Shanghai Froze

In 2052, you consider buying an entire set of private keys containing an antique, legendary NFT collection on Ethereum which comes with complex, binding legal agreements for security.

These types of sales are now commonplace, albeit not very often. Private keys must be sold because transactions are no longer possible between wallets. Transactions are no longer possible because in 2023, the Shanghai upgrade failed the network.

Well, to be fair, the Shanghai upgrade didn't technically "fail," per se. Some tokens could still be bought, sold, and exchanged. However, because of a bug never caught in testnet, the Shanghai upgrade froze all ERC-721 and ERC-1155 tokens. While EIPs thereafter introduced NFT standards that made future iterations of NFTs usable, ERC-721 and ERC-1155 tokens became soulbound to the wallets holding them at the time of the upgrade.

You never forgot the day the Shanghai upgrade occurred. Stepping out of a work meeting, you absentmindedly opened Twitter and saw some bizarre Tweets complaining about failed transactions but didn't think much of it. Devs will fix it, right?

The devs could not fix it.

At lunch that day, you became fully apprised of the situation. Mass panic spread throughout the community, which garnered international media attention. Crypto, once again, failed.

Opinion articles immediately scolded the crypto community; see, blockchain was all a hoax, wasn’t it? However, blockchain does work and solutions were eventually implemented which kept the network operating.

What was never solved was the original frozen NFTs.

Some people became grief stricken with their lot. Disappointed in the tokens they could not transact with, the NFTs were, in some sense, completely rendered worthless. One still owned the tokens and, technically, maintained the private keys to manipulate the wallets as they chose.

But despite possessing undeniable grails in Fidenzas, Chromie Squiggles, and XCOPY work, some collectors simply became hollowed versions of themselves with nothing to sell.

However, the tokens were not totally devoid of value. Remaining buyers were mostly interested in art: generative, 1/1, or miscellaneous art they could display in their homes or in museum galleries, harkening back to the initial NFT experiments on blockchain.

Sales became vastly more complex. Entire sets of private keys, hardware wallets, and seed phrases needed to be sold for a new owner to gain technical possession over the NFTs, even if the NFTs could not be transacted on the blockchain. Legal documents thousands of pages long conferred agreement that, even though the previous owner had a copy of the seed phrase, sellers were obligated to not recreate wallets. Furthermore, they would entirely forfeit ownership of the private keys to the new owner.

~~

Late one night, you awake for your ritual walk downstairs to refill a glass of water. As you return to the living room before you walk up the stairs, you pause to sit on the couch, lean back, and stare at the large screen in front of you.

A Chromie Squiggle, your old prized possession, dances softly on the black screen. You look up, gazing in wonderment at a relic of a time long lost yet filled with so much fun, hope, and optimism. The excitement of making a purchase and the thrill of participating in a global art revolution filled you with joy.

You aren’t sad about what happened - it’s just life.

You just wished that you paused to enjoy the ride.