XCOPY — His History and His Mystery
XCOPY came into my world a couple of months ago. The anonymous artist was mentioned in every corner of the NFT space and his monster sales to prominent collectors were unmissable. His flashing, hypnotic, ghoulish gifs attacked my senses. With every encounter, my intrigue amplified.
Over the last week I did nothing but eat, sleep, and research XCOPY. I uncovered a trail of breadcrumbs and pieced together an image of the most illusive artist in the NFT space today. Here’s what I found.
XCOPYs is an NFT OG
The unknown London based artist has~2000 pieces of art and $50,000,000 in sales, placing him firmly in the top 10 NFT artists of all time. More interesting however, XCOPY created art for nearly a decade before a deluge of collectors and a tornado of excitement enveloped him. He had a cult following of Tumblr fans who clearly loved his work, with some buying prints and hanging them in their homes long before NFTs were a thing.
If you look at XCOPY’s history on Tumblr, you’ll find he was only absent for a single month between August 2010 and April 2020. That month was April 2014. That’s 116 months straight of posting. 🤯🤯🤯
To create art (or anything) for nearly a decade before a major payday, tells us a few things about our unknown artist.
He loves what he does.
He isn’t in it for the money.
In 2010, it was impossible to know NFTs would be a profitable endeavor. If you enjoyed creating gifs, you were doing it for the love of your craft. As XCOPY himself has said:
“I want everyone to create more, I always feel better when I’ve made something.”
It actually wasn’t until March 22, 2018 when XCOPY sold his first gif.
“Today I sold my first gif for £1
Nothing can stop us tumblr” -XCOPY on Tumblr
XCOPY began minting NFTs as early as 2018 on several platforms and his posting on Tumblr got a bit more sporadic in 2020. He began having major NFT sales as early as February 2020, when a collaboration work First Supper sold for $333,716.26 USD. He may have reprioritized his work from Tumblr into NFTs at this point, or maybe it was just 2020 and the world was upside down.
Some of His Digital and Physical Art is Currently Lost
XCOPY was an NFT pioneer. As such many of the early marketplaces where he listed his art are now defunct. Some of his art is locked away in smart contracts that seem to be unattainable.
DigitalObjects.art- While DigitalObjects.art no longer exists, it seems like most of the art was recovered and salvaged on OpenSea. I find this collection is particularly interesting because XCOPY offers a bit of a backstory on the three pieces, something I haven’t found with his other work. You can see the original post on Giphy here.
“New Teeth 2033: Citizen grows sharks teeth against G-Doc advice. Chews uncomfortably for his remaining years.” — XCOPY
Ascribe- Ascribe was an early NFT marketplace that was securing NFTs using the Bitcoin blockchain. They didn’t survive and with it, many of XCOPY’s early work was lost. I’ve been able to find 2 early Ascribe pieces, including this one which he shared on his Tumblr.
It appears XCOPY did end up re-releasing this piece in a different color scheme on SuperRare. You can see it on OpenSea here.
XCOPY’s Jesus Mob from Ascribe was saved and documented on a post to the website Steam.it here. This post does a great job of describing the process of procuring this early work.
After Ascribe closed their doors, XCOPY minted seven variations of his piece Loading New Conflict… and gifted them to seven of his Ascribe supporters. Here is a link to the 4th version on OpenSea.
RareArt Labs- Another NFT platform that was a bit before it’s time. Some of his work from this site survived, some of it was never minted. XCOPY and the original owners of this art consented to having this work wrapped so it can continue to live on in modern NFT marketplaces.
10 editions of Death Wannabe were produced on 7/17/18, with only 3 in known circulation today. The remaining 7 are locked in the initial contract.
Disaster Suit was released on 7/31/18. 4 of 10 copies are in circulation with the remaining 6 copies are irretrievably locked in the contract. On 10/21/21, a Disaster Suit sold for $1 million USD.
Radi.Cards- This website is actually still alive today and allows users to create NFT e-cards that can be used to transmit ETH and DAI (USD stable coin). XCOPY created a Christmas card in 2018. 15 of the cards were minted, and the project was forgotten until April 2021, when it was rediscovered.
Upon rediscovery, collectors managed to mint 19 more for a total of 34 Christmas cards before the contract was shut down. There were two contracts that handled this. You can see the Christmas cards on OpenSea here and here.
If you’re interested in learning more about his lost art, this article does a great deep dive and was the inspiration for this section of the essay.
Missing Physical Art
If you dig carefully through his Tumblr, you will find that for some time, XCOPY sold prints. All of the links to these prints no longer function. Some were sold, and these rare treasures are now hanging on the walls of people potentially unaware of their historical significance.
XCOPY even proclaimed someone owns a 1 of 1, as he destroyed the remaining physical copies. Truly the holy grail… But I will make you all dig for that specific comment. ( :
His Art was Rejected by an Early NFT Collection
If you’ve spent any time digging around well known NFT wallets, you will inevitably find a CurioCard NFT. This 2017 collection features 30 unique NFTs from 7 artists and is an important artifact of early NFT history. CurioCards apparently used community voting for selecting the initial seven artists. Based on early tweets, it appears XCOPY was in the running to be one of these artists.
In January 2022, XCOPY recounted the experience in the below tweet. Based on my research, had he been selected, this would have been the earliest known XCOPY NFTs. This shows he had an early desire to publish his gifs as collectibles. It’s likely in 2017 artists lacked accessible means to mint NFTs.
A complete CurioCard set recently sold for $1.2 million USD at a Christie’s Auction, one can only imagine what the inclusion of an XCOPY would have done to the price and notoriety of CurioCards.
He Does Some Art by Hand
Scrolling through month after month of his decade+ of work on Tumblr, rapidly oscillating neon lights flashing in my face, more scrolling, more flashing… scrolling, clicking here, clicking there. Scrolling. Flashing. Flashing. Flashing.
I sink into a hypnotic fog. I feel as though I was slowly becoming one of XCOPY’s gifs.
My eyes, locked in a semi-mesmerized state, snap open. A rough sketch breaks the noise. I awaken and find a diamond in the rough.
This sketch is an early rendition of his now famous work $LAVE. One can only wonder if he did the sketch first or the digital.
This to me was an exciting artifact of early XCOPY, and possibly an insight into his somewhat unknown creative process. It makes me wonder if he draws GIFs by hand before digitization. The only other information I know about his process is that circa June 2012, he was using Photoshop.
Another note from his early Tumblr days offers more insight on how he got started:
“my first gifs were really just 4 random images mashed together” -XCOPY, 8/18/2014
He Experimented with Pixelchain.art
If you want a holistic view of XCOPY, his experimentations with the pixelchain.art are a notable departure from his usual gifs. Pixelchain.art allows anyone to create simple artwork stored on chain. In 2020, XCOPY made 16 of these pieces.
He Cares
If you go through some of his tweets, you will find a person who is passionate about human rights, animal welfare and the environment. He is clearly anti-authoritarian and anti-corporation. This is displayed prominently on his Tumblr and also in his older tweets. He’s basically an anti-douchebag.
He most recently launched the a collection of 666 Grifters. He auctioned several to charity, raising over $500,000 USD. For anyone looking to collect their first piece, Grifters is presently one of the few XCOPY collections with pieces available under 10 ETH.
And with that, I will raise a glass and congratulate a guy with a big heart on growing his audience from a loyal cult, to an army of NFT archeologists who worship his work. He’s an innovative pioneer of the space and helped lay many of the bricks NFT artists and collectors walk on today.
XCOPY has been with us for a decade, he is arguably the most important living artist alive, and he seems to just be getting started. Here’s to the next decade. 🍻
All the best and happy NFT collecting.
Noochie 🙂
Follow me on twitter for more stories like this: https://twitter.com/asimplenoochie
Feel free to DM me if anything in this story is inaccurate or requires a correction.
P.S. 👇👇👇 Old XCOPY comment from Steemit.
Sources
XCOPY’s Tumblr:
https://xcopy.tumblr.com/
https://cryptoart.io/artist/xcopy
XCOPYS GIPHY: https://giphy.com/XCOPY
SuperRare: https://editorial.superrare.com/2021/06/21/superrare-x-bonhams-presents-cryptogs-7-questions-with-xcopy/
Redlion: https://www.redlion.news/article/the-lost-xcopies
XCOPY’s linktr.ee
Thank you to wanderlunging for editing. Check his writing out here: linktr.ee/wanderlunging. Also thank you to Parzival who you can find at https://twitter.com/nftwhispers.