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Jeremy Posvar’s ExpansionPunks began with a family search for an avatar. Posvar, a Microsoft employee, was browsing CryptoPunks with his three daughters when they found that some of the traits they wanted—including a smile on a female character—weren’t available. He responded by creating a 10,000-avatar collection intended to widen the original set’s visual representation. It was a personal project, not a Microsoft initiative, and its story is best understood as a 2021–2022 NFT-history snapshot, not a guide to current prices or project activity.
Why CryptoPunks mattered to the project
Launched by Larva Labs in 2017, CryptoPunks is a collection of 10,000 algorithmically generated pixel-art characters on Ethereum. Each image uses a 24-by-24-pixel canvas. The collection became an influential reference point in NFT culture, but calling it one of the earliest prominent NFT projects is more precise than calling it the first NFT. Larva Labs’ CryptoPunks site presents the collection; GeekWire’s January 5, 2022 profile of Posvar provides the account of ExpansionPunks’ origins.
Posvar was described in that profile as a Microsoft internal marketing-services manager who had worked at the company for 12 years. The reporting frames ExpansionPunks as something he pursued independently. It does not describe Microsoft as a sponsor, collaborator, or endorser.
The avatar search that prompted ExpansionPunks
Posvar and his daughters looked for CryptoPunks with traits they liked, including a hoodie, a smile, and a cowboy hat. The search exposed a gap that mattered to them: according to Posvar, some appealing traits and emotional expressions were not available on female characters. The issue was not simply whether the collection contained female avatars; it was whether the available combinations let his daughters find characters that felt expressive and familiar to them.
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Posvar also saw a broader design limitation. He said female CryptoPunks had less range of emotion than male ones, and that zombies, apes, and aliens appeared with male-style faces in the original set. He interpreted those patterns, along with the collection’s gender and skin-tone distributions, as potentially reinforcing familiar biases. Those are the creator’s observations and framing, not the result of an independent audit of CryptoPunks or a claim that a pixel avatar can represent every identity.
How the expansion was designed
Posvar first reverse-engineered selected CryptoPunks canvases and began modifying character types, then worked with Florian Uhde, a blockchain developer based in Germany, to develop the larger collection. Their stated approach was to retain the original Punks’ pixel-layer and color-variation logic while introducing new combinations and characters. ExpansionPunks was therefore presented as an expansion of CryptoPunks’ visual language, rather than simply an unrelated pixel-art collection.
The creators said they made 10,000 additional avatars. They also built PunkExplorer, a trait-filtering tool that let visitors inspect ExpansionPunks and compare characters with CryptoPunks counterparts. The project site is expansionpunks.com; the historical profile describes the explorer and the creators’ process.
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What “more diverse” meant in the collection
Posvar described the design targets in demographic and character terms. GeekWire reported them as creator-reported figures, not independently verified counts:
| Design element | Reported target or feature |
|---|---|
| Gender balance | About 60% female and 40% male, reversing the original collection’s reported approximate 60% male and 40% female split. |
| Nonbinary traits | Approximately 2% of ExpansionPunks, according to Posvar. |
| Special character types | Female versions were created for 121 zombie, ape, and alien characters. |
| Skin tone | Additional skin-tone variations were added; the profile does not give a count for them. |
These choices broadened the range of avatars within the creators’ chosen categories. They do not establish that the set represents all genders, skin tones, cultures, or experiences. Nor does changing avatar attributes, by itself, change who can afford to participate, who creates work, or who holds influence in an NFT community.
The technical comparison Posvar described
To check similarity between the two sets, Posvar said a script compared every original avatar with every new one: 10,000 by 10,000, or 100 million pairings. He described these as perceptual comparisons intended to identify how the images related. That number is his account in the 2022 profile, not an independently audited measurement, and it should not be taken as proof that every design difference was objectively measured or that the collection passed an independent originality test.
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How the launch unfolded
The 2022 account says the project launched in August, then describes roughly five months of limited attention before influencers amplified it in early December. The chronology points to 2021, although the profile does not state the launch year in that passage with the same precision as its publication date. It reported that about 40% of the collection had been minted before the rest reportedly sold out in about 90 minutes.
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The funding plan and DAO
ExpansionPunks’ creators said 34% of initial mint revenue went to a DAO, or decentralized autonomous organization: a community organized around shared rules and, often, proposals and voting about pooled funds. The project also assigned a 1% royalty on secondary sales to the DAO, while Posvar and Uhde said they did not receive secondary-sale royalties personally. The project’s historical description is on its site; Ethereum’s DAO explainer outlines the general concept.
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GeekWire reported that the DAO treasury stood at approximately $800,000 at the time of its January 5, 2022 article. The creators described community voting on proposals and mentioned scholarships and support for emerging NFT artists as possible uses. The reporting does not document completed grants, participation levels, vote results, or audited treasury activity. A stated allocation, a governance mechanism, and a completed community benefit are separate things; the available account establishes the first two as plans or claims, not the third.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.What the inclusion argument does—and does not—show
ExpansionPunks’ case for inclusion had two distinct parts: offer more people avatars they might identify with, and direct some project resources toward community-selected causes. The first is visible in the reported design goals. The second depended on the DAO’s actual governance and spending, for which the profile offers no outcome record.
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1Repair Windows errors before they cause bigger problems2Fix the driver behind crashes, sound loss and screen glitches3Clear out junk files and repair common Windows errorsThe project also sat within wider debates about NFT markets. GeekWire summarized concerns about gender and skin-tone differences in CryptoPunk prices and about the demographics of NFT buyers, drawing on other reporting rather than presenting the underlying datasets. Those claims should be treated as reported concerns, not universal findings established by the ExpansionPunks story. Avatar representation, representation among artists, the demographics of buyers and owners, and the distribution of proceeds are related but different questions.
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Nor does a broader set of images remove the practical barriers to NFT participation. Buying or managing an Ethereum NFT can involve a crypto wallet, transaction fees, familiarity with marketplaces and smart contracts, exposure to price volatility, and security risks such as phishing or counterfeit collections. The historical floor-price figure in the 2022 account illustrates that a more varied collection did not necessarily mean affordable ownership. A project can make one aspect of representation more visible without resolving economic or technical access.
Historical status and what remains unknown
This account rests principally on GeekWire’s article published January 5, 2022. That reporting does not establish whether ExpansionPunks is active now, whether its DAO continues to operate, what its treasury holds, whether the royalty is currently collected, or what the collection’s present prices, liquidity, or marketplace availability are. The site’s historical description should not be read as verification of current activity.
The account also does not resolve the legal relationship between ExpansionPunks and CryptoPunks. It does not establish that the expansion was licensed or explain copyright permissions. In any NFT project, owning a token is not automatically the same as owning the underlying artwork or receiving copyright, commercial rights, or DAO voting rights; the specific terms and governing documents matter.
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Posvar’s story began with his daughters trying to find characters that felt more expressive and relatable. ExpansionPunks translated that family experience into a larger visual set and a proposed community funding model. The story is meaningful as an example of someone trying to broaden a recognizable avatar culture, while its documented limits matter just as much: creator-defined design targets are not a comprehensive representation audit, and an intended social benefit is not proof that it was delivered.
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