Daisy Chain: Where blockchain meets the real world, one link at a time

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In 2021 an Uber broke down on the side of the Van Wyck Expressway. Somewhere near John F. Kennedy Airport, three 20-somethings got out and waited for another lift, holding aloft “Morons” – a certified Banksy original. They were planning to burn it. 

“It's me, my friend, Eric and my friend, Mirza,” said the man now called Burnt Banksy. “We're all sitting there and Mirza's like, ‘well, I can't do it – I have too much to lose.’ And Eric's like, ‘well, I can't do it – I have too much to lose.’ And I'm like, ‘guys, I have nothing to lose.’”

When the three men – then co-founders of what is now called Injective Protocol – arrived at their location, 50,000 people tuned in live on Twitter to watch him set it ablaze. Alas, it wouldn’t burn. “It was the worst thing in the world,” Burnt Banksy told the New Yorker. “It took, like, fifteen minutes for it to burn. Some of the comments on the video were, like, ‘This kid’s never burnt down the establishment before!’” 

Another popular video comment reads: “These folks who burn paintings and believe in NFT were supposed to be born digitally.”

One of the stunt’s goals was to transfer the physical piece’s value to a non-fungible token (NFT). “By removing the physical from existence and only having the NFT,” Burnt Banksy said in the video, “we can ensure that it is the true piece that exists in the world.”

It was a page out of Banksy’s own book. Three years prior, at a Sotheby’s auction in London, the Banksy piece “Girl with Balloon” was shredded as soon as it sold for $1.04 million. Banksy himself had rigged the frame as a means to critique the commercial art world’s obsession with high valuations and ownership. (Ironically, after the shredding unexpectedly stopped halfway, the stunt increased the piece’s value; in 2021, now dubbed “Love is in the Bin,” it sold for $25.4 million.)

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Banksy’s anti-establishment spirit has made him something of a web3 idol. In 2021, the company Particle purchased Banksy’s “Love is in the Air” and used some lawyerly finesse to “legally destroy” the work. In so doing, they were able to fractionalize ownership across 10,000 NFTs – without physically destroying the painting.

“I got in a huge fight with those guys,” Burnt Banksy said. “[Particle] invited me to their gallery here in New York and I loved it. I am all for exploration. Then the next day, there's a photo of me and they're like ‘so this never has to happen again’ – I’m like, ‘what the hell did I do?’”

Particle wasn’t alone in their criticism. “I was on [the app] Clubhouse 24/7 and everyone was coming up and screaming at me – or telling me I was a genius, one or the other,” he said. 

He was on Clubhouse when the three co-founders were auctioning the “Morons” NFT. “I'm getting screamed at by this woman as they were counting down,” he said. “The two of them are screaming every time we get a new bid – three hundred thousand, three fifty. It was so surreal.”

The Injector team had initially purchased “Morons” for $95,000 from the Taglialatella Gallery in New York. They’d set a reserve price of $40,000, and it didn’t exceed that until the day of the auction. “Our logic was we'll make some of our money back and that's fine – this was fun,” he said. 

But as with “Love is in the Bin,” the stunt actually increased the value of “Morons” – which depicts an auction house selling a piece that reads: “I can’t believe you morons actually buy this shit.” The NFT sold for $380,000.

“I remember very vividly – the auction ended and it was like, I need everyone to know that I'm still here,” he said. “This was not a one-and-done thing. This isn't a grift – this is me trying to spread this message. There's a lot that needs to be done.” 

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For the next two years, he remained “largely anonymous” – partially, he said, because he was “a little scared of people,” and partially to remove attention from himself. “I don't really feel like I'm inherently impressive,” he said. “That's why I always say you're going to get more clicks for ‘Burnt Banksy’ than ‘here's Anthony, an Italian guy in Manhattan’ – like what does that mean?”

Before burning the Banksy piece, Burnt Banksy worked at a small family investing office focused on venture deals. He traded crypto on the side. Today he’s the solo founder of Burnt, a “web3 foundry” that parlayed his fiery gambit into a burgeoning 17-employee startup. In March, the company raised $25 million to build XION, a blockchain built for consumer-focused developers and oriented around mainstream adoption. 

“If someone wants to make a [decentralized finance (DeFi)] application, we're not the chain for you,” he said. 

For Burnt Banksy, XION is a promethean project, where success comes from enabling other builders and “providing the benefits of crypto to the masses – not via the inherent success of XION itself.”

Not surprisingly, he’s fascinated with the myth of Prometheus, who stole fire from the gods and gave it to the people. “Fire is something I use a lot in my imagery,” he said. “Shortly into building XION, the idea of Prometheus started to connect. This time rather than using fire as destruction, it came in the form of knowledge.”

Burning the Banksy

In most versions of the myth, Prometheus is a champion of humanity who risked his own torment to bring knowledge to the people. But knowledge is not unconditional. In the Western Classical tradition, Prometheus is a figure who encompasses human striving as well as the risk of overreach or unintended consequences. Mary Shelley used “The Modern Prometheus” as the subtitle to Frankenstein, for instance. It’s difficult to know how the fire’s going to spread.

Back to his original exploit, Burnt Banksy has never learned what Banksy himself made of it.

“I always wanted to know what he thought about it,” he said. But he admitted that the real motivator was making a Banksy-like statement. “It was more about sparking the conversation than it was bringing physical assets on-chain.”

Remembering the initial gallery visit when the team purchased “Morons,” he said, “We walked in and I’d never bought art before – we were just three kids who had no idea what we were doing. “Do we get cash? “And they're like, ‘we’ll take a wire – what are you going to do with it?’ I was like, ‘we're going to light it on fire and make an NFT out of it.’ 

“They didn't think we would, but it was funny because I remember going back to the Taglialatella Gallery [later] and they had NFT art pieces on the second floor,” he continued. “And I'm like, ‘I'm gonna take that as a subtle win.’”

lead image: Burnt Banksy