I consider myself an artist with an agenda to democratize art. I want to reach people through as many platforms as possible.
Shepard Fairey
We are beyond proud to announce the launch of $OBEY, a social token from Shepard Fairey and the ObeyGiant community. Help us celebrate with the twitter post and link below (andĀ here):
As a teenager, I grew up skateboarding in and around New York City, jumping down 4-sets of stairs and (trying to) grind down handrails and ledges. At these sites, I often came across massive imagery of Andre the Giant wheat-pasted onto buildings, stuck onto street poles or slapped on the skateboards themselves.
The image of a piercing set of eyes with āOBEYā scrolled below often followed. I soon began to identify great skate spots by how many of these images were prevalent. It was the first significant trail of counterculture that I remember seeing as a teenager. We are thrilled to bring this culture and community to Web3 with the launch of $OBEY from Shepard and the folks at ObeyGiant.
The work of Shepard Fairey extends over three decades with a career starting at RISD where he began experimenting with street art campaigns in 1989. Many know Shepard as one of the most influential street artists of our time with images like āAndreā and āObeyā, but heās also designed albums and artwork for a near-endless amount of acts, some of which include The Beastie Boys, Nirvana and Henry Rollins which we highlight in ourĀ announcement video.
As if evolving skate, graffiti and music culture werenāt enough, Shepherdās activism led him to create one of the most iconic political images of the century so far in the Obama 2008 āHOPEā poster. Many consider his 10-story mural of Nelson Mandela overlooking Johannesburg as a sequel to the āHOPEā piece.
Thinking through $OBEY as a currency, Shepard and the ObeyGiant team are now able to experiment with community as a digital asset and reach even more people across entirely new platforms and infrastructure. Like all Roll tokens, $OBEY is minted directly on Ethereum and exists as a standalone ERC20 token that is interoperable with any other smart contract or application on the blockchain. This includes traditional Web2 platforms powered by Rollās APIs and Web3 applications in the DeFi, NFT and DAO spaces.
You can view the contract address for $OBEY onĀ RollĀ andĀ etherscan. It has a max supply of 10MM $OBEY which will fully vest by November 2022. Weāll be celebrating the launch of $OBEY on our twitter and you can join the 10k strong ObeyGiant community onĀ discordĀ or follow alongĀ @ObeyGiantĀ on twitter as well. There are some moments in Web3 that truly amaze me, this is one of them.
This is the beginning of a year where Roll will showcase how social tokens can upgrade the web with creators, new infrastructure and a whole host of platforms that weāll be working with this year. We couldnāt be more excited.
PS: Probably a good idea to grab one of the teamāsĀ recent NFTsĀ or ShepāsĀ poster artĀ in the next few weeks. šļø šļø