News broke late Friday that the artwork from massively successful NFT project “Crypto Chicks” was stolen from artist Amanda Costa’s Instagram.
Here is the tweet that first claimed the artwork was stolen, it was sent out in early November, but very few saw it until last night, and it quickly went viral.
These allegations spread like wildfire across NFT twitter, and the floor (lowest priced token in the collection) dropped from over 1eth to as low as .31eth at it’s lowest, before roaring back to .68 after Ms. Polly’s response (below.)
But didn’t Amanda Costa say she stole this image as well?
No.
Coincidentally, Amanda Costa was accused of plagiarizing the three-eyed woman image that Crypto Chicks is currently being accused of plagiarizing. She responded to these allegations in an Instagram comment saying that there are many images of the three-eyed woman that artists use as reference material.
Her comment translated to English reads as “Nono, if u enter in Pinterest u can see many references to this kind of alien girl, u can differences them because of the ton of the skin and the hair”
This led to rumors that the three-eyed woman was not created by Amanda, and that it was potentially open-sourced or public domain. The below image is the one Amanda was accused of plagiarizing from, it looks different enough to me.
Ms Polly responded to these allegations
The tl;dr is that she was unaware of Amanda Costa’s work and took inspiration from reference material for her iconic Crypto Chicks collections.
Complicating matters is the fact that Amanda Costa’s work has been copied dozens of times since 2018, but it appears that the image posted to her Instagram in 2018 is the first instance.
Now that is an “influencer.”
The floor on Crypto Chicks is volatile, moving sharply up and down as the situation unfolds.
Artchick owns 25 Crypto Chicks at the time of this article’s publication and will not be selling or buying anytime soon due to a conflict of interest now that she commented on this situation.
This article will be updated as the situation unfolds.