Introduction to Bastard Gan Punk V2 NFT art collection.
All you need to know about the most important and most innovative NFT collection of 2021.
Disclaimer: The following text is the opinion of an individual member of Mooncat #888 DAO (Twitter here, our NFT account here). We are NFT collectors and fans, however, our opinions are our own, and are not financial advice.
Short Summary:
Bastard Gan Punks V2 (created in March 2021, one month earlier then BAYC) is the first transformative NFT collection in existence inspired by CryptoPunks. It contains 11307 NFTs, and it is a direct continuation of Bastard Gan Punks V1 (which is a small collection of 76 Bastards, created in Spring 2020).
It is also a first 10k+ PFP collection created by AI (Bastards were brought into existence by GAN technology), first PFP collection which used Glitch technique (for the creation of its backgrounds), first large PFP collection with its own smart contract containing rotational/moving PFPs, and first NFT collection in history for which a separate smart contract was created by artist, enabling each Bastard owner to create their own IP licences directly on blockchain and store it there (Bastard owners have full IP and Commercial rights granted by creator for the Bastards they own, so they can create their own IP and Commercial licences using that smart contract).
It is also an earliest PFP collection which is gender neutral: this is intentional, as Bastards are directly supporting gender inclusivity and equality for everyone. Unlike their inspiration, CryptoPunks, which have “Male” and “Female” traits in their collection, Bastards are genderless.
Bastards are first NFT collection in history where collection traits were defined not by artist who created the collection, but by community effort.
Bastards are governed by Bastard DAO in pure web3 spirit. Each NFT holder can vote on all important issues related to collection development and future plans, and also create Proposals using snapshot.org platform. Governance is thus fully decentralised, all decisions are made by Bastard owners by voting on created Proposals. At the moment of writing there are approximatelly 2900 individual NFT owners with voting rights.
1. Introduction:
In the middle of March 2021, I was checking a new service for NFTs, named lazy.com, created by famous American entrepreneur and billionaire Mark Cuban. This service enables you to check anyone’s NFTs, and so I was naturally curious and among many others, I was also checking Mr.Cuban’s personal NFT wallet.
On the very first position, Mr. Cuban had pinned a strange, yet very beautiful shape-shifting CryptoPunk-like creature. I have later learned that it is named Bastard (or, in full, Bastard Gan Punk V2, or also Bgan), and it is one of 11305 NFTs in the new art collection created by young visionary artist Berk Özdemir.
This is the NFT:
The Opensea.io link to this NFT is here.
It caught my attention that he obviously liked it much, as it was pinned at no.1 position in his personal NFT wallet for many weeks. Considering that Mr.Cuban is extremely active in NFT space, and owns hundreds of best NFTs in existence (which he either purchased or were donated to him by various artists trying to catch his attention), this was the first indication to me that something very interesting might be happening.
Later in March 2021, NFT Twitter woke up to Bastards/Bgans as well quite intensively, and soon some of the most influential people in NFT space started to tweet about Bastards.
NFT collector and one of the most followed experts in NFT space, Twitter account “ShroomDaddy” analyzed the significance of the collection in his now-notorious series of tweets named “Appropriation in NFTs and Art in General”, and another large Twitter crypto/NFT influencers “MoonOverlord”, “Cobie”, “Icebergy” and “Notsofast” with hundreds of thousands of followers also had some very good things to say about the collection.
In parallel, significant Bgan sales were recorded on Opensea.io, and the rest is history.
Sources:
Before we start to discuss Bastards/Bgans in detail, here are the main links reader can use to get full information about this collection:
Bastard Gan Punk V1 website: bganpunks.eth.link
Bastard Gan Punk V2 website: bastardganpunks.club
Glicpixxx website: glicpixxx.love
Artglixxx website: artglixxx.io
Twitter: https://twitter.com/bganpunks
Opensea Bastard Gan Punks V1: https://opensea.io/collection/bastard-gan-punks
Opensea Bastard Gan Punks V2: https://opensea.io/assets/bastard-gan-punks-v2
Opensea Glicpixxx: https://opensea.io/collection/glicpixxxver002
Discord: discord.com/invite/bganpunks
Artist/Creator of the collections: Berk Özdemir (https://linktr.ee/0xberk)
2. The predecessors of Bastard Gan Punks are Cryptopunks.
So let’s speak now about what Bastards are. In order to understand this, we need to quickly mention the most successful collection in NFT history, which is CryptoPunks. CryptoPunks are an NFT collection of 10 000 Avatars, mostly humans (females and males), but there there are some Zombies, Apes, and Aliens as well. CryptoPunks was created in 2017, and in 2021 we see record sales per NFT (Aliens sells in the range of 7–11 mil USD).
To have a complete picture, Apes and Zombies are selling in hundreds and millions of dollars as well, while basic CryptoPunks with the lowest rarities have floor prices in tens of thousands of dollars, subject to fluctuation.
Here are some random examples of CryptoPunk Aliens:
Examples of Apes:
Examples of Zombies:
Examples of Humans (Males):
Examples of Humans (Females):
As we can see, CryptoPunks is a very successful NFT collection, while prices reflect this. In mid-2021 there are around 2500 unique holders of CryptoPunks, many of them are extremely wealthy individuals.
3. The arrival of Bastard Gan Punks V2 via GAN technology:
There are hundreds of NFT collections inspired by CryptoPunks in 2021 (all of them can be seen via marketplaces like Opensea.io or Rarible.com). Pixelated avatar-style collections simply sell well at the moment, and many crypto fans are using those Avatars as personal online identities in crypto space, and on crypto Twiter.
This however got to the point, when almost everyone who can work with pixels editor became an “artist”. There is now an oversaturation of CryptoPunk inspired pixelated avatar collections (literally hundreds), most of them 99,99% worthless, both from artistic/aesthetics and investment point of view. Most of them look the same, most were created with the same software tools, and they do not bring anything new to the market. Most of them have even very similar descriptions on Opensea.io, usually using the wording “XXXPunksXXXs was created to pay homage to CryptoPunks”. In my opinion, such projects are paying “homage” to quick cash-grab and will hold 0 value in the future.
Still, because we have only 10 000 CryptoPunks, they can serve only 10 000 unique people if they achieve the maximum distribution.
There is of course a much larger amount of people willing to acquire nice virtual avatars, and therefore at the moment, there is a very large demand for something unusual, beautiful, a little bit outlandish but still with the familiarity which is provided by some similar features to CryptoPunks.
I think this is one of the main driving forces why the art collection of Bastard Gan Punk V2 is so widely successful.
As the creator of the collection, Berk Özdemir (Twitter here) wrote on the collection webpage bastardganpunks.club:
“BASTARD GAN PUNKS project has started as a hobby NFT project of me (@berkozdemir).
There were two main reasons for me to initiate this project:
- to practice Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) with my own dataset, as part of my artistic research at Masters programme at ArtScience Interfaculty
- even though Cryptopunks were way cheaper last year than now, I had no money to buy any, so I challenged myself to make “interesting enough” remixes of them. So I came up with the bastards concept. Bastard GAN Punks carry the genes of original Cryptopunk, but they carry many different traits from several punks, so they don’t know who their actual parents are. And you know, sometimes BASTARDS are much cooler than their parents. Look at Jon Snow for example lol”
As is further detailed, the process of Bastard GAN Punks V2 creation was long and very technical. to create 11305 very different and beautiful NFTs was not straightforward by any means.
Berk Özdemir first created NFTs named Bastard GAN Punks V1 (which is now a separate NFT collection of its own, consisting of only 74 pieces, you can find more details about them here). Artist’s website describes the process of creation of V1s as following:
First iteration of Bastard Gan Punks were trained on 10000 original Cryptopunks and gave birth to many weirdo adorable motherfuckin’ bastards. The process worked very well and I was so happy with getting weird interesting results.
However, since some traits of Cryptopunks exist on just a few ones (like Alien, Ape, Zombie, or Beanie etc); most of the rare traits were lost during the model training.
So, Berk then used a little different technique to create V2s:
For BGANPUNKS V2, I chopped all Cryptopunks attributes, made cross-gender copies of ones which were made for only one gender (BGANPUNKS ARE QUEER!), categorised them in different folders (Hairs/Heads, Eyes, Glasses, Smokes etc.), and wrote a script to make all possible combinations of those traits. I also added skin and accessory color randomization + a couple of custom traits I’ve drawn myself. To be honest it was a painful and shitty process because I had to do all the cuts by hand and had to optimize the script via trial and error maybe like hundreds of times, to not to make unnecessary 1000000 images at the end which would take a lifetime to train the model with my shitty GPU
In case this was not emphasized clearly so far, the artist used advanced GANs (Generative Adversarial Networks) to generate the base of his art. To learn about GANs, check more details here. For the purpose of this introduction, let’s just note that GAN usually consists of two neural networks which contest with each other in a game (in the form of a zero-sum game, where one agent’s gain is another agent’s loss). Given a training set, this technique learns to generate new data with the same statistics as the training set. For example, a GAN trained on photographs can generate new photographs that look at least superficially authentic to human observers, having many realistic characteristics. To quote Wikipedia “GANs can be used to generate art; The Verge wrote in March 2019 that “The images created by GANs have become the defining look of contemporary AI art.”[11] GANs can also be used to inpaint photographs[12] or create photos of imaginary fashion models, with no need to hire a model, photographer, or makeup artist, or pay for a studio and transportation.[13]”
Apparently, in the case of Bastard Gan Punks V2, GAN was uniquely used in an unprecedented fashion to generate a set of highly beautiful NFTs.
4. Traits Categorization of Bastard Gan Punks V2s:
The collection of 11305 Bastards is extremely diverse and complex. To be honest, I have not yet seen the NFT collection with more traits and categories. Which makes the collecting Bastards both intellectually challenging, but also great fun for many collectors I know from the Discord and Twitter communities as well. I have a lot of fun myself as well.
The second thing to note is that most traits as they are now defined were created not by the artist himself, but by a vibrant community of fans and collectors, active mainly on Discord and Twitter, who suggested the categories, then categorized all Bastards using those categories, and finally had the whole thing approved by the artist, who then subsequently transferred these traits to code. This is a great example of community work, and it took months for community members to go via multiple excel sheets and carefully categorize each and every Bastard.
In addition, the traits creation process is still ongoing (in minimum Item categories are still under review) at the time when I write this review, so please keep in mind that additional traits will still be introduced.
Here is an overview of traits that were already created by the community, approved by the artist, and exported to marketplaces like Opensea.io, so they are already final and definite (the link to the verified Opensea collection of Bastard Gan Punk V2 is here):
- HYPE TYPE (this trait distinguish among static and moving Bastards)
- SONG WORD COUNT (this trait applies to all Bastards, regardless of HYPE TYPE)
- BASTARDNESS (this trait applies to all Bastards, regardless of HYPE TYPE)
- BACKGROUND (applies only for static Bastards)
- GLITCH PATTERN (applies only for static Bastards)
- BAD HABITS (applies only for static Bastards)
- FACING DIRECTION (applies only for static Bastards)
- TYPE (applies only for static Bastards)
- BACKGROUND GLICH LEVEL (applies only for moving Bastards)
- BACKGROUND MOOD (applies only for moving Bastards)
- FLOATY HEAD (applies only for moving Bastards)
- SPEEDOMETER (applies only for moving Bastards)
- NUM OF FRAMES (applies only for moving Bastards)
- HEAD TURNS (applies only for moving Bastards)
We will discuss each trait now in detail.
Trait: Hype Type
There are 2 main categories of Bastards — they are either moving or are static.
10458 of Bastards have “Calm AF” Hype Type trait (they are static .PNG images of Bastards)
847 of Bastards have “Hyped AF” Hype Type trait (they are moving .GIF animations of Bastards)
Here is a random example of Hyped AF Bastard:
Here is a random example of Calm AF Bastard:
Trait: Background
This trait only applies for static Bastards (with Hype trait: “Calm AF”):
There are 2 values:
“Glitchy AF” (glitchy backgrounds containing several colors and geometric patterns, 2003 Bastards)
“Static AF” (background consists of 1 color only, 8455 Bastard).
Example of Static AF Bastards:
Example of Glitchy AF Bastards (3 of many different backgrounds in the collection):
Trait: Type
This trait only applies for static Bastards (with Hype trait: “Calm AF”):
There are:
- Main categories (Apes, Aliens, Humans (Large and Petite) and Zombies)
2. Hybrids (combinations of Main categories)
3. X-Bastard category
Let’s see them in detail now:
- Main Categories:
Large (Humans, 4138 Bastards): defined in general by a large head, specific ears, and nose.
Petit (Humans, 1758 Bastards)defined in general by a smaller head, specific ears, and nose.
Apes (1954 Bastards): defined in general by specific head shape, and nose.
Aliens (1777 Bastards) defined in general by specific ears shape, and nose.
Zombies (106 Bastards): defined in general by a specific degree of red in eyes.
2. Hybrids (Hybrids are Bastards which have traits belonging to at least 2 main categories) :
ALIEN APE HYBRID (20 Bastards): defined in general by a combination of specific head shapes, ears, and noses.
ALIEN HUMAN HYBRID (381 Bastards): defined in general by a combination of specific head shapes, ears, and noses.
ALIEN ZOMBIE HYBRID (44 Bastards): defined in general by a combination of specific ears, eyes, and noses.
APE HUMAN HYBRID (84 Bastards): defined in general by a combination of specific head shapes and noses.
APE ZOMBIE HYBRID (38 Bastards): defined in general by a combination of specific head shapes, eyes, and noses.
and finally:
3. X-Bastards (158 Bastards: a very special, and probably most prized category among many collectors, where only extremely glitchy/pixelated Bastards were assigned, for which it was impossible to classify them otherwise).
Trait: GLITCH PATTERN
This trait only applies for static Bastards (with Hype trait: “Calm AF”):
This trait is one of the core traits in the collection, as it defines different backgrounds Bastards can have. Some examples of backgrounds:
GRID (158 Bastards):
ABSTRACT LIGHT (140 Bastards):
2x2s (45 Bastards):
EYES WITH DIAGONAL (59 Bastards):
EYES (23 Bastards):
EGG CARTON (99 BASTARDS):
These are only a few examples of backgrounds.
Here is the complete list of 32 different backgrounds, you can use it for filtering on venues like Opensea.io:
Trait: Bad Habits
This trait only applies for static Bastards (with Hype trait: “Calm AF”):
BIG SMOKE (1702 Bastards): defined by Bastard holding a “Big Smoke”:
VAPE (1624 Bastards): defined by Bastard holding a “Vape”:
PIPE (1717 Bastards): defined by Bastard holding a “Pipe”:
Some of them, in rare cases, are combining these items, like in the following examples:
BIG SMOKE ‘n CIGGIE (49 Bastards)
or
BIG SMOKE ‘n PIPE (60 Bastards)
There are even rarer combinations where Bastards are combining as much as 3 items, although this is extremely rare. It is possible to filter those NFTs on Opensea.io, using the following trait values, for which I will not provide examples as to keep this article in proper length:
BIG SMOKE ‘n PIPE ‘n VAPE (2 Bastards), BIG SMOKE ‘n VAPE (31 Bastards), CIGGIE (1652 Bastards), CIGGIE ‘n PIPE (23 Bastards), CIGGIE ‘n PIPE ‘n VAPE (1 Bastard), CIGGIE ‘n VAPE (7 Bastards), DOUBLE BIG SMOKE (14 Bastards), DOUBLE BIG SMOKE ‘n CIGGIE (1 Bastard), DOUBLE CIGGIE (6 Bastards), DOUBLE PIPE (17 Bastards), DOUBLE PIPE ‘n BIG SMOKE (1 Bastard), DOUBLE VAPE (7 Bastards), EDIBLES??? (3458 Bastards), PIPE ‘n VAPE (85 Bastards), BIG SMOKE ‘n CIGGIE ‘n PIPE (1 Bastard)
Trait: Items
Various items: at the moment of writing values for this trait are yet to be classified and added to Opensea.io by Berk and the community. This trait will only apply for static Bastards (with Hype trait: “Calm AF”):
Traits: Text (Song)
This trait only applies both for static and moving Bastards:
Basically, each Bastard carries a special song assigned to it. The text was generated by AI, and artists stated on his website:
Also for each BASTARD V2 to have their own story like fortune cookie, I fetched all Punk & Emo song lyrics from this website and trained them with GPT-2, which resulted in very weird texts which you will see in NFT description. In BGANPUNKS V1, there were lots of people who loved my humorous approach to NFT descriptions (I was writing goofy and edgy stuff), this time I trusted GPUs on this task.
Texts are very different: some of them are only 1 or 2 worders, some are complex and long. The longest text contains 49 characters.
In most cases, it seems texts are not related to Bastard’s image, however careful examination of 11305 strong collection shows that few Bastards are equipped by self-referencing text. My favorites are Zombie Bastard singing about “Zombies Hunt” or another Bastard (which clearly looks like a member of the medical unit), singing “Your Symptoms”.
Here they are:
Text: “NON FUNGIBLE TOKENS, ZOMBIES HUNT ANDUNT, THE ONLY FUNGRY AT THE GUNFUD COURSE REPLACE THE TRUTH INSOLE WITH THE PASSING”
Opensea.io link here
and
Text: “YOUR SYMPTOMS”
Opensea.io link here.
I am sure there will be more examples like this, but I did not have time to check all texts in detail yet.
Apart from the content and meaning of the Bastard’s songs, it should be also noted that while the majority of the text is in English, there is no shortage of Bastards singing in Spanish, French, German, Scandinavian languages and in languages which I was not able to identify using Google translator. This by itself is an area that seems to be of interest to many collectors in the community and can contain a lot of hidden gems.
Trait: Bastardness
is an original trait, assigned to each Bastard directly by the artist.
As can be seen from the trait values distribution below, the trait is pretty symmetrically distributed (around 90–110 Bastard’s per trait value), with few exceptions. For example “AB123 BASTARD” and GOD BASTARD are each assigned to only 1 Bastard, thus making those Bastards very rare.
Trait Values (number of Bastards):
$UGARWHALE BASTARD (6), 0.0001 IQ BASTARD (102), 0HEAD BASTARD (107), 1HEAD BASTARD (97), 2HEAD BASTARD (116), 3HEAD BASTARD (119), 4HEAD BASTARD (107), 500 IQ BASTARD (97), 5HEAD BASTARD (103), 6HEAD BASTARD (111), AB123 BASTARD (1), ALPHA BASTARD (112), ANGEL BASTARD (95), ANON BASTARD (110), BADA$$ BASTARD (117), BARBARIAN BASTARD (103), BETA BASTARD (114), BIG TIDDY GOTH BASTARD (109), BIGBRAIN BASTARD (7), BLACKPIL BASTARD (97), BLACKSMITH BASTARD (100), BLOOMER BASTARD (111), BLUPIL BASTARD (108), BOMBSHELL BASTARD (114), BOOMER BASTARD (99), BOURGEOIS BASTARD (121), C00LIO BASTARD (128), CD456 BASTARD (4), CHAD BASTARD (96), CONFORMIST BASTARD (97), COOMER BASTARD (95), C̣ͦͧU̺̱̫RͨͣͫŠ͎͞E᷿ͯ͂Dͩ͢ BASTARD (5), DANK BASTARD (115), DEALER BASTARD (115), DEF NOT A BASTARD (3), DIABOLIQUE BASTARD (117), DOOMER BASTARD (115), DOUCHE BASTARD (114), DUMBA$$ BASTARD (103), DUMMKOPF BASTARD (109), DUMPER BASTARD (112), DUMPSTER BASTARD (112), DΞGΞN BASTARD (88), EF789 BASTARD (1), EGGPLANT BASTARD (100), EMO BASTARD (129), ETHEREUM KILLA BASTARD (107), EVANGELIST BASTARD (123), EVIL BASTARD (85), FAKE BASTARD (106), FEELSGOOD BASTARD (98), FLIPPER BASTARD (107), FOMBOI BASTARD (96), FREN BASTARD (127), FUTURIST BASTARD (100), GAMER BASTARD (103), GENTLE BASTARD (89), GLOOMER BASTARD (85), GOD BASTARD (1), HALAL BASTARD (117), HIPPIE BASTARD (122), HODLER BASTARD (119), HORNY BASTARD (88), INGLOURIOUS BASTARD (1), JACK OF ALL TRADES BASTARD (5), JOKER BASTARD (106), JUST A PLAIN BASTARD (99), L4M3R BASTARD (115), LOW POLY BASTARD (111), MAXIE BASTARD (94), MELON USK BASTARD (10), MINNIE BASTARD (122), MOONBOI BASTARD (128), NECROMANCER BASTARD (84), NERD BASTARD (123), NIFTYMANIAC BASTARD (88), NOCOINER BASTARD (100), NOOB BASTARD (114), NOT A BASTARD (4), NYANCAT BASTARD (15), OMEGA BASTARD (115), ONE OF A KIND BASTARD (6), PARASITE BASTARD (124), PEACH BASTARD (94), PEPEGA BASTARD (105), PERSONA NON GRATA BASTARD (107), PIMP BASTARD (117), POOR BASTARD (97), PRANKER BASTARD (110), PUMPER BASTARD (88), RADPIL BASTARD (104), REAL DEAL BASTARD (116), REKT BASTARD (103), ROGUE BASTARD (118), ROMANTIQUE BASTARD (103), RUGPULLER BASTARD (87), SAFU BASTARD (102), SEMI BASTARD (108), SER BASTARD (116), SEXMACHINA BASTARD (109), SIMP BASTARD (91), SMOL BASTARD (102), SMUG BASTARD (120), SNOOB BASTARD (97), SORCERER BASTARD (111), STINKY BASTARD (114), STONER BASTARD (104), TANKIE BASTARD (100), THETA BASTARD (122), TROLL BASTARD (118), UGLY BASTARD (112), VEGAN BASTARD (107), VIRGIN BASTARD (95), W4NK3R BASTARD (106), WAIFU BASTARD (115), WEEB BASTARD (98), WHALE WANNABE BASTARD (127), WHITEPIL BASTARD (88), ZERO DIVIDER BASTARD (5), ZOOMER BASTARD (111)
Trait: Facing Direction
Bastards can face either Left (4799 Bastards), Right (5434 Bastards), or can be Front-facing (225 Bastards).
Example of Left-facing Bastards:
Example of Right-facing Bastards:
Example of Front-facing Bastards:
Above were all traits related to static Bastards. Following are traits that are related exclusively to moving Bastards.
Trait: Background Glitch Level
This trait only applies for moving Bastards (with Hype trait: “Hyped AF”).
3 — NOISY (336 Bastards)
2 — DISTORTED (174 Bastards)
5 — GOES TO 11 (171 Bastards)
1 — UNPLUGGED (108 Bastards)
4 — FLASHIE AF (58 Bastards)
Trait: Background Mood
This trait only applies for moving Bastards (with Hype trait: “Hyped AF”):
TRANSIENT COLORS (801 Bastards): background color is changing
FIXED COLOR (31 Bastards): background color is stable, and is other than white
WHITE (15 Bastards): background color is always white
Trait: Floaty Head
This trait only applies for moving Bastards (with Hype trait: “Hyped AF”):
There are some very special moving Bastards, with so-called “Floaty Head”
NAH (822 Bastards): indicates it is not Floaty Head
YEAH (25 Bastards): indicates it is a Floaty Head, which looks like this:
Floaty Heads seems to be some o the most sought-after items in the collection, due to the fact that there are extremely rare (only 25 of them in 11305 strong collection), and I assume also because of their very distinctive look.
Trait: Head Turns, Speedometer, and Num of Frames:
are all more technical traits which only apply for moving Bastards (with the Hype trait: “Hyped AF”). They are out of the scope of this article: for readers who want to learn more about them, I advise you to join Bastard’s Discord.
4. How to collect Bastard Gan Punks V2
Ranking/Appraisals
There are many tools that started to rank/sort Bastards/Bgans based on traits, described in the previous section.
Some sites collectors can use are:
nftexp.io, rarity.tools and alphaonchain.com
Now, the above tools are using math to calculate some rankings (and are giving significantly different results), but collectors in my opinion should always keep in mind that beauty itself can not be ranked.
When it comes to Bastards, there are two important things to consider: Traits and Visuals (Aesthetics). I feel that in the future when Bastards will get into mass NFT markets, Traits will be the way how “average collector” without much initial information will go about it, while for true experts/informed collectors, aesthetics will be probably dominant. These are much fewer people, but also much wealthier and influential than the average collectors. So it might well happen in my opinion that aesthetically very pleasing or very interesting Bastards will command significant premiums in the future over these with rare traits.
Saying above, let’s now explain how different ranking websites work. They are all doing pretty similar things.
First, they search what categories/traits are in a particular collection. Then, they retrieve data for each particular category/trait and calculate Rarity points (the more rare traits, the more Rarity points assigned to that particular NFT).
Once done, they sum up all Rarity points for given NFT, to calculate the final rarity score, and then rank the NFT accordingly (higher final rarity score = higher overall ranking).
In the future, an average collector will rely more and more on ranking websites and tools in my opinion, as there is no easy way how to check all items in the 11305 strong Bastard Gan Punk V2 collection without literally spending few full days on it.
The great thing for Bastard’s collectors is that community together with the artist has done an amazing job defining rarities/categories (which is still work under progress for some categories), and this results in a fact that RARITIES AND VISUALS are having a big intersection in general as I see it (while not always).
So what is the best way of collecting Bastards/Bgans? I am personally always looking for the best possible combination of traits, while visuals must be also beautiful.
So for example, in the case of CALM AF Bastards (static ones), it is BACKGROUND + DIRECTION + TYPE + BAD HABITS + ITEMS + SONG COUNT. The rarer the NFT is in each category, the higher the overall ranking score and final NFT ranking is.
Considering all the above, the highest-ranking Bastards probably will be: HYBRIDS/X-BASTARDS/ZOMBIES + FRONT FACING + “N”/DOUBLE+ GLITCHY BACKGROUND + SOME INTERESTING ITEMS + RARE SONG COUNT.
While this is good basic information to take into consideration, things are not so simple in reality, as secondary market activity already shows us.
Secondary Market Activity
Bastard Gan Punks are actively traded on places like Opensea.io and Rarible.com. The nature of the secondary market is very complex though.
It seems so far that some collectors are focusing on collecting Bastards purely based on the rarity of their traits, while another large group of collectors ignore traits completely, and focus on pure aesthetics. The best summary of all this I have read in the recent days is from OG Bastard/Bgan expert and collector, Twitter account “snooplyin42”, who recently posted this analysis:
I would not be able to say it better.
Liquidity
Bastard Gan Punk V2 is a global NFT collection with large and increasing demand from some very wealthy investors and art collectors. As such, Bastards are not exactly cheap to collect, particularly if one is interested in slightly better Bastard, with interesting rarity or visuals. On the other hand, they are still significantly cheaper comparing to CryptoPunks.
The good thing for smaller collectors and NFT investors is that the collection is highly liquid. Not only because of the dedicated base of international collectors on Opensea.io or Rarible.io but also because, due to its size and quality, it has its own automated liquidity pools (ALPs) built on the Ethereum blockchain.
This means, that if you are a Bastard/Bgan collector, you can swap your Bastard back to Eth (at least for the price of the floor items in the Bastard Gan Punk V2 collection) without a need to find a “living” buyer.
This makes Bastards “insta-liquid”, 24/7/365.
The 2 main automated liquidity pools for Bastards are currently built within nft20.io and nftx.org projects.
It is unfortunately outside the scope of this article to explain these pools and the technology behind them, but I really do recommend everyone who is serious about NFTs to get familiar with NFT ALPs in detail, as liquidity is super important for so many people in the NFT space.
5. The future
Future of Bastards (Roadmap for the collections).
While the Bastards collection is already created and actively traded on the secondary markets, the artist and the vibrant Bastard community are far from asleep.
The following roadmap was announced on Jun 2021, detailing a new airdrop of GLICPIXs to all Bastard holders (a new large collection of glitchy objects, prepared by Berk), finalization of Bastards traits, various contests, and most importantly, preparations for Bastard Metaverse Integration:
It is so great to see this large amount of energy and enthusiasm in the NFT community.
And why would not they be happy? They are owners of beautiful NFTs and part of the great team, with a young and innovative artist who truly cares as much as he can for them.
Btw, when it comes to ownership of NFTs, this clearly belongs to NFT owners, as noted on Berk’s website:
NFT OWNERSHIP:IF YOU ARE PROVIDING A WARM HOME AND FOOD TO A BASTARD GAN PUNK; YOU ARE FULLY PERMITTED TO DO WHATEVER YOU WANNA DO/MAKE WITH IT. MEANING, YOU OWN FULL COPYRIGHT OF ARTWORK AND DESCRIPTION TEXT.DO A NON-COMMERCIAL OR COMMERCIAL THING, START YOUR FRANCHISE WITH YOUR BGANPUNK AS MASCOT, OR BRANDIZE IT WITH MERCH, MAKE A SONG WITH DESCRIPTION, IT IS ALL UP TO YOU. YOUR BGANPUNK IS A FAMILY MEMBER OF YOU AFTER ALL ❤️
This is so very different from many NFT projects out there.
6.Summary
Apart from the amazing potential of this collection, its bright future, and its very active community, what I like the most is the sheer and partially outlandish beauty of individual Bastards.
It would be impossible to achieve this level of beauty without nascent GAN technology and without the exceptional vision and the genius artistic execution of the creator. Only the combination of this new technology and visionary artist made the beauty in this art collection possible.
Look at this one, for example:
And it is exactly this beauty that makes me happy. Viscerally happy.
