You probably saw that a Vincent van Gogh painting was defiled by two protestors using none other than a can of tomato soup.
This triggered an idea for Danny Cole (an artist) and Devotion (Andrew Wang‘s Web3 project). An NFT project that enables you to defile other people’s NFTs with a can of soup! Meet Splat.
Here’s how Splat works
You can buy a Splat NFT which is a can of tomato soup JPEG. You can use that can of soup to splat any NFT, but only once (1 can = 1 splat). However, you can’t splat an NFT that has already been splatted – so Farokh’s iconic CryptoPunk can only be splatted by one person, once.
After splatting, your tomato soup NFT will turn into the NFT you selected, but now covered in sauce (FYI it doesn’t actually affect the original NFT). Here’s a splatted version of Beeple’s ‘Everydays: the First 5000 Days’ NFT:
What does Splat tell us about the NFT space?
The project was a massive success. The 1,000-piece collection sold out extremely quickly at 0.05 ETH each. The floor price even peaked at over 0.5 ETH at one point yesterday. These are my key takeaways from this tomato-based fiasco:
- We love urgency and relevancy: The van Gogh protest was 5 days ago. Splat managed to pull this entire project off with outrageous urgency. As with any form of art, it has power when it delivers a relevant message. NFT art is no exception.
- We love being a bit naughty: Splat uses the term “permissionless collaborators”. A more appropriate term is probably “IP-breaching vandalism”. It almost certainly breaches the IP rights of the original NFT artwork (unless they are from CC0 collections), but people love it.
- We have short attention spans: On the day of its launch, Splat’s floor price reached 0.5 ETH. The next day, it plummeted to 0.15 ETH. It’s another harsh reminder of how short profitable trade windows are in this bear market for most projects.
Above all, it has proven that the NFT community likes having a bit of fun. And mark my words, this won’t be the last project that allows you to defile other NFTs. How long until we have penis graffiti collections?
