What is a PFP?

What is a PFP?
"I’d rather buy a 1/1 NFT from a new artist then buy another pfp from a random project. Support smaller artists." DireVice.

Pfp is shorthand for 'profile picture' and is synonymous with a kind of art that is generated by a partnership between human and computers as attributes get randomly allocated to a base character. That character might be an elephant, a cat or an ape with the motivation to collect being the affinity with the animal or the potential to sell the character later for more than the original mint.

You'll see plenty of PFP's on Twitter.

The base character plus artistic variations based on rarity is an early trend in the digital artwork space and it is well suited to traders who prefer to not judge the aesthetic, but rather search for rare traits in characters at mint, or just after.

Bored Ape Yacht Club launched early 2021 by Yuga Labs and was recently covered by Fortune magazine.

Each Bored Ape is unique and programmatically generated from over 170 possible traits, including expression, headwear, clothing, and more. All apes are dope, but some are rarer than others according to the Bored Ape Yacht Club website.

The provenance of each ape artwork can be searched on their site, with images decentrally held via IPFS. I believe that many of the owners of these early character or avatar assets will eventually diversify into artwork by artists with a provenance of work that began before NFT's were a thing.

That's the kind of artwork that MintFace will primarily cover. If you're an artist interested in getting started and publishing your first digital art collection as a series of NFT's, MintFace offers the Digital Artist Economy three week course.


MintFace surfaces great artists and artworks so you don't have to.

Enjoying MintFace? Help keep it free by supporting the platform in one of two ways.

Art Collectors - you can become a member to receive a secret weekly MintFace  surfacing artwork that others have missed. No apes. No punks. Just quality art by quality artists.

Artists - you can send any notes of appreciation to mintface.eth in whatever form you feel reflects your art.