CC0 + Meme: Why are Mfers so popular?

Author: Han Ya, The SeeDAO

Editor: Sloth Run

After Azuki, Mfers has become a PFP project that everyone must talk about and pay attention to.

But how did Mfers become popular? Its path is so different from that of Azuki, and what is the valuation logic behind it? What kind of projects should we focus on after Mfers? This article attempts to explore these questions. Figure 1 | Mfers Community Creation: The Last Supper of Mfers

Mfers: A CC0 Project Without an Official Twitter

Mfers is a PFP (profile picture) project hand-drawn by the artist sartoshi, featuring a minimalist stick figure style. As the founder of the project, sartoshi is an OG in the CryptoPunks community and has significant influence in the NFT space. The technical development of the project is handled by Westcoastnft, which is also the technical development team behind Doodles.

Mfers is a typical CC0 project, meaning the author retains only the right to attribution. "CC" stands for "creative commons," which defines a series of permissions related to the work. CC0 means "No Rights Reserved," allowing the creator to place the work in the public domain without reservation, enabling everyone to freely copy, distribute, and create derivative works. This concept has existed for over twenty years.

Mfers was officially launched at the end of November last year, maintaining an average price of 0.2ETH to 0.4ETH for the next two months. However, in February of this year, with the announcement of airdropping 3D characters, Mfers' trading volume surged, and the price skyrocketed, reaching an average of 6.03ETH on February 21, currently retreating to around 4ETH.

According to OpenSea's rankings, Mfers has surpassed Azuki in trading volume over the past week, ranking in the top 3, and the derivative project xmfers also saw significant growth on February 21. However, unlike projects like BAYC and Azuki, Mfers doesn't even have its own official Twitter account. Figure 2 | OpenSea TOP NFTs (as of February 26) Another popular NFT project is 3Landers, which is also a PFP project. In the 7-day trading leaderboard on Opensea, 3Landers has dominated the first place with its trading volume. Similar to Mfers, 3Landers has also issued a CC0 statement for its NFT works.

Other CC0-NFTs include CrypToadz by Gremplin, NounsNFT, and others. If we check the mutual holdings of Mfers and blue-chip projects on coniun, we can find that the top three mutual holders of Mfers are Doodles, Mutant Ape Yacht Club, and CrypToadz. It is not surprising that Doodles holds the most Mfers, as they come from the same technical development team, WestCoastNFT.

In contrast, the mutual holding relationship between Mfers and CrypToadz is more due to CC0. The Mfers community has a page on Notion titled "Event Recaps," which includes minutes from an internal chat last December, where under the topic "Growth Potential and Goals," there is a statement: "Carry the flag on CC0"------ so why are so many projects starting to adopt CC0? Figure 3 | Mutual Holdings of Mfers and Other Projects (as of February 26) Source: coniun Meme: From Memes to NFTs, and Then to CC0

NFT Royalty Mechanism: Why Giving Up Rights Can Earn Creators More? In fact, the concept of CC0 has existed for over twenty years.

In the classical internet era before NFTs became popular, CC0 was more like a public welfare action. In the context of zero marginal cost reproduction, images could be freely disseminated. This friendly and open attitude provided non-economic returns to original creators; people might strive to find the source of the original image and become followers of the creator on social media, but more likely, they would be indifferent to the source, limiting the scope of CC0's impact.

Today, as non-fungible tokens define on-chain ownership of JPEGs, a kind of "embedded relationship" has emerged between JPEG content and blockchain smart contracts------ through a technical environment where rules are automatically executed via contract coding, there has been a structural transformation in the revenue sources of JPEGs. In the past, if content without a CC0 declaration was misappropriated, creators would incur high legal fees to protect their copyrights, as the latter was directly linked to revenue.

However, NFT royalties can be encoded into smart contracts, automatically paying creators during secondary sales. Digital artists can achieve sustainable income through the circulation of their NFT works in the secondary market. The value generation process has shifted, occurring with each transaction transfer. Each time a creator's NFT is sold in the market, NFT royalties provide a percentage of the sale price to the creator, ranging from 2.5% to 10%.

For an outstanding NFT project, the profits generated from this shift in value generation are enormous: for example, blue-chip projects like BAYC and Azuki have seen secondary royalty earnings surpass primary income. Therefore, economically, some creators have shifted their focus from "how to prevent my copyright profits from being stolen" to "how to make my NFTs circulate and spread more frequently," which provides a great application scenario for CC0 licensing.

Compared to traditional copyright protection, the secondary royalty share offers better economic benefits to creators and is much more cost-effective. The economic interest relationship of NFT royalties is an indispensable dimension for understanding the "public nature" of CC0. Within this mechanism, CC0 is no longer a purely altruistic ideal but has a solid economic foundation and profit demand. So, since CC0 helps in the dissemination of works, should all NFTs adopt CC0 declarations? Clearly, the market tells us otherwise. Figure 4 | Source: Unsplash CC0 is More Suitable for Meme Projects

Although CC0 can better promote the dissemination of NFT projects, not all projects will adopt CC0.

PFP projects represented by BAYC and Azuki often require high R&D costs, and the project teams themselves possess strong development and operational capabilities, along with long-term operational plans. Such projects often do not adopt CC0.

In contrast, projects like Mfers, not to mention the official continuous operation of the project, do not even have an official Twitter account. Its popularity relies on the strong meme of its visual image and community support. Such projects are more suitable for adopting CC0.

Why is that?

For BAYC and Azuki, brand dissemination relies on the official (i.e., centralized) guidance of NFT holders to create and spread content together. Due to their visual nature lacking strong meme attributes, they find it difficult to gain natural dissemination beyond their core interest community (i.e., the project team and NFT holders).

The project teams are certainly aware of this------ even opening CC0 would be unlikely to help the project spread. Conversely, if they only control the rights to use the NFT images within the NFT holder community while leveraging their connections with celebrities, game developers, and trendy brand developers to expand brand influence, it would encourage more people to hold that NFT.

However, for meme projects, they are inherently suitable for widespread dissemination from the moment they are created, with very low dissemination costs. Authors requesting commercial rights would only hinder this dissemination. Moreover, the project team and the NFT-holding community hardly need to invest any effort; they can simply ride the wave and enjoy the traffic dividends of the project. Even after the official team exits, meme projects can still gain widespread vitality. This is the fundamental reason for the different approaches taken by these two types of projects. Mfers: How Does Meme Transform into Price After Being Liberated by CC0? Mfers understands the essence of meme popularity, which is evident from its visual characteristics: the Mfers stick figures are composed of thick lines and simple color blocks, as Mingzin revealed in his analysis article: "The rough art style (lacking verisimilitude) makes people resonate more with the described body movements." Figure 5 | Visual Characteristics of Mfers The demand for self-expansion of memes is inversely proportional to the delicacy and realism of NFTs------ just look at the panda heads we have saved in WeChat; the ultra-clear quality expressions are not as useful as the low-resolution ones, which even receive the praise of "patina"------ thus proving countless times that the quality of the image can be compressed to the lowest.

The simplistic art style of Mfers evokes memories of drawing stick figures in the blank spaces of our textbooks as children, requiring no professional drawing skills, making it accessible to everyone------ today, the stick figure sitting at a desk with headphones is a true reflection of our adult selves. The CC0 license has opened the doors to creation, allowing the crypto-native younger generation to return to their childhood creativity and imagination, diving into the vibrant world of memes.

Meme NFTs are more inclined to use CC0 than art or brand NFTs because the popularity of meme NFTs heavily relies on the FOMO sentiment of the crypto market and the activity of the community, while copyright can hinder the dissemination of meme symbols and NFT transactions. Under the economic guarantee of NFT secondary royalties, memes and CC0 successfully unleash the creativity of the community: Mfers' group chat can generate over 3000 messages in one night; in the "Official Unofficial" Discord server, memes are continuously produced from the memecraft channel; Mfers has not only generated derivatives like xmfers, mphers, and buttfaced mfers but has also "devoured" previous market favorites, from CryptoPunks to Azuki: zuki mfers, ape mfers, punk mfers………

In summary, the use of CC0 in the NFT market is closely related to the positioning of NFTs themselves. Starting from the three-way fusion of NFT, Meme, and CC0, we can roughly grasp the group dynamics of the entire Mfers community. Figure 6 | Overview of Mfers Derivative Projects (as of February 26) CC0 and Popular Culture: Returning to Fisk and Rifkin

Finally, I want to talk about Fisk and Rifkin. Fisk is a scholar studying media, who developed the theory of "productive audience" along the path of active audiences in Birmingham School cultural studies.

Fisk believes that in the cultural economy, the circulation process is not the turnover of currency but the dissemination of meaning and pleasure. The audience transforms from consumers of goods into producers, that is, producers of meaning and pleasure. In a positive audience environment, there are no consumers, only the circulation of meaning, which is the only element in the entire process.

Doesn't this sound very much like the current NFT market?

NFTs are undoubtedly a realization of the cultural economy, with NFT natives being the "public." Compared to the meme-like Mfers, 3D NFTs are undoubtedly the highest barrier to secondary creation. Since "it seems like I can't do much," the general community has to rely on professional designers and artists for the aesthetics of NFTs, entrusting the empowerment of NFTs to project operations.

Only in CC0 and meme-like NFTs can the public truly escape the passive identity of "content receivers" and become producers of meaning and pleasure themselves.

This is crucial. As Fisk pointed out in "Understanding Popular Culture": Popular culture is created by the public, not imposed on the public; it arises from within or from the grassroots, not from above. For Rifkin, this is the collaborative sharing model in the "zero marginal cost society," where the "productive audience" is what Rifkin calls "collaborators composed of producers and consumers." In this mechanism, "property rights yield to open-source sharing, ownership yields to access rights, and markets yield to networks."

This reminds us of the respect for collective creativity in the web3 concept: the project team of Mirror.xyz does not own the rights to publish or manage content but sees the flexibility of web3 tool components------ traffic economy and long-tail effects have become the "limited game" of the web2 era.

Similarly, the "CC0-style rebellion" abandons property rights and copyright, seeing a broader creative stage: it provides a symbol of "everyone can become a producer and consumer": if the little ghost chooses to collaborate with artists from weirDAO, then Mfers' sartoshi chooses to collaborate with all "productive audiences"; the result is that mfer can freely ferment within the community, and those who want to ride the wave, whether voluntarily or not, become allies, "because it does not compete, therefore the world cannot compete with it."

Within this theoretical framework, memes are the symbols that Fisk believes act upon popular culture, NFTs are the carriers of value and the entry ticket to this community, while CC0 elevates to a concept: in an environment filled with individual ownership and self-interest, "publicness" ironically becomes one of the most cherished values of the community; amidst the roadmap engineering thinking filled with empty promises, self-organization and participation achieve the productivity of the community. As the Mfers community puts it: no empowerment is the strongest empowerment. Conclusion The article "Mfers: The New Tribe of Web 3.0 Under the Culture of Loss and Subculture" explores the cultural community connotation of mfers from the perspectives of "global network cultural trends" and "postmodernist resonance." This article attempts to explore the possibilities created by the combination of Meme, NFT, and CC0: Mfers has taken up the banner of CC0, using memes as a medium to advocate a rebellious NFT value paradigm.

But as Fisk describes, the public has a "nomadic subjectivity," which will traverse the layers created by the cultural industry, perhaps explaining why internet pop culture always undergoes rapid metabolism, with memes and images cropping up like leeks, being harvested and growing back anew.

On a cultural level, the subculture of crypto punks and the modernist "disgust" towards reality will still connect the NFT native community in a free and open environment; on the level of NFT value structure, we see in Mfers a relationship form different from the traditional "project team-consumer" model, and we also see the "public value" in crypto narratives------ after Mfers and 3Landers, who will take up the banner of CC0?