Ever played the Surrealist parlour game Exquisite Corpse? You pass a drawing around a room, each person adds a single detail, and nobody sees the full picture until the end.
Broken Telephone works on the same instinct: information distorts through repeated transmission, turning accidental edits into something entirely new. Sequential constraints, cascading transformations, and an outcome no single contributor could plan alone.
The modern web built a culture of passive scrolling and static holding. This is an experiment in bringing back shared creation.
Proof of Work → Proof of Relay
In 2021, I co-founded POW NFT, where minting required running a browser-based proof-of-work miner to earn an asset through raw computation.
Five years later, the focus shifts from computational work to social coordination. Instead of burning CPU cycles, you earn your place by keeping a shared canvas alive as it passes from wallet to wallet. Proof of Work becomes Proof of Relay.
How It Works
The setup is deliberately tactile:
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Your identity: Connect your wallet, resolve your handle (collection.tokenId@fax), and check your inbox.
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The canvas: Start a bitmap canvas or add to the corpse in your in-tray.
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The timer: You have 72 hours to make your move. Upload your mark in greyscale (OR/XOR) to fuse it on-chain, then forward it to another player on the Rolofax.
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The stakes: Forward it, and the canvas evolves while the chain stays alive. Ignore it, and the line jams, the image decays, and the relay dies on your watch.
Art Without Judges
There are no likes, no upvotes, and no curation panels. The moment you rank art, people start optimising for algorithms instead of creating freely.
The protocol measures persistence over taste:
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How many hops the fax survived
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How many distinct communities it bridged
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How long the line stayed open
The artwork stays unpredictable. The protocol simply tracks whether the relay can endure the next handoff.
Shared Creation Beats Static Holding
NFT communities often suffer from static ownership: you mint a token, join a chat, hold an asset alongside thousands of people, and never actually build anything together.
The Fax Chain Game turns quiet holders into active co-creators. With 2,222 fixed-supply mints, a 4.04 ETH prize pool, and a global Rolofax log, the mechanics provide the structure, but the real output is the connection: art no single person planned, and no single person could have made alone.
nftfax.app — Launching Aug 15 at 12:00 UTC. Join the relay and add your address to the Rolofax.