With the plethora of new algorithmically generated, non-fungible token projects lowering the premium for digital rarity, digital history and being among the “first” has become a more reliable source of value. As a result, long-forgotten projects by chain dogs are uncovered, and yesterday they may have struck gold on their largest find to date.
At 12 noon UTC, March 12, the Twitter user and NFT collector “ETHoard” published a short thread about what may be the second non-fungible collector project that was started on Ethereum, MoonCats.
While it may not be as appealing as #CryptoCats’ recent discovery, I started rummaging around after this onslaught and came across #MoonCatRescue. Also inspired by Cryptopunks and actually older than CryptoCats. / 1
– ETHoard (@ETHoard) March 12, 2021
According to Etherscan, the MoonCatsRescue contract is 1310 days old and was first written to Ethereum on August 9, 2017. This would mean that MoonCats knew three months before CryptoKitties, the NFT project, that NFTs were popularized, is three months and also just a touch younger than CryptoPunks, the OG NFT project on Ethereum.
Users quickly set about figuring out how to manually interact with the contracts via Etherscan as the front of the website has long been down. The first MoonCat to be minted in 992 days was digitized at 2:52 p.m. UTC.
Here’s how to wrap your MoonCats to sell on @opensea
Do this at your own risk and always confirm the contract addresses.
thread
– RyanJK (@RJ_Kunz) March 12, 2021
At the time, users reported that the cost of interacting with the contract to “rescue” the cats ranged from $ 50 to $ 200 (some speculate that gas prices have increased due to demand for MoonCat mining) and the cost for packaging so it can be listed NFT marketplace opensea ran over $ 200. All 25,600 cats were minted within a few hours.
The minimum price for cats on Opensea has risen to 0.8 ETH at the time of publication. There have been 715 ETH worth of activity bringing the project to the top of various volume leaderboards, and new community-created front ends have already been developed.
The remarkable story has been likened by some as a form of digital archeology where treasure hunters found a long lost story:
They are the first digital archaeological dig. The context is anything but lame imo. https://t.co/ciDmeOjpbb
– mewny (@ mewn21), March 13, 2021
“In my opinion, what we saw yesterday was the digital equivalent of historical artifact discovery,” said MoonCat collector Elmo. “While that sounds hyperbolic at the moment, I think history will look back on these seemingly rudimentary works of art as the first steps to fuel the growth of digital art.”
Elmo has published curious statistics and records on MoonCatRescue’s digital footprint, including a Reddit thread where users said the cost of imprinting a cat was 50 cents. He also notes that the project is a rare example of a truly “fair start” that they completed and that was open to the public for years before the community got wind of it and it exploded in popularity.
> Amazed, he missed getting into cryptopunks
> posted 3 years ago
> RIP pic.twitter.com/hCf2Kmw3Hx
– Elmos Short Volatility Fund (@ jrob1564), March 12, 2021
MoonCats aren’t the only digits that historians and prospectors have stumbled upon in the past few days. Efforts have been made to revive other projects that have been considered underrated by the community. The collector and developer Nate Hart saw in his Chainfaces project, one of the earliest NFT projects, a sudden offer to have all relevant metadata earlier this month after months of relative stagnation in the chain.
The question now turns to which other long-lost contracts collect cobwebs on Ethereum.
