP token transaction process. According to Blur data, more than 140,000 BitmapPunks have been destroyed. At the same time, BitmapPunks and the ERC404 concept of "picture-to-coin swap" hyped in early 2024 are also quite different in operation.

According to DEXscreener data, the current price of BMP is 3.48USDT, with a market value of $7.3 million. At the same time, according to OKX Wallet data, the transaction volume of BitmapPunks has exceeded 22 ETH, and the floor price is 0.0008 ETH. According to the author's personal test, with 30 gwei minted, the cost of a single BitmapPunks is about 1.5USDT. So far, the profit has at least doubled based on the currency price alone.

Will BitmapPunks set off a new year NFT craze?

Although BitmapPunks has been minted, the project was born not long ago and there is not much public information to interpret it. The official Twitter account has not updated the detailed project introduction. The latest tweet is announcing the end of BitmapPunks minting.

However, according to the community's inference, the founder of the BitmapPunks project is most likely the founder of the NFT liquidity protocol Floor Protocol (X: @FLC_FlooringLab), who posted multiple tweets related to BitmapPunks before and after the minting of BitmapPunks. The only two followers of BitmapPunks besides the CryptoPunks official Twitter account are the founder of Floor Protocol, which seems to confirm this.

With the support of the founder of Floor Protocol, BitmapPunks has been shrouded in mystery. At the same time, the prefix Bitmap in the name of BitmapPunks has also aroused speculation among some players. Bitmap was originally a metaverse project developed on the Bitcoin ecosystem based on ordinal theory and bitmap theory. The core concept is to generate 2D plots based on Bitcoin block data. As a super-large collection, is the random generation rule of BitmapPunks similar to the Bitmap principle and matched with certain data on the Ethereum chain? If this hypothesis is true, then BitmapPunks may become a collection of NFTs generated in this way on Ethereum.

However, the above are all based on community inferences and assumptions, and the subsequent performance of BitmapPunks remains to be seen. At the end of 2024, many