The ZKM museum has lost 2 NFT in the Ether

One of the most famous German digital art museums has lost access to the 2 CryptoPunks in its collection

The museum protagonist of the unfortunate story is the ZKM Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe. Within the museum collection there were, among the numerous digital works, also the two CryptoPunks that now seem to have been lost forever.

The works had been purchased in 2017 by software programmer and cryptography expert Daniel Heiss, who had managed to purchase 4 of them for $ 100 each thanks to a crypto mining facility built for the Open Codes exhibition.

However, Heiss, attempting to send two of these CryptoPunks to another blockchain address, accidentally burned the works by sending them to visible but inaccessible wallets. The present value of the two lost NFTs corresponds to approximately 120 ETH.

“The transfer of the punks was a stupid copy / paste mistake,” Heiss says. “But seen another way, it’s sort of a statement of what blockchain and cryptography are. The museum’s purpose was never to sell the works anyway.”

Currently, the two punks are forever stuck in the smart contract address of the Larva Labs producers, a no-man’s land where they are visible to everyone but no longer exchangeable.

Heiss adds “So seen in another way, the two punks are ours forever, verifiably inaccessible, because the CryptoPunks smart contract address can be seen as a so-called ‘nothing number’.”

Photo credits: Courtesy ZKM e Larva Labs