Regular Punks: CryptoPunks as Robot Dogs, via Beeple.

the origin

an artist named Sheipi drew a series of pixel-art robot dogs with CryptoPunks heads on top, and posted them to x.

the concept is a riff on Beeple's "regular animals" series. beeple's regular animals are robot dogs with human heads on top. sheipi took the same template and ran it with a very specific kind of human head: the canonical 24×24 pixel ones from the most famous nft collection in the world. same robot-dog-with-a-human-head genre, very different head.

it went viral. beeple quote-tweeted it. things move fast when beeple is in your corner.

with the attention came the next question: how do you actually ship this as an NFT collection? sheipi reached out to me with the concept for the onchain collection and the game that was supposed to come with it.

three days later the contract was deployed and the collection was live.

the night of the mint, beeple posted an Everyday featuring a regular-punks robot dog fight with the project's actual logo on it. for anyone who doesn't follow him: beeple's Everydays are the daily-art series he's been making every single day since 2007. it's the same series that culminated in the $69M Christie's sale a few years back. having one of them land on a project the same night it launched is the kind of validation you don't get to engineer.

what's actually onchain

the contract is the part i'm proudest of. the dogs aren't pre-rendered images sitting on a server somewhere. every regular punk is assembled onchain at request time, pulling its head directly from the actual CryptoPunks data on mainnet.

here's the pipeline:

1. the contract reads bitmap data for a specific cryptopunk directly from the CryptoPunksData contract on ethereum mainnet. that's the canonical, fully-onchain source for cryptopunk pixel data.
2. it converts that bitmap into a PNG, then pads it with buffer pixels on every side so the head sits in exactly the right spot when it's layered over the body.
3. the robot bodies are uploaded to the NFT render contract separately, with one body per type of cryptopunk (different bodies for the different punk archetypes). the contract pulls the matching body for the target cryptopunk.
4. it then layers the onchain-generated cryptopunk PNG over the matching body inside an SVG at request time, and returns the assembled image as the token's metadata.

end result: every regular punk is assembled live, on demand, with its head sourced directly from the actual cryptopunks contract and its body pulled from onchain SSTORE2 storage. no snapshot, no static asset, no off-chain dependency.

the renderer itself is upgradeable on purpose. we've already swapped it once, and we want to keep doing that to support things like visually showing when a dog is training between fights. what's permanent is the underlying data the renderer composes from: the cryptopunks bitmap on mainnet, the body bytes in contract storage. the art can evolve. the source data the art is built from doesn't have to.

commit and mint

the mint had a problem most NFT mints don't have.

each regular punk maps 1-to-1 with a specific cryptopunk. token #1042 is the regular punk based on cryptopunk #1042. that means once you know the token ID you're about to mint, you know exactly which dog you're getting, and ERC-721 mints have to involve a token ID, so a normal one-shot mint would expose the answer before the transaction was even committed. sniping the rares and front-running everyone else would be trivial.

most collections that need privacy here use a normal commit/reveal pattern: you mint your ERC-721 during the commit phase with placeholder metadata, then a reveal phase afterward unmasks the metadata and tells you what you got. that doesn't work for regular punks, because the secret isn't the metadata. the secret is the token ID itself. there's nothing to mask. token #1042 is the answer.

so regular punks does a different two-phase flow we called commit and mint:

1. commit phase: you pay, but nothing actually mints. no ERC-721 token, no token ID, nothing about which specific dog you're going to receive is visible.
2. mint phase: the actual ERC-721 mint happens here, with the token ID assigned in a way that wasn't choosable during the commit.

the difference from normal commit/reveal is that in normal commit/reveal you mint during the commit and unmask metadata during the reveal. here you do the opposite: you only pay during the commit, and the mint happens in what would normally have been the reveal phase. since the token ID is the secret, the actual mint has to wait for the second phase. it can't be done up front.

normal users go through both phases without knowing which dog they're going to end up with until it lands in their wallet. fair, no sniping, no front-running.

the second thing this enabled is more interesting: CryptoPunks holders can claim their own cryptopunk's specific regular punk, and anyone else can pay to claim a holder's regular punk on the holder's behalf. that second path means a holder can claim their dog from a hot wallet (or any wallet) without exposing their cold-storage cryptopunk, and it means non-holders can still pay for a specific dog by routing the claim through the cryptopunk's owner. holder claims sit alongside the same commit-and-mint plumbing.

the dog fight game

the part still in development is the onchain dog fight.

regular punks isn't going to stay a static art collection. there's a game in the works where you take your dog into a 1v1 against another holder's dog. winners win real eth, paid out onchain.

between matches you can train your dog to level it up. the training carries over, the leveled dog beats the un-leveled dog when stats start mattering, and "i should train my dog tonight" is a sentence i did not expect to write.

i can't wait.

why this is a collaboration, not a Blockhash project

regular punks is not a Blockhash-owned project. it's Sheipi's project. the concept, the art, the brand, the community: all theirs. Blockhash built the chain part with them: the contract, the rendering pipeline, the two-step mint, the upcoming fight game.

this is how a meaningful share of what Blockhash actually ships gets made: someone has a concept that's the right kind of weird, they don't have the chain skills, they reach out, we build the chain part together. they own everything else.

if you have something you'd like the chain part of built, Blockhash takes proposals. regular punks started exactly that way.

where to find it

• the collection: regularpunks.com
• the artist: Sheipi on x
• the post that started it all: Sheipi's viral tweet
• beeple's quote-tweet
• beeple's Everyday featuring a regular-punks dog fight
• the studio that built the chain part: Blockhash
• the inspiration: search "beeple regular animals" on x

more weird things on the way.