In October 2017, while most of the cryptocurrency world was fixated on Bitcoin’s charge toward $6,000 and Warren Buffett’s dismissal of digital assets as a “real bubble,” a quiet revolution was taking place on the Ethereum blockchain. A collaborative art platform called DADA released a collection of 108 hand-drawn digital artworks called Creeps and Weirdos — and in doing so, introduced a concept that would fundamentally reshape how artists are compensated in the digital age: on-chain royalties.
TL;DR
- DADA.art launched the Creeps and Weirdos collection in October 2017 on Ethereum
- 108 unique drawings by 30 artists with a total supply of 16,600 digital prints
- First project to code artist royalties directly into smart contracts on-chain
- Inspired by CryptoPunks (June 2017) and the Rare Pepe trading card movement
- Predated CryptoKitties and the ERC-721 standard that would define NFTs
- ETH traded at $296.53, BTC at $5,904.83 at the time
Before NFTs Had a Name
The term “NFT” — non-fungible token — was not yet in common use in the fall of 2017. The community referred to what they were creating as “rare digital art” or simply “rare art.” The concept of unique, verifiable digital ownership was still in its embryonic stage. CryptoPunks, launched by Larva Labs in June 2017, had introduced the idea of algorithmically generated collectible characters on Ethereum. The Rare Pepe phenomenon on Bitcoin’s Counterparty protocol had demonstrated that digital trading cards could hold real value. But nobody had yet created a platform where artists could sell original digital artwork with built-in resale compensation.
DADA changed that. Founded as a collaborative drawing platform where artists communicated through visual conversations, DADA was already a thriving creative community before it ever touched blockchain technology. The decision to bring Creeps and Weirdos on-chain was born from the conviction that digital artists deserved the same economic protections as traditional creators — and that Ethereum’s smart contracts could make that possible.
Breaking New Ground: On-Chain Royalties
The most significant innovation embedded in the Creeps and Weirdos smart contracts was the introduction of artist royalties. Matt Hall and John Watkinson from Larva Labs generously allowed DADA to modify the CryptoPunks smart contract as a foundation, and the DADA team coded royalty distributions directly into the contract logic. This meant that every time a Creeps and Weirdos piece was resold on the secondary market, the original artist would automatically receive a percentage of the sale.
This was unprecedented. In the traditional art world, resale royalties — known as droit de suite — exist in some jurisdictions but are notoriously difficult to enforce. By embedding royalty logic directly into the blockchain’s immutable code, DADA created a system where artists were guaranteed compensation without needing galleries, agents, or legal enforcement. It was a simple idea with profound implications, and it laid the groundwork for the royalty structures that would become standard in the NFT market years later.
The Art Itself: Dank, Weird, and Wonderful
The Creeps and Weirdos collection drew visual inspiration from the Rare Pepe aesthetic — deliberately rough, meme-influenced, and appealing to the early crypto community’s appetite for “dank” content. Thirty artists from the DADA platform created the 108 distinct drawings, each reproduced in limited quantities totaling 16,600 prints across the collection. The scarcity structure was adapted from CryptoPunks, with different tiers of rarity to encourage collecting and trading.
The early collectors were primarily developers and crypto enthusiasts — people with Ether to spend who were excited by the novelty of owning verifiable digital art. At ETH $296.53, the cost of participation was accessible, and the community was small enough that direct interaction between artists and collectors was commonplace. The term “rare art” captured the spirit of the movement: these were digital artifacts that were genuinely scarce, verifiably authentic, and created by real artists rather than algorithms.
A Marketplace Built for Artists
What set DADA apart from earlier blockchain art experiments was the creation of a decentralized marketplace specifically designed for rare digital art. While CryptoPunks had a simple trading interface and Rare Pepes were traded on Counterparty, DADA built a curated platform where artists could present their work in a professional context. The marketplace was hybrid in nature — part art gallery, part collectible trading platform — and it attracted early adopters who recognized that blockchain technology could solve the long-standing problem of digital art provenance.
The collection was featured in art historian Jason Bailey’s influential Artnome article “The Blockchain Art Market is Here,” published in December 2017. The piece helped legitimize the concept of blockchain-based art in the eyes of the traditional art world and brought attention to platforms like DADA that were building the infrastructure for a new creative economy.
The Road to Rare Art Festival and Beyond
The energy generated by Creeps and Weirdos and similar early projects culminated in the Rare Art Festival (Rare AF 1) in January 2018 — the first-ever live auction of rare digital art. The event brought together pioneers from across the emerging blockchain art space, including CryptoPunks, CryptoKitties, DADA, Rare Pepes, and Spells of Genesis. It was a moment of convergence where artists, technologists, and collectors recognized they were part of something larger than any individual project.
From that point, the movement accelerated rapidly. CryptoKitties, launching just weeks after Creeps and Weirdos in late November 2017, would popularize the concept of blockchain collectibles to a mainstream audience and eventually inspire the creation of the ERC-721 token standard — the technical foundation for all NFTs that followed. But the seeds of on-chain royalties, artist-first marketplaces, and the idea that digital art could carry real economic value were already planted.
Why This Matters
The Creeps and Weirdos collection represents a pivotal moment in the history of digital art and blockchain technology. In October 2017, while the cryptocurrency market was consumed by price speculation and institutional skepticism, a group of artists and developers were building the infrastructure for a new creative economy. The introduction of on-chain royalties was not just a technical achievement — it was a philosophical statement that artists deserve to be compensated for their work in perpetuity, regardless of how many times it changes hands. As the NFT market has grown into a multi-billion dollar industry, the principles first coded into the Creeps and Weirdos smart contracts have become foundational to how the entire ecosystem operates. Every royalty payment made to a digital artist today traces its lineage back to this unassuming collection of funky drawings released on Ethereum when few were paying attention.
Disclaimer: This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute financial advice. Cryptocurrency investments carry significant risk. Always conduct your own research before making investment decisions.