Larva Labs

There is. Not from the entire space, but there's a bit of street cred you get by being entirely 'on-chain', as they say.

Within the smart contracts themselves is a read function for that content uri that provides all the data needed (from what I've seen, a hashed string) to generate an .svg file. But it obviously taxes the system and costs a lot more in gas fees (not to read it, that doesn't cost gas fees, but to deploy the contracts and mint), especially the more complex those are, which is why you mostly see it with 8-bit or very low-res artwork.

Cryptopunks being the most well-known (and also the most valuable) NFT project is all on-chain, and Anonymice being the most open and forked project that does this. EtherOrcs does it a little differently but is also on-chain and has completely open contracts you can refer to as well.

There's quite a few more besides this, but I don't know what percent it is, probably pretty small. Some people won't buy anything that's not entirely on-chain. But you're right that most people don't really care, they just care about the price or the image.

I've been digging through the Anonymice and EtherOrcs contracts to get a better understanding of the different approaches they took (and I still wouldn't say I completely understand it yet). It's pretty interesting, though.

[1]: https://www.larvalabs.com/blog/2021-8-18-18-0/on-chain-cryptopunks

[2]: https://anonymice.org/

[3]: https://etherorcs.com/

EDIT: Sorry, you only said cryptographic…

>Ethereum - Cool tech, but all the innovative parts of it are highly unproven.

I think it's quite proven. Turing complete contracts work according to their code. This has already allowed hundreds of automated token sales to take place, and anyone to copy paste some code to make their own token (with most using the ERC20 standard).

Alpha versions of several Dapps like Augur have been created and there is the Ethereum Name Service (ENS) which was programmed to do several innovative things:

* automatically release names for registration on a staggered schedule

* use hidden bids that are all revealed during a reveal phase

* require the winning bidder to deposit the winning amount of ETH in the ENS contract for as long as they want to maintain control over the name, thus attaching a rental cost for squatting on a valuable name like exchange.eth, which means the rent charged is proportional to the economic rent extracted by rent-seekers.

* allow peer to peer trade of names

All of these ENS features have been working for months. And this is simply a contract built on Ethereum.

And there are people working on contracts to lend out the ETH held for reserving ENS names, showing there are no limits to what can be done, subject only to the cost of the computing resources of the EVM.

Just as another quick illustration of the openness of Ethereum to innovation, here's a project that automatically created 10,000 unique digital collectibles, each a graphical depiction of a…

I wrote a blog post on a related topic last week.

Here is some more relevant data
The folks at http://larvalabs.com/blog/android/android-market-payouts-total-2-of-app-stores-1b/ say that only 13 Android apps have got more than 50,000 downloads.
A greater number of iPhone apps have got more than a million downloads.

This should give you a good indication of two things

(a) which platform successful developers focus on and

(b) how many Android users vote with their wallet to indicate that the Android market has good apps.

Edit: It is interesting to see the downvotes canceling out some of the upvotes :) I understand that some people may not like these numbers, but the commenter/reply suggesting that the numbers are "misleading" (because money-making iPhone apps are older) is mistaken.

Consider the fact that the iPhone Angry Birds app has got more than 4 million downloads in less than 4 months. A paid iPhone app in the #1 slot for a month can get more than a million downloads in that month. Now think about how many downloads a #1 or #10 paid Android app can get in one month.

This isn't the whole story. Some NFTs are written to the blockchain.

Avastars https://avastars.io/ is an NFT collection that's represented by an SVG. The SVGs are all written on-chain, back when it was cheaper to do so. https://nft.substack.com/p/the-art-of-avastars

The original NFT, Cryptopunks is also written on-chain now. (It wasn't originally).
https://www.larvalabs.com/blog/2021-8-18-18-0/on-chain-cryptopunks

One of the oldest NFTs, MoonCatRescue https://mooncatrescue.com/ writes an encoded version of the image onchain, and uses a published function to regenerate the image. The MD5 hash of the algorithm is written onchain so you know you're using the right one. https://github.com/ponderware/mooncatparser/blob/master/mooncatparser.js

For other NFT projects that can't use these techniques, they use decentralized storage like IPFS and ARWeave.

You can check what technique is used with this tool for any NFT project on ETH chain: https://checkmynft.com/

Cryptopunks selling for 10 million $: https://www.larvalabs.com/cryptopunks

Or 532 million$ for https://www.cnet.com/news/why-this-cryptopunk-nft-sold-for-532-million-sort-of/

A lot of it is greenwashing + fraud (eg. money laundering) + wales upping the price for a ( stupid) digital avatar. I would expect some people also earned a lot of money with crypto and are using it just as a way to show off.

The intrinsic value is yet to be determined. Let's see what happens when crypto drops like after 2017.

Edit: I just crawled OpenSea api and these are the results by it's collection market cap ( 50.100 collections).

The value quickly decimates and there are only 277 of 50100 collections with > 0 eth

Data: https://pastebin.com/NyLMcs7c ( not sure why cryptopunks is not in it though. All data without market cap from the api was filtered out)

Script ( linqpad) : http://share.linqpad.net/wkbrut.linq

The artist needs to confirm this. For example, many artists selling on Hicetnunc[1] will put their Tezos wallet address as a link in their Twitter bio. If you spot an artwork that looks like theirs minted by a different address, it’s likely a “copymint” (typically seen as worth no value).

There are other blockchain/crypto art projects that use the chain itself to store data; such as Autoglyphs[2], which is essentially a first of its kind generative artwork on Ethereum coded entirely within the Solidity smart contract. In this case there is no question about the authenticity; you simply look at that contract address and the tokens it initiated.

[1] - https://hicetnunc.xyz/

[2] - https://www.larvalabs.com/autoglyphs