Are racial and gender inequalities emerging in the NFT artwork? A visual exploration of CryptoPunks

Anonymous

Keywords: Visualization, Blockchain, NFT, Ethic, Inequality

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, potential ethical and racial fairness issues are arising in NFT artworks due to a lack of ethical guidelines or censorship. Therefore, in this research, we investigated the potential ethical issues of CryptoPunk, one of the most long-lasting NFT collections, and visualized its visual appearance’s genetic distribution, associations between selling prices, gender/skin tone factors, and transaction network. We further explored the ethical issues related to CryptoPunks from three aspects: design, trading transactions, and related topics on Twitter. We provided five visualization sections to highlight our findings about CryptoPunks’ ethics issues. From our data analysis and visualization interpretations, we found that (1) around 1.6 times more male punks were created in the initial design process than the female ones; (2) lighter-skinned punks tend to sell for higher prices; (3) the topic related to identity equality in NFTs is rarely mentioned on Twitter. These findings and visualizations from CryptoPunks example provide a preliminary understanding of the racial and gender inequity ethical problems, and also a potential approach for exploring future ethical-related research in the NFT domain.