Visualizing Non-Fungible Token Ethics: A Case Study On CryptoPunks

TL;DR

This paper investigates ethical and racial fairness issues in CryptoPunks, a popular NFT collection, through data analysis and visualization, revealing gender and skin tone disparities in creation and trading patterns.

Contribution

It introduces a novel visualization approach to explore ethical concerns in NFT design, focusing on gender and racial fairness in CryptoPunks.

Findings

More male than female punks were created initially.

Male punks tend to sell for higher prices than female punks.

Lighter-skinned punks generally fetch higher prices.

Abstract

As a blockchain-based application, Non-Fungible Token (NFT) has received worldwide attention over the past few years. Digital artwork is the main form of NFT that can be stored on different blockchains. Although the NFT market is rapidly developing, we observed potential ethical and racial fairness issues in the design of NFT artworks due to a lack of ethical guidelines or censorship. Therefore, we investigated CryptoPunks, the most famous collection in the NFT market, to explore and visualize its potential ethical issues. We explored the ethical issues from three aspects: design, trading transactions, and related topics on Twitter. We scraped data from Twitter and Dune Analytics using python libraries, Twitter crawler, and sentiment analysis tools. Our five visualizations implied that 1.6 times more male punks were created in the initial design process than the female ones. And the male ones have a higher average selling price than females; lighter-skinned punks tend to sell for higher prices. The results of our study and visualizations provide a preliminary exploration of CryptoPunks and further inspire future ethical-related investigation and research in the NFT domain.