The Lost XCOPIES

Pieces of art that have been lost to time and some never to be seen again. A story of a man who outlived his own work after being an early adopter of a fringe part of the art society. 

First off, who is XCOPY?

XCOPY is a London-based crypto artist and enthusiast who is most well known for his hand-drawn neon gifs. He is one of the pioneers of the crypto art scene starting all the way back before the Ethereum blockchain was in existence. 

Because XCOPY started selling his work in the infancy of the cryptoart movement, some of his work has been deleted off the internet. Before marketplaces like Opensea, Rarible, and SuperRare, XCOPY resorted to exclusively using early NFT marketplaces like Ascribe, RARE Art Labs, and Digital Objects. But all three of these early NFT markets have now closed, and thus the works of XCOPY have either been deleted or lost. This is where the name the “lost works of XCOPY” comes from. 

Ascribe 

Ascribe was one of the earliest marketplaces for digital art, starting back in 2015. Ascribe figured out how to use the Bitcoin blockchain in order to give owners of a digital asset proof of ownership. But because it was made when blockchains were in their infancy, the marketplace ran into problems. According to Ascribe, “We discovered that there was still a lot of blockchain infrastructure work to do in terms of scaling, user experience, interoperability, and security. Two of these in particular impacted ascribe.” These infrastructure limitations eventually led the Ascribe team to shut the site down, and with it most of the digital art on it disappeared. 

Some of XCOPY’s pieces survived, whether it be from a blog that posted about his early work or a piece that migrated to super rare.

Jesus Mob

RARE Art Labs

Another marketplace that XCOPY would release on was RARE Art Labs. It was advertised as “the first crypto-economy for the digital art world.” It was an early adopter of the Ethereum blockchain. It was ultimately shut down, but XCOPY archived some of his releases on GIPHY.

In recent days there have been new sales of pieces that were originally launched on RARE. First, NooNe0x.eth just bought an original edition of "Death Wannabe" by XCOPY. The piece was originally released on July 17, 2018, with ten editions. There are only three in circulation, with the remaining seven being locked away in the original RARE ART contract. 

Second, on Oct. 21, 2021, an anonymous buyer bought an edition of "Disaster Suit" for $1 million. The piece was a collection of 10 editions minted on July 27, 2018. Four people hold an edition, and the metadata on it is gone. 

The final marketplace in the trio is Digital Object. Like the other two, this one shut down after building a small community but decided to shut down when there was no wide adoption of their site. Digital Object said on their website, “While a small community has formed around this new kind of collecting, we learned that it would likely take years to gain enough adoption to support a company.” 

These three pieces are some of the survivors of the now-defunct Digital Objects platform where they were minted. Somehow, Opensea has been able to keep them alive. 

If you want to discover the lost pieces yourself check out his Tumblr. He has been posting on it since 2010, and you can see the evolution of his craft.

The Lost Christmas Cards 

After writing this we found out about another lost XCOPY thanks to Druid and just like the rest it was forgotten because of an abandoned website. Back in 2018 XCOPY created Christmas cards for Radi.cards for anyone to mint. The project was forgotten about and only 15 cards were minted. The project was later rediscovered in April 2021 where people started to mint their own and the minting was ultimately shut down. By the time the minting stopped, a total of 34 cards were minted. Seven cards were minted on the original contract and 27 were minted on the V2 contract.

updated on: Oct 21, 2021

Read More:

XCOPY - The Definitive Collection

New Lost XCOPIES UNEARTHED!

XCOPY Story