Humanity saw the High Renaissance began with the works of Leonardo da Vinci in the late 1400s, while Claude Monet later ushered in a period of Impressionism in the early 1860s. More than 150 years later, the landscape of art may be changing again, led not by traditional artists with brush and ink, but two programmers – John Watkinson and Matt Hall, the founders of Larva Labs.
For the uninitiated, Larva Labs are the creators of CryptoPunks – 10,000 unique characters generated on the Ethereum blockchain which comes in the form of 24-by-24 pixel heads. These CryptoPunks, known more broadly as Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs), have introduced to the world a new form of digital art – and by extension, an evolution of what art means in the 21st century.
This art, however, differs from the digital drawings of years past. How? For starters, they exist entirely on the blockchain – leveraging decentralized technologies and virtually guaranteeing their existence forever. In addition to this unique characteristic, NFTs have provided art for the first time with the tools and mechanisms to indisputably verify ownership and provenance for every piece ever created.
Back to CryptoPunks. Released in June 2017, these digital assets represent some of the earliest NFTs ever released. Towards the end of October, 2021, the collective market capitalization of CryptoPunks was more than 1mETH – it’s hard to imagine that there was once a time that these digital assets were once being given away for free. Needless to say, these digital pixels have become wildly popular – financially, culturally, and otherwise.
In this way, CryptoPunks have evolved to be quite important for the crypto industry – as they are arguably serving as a barometer for the adoption and acceptance of NFTs, and what NFTs can represent and become. From art enthusiasts to traders, the rise in popularity and value of CryptoPunks is growing in importance, as these pixelated images continue to pound their way into the mainstream, and show the world how important the NFT and crypto industry have become.
Tracking CryptoPunk Activity – Easier Than You Think
One may think that the best options to track CryptoPunks are waiting for Twitter to blow up about the next big transaction, or to stare at Etherscan all day long. Fortunately, that’s not the case. Not only can one go about their day normally, but thanks to PARSIQ and its monitoring capabilities, one can easily be notified instantaneously each time there is specific activity related to CryptoPunks on the blockchain.
How PARSIQ Provides the Way
PARSIQ’s monitoring and transaction notification solution provides everything which is needed to begin tracking not only CryptoPunks, but anything imaginable which exists on the blockchain.
For those unfamiliar, PARSIQ is an automation platform that serves as “the glue” between blockchain applications and real-world applications. It does this by facilitating the creation of workflows and notifications between common blockchains and off-chain systems.
Similar to other automation tools, PARSIQ allows users to initiate various workflows or notifications if and when a certain event takes place. In the case of CryptoPunks, one may want to follow the activities related to the listing, buying, and selling of these digital assets.
PARSIQ’s platform standardizes all chains for users into one easily consumable system – which means that regardless of the blockchain, only one platform is needed to manage all of the workflow and notifications required by the user.
The First CryptoPunk Automated Tracker
PARSIQ recently teamed up with Gitcoin on their Defi & Cross-Chain Interoperability Hackathon, which was held between October 18th – November 8th, 2021. Teams from all over the world participated to come up with new and innovative ways to leverage PARSIQ’s monitoring solutions. Amongst the winners was a submission from Pfed-prog, who submitted an entry of tracking CryptoPunks.
In the following detailed, step-by-step instruction, the winner describes clearly and simplistically how such an innovative and useful solution was developed.
- The developers created a free PARSIQ account with an Empty project instead of a template as it allows us to edit the trigger code.
- Next, to monitor the NFT collection they added its contract ABI in the User stream on the PARSIQ platform.
They selected the ABI straight from the page or export into RAW/TEXT format and uploaded to the Platform.
Based on data from Etherscan three most frequent events were chosen.
- Based on data from Etherscan, they chose the three most frequent events so that they could use them with ParsiQL to create a trigger. In that instance, developers added the following events: PunkOffered, PunkBidEntered and PunkBidWithdrawn.
- Back in the Project users also included transports to get the necessary data. There are four options: Web, Discord, Telegram and Google Sheets. In this project, Web, Telegram and Google Sheets transports were implemented.
- As developers implemented the necessary details they needed to combine them as a final product. In the Project, they created triggers for each of the events with similar ParsiQL code, deployed them, and added transports. Here are some details on the code and configuration:
Results
The results are as follows:
We get immediate notifications through a telegram bot in the private channel.
A detailed description of this project can be found here.
With creative thinking and application of those thoughts using PARSIQ’s platform, an easy-to-use solution now exists where CryptoPunk activity can be easily followed and tracked on the blockchain, in real-time – all without any active engagement from the interested parties!
The Future of NFT Tracking
As NFTs continue to pick up traction and adoption within and outside of the crypto community, more and more trackers such as the one developed for CryptoPunks will become increasingly relevant. Interested parties may want to obtain the latest information on available assets for sale so that they can react timely. Alternatively, traders or interested individuals may want to follow a particular NFT asset class, to understand market movements and overall behavior – by utilizing a specific group of NFTs as a barometer for overall market conditions.
Automated tracking may be starting with CryptoPunks, but it certainly does not end here. Much more is expected to come in the months and years to come, as the importance and relevance of NFTs continue to grow and develop.
Disclaimer: This is a paid post and should not be treated as news/advice.
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