Introduction

Hello everyone, I’m mashbean. Originally, I planned to present something quite serious today — a formal research talk. But then I realized: this is a d/acc space. It's meant to be chill, exploratory, a little chaotic. So I changed my topic.

Today, I’m calling my talk "Will of the D." Why? Because I’m a manga nerd. I love One Piece.

If you haven’t read it yet, now’s a perfect time — it's finally reaching its endgame. The story is about Luffy and his crewmates on a wild journey for freedom and justice. In that world, the "Will of D" is a mysterious concept. No one fully knows what it means, except that it's associated with being the "enemy of the gods."

To me, the D in d/acc might be just that: the enemy of digital gods. The enemy of tech hegemony. The enemy of political tyranny. The enemy of injustice, in all forms.

That’s why this talk is called The Will of D — it's my personal journey in exploring and applying d/acc to real-world contexts, especially in Taiwan.

From the State to the DAO: My Work in Paradox

Since Vitalik introduced d/acc in 2023, I've been fascinated by it. The vision of defensive, decentralized, and democratic acceleration felt deeply meaningful. So over the past year, I began working to turn it into practice.

I work in the Taiwanese public sector, where everything is built top-down. In fact, I help shape Web3 policy and lead a national project called the Taiwan Digital Identity Wallet Project. The goal? To turn Decentralized Identity into an everyday civic tool — to realize the vision of Self-Sovereign Identity.

But here’s the paradox: we’re using centralized institutions, people, and resources to implement decentralized technologies. It often feels weird. Is that still d/acc? Or have we twisted the very idea?

I kept wondering: do important tech developments require a "benevolent dictator"? Or can distributed governance really drive critical progress? Maybe we don't even need acceleration. Maybe just the "D" is enough.

To work through this dilemma, I started a side project at FAB DAO, a grassroots local DAO in Taiwan. We launched a campaign called “戍衛轉型指南" — The Digital Transformation’s Guide to the Sovereign & Solidarity.

In Chinese, "digital" (數位) and "defensive" (戍衛) are pronounced the same. So for us, "digital transformation" is also about defensive transformation. And in a geopolitical pressure like Taiwan, we need both. Technology must protect our democracy. Tech and democracy must reinforce each other.

Mapping the Paths to d/acc

Through this project, I identified three major paths toward d/acc:

• Cypherpunk, the center route

• Solidarity tech, slightly to the left

• Sovereignty tech, slightly to the right

I know. This framework already feels a little outdated. Vitalik's 2024 d/acc article added new dimensions: individual vs. collective, digital vs. biological. But my work focuses more on the 2023 version, because I’m still deeply rooted in its original provocation.

The Concept of Decentralization: Confusion and Clarity

At first, I was confused by decentralization. Depending on which layer of the internet you're looking at, the definition changes.

Blockchain distributes control, yet also centralizes data. Decentralized identity disperses databases, but centralizes information in the hands of individuals. Is P2P truly decentralized? Is Web3 really decentralized?

Eventually, I realized: maybe the issue isn’t the technology, but the problem it tries to solve. And these problems are always political, economic, and social.

So I went back to the classics: left vs. right. Ideology still matters. It helps us understand which kind of acceleration we're facing: hegemonic, or anti-hegemonic.

Extremes Are Centralized: The Authoritarian Paradox

Extreme right-wing systems like fascism favor hierarchy, nationalism, and elite control — they need centralized power to "maintain order."

Extreme left-wing systems like hardline communism push for equality and redistribution, but often enforce a single ideology through party control.

Both ends build digital tools of control: censorship, surveillance, internet sovereignty, or platform monopolies. Different masks. Same logic.

When an ideology refuses dissent, excludes diversity, and demands total obedience, it becomes centralized by design.

That’s why the arrow of d/acc can be drawn simply: if a technology resists extremism and empowers pluralism, it's on the side of decentralization. It’s anti-hegemonic. It’s d/acc.

Centered Power Is Always a Threat

Centralized power is hegemony.

On the left, it becomes digital totalitarianism. On the right, it becomes digital feudalism. Either way, the result is control, not freedom.

So what is decentralization? At its heart, it’s resistance against these forces.

Cypherpunk people knew this. They sit in the zone no government or corporation can reach. Whether you see them as libertarians, anarchists, or mutualists, the core is the same: no gods, no masters.

Cypherpunk is where d/acc begins. Not in capital, not in policy. But in protocols and protest. It's the toolkit for fighting both digital dictatorship and cloud feudalism.

The Poster and the Map

From here on, things get comlicated. So if you want to explore further, scan the QR code on the screen. It links to the original poster version of this talk. It's CC0 in public domain. You can remix it, translate it, print it. It’s for everyone.

The Tech Trifecta: Cypherpunk, Solidarity, Sovereignty

Zooming out, the poster maps d/acc on three fronts. First, Cypherpunk arose in response to the 1980s-90s "government-telecom complex." Then, Crypto communities rose in the 2010s-2020s against cloud-financial platform feudalism. What will come next? Another complex? Another resistance? We don’t know. But we know that the Will of D persists.

Solidarity Tech: Democracy as Practice

Solidarity tech is Technology Exploring the Path to Democracy.

The internet created new digital spaces, allowing communication across borders. Over 30 years, collaborative tools, forums, and net-native governance evolved. Digital democracy has begun flowing back into the real world.

Solidarity is its destination.

Sovereignty Tech: Freedom as Survival

Sovereignty tech is Technology Advancing Toward Freedom.

The internet liberated users from geographic limits. Censorship resistance ensured free speech. Mesh networks preserved open communication. Open source guaranteed free knowledge.

Freedom makes resilience possible. It makes survival possible.

Digital Association: The Final Frontier

So where does the Will of D ultimately lead us?

To digital association.

We know how to assemble online. Taiwan proved that in the 318 Sunflower Movement. We had millions of people coming to street via internet. But we still don’t know how to associate digitally — how to build enduring organizations that persist beyond a moment.

Association is the foundation. It’s how we resist hegemony:

• Through unions

• Through user alliances

• Through local cooperatives

• Through DAOs

In Taiwan, we need this more than ever. We live under the shadow of a superpower. But we have a choice: to build dense, distributed, digital networks that defend our democracy.

We are not isolationists. We are not internationalist, because Taiwan is not a formal country. Maybe we are globalists. But we are also realists. And we must govern ourselves with the tools, technologies, and policies that match our reality.

That, I believe, is the true Will of D.

Final Reflection: Two Mashbeans, One Answer

I started this journey with a question.

Can centralized tools create decentralized outcomes? Working in government, I doubted it. But working in DAO spaces, I found some answers.

The Taiwan Digital Identity Wallet Project advances sovereignty. It carries Cypherpunk DNA. But it lacks solidarity tools and governance models. That imbalance matters.

Using this d/acc roadmap has helped me locate myself. And maybe, it can help others do the same.

Whether you're building tools, shaping policy, or writing code, you can ask: Where am I on the map?

The Will of D isn’t a prophecy. It’s a practice. It lives in the choices we make — technical, social, and political. And through those choices, we draw the path toward autonomy, one block, one protocol, one DAO at a time. Thank you.

After six months in the making, the sandbox version of Taiwan Digital Identiy Wallet is now live! Anyone interested can try it out. Download the test app, request issuer/verifier accounts, and walk through the full experience of issuing, holding, and verifying digital credentials. No coding needed.

This is one of the world’s ealry government-backed apps implementing decentralized identidier (DID)—and honestly, it's exhilarating to see it happening. With DID, the credentials you receive truly belong to you. You decide how, when, and with whom to share them. I still believe this is the backbone of our future digital society.

Here are some of my key takeaways:

A. More than a photocopy—it's verifiable

This isn't just about showing a scan of your ID.

Every credential is cryptographically signed by an issuer and acknowledged by your wallet, making it a true digital original, not just a copy. When you present it for verification, it’s like handing over the real document—only more secure and tamper-resistant. This is the core of Verifiable Credentials (VCs).

B. Selective Disclosure = Privacy Reinvented

The next problem we tackled: over-disclosure. Ever had to send both sides of your ID just to get reimbursed? Frustrating, right?

We implemented Selective Disclosure—you reveal only what’s necessary. Want a birthday discount at a restaurant? You only need to prove you're an April baby, not the year you were born.

We followed IETF’s SD-JWT VC standard, where each field is individually encrypted and only unlocked with your consent.

Maybe the next frontier is Zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs): proving you're over 18 without disclosing your birthdate.

C. Compound Presentations = Smarter Verification

One feature that really moved me: Compound Verifiable Presentation.

You can now present two credentials at once—like digital double-ID—for remote verification. No more making copies and visiting offices just to show you’re legit. Sure, real-world adoption will take time, but tech-wise? It's already doable.

D. Enter the "Trust List"

“I don’t trust you, but I trust who certified you.”

That’s the magic of a Trust List. Whether it's a government agency, business entity, or NGO, any credential they issue can build trust in a decentralized way.

For example, my self-issued “mashbean xard” came from the sandbox. If you trust the sandbox (which you don’t have to), you can trust the card. But if you link a business certificate in Taiwan, you enter the trust list and get a “verified badge” (a.k.a. blue check).

This embodies the idea: "I may not know you, but I trust the org that verified you."

E. Among the Pioneer to Truly Implement SSI

Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI) isn’t about national sovereignty—it’s about individuals controlling their credentials.

While many global organizations promote SSI, few governments have fully implemented it. Taiwan might be among the first (or second) to do so using open blockchain infrastructure—not closed enterprise chains.

Our trust list is deployed on public chains like Arbitrum and Polygon zkEVM, both secure and cost-efficient. More DID-native blockchains are launching this year—exciting times ahead!

F. Governance: The Big Question

Who manages the trust list? Who gives out blue checks?

This is the governance question. It’s unlikely one authority can validate both official and community-issued credentials. Internet Governance models may offer inspiration here.

Digital trust frameworks must be co-created with civic participation. This isn’t just government tech. It’s public infrastructure.

Final Thoughts

After 2+ years in the public sector, I’ve learned just how hard it is to take a project from zero to one. It takes a relay of champions, every handoff matters.

The Taiwan Digital Identity Wallet project carries deep human rights values, while enhancing convenience and digital economy potential. I’m grateful to have been part of it from the early days. 🙏

1. Taiwan Digital Identity Wallet Website: wallet.gov.tw/

2. Download APP

   1. iOS: https://testflight.apple.com/join/gxr3mQFj

   2. Android: https://play.google.com/apps/testing/tw.gov.moda.diw

3. Get mashbean Card

   https://mashbeanvc.tonyq.org

What does a meaningful local chapter mean for the Greenpill Network? This time, we tried becoming sybils and discussed the meaning of sybils. QF can be effective or ineffective. A healthy, high-quality digital community can greatly enhance local social resilience, and effective public resource allocation will be the cornerstone of community governance.

In this article, I will focus on discussing why we operate sybil-attack at our related grant program, using actions to prove the effectiveness of quadratic funding(QF). To conclude, I believe that the 'local chapter' of the Greenpill Network is not easily developed into a mature, sustainable, non-profit action community, but is suitable as a stress tester for quadratic funding tools. Below, I will share the story step by step and analyze the reasons.

Context Introduction

First of all, Taiwan's FAB DAO is a community primarily engaged in non-profit web3 actions, closely interacting with the g0v citizen technology community project da0, with overlapping members and frequent joint events. As a member of the Greenpill Network, FAB DAO has a branch project called Green Sofa (Greenpill Taiwan), with about five regular contributors. The Greenpill Network, initiated by Kevin Owocki, aims to develop digital communities worldwide and advocate for sustainable web3 actions, with dozens of local communities, publications, and a regularly updated Podcast.

In November this year, we used four weeks to complete the first round of quadratic funding actions, carried out with the support of the Gitcoin Grant Stack tool and funded from Gitcoin Grant 18. The action met expectations, proving that a QF action can be fully executed in four weeks, creating reasonable funding and distribution results, as detailed in the article "FAB DAO Grant is Great: Results & Discussion of the Quadratic Funding Experiment". During the action, I mentioned in the Podcast 'Blocktrend' with MN Hsu (also a proponent and participant in public goods funding) that in this experiment we intentionally did not set identity qualification thresholds, i.e., no Gitcoin Passport score restrictions. We welcomed Sybil attacks to collect data and observe effects. Of course, there were no attacks, possibly because the 'Grant is great!' had only about $1,400 in public funds.

However, I did not expect to write a second article on quadratic funding experiments so soon. Because we conducted a sybil attack ourselves.

This was because Sejal Rekhan from the Greenpill Network, during her visit to Taipei, initiated a lightning QF event. December this year in Taipei is a web3 month, with events like Funding the Commons Taipei(FtC), Taipei Blockchain Week 2023(TBW 2023), DAO Taipei, NFT Taipei, etc. Sejal's event, called 'gov0/FAB DAO/dao0 Live Round,' lasted from 12/11 to 12/16, a total of only 6 days, coinciding with FtC and the day after the g0v hackathon, ending the day before DAO Taipei. The schedule was extremely tight, 20 days shorter than our own 'Grant is Great!'. Remember, the length of the schedule is very important, even more so than the amount of public funds, as it affects the quality of QF.

Quadratic Funding Process

The event started on 12/9 (Saturday). After attending the g0v hackathon in Hsinchu City, Sejal immediately participated in the FtC forum in Taipei and announced a QF in Taipei called 'gov0/FAB DAO/dao0 Live Round' (actually should be written as g0v and da0). She set up a workshop at the FtC venue to guide anyone interested in submitting proposals or donating. The public funds for this QF were $3,000, later found to be provided by the organizers of FtC, not the Greenpill Network, which was the first relatively unclear point, leaving willing collaborators unsure how to promote.

After Sejal announced this, members of Greensofa began discussing how to assist and felt anxious. This was because Greensofa had just completed a round of QF, and at the same time, another team had just completed a round of QV (Quadratic Voting) experiment 'FOSS and Open Data Playground' at g0v with about $13,000 to verify the effect of Retroactive Public Good Funding (RPGF). Another QF so soon was unexpected and its actual effect uncertain. First, this sudden announcement would certainly mobilize cooperators again, and second, such frequent QV/QF activities would also mobilize proposers and funders, not sure if it would reduce effectiveness due to crowding out or reduce participation due to cognitive fatigue.

In this process, the main collaborator assisting Sejal was Stanley from Greensofa, an experimental education teacher, handling translation, coordination, etc. After Greensofa's regular weekly meeting (attended by Stanley, g0v and FAB DAO participant Denken, and multi-organizational participant Swift), it was decided to help promote Sejal's event as much as possible. Technical assistance, like setting up wallets for new participation in funding, would be provided if needed, and if Chinese customer service was required, one could ask on FAB DAO Discord. The Greensofa team itself would not apply for projects.

Summarizing the above, in this round of QF, the promotions included:

1. Sejal's oral promotion at g0v hackathon and FtC

2. Sejal's promotion on g0v slack and Telegram

3. FAB DAO's promotion on Discord

4. There was no design for public page promotion this time.

This QF also did not set identity verification thresholds, with proposals manually reviewed by Sejal, similar to our own QF.

Quadratic Funding Results

From the results, there were 13 proposals, 9 of which overlapped with the 'Great Grant!' team already completed by FAB DAO, with 3 new proposals: a crystal bead workshop, a seed art workshop, and MozTW Space (Mozilla Community Space Taipei). The last one was Sejal's own proposal. Of these 13 proposals, only MozTW was from the g0v community.

The funding amount reached a considerable $5,135, more than the $3,000 public fund pool, with 24 funders and 90 funding instances. The Micetopia project (a free Taipei web3 event hat and game project) alone accounted for $4,638, details seen in the 'report card' image.

Unfortunately, there was not so much actual donation, mostly false funding from witch attacks, with the actual funding amount around $200 and only 10 donors. Judging from the funding behavior, these amounts were likely from the proposers themselves.

It can be said that the proposers were more enthusiastic than the funders in this QF.

The Story of the Sybil Attack

Based on only insiders participating, Gimmy Chang from Greensofa and also the initiator of Micetopia, and I decided to launch a sybil attack six hours before the end of QF. The attack was not difficult to execute, needing not many instances to be effective, and this attack did not cause collateral damage. We thought this fund deserved higher quality QF and could be used again with other public funds in the future for more effective Rounds.

Besides, we discovered flaws in the Grant Stack's system design and experimented with them.

We found that after funders transferred money, proposers' addresses immediately received the funds. So, we adopted a 'circular funding' process to generate high funding amounts.

For example, I donated $300 to the Micetopia project, and Gimmy immediately transferred $300 to my second address, which I then reused to donate to the same project, repeating the process. We eventually used 12 addresses to generate about $4,900 in funding. Based on QF rules, this actually created more than ten times the funding weight, so this round of attack would take over 90% of the public funds.

We also found some small flaws in the design of Gitcoin Grant Stack:

1. Funds are directly transferred to the recipient's address, making collusion easy. The risk of lowering the threshold is the inability to prevent collusion.

2. Using Metamask wallets encountered issues with proposing or funding.

3. The full amount in the wallet could not be used for funding. For example, with 50 DAI in my wallet, I couldn't donate the full $50 but had to give $49.99.

The final result was uncertain whether Sejal would receive this donation from FtC and whether this public fund would be distributed to each project as verbally promised. But we also verbally promised that if we received this fund, it would be used for public good purposes, such as more educational projects and the next round of 'Grant is great!' QF action.

Discussion of Results

Aside from technical flaws that are easy to fix, we are more interested in discussing community dynamics, the most important issue for the Greenpill Network in expanding territories. Because communities and territories are different, you can't claim ownership by planting a flag but must deal with intricate cultural issues.

Our core question is, what kind of international support can effectively promote local community development? Good methods will align global/local dual needs and avoid ineffective actions or easily misunderstood colonialist behaviors. To clarify, Sejal's enthusiastic lightning QF does not make us feel colonized, but I am concerned that when the Greenpill Network has substantial funds in the future and lacks a clever injection process, it will be easy to give people the wrong idea.

We believe QF will have different meanings for communities at different stages. For local communities initially understanding QF, the experiential effect is greater than actual funding; for experienced local communities, the community will care if QF meets the goal—effective resource distribution. After all, traditional grant rules and the capital market have difficulty effectively distributing resources related to public goods; otherwise, QF would not be so welcomed by Regens.

We think, in any case, the human resources of local collaborators are more important than public funds, as high-quality promotion, guidance, and planning will significantly affect the quality of public fund distribution. Without effective distribution, no matter how high the public funds, it will not persuade local non-profits to participate in QF actions, becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. This argument can be drawn from comparing the 'Great Grant!' QF and Sejal's QF.

From the 'Great Grant!' QF, we can see that since the proposers were all from FAB DAO, the funding amounts were small, but aligned with everyone's independent value judgment, so these judgments together generated collective intelligence, distributing more effectively to different projects through QF. Here's an important phenomenon: as most donors were also from FAB DAO, they didn't viciously compete to increase funding amounts, nor did they try to conduct malicious collusive attacks.

In Sejal's QF, we can see a significant increase in individual funding amounts, tens of times higher, because the proposers did not know each other, lacking a 'courteous' atmosphere, and each tried to increase funding amounts to get more public funds. Although both events were QF, they produced completely different effects.

Why is this so?

I think it can be analyzed using the eight principles of public goods governance (Governing the Commons) by Nobel laureate in economics Olinor Ostrom:

1. Define clear group boundaries.

2. Match rules governing use of common goods to local needs and conditions.

3. Ensure that those affected by the rules can participate in modifying the rules.

4. Make sure the rule-making rights of community members are respected by outside authorities.

5. Develop a system, carried out by community members, for monitoring members’ behavior.

6. Use graduated sanctions for rule violators.

7. Provide accessible, low-cost means for dispute resolution.

8. Build responsibility for governing the common resource in nested tiers from the lowest level up to the entire interconnected system.

To me, the most significant difference in these two QFs is the clearly defined boundaries and actual needs of the local community. The same rules, even if executed by the same group, will produce different results with different narratives. Moreover, considering that QF still has a high participation threshold, this new mechanism benefits funders feeling the actual benefit of funding, thereby increasing motivation to participate, but the downside is vulnerability to sybil attacks. Balancing threshold settings and witch attacks needs to be determined based on the range and purpose of different QFs.

Therefore, we suggest:

1. Local collaborators are key because they can effectively influence other participants and ensure meaningful 'distribution' during QF execution, as defined by different local communities.

2. The opinions of local community collaborators, especially unpaid contributors, should be valued. This will reduce the likelihood of collusion and improve distribution quality.

3. Each round of QF should have a complete promotional cycle and guidance setup.

4. Before each round of QF, potential participants should be clearly defined, whether in a DAO, a region, or at an international level.

5. Each round of QF should preliminarily investigate the actual needs of potential participants, including proposers and funders, to enhance their long-term participation or regular funding motivation.

6. Greenpill local communities are currently most useful not as sustainable communities (thinking so easily leads to bubbles) but as stress testers for Grant Stack.

Conclusion

Healthy, high-quality digital communities can greatly enhance local social resilience, and effective public resource distribution will be the cornerstone of community governance. No single mechanism design can universally fit all cultures, but we know that under sufficient discussion and experimentation, different local communities will slowly find distribution methods that best suit their interests.

We discovered these important community values through sybil attacks, providing them for all Greenpill Network reference.

By mashbean & Gimmy Chang (Authors and contributors to FAB DAO)

Introduction

FAB DAO (Formosa Art Bank DAO), Taiwan's first non-profit-centric decentralized autonomous organization (DAO), has, in two years, executed over 20 NFT-based non-profit actions. These range from self-initiated projects to collaborations with Taiwanese cultural institutions, non-profits, advocacy groups, and schools. Through “Project Percentage,” the DAO partners with Taiwanese generative artists to raise funds and recruit its members. It has transitioned to a decentralized governance model with various subgroups focusing on non-profit actions, public goods research, and collections. FAB DAO's active contributors number around 20, with a general following of about 200 and a Discord server community of approximately 2300. Participants include non-profit workers, engineers, researchers, creators, teachers, business professionals, retirees, first responders, and civil servants, showcasing the diversity of its members.

In 2023, FAB DAO joined the GreenPill Network, operating under the alias GreeSofa and managing GreenPill Taiwan affairs. Between November and December 2023, the DAO conducted its first fully on-chain quadratic funding experiment using the Gitcoin-developed "Grant Stack." This marked Taiwan's first local team-led web3 quadratic funding campaign. The Taiwanese web3 ecosystem, themed around public goods, includes about three groups with overlapping memberships, such as da0 (part of the g0v ecosystem), focusing on civic technology, Volume DAO centered on digital art, along with informal study groups, self-media, and academic research teams, forming a vibrant web3 ecosystem.

Podcast about this experiment with Blocktreand (Chinese)

https://open.substack.com/pub/blocktrend/p/ep227?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

Results

This experiment signifies Taiwan's first foray into non-profit quadratic fundraising, led entirely by the community. The participating donation teams were diverse, including influential Taiwanese blockchain media like Blocktrend, projects focused on elderly care, art and cultural event organizers like Volume DAO, individual researchers like Frank Hu, and DAO's internal activities such as year-end gatherings. In just 25 days, we completed an entire fundraising cycle. This success demonstrates the Taiwanese community's capability for autonomous operations, donations, and quadratic funding proposals. This was also a stress test for Grant Stack in Taiwan.

Mission

Our initial goal was to localize Gitcoin Stack's tools for native public interest projects, thereby minimizing participation barriers. We weren’t concerned about Sybil’s attacks on resource distribution issues in this experiment due to the limited matching fund pool. Regarding this initial goal, we are successful. Notably, this quadratic funding campaign did not experience sybil attacks, possibly due to the small public funding pool size.

Duration

The promotional phase began on November 5th, followed by a 10-day preparation period involving image creation, drafting press releases, hosting two AMA sessions, mobilizing publicity, and collaborating on a podcast with Blocktrend. The proposal period ran from November 14th to 30th, spanning 16 days, with the donation period lasting from November 24th to 30th, a total of 6 days.

Funding

FAB DAO initiated the “Grant is Great!” experiment. Matching funds were derived from the previous Gitcoin Grant Round 18 (GG18) and the Global Chinese Community (GCC). In GG18, 95 individuals donated a direct sum of $294, resulting in a total of 1212 DAI (approximately equal in USD). In the GCC, 17 individuals donated $58, with the matched capacity reaching 136 DAI. The combined matching funds amounted to 1369.6 DAI.

Manpower

The human resources involved three individuals: mashbean responsible for initial planning, promotional materials, podcast recording (invited by Blocktrend's Astro Hsu), and two AMA sessions (one for proposers and one for sponsors, each lasting about 1 hour on Discord); Gimmy handled Grant Stack setup and co-hosted the AMAs; Stanley focused on writing promotional text. This final report was jointly completed by mashbean and Gimmy.

Distribution

Ultimately, 32 individuals participated in donating, with a direct donation sum of $93.57 across 166 donations. Among the 13 proposal teams, matching funds ranged from a low of $35 (2.61% of the pool) to a high of $191 (13.97% of the pool).

Grantee

There were 13 teams or individuals involved in this experiment. One team, Wagami Fund, was an unfamiliar proposal not affiliated with any DAO member. Due to the nature of quadratic funding, this team also received $35. The rest of the teams were DAO members or their acquaintances, resulting in an equitable distribution.

Donor

Considering the Gitcoin Passport scores, all 32 donors were familiar with wallet operations. Specific data on the teams was limited, but we attempted to lower the participation threshold for project teams and donors through two educational sessions. The average Passport score was 21.9, mainly between 15 and 30. Although we didn't set a Passport score threshold, all donors scored above 15, indicating no evident sybil attacks. As GG18 used the OP chain, most participants were familiar with cross-chain operations, with only a few newcomers involved.

Discussion

The event leveraged $93.5 in direct donations into a $1370 matching fund pool, demonstrating a significant amplification effect. Donors made 166 donations, averaging $0.5 per donation and $2.6 in total donations per person to 5.2 projects. On average, each recipient received 12 donations.

This experiment faced challenges, including imperfections in the "Export Results" feature, issues with Gitcoin Passport Scores, Metamask plugin detection errors, and unintuitive UI operations. Despite efforts, the campaign only extended up to the DAO and Gitcoin regulars. The community's robust connections played a significant role in participation, with little involvement from unfamiliar members. To lower barriers for willing first-time donors, we offered small airdrops of about $3 in ETH, with three participants receiving them during the second AMA. However, one failed due to using a centralized wallet address.

We suggest that traditional Chinese-speaking DAO contributors and civic tech communities jointly propose translating Gitcoin-related interfaces like Grant Stack, Gitcoin Grant, and Gitcoin Passport into Chinese, collaborating with official bodies. This would reduce barriers for Chinese-speaking users, embracing the spirit of internet internalization (i18n) and continuing to attract non-English speakers interested in digital public goods.

Conclusion

The "FAB DAO Grant is Great!" campaign was Taiwan's first non-profit quadratic funding experiment, entirely community-led, with diverse proposal teams. In 25 days, we've shown that Taiwan's community is now an ecosystem capable of independent operations, donations, and proposing quadratic funding initiatives. Quadratic funding is still in a pioneering phase, not yet reaching mass adoption. It's essential to motivate proposal teams and sponsors through intangible rewards like reputation systems or tangible incentives like tokens and to continue strengthening local community connections to enhance participant engagement. Despite some areas for improvement in the tools, this campaign was valuable.

Detail Raw Data: https://bit.ly/fabdao_grantisgreat_data

by Yen-Lin (mashbean) Huang, M.D.

Taiwan has two big problems related to its position in the world. One is about language, and the other is about public discussions. Even though Taiwan and China are close neighbors, our language and culture have become quite different over the last 80 years. We use Traditional Chinese, but China uses Simplified Chinese. We are a democratic sovereign state, but China is not. Because of this, some things are not written in Simplified Chinese. However, China has invested significant resources to develop open-source Language Models, making AI Models containers for their ideology. This has become an established fact.

Recently, there was a new about AI from Taiwan's leading research center, Academia Sinica. The Chinese Knowledge and Information Processing group, known for its work on cultural preservation and digitalization, made an AI model for Traditional Chinese, but people found out it sometimes gave answers favoring China. This happened because they used open-source LLM from Simplified Chinese due to a limited budget. As a result, they took down the model for now and said they would be more careful in the future.

Creating a language model requires tremendous funding. It’s a task only centralized governments and big tech can undertake. The cultural gap between Traditional Chinese and Simplified Chinese will likely narrow in the future, but not in a direction that Taiwan would prefer.

The second problem is Public Sphere Dysfunction. Taiwan is dealing with Information manipulation and how it's used as a weapon. We have an open online space for discourse, but China has been influencing stories for a long time. Also, big social platforms that favor China are now common for students. Policymakers find it hard to adapt to these fast-changing online discussion areas.

We are embracing the awkward dilemma. When discussing National security, there's an easy risk of falling into Censorship of speech. When talking about Freedom of speech, it's hard to sidestep Information manipulation. Generative AI only acts as an amplifier, intensifying conflicts. As the saying goes, "As righteousness rises an inch, evil rises a foot."

Biologist E. O. Wilson once said, "We have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and godlike technology." Currently, Generative AI embodies this godlike technology.

Earlier this year, a group of AI experts and public figures issued a Statement on AI Risk. They believe that "Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war."

We believe that new technologies like LLM, which could shake up current democratic systems, should be adopted sooner by democratic groups. This early use can help democracies spot their weak points and adjust better, stopping autocracies from getting ahead.

To discuss how to have effective, high-quality discussions in the Digital Public Sphere, such as on Social Platforms, we must address its underlying foundation, like Digital Public Goods. For instance, Open Source LLM is a vital public good. We need to establish an open, fair, and transparent mechanism for AI development and use to ensure everyone can access AI equally. At the core is the Digital Public Infrastructure. Taking AI as an example, data governance, especially data related to Taiwanese culture, is crucial. Without data, there can be no LLM specific to Taiwan.

In Taiwan, we are no strangers to thinking outside the box and reaching a consensus on various issues. The public must participate in policymaking to strengthen unity. Such an investment in the democratic process is yielding significant returns by fostering shared values and resilience against authoritarian expansionism. We refer to this as the Taiwan method.

Using AI as an example, we should categorize it into three pillars: Education, Decentralisation, and Deliberation. Through Education, we aim to strengthen digital literacy, ensuring everyone has experience using AI and can make independent judgments. Through Decentralisation, our goal is for everyone to run LLM on their personal computers. Only in this way can AI truly serve as a universal service, overcoming biases, and ensuring that personal data isn't uploaded to the cloud. Lastly, through Deliberation, we are exploring methods of democratic alignment and partnering with international organizations, seeking an AI Constitution that aligns with our own.

1 - Education

In education, I once participated in a discussion meeting with the Ministry of Education, deliberating on how emerging technologies like AI could be integrated into the 12-Year Basic Education Curriculum Guidelines. I also took part in local experimental education forums in Taiwan, discussing how alternative educational systems could utilize AI effectively. Our conclusion was straightforward: questions that teachers can easily answer might no longer be the most valuable. Instead, we need to enhance students' critical thinking and practical skills. Hence, digital literacy is a specialized field, and we must intentionally maintain the digital public sphere.

2 - Decentralization

In terms of Decentralization, taking generative AI for images as an example, we are currently witnessing a battle between Proprietary Software and Open Source Software. Engineers might be able to design fantastic AI, but they can't singlehandedly address all issues between humans and artificial intelligence. What can open-source AI achieve that closed AI cannot?

Let me share a case. Have you ever seen the animation "Dragon Ball"? There was a fan who loved "Dragon Ball" so much that he fine-tuned a model to produce images of the Nimbus cloud, a recognizable feature from the show. He even uploaded it online for other Dragon Ball enthusiasts to download. We can't eliminate biases, just as we can't prevent someone from loving "Dragon Ball." Even less so can we stop someone from creating an AI that produces the Nimbus cloud from "Dragon Ball" and then sharing it with fellow fans. Such customized images can only be achieved when run on personal computers, combined with an open-source AI model, and further augmented with various small-scale, custom-made models. This embodies the concept of plurality. Our goal isn't to erase biases, but to allow more individuals to create diverse and heterogeneous algorithms, contributing to this universe.

3 - Deliberation

The last pillar is deliberations. We employed Polis to discuss AI, an open-source tool for online deliberation, to collate viewpoints from Ideathon attendees regarding the future course of AI. Polis has a precedent of being utilized for legislating on matters related to emerging technologies in Taiwan, such as Shared Economy like Uber in the past. Post-voting, this platform facilitates the formation of distinct opinion clusters, assisting participants in identifying how their perspectives differ from the broader consensus.

We have two purposes when it comes to deliberation: enhancing local digital citizen engagement and forging international partnerships for collaborative progress. For this year, AI Democratization stands as a pivotal and highly relative pilot initiative. In collaboration with the Collective Intelligence Project, we have initiated Alignment Assemblies in Taiwan and staged our pilot project at the Ideathon, a hackathon designed to ignite the imagination.

In addition, we have taken the initiative to upgrade to Polis 2.0. In alliance with the AI Objectives Institute, we have deployed their ‘Talk to the City’ utility to visually map the seed statements and voting results into varied thematic clusters. These clusters offer an interface for users to engage with and discern the ‘collective wisdom’ derived from the deliberative process. You can discuss with the virtual collective opinion leader through Talk to the City with the assistance of LLM.

To round off, Moda has launched on-site AI Democratization workshops. By partnering with specialists in deliberative democracy, we aim to evolve the discourse further, leading to a result that encapsulates both raw data and conclusive findings.

Upon authorization from participants, this treasure trove of deliberative data will be shared publicly online. We extend an invitation to global democratic networks—including AI policymakers and AI model developers —to utilize these insights. As Taiwan serves as a fertile testing ground for AI Democratization, we welcome nations worldwide to leverage our collective intelligence as we cautiously, yet optimistically, navigate the future.

Lastly, let's discuss Taiwan's Law and Policy. According to the theory of American legal scholar Lawrence Lessig’s Pathetic Dot theory, Code, Laws, and Markets shape our digital society. However, we still have the opportunity, through Digital Democracy and especially the Deliberate process, to build Collective Intelligence, emerging as a fourth force shaping society—Norms.

In 2019, Taiwan passed the "Cultural Fundamental Act." The section related to Cultural Technology aims to include comprehensive digital governance and enhance citizens' digital participation. However, achieving this objective within the Ministry of Culture is challenging. The potential reason might be the lack of a collaboration mechanism between those familiar with emergent technology and the bureaucrats responsible for cultural policy. What we need most at this moment is a platform or system that can bridge and facilitate cooperation between the two.

Conclusion

First, we discussed the threats Taiwan faces from China. Taiwan's Geopolitical Crisis includes a vulnerable culture and public sphere dysfunction, with AI evidently exacerbated this situation. However, we still have a turning point. The solution lies in the Taiwan model and international cooperation, encompassing Education, decentralized AI, and deliberation. The next step might be the legal framework for cultural technology, enabling multi-stakeholders to collaborate and fostering pro-democracy technological development.

From “degrowth" to "abundance",
from "decentralization" to “plurality”,
from "decoupling" to "complexity".
In the abundant pluriverse, we have finally found digital democracy.

This article is one of the parts of the GreenPill.Network global movement, with the Chinese version published on the matters platform. The Green Pill Network writing project, initiated by Gitcoin founder Kevin Owocki, encourages global local communities to write about the unique public culture of web3 spontaneously. This is the last piece in the series, discussing the concept of digital democracy.

Previous articles:

1. Green Pill Network 1: What should local non-profit organizations pay attention to when issuing NFTs?

2. Green Pill Network 2: The Real Conditions of Digital Solidarity: The Third Space of Anti-establishment

GreenPilled3 Seeking a Third Way Beyond Entrepreneurial Sovereignty and Abundance Technocracy Struggles

GreenPill.Network encourages practitioners of web3 to become Regen (short for Regenerative, also the antonym of Degen, which refers to speculators). In the first article, I discussed how NFTs, apart from serving as digital certificates, become symbolic tokens for local communities - advanced human technology becoming almost religious artifacts. Sacred objects gain powerful spiritual significance through a religious context, and social advocacy NFTs, through processes of collaboration and cooperation, are imbued with the consensus of the community. These consensuses become stories, slowly disseminating into other communities, creating low-efficiency yet strong connections. In the second article, I discussed how digital public spheres can be established and the preciousness of these low-efficiency unity movements against the prevalent algorithms, drawing from real-world web3 community practices.

In this third article, I attempt to discuss the ultimate imagination of Regen—Digital Democracy, a bold attempt. Overseas, Taiwan is often seen as the island of digital democracy. However, those of us in Taiwan are still troubled by polarization every day. Past successes seem like fleeting moments, and the trauma caused by digital social movements has driven many open, free, and democratic practitioners out of the third space. They return to their families and jobs, occasionally reminiscing about the past on social platforms. The next generation, who have not experienced the waves of digital transformation and movements, live as if these histories of digital democracy never happened. They remain entangled in the algorithmically addictive world, and in the end, they all suffer from algorithmic abuse.

The following article can be considered as reading notes, distilling the essence of the past six months of web3 for all and da0 learning reading group discussions. In the atmosphere of intensive reading and discussion, we gradually practice while reading, slowly grasping necessary narratives, becoming theoretical nourishment. Meanwhile, working in Taiwan's Ministry of Digital Affairs(moda), section of plurality, I also strive to explore the meaning of Plurality.

Audrey Tang, the minister of moda, is the official inventor of the term Plurality. Audrey and Glen Weyl are currently writing a book, "Plurality" (which can be considered as another style of "GreenPilled", or a sequel to "Radical Market"). The Plurality Institute has held two physical symposiums in the US to discuss many related studies between emerging technologies and democratic society. The Plurality Tokyo Forum is also carving out its own localized path.

The following discussion only represents my personal standpoint and does not represent any DAO or centralized organization.

In the narrative concept of Plurality, Glen Weyl proposed three possible future pathways, correspondingly mapped to the latest civilization regimes in Civilization VI: Entrepreneurial Sovereignty (ES), Abundance Technocracy (AT), and Digital Democracy. Let's expand the theory with these core principles.

Entrepreneurial Sovereignty is advocated by Silicon Valley's accelerationists and singularity believers. It is a technology world that maximizes capitalism, where the spirit of man conquers nature may lead to greater social inequality, and all information content is privatized into intangible assets that can be calculated as GDP. Abundance Technocracy is a highly efficient, convenient, and uniform single-pole world developed when a totalitarian government fully controls digital tools. The development of AI can align collective will with a single ideology.

Digital Democracy, as a third way, creates digital lifestyles that meet the needs of the public. Glen Weyl believes that Plurality serves as the technical implementation of Digital Democracy, bridging the gap between a democratic society and emerging technologies, such as quadratic voting, Harberger taxes, language models that align diverse opinions, online deliberation tools, etc.

The above three can be reduced to three economic types:

1. Entrepreneurial Sovereignty: Market Economics

2. Abundance Technocracy: Planned Economics

3. Digital Democracy: Cooperative Economics

Essentially, market economies and planned economies are on a spectrum, which is relatively close. The cooperative economy is another dimension, which transcends this spectrum. The cooperative economy, fully named the Social Solidarity Economy (SSE), serves as an umbrella term for alternative economies, underground economies, cooperativism, and more, widely seen in Central and South American and European cultures. I became familiar with this term through Dr. Chi-jen Wu(吳啟禎) of the Taiwan Economic Democracy Union (recommend book: "The Human Conditions of Taiwan’s Sovereignty") and Dr. Ching-Shu Hung(洪敬舒), director of the research department of the Taiwan Labour Front (recommend book: "When Labor Hires Capital: Overturning Capitalism with Economic Democracy"). Both teachers have talked about Nordic democracy to economic democracy and social investment, reflecting on the status of cooperatives in Taiwan.

Digital democracy, when directly translated in Chinese, can mean using digital methods to support democracy, such as open government data, open supervision, online deliberation, electronic voting, identity verification, and so on; it can also imply a coexistence of various (plural) forms of democracy. However, this state of coexistence must be based on a cooperative economic model. If it is a market economy growth path for the future, democracy is likely to become a secondary consideration or even a manipulated tool. So, it is boldly hypothesized here that digital democracy and the cooperative economy are two sides of the same concept; they contain too many similar ideas. According to the article "Why I Am a Pluralist?" by Glen Weyl, the term "cooperative liberal democratic pluralism" is condensed into “plurality”, which emphasizes the importance of cooperation.

Let's continue to build upon this. In the spectrum between market economy and planned economy, three concepts appear at different costs: artificially scarce goods, closed technologies, and atomism.

Information is fluid and was originally shared until someone monopolized it, artificially packaging and selling it, turning it into artificially scarce goods. These could be valued-added via designing, packaging, and curating process, but they also become inaccessible resources. Opposite to artificially scarce goods are public goods, especially Digital Public Goods (DPGs) in an information society.

Closed technologies, like nuclear energy or AI models that have not yet been open-sourced, are more likely to fall into the hands of technology elites or bureaucrats as they advance, making technology increasingly distant from citizens. In contrast, open technologies can be used mutually through standards and open licensing formats.

People's work habits in modern society are hierarchical and atomized, accustomed to obtaining their tasks through layers of information transmission. In this framework, people are divided into individual units without characteristics and manipulated within a larger structure. Opposite this concept is the spirit of flat organizations and united cooperation.

Therefore, the corresponding concepts are displayed as follows:

1. Artificially scarce goods - Digital Public Goods

2. Closed technologies - Open technologies

3. Hierarchy and atomization - Flatness and unity

These three concepts are mentioned extensively in various theories.

As Kohei Saito, known for his research on Marx's later works, advocates the concept of Degrowth. He believes that only by abandoning capitalism and the dream of greenwashing and advanced carbon reduction technologies can the natural environment be resolved because only when humans give up unlimited growth can they enter a state of true abundance. In his book "Capital in the Anthropocene,”(人新世の「資本論」) he spends a lot of time explaining the concepts of public and private goods, emphasizing the importance of open technologies. We can ask here: in the digital world, how can we contribute and meet our needs to achieve abundance?

The spirit of the plurality, briefly mentioned above, serves as a bridge between emerging technology and a democratic society. The integral part of it is decentralization, which involves deconstructing the center, breaking down concepts, technologies, and operation modes, and only then is multi-centrism possible. We can easily see the benefits of multi-centric operations in the world of web3. For example, avoiding single-point of failures(SPOF), decentralizing identities(DIDs), partial common ownership(PCO), and quadratic voting(QV) for automated and permissionless possibilities. Of course, the Plurality also emphasizes universally accessible digital public goods services, promotes interoperability of open technologies, and emphasizes cooperate across difference(CAD).

Finally, there is decoupling, a term taken from Joichi Ito's "The Practice of Change." He describes the history of Internet development with decoupling. He believes that the development of the Internet is like a pendulum, swinging from centralization to decentralization. And on different levels, it can be decoupled, allowing invented standards or things to no longer monopolize. When a tool can be easily used, it has the space to evolve. Different levels of technology, people, and events can operate repeatedly on a simple scale, giving birth to complex systems. Although complex systems may not be as efficient for a single task, they are almost universally applicable to various changes, thus creating resilience and coping with various situations. The solidarity economy can be seen in worlds where various regimes collapse and are maintained by small community autonomies, which can quickly respond to changes. Of course, this group is inherently decentralized and in a state of abundance.

1. From "Degrowth" to "Abundance"

2. From "Decentralization" to “Plurality”

3. From "Decoupling" to "Complexity"

Summary: The mindset that a Regen should have

In the world of digital democracy, being a Regen possibly means engaging in matters you identify with and making limited decisions in a complex environment. When an individual collaborates with those they identify with, forming one or more Pods (or DAOs), and still works across differences with groups they less identify with (or so-called associate between cooperatives), it is ultimately possible to "give according to ability, take according to needs" in an abundant environment. This is an ideal description for public goods and the third space(digital public sphere), though reality is more austere. Taiwan as an island facing significant threats, we can't afford to miss any opportunities for external aid collaboration, inevitably getting entwined in the complex network of international political relations. Yet the internet has been open for connections since the very beginning. Perhaps we can revisit the spirit of "openness," "sharing," and “solidarity” through the history of internet development and continue creating abundance.

To conclude, reaching the realm of digital democracy may require discussions about the cooperative economy.

The cooperative economy could possibly appear in three states simultaneously: "abundance" after degrowth, a “plurality” after decentralization, and "complexity" after decoupling.

These three characteristics are based on three features: "public goods," "open technologies," and "flat and solidarity.”

These three features could potentially allow us to break away from the dichotomous narrative of market economy versus planned economy. The direction of web3 Regen development could be its latest standard-bearer, which is conceptually elaborated in the third article of the Green Pill Writing Program.

Although this is the conclusion of the three-article independent writing plan for the Green Pill and only explains a schematic diagram, it is also the beginning of discussing Digital Solidarity. Many concepts might seem inconclusive, but the back-and-forths often overlap considerably, gradually building up an international consensus that becomes the theoretical foundation for practitioners.

This is the 2nd article for the GreenPill.Network global movement, with the Chinese version published on the Matters platform. The GreenPill Network writing project was initiated by Gitcoin founder Kevin Owocki to encourage global local communities to voluntarily write down unique web3 public culture.

After the trend, there is no grass here.

The bear market is a moment of truth. When someone says that minting "NFT" can increase sales, it is a hypothesis. Looking back now, this is just a joke, just like people said that registering the domain ".com" could make a fortune 20 years ago. These people have misunderstood the essential difference between Buzzwords and the technological revolution. Buzzwords can indeed attract attention, and under the amplification of social media platform algorithms, humans are like sheep, domesticated by mechanical sheepdogs. Chasing Buzzwords can indeed bring a rapid market, but this is like the grass in the desert, it comes and goes quickly.

And obviously, this year's grass is growing in the AI field. The underlying research of these two technologies is as difficult as it can be, but the application layer can be very simple. Releasing a smart contract to access OpenSea (NFT trading platform) can be called an NFT project; releasing a service that connects to the API provided by ChatGPT can also be called a developer. The reduction of entry barriers for emerging technologies, which quickly increases the number of early developers, is indeed a key condition for igniting Buzzwords, and media, public sectors, forums, and the public follow.

But don't just focus on the development of hardcore technology, and underestimate the simple creativity of "connecting". The connection has created stackability, and many unexpected application modes have begun to emerge. This is like "The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom", where players thought that the tools available to everyone, were created by Nintendo in 2023. I think this is where Cultural Technology is important. Cultural Technology is the interface active agent of technology, integrating technology into society, and creating more diverse and heterogeneous application possibilities.

Digital Solidarity and Decentralization Tangles

Let's take a look back at the wave caused by the technology tree of "cryptography - distributed ledger - NFT", to see what's left to assemble, among which is DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organization). When the marketing narrative of the metaverse combined with the concept of NFT becomes popular, the grand narrative cleverly combines "decentralized will", "storytelling” and "autonomous tools". Many web3 projects claim in their roadmap that after earning wealth, they will move towards decentralized autonomy (daoxit). In the narrative, they weave fantasies of community co-governance and IP co-creation together; in terms of tools, they operate through multi-sig vaults and voting deliberations. However, in reality, some teams in Taiwan, for example, have rug pulled funds and stopped operating (which is not uncommon in recent months), some operators have clashed with the community, and some have lost momentum after entering a decentralized autonomous state. "Decentralized" seems to be a synonym worse than "saying goodbye."

But is there really no possibility for "Digital Solidarity"?

People who walk into "DAO autonomy" from "NFT project" seem to naturally believe that holding "tokens" and voting is the so-called Digital Democracy. However, people almost at the same time found that democracy is a goal that seems to never be achieved. A famous NFT project in Taiwan originally had high popularity, and the community that had online meetings every day looked forward to entering real decentralized autonomy, but when people found that the operators were only willing to provide a small amount of funding as governance initial capital, the polis disbanded. These early pioneers who first tasted digital democracy, as consumers, gradually became believers but seemed to have not made a "promise" yet, to fulfill community autonomy under collective cooperation.

In addition to the emerging web3 projects in Taiwan promoting the spirit of decentralization, the open-source field has been doing so for years and has given birth to many world-renowned projects. However, under the commercial narrative of the metaverse, "decentralization" has become a buzzword again. It is a term that has successfully risen in an era where large commercial platforms monopolize the attention economy. Young people (or venture capitalists) may be inspired and want to achieve commercial success (NFT) while getting spiritual comfort (DAO). Rebellious young people want to break down rules, oppose bureaucracy, establishment, or everything constructed by the secular society of the older generation, which is the same in any era. Whether it is the Cultural Revolution in China, the Hippie Movement in America, or the Wild Lily student movement in Taiwan, these movements contain a revolutionary will no matter how divergent their demands are. However, the classic paper "The Tyranny of Structurelessness" by Jo Freeman, a feminist activist from the 1970s in America, tells us that after removing the rules, flat and non-hierarchical organizations can easily become elite circles due to the inherent limitations of trust chain and information transmission, and thus give rise to representative controversies, power struggles, and movement traumas. The outcome of a movement is often not institutionalization, but the dissipation of social mobilization.

"Decentralization" primarily faces cultural collaboration issues, followed by how DAO tools support its spirit. In facing representative controversy, g0v in Taiwan is a very good example. This is a long-standing (just turned ten) decentralized organization primarily composed of hackers, initially founded with the slogan "hack the government", and subsequently gave birth to many civic technology projects. As g0v expanded, it inevitably faced representative disputes, but in the end, it established the principle of “nobody can represent g0v" under community consensus and emphasized the principle of joint notes for media contact, which is still in use today.

How web3 projects survive, especially teams oriented towards digital art, should reflect on the problems faced by decentralized organizations in different eras, rather than wanting commercial success while maintaining decentralized autonomy. Taiwan does not have a tradition of solidarity economy like Europe or Central and South America. Employees are not consciously also owners, and the community does not have the habit of sharing commercial benefits. This is because the Cooperatives Act is outdated and difficult to use, and it creates a situation of nominal cooperation but actual labor employment. Therefore, "decentralization" has influenced the social and economic level in different forms and appearances at different times, undergoing a wave of changes brought by cooperative corporatization, social movement, and digital tools.

Public Domain and Digital Third Space

Despite the traumas that the decentralization movement brings to its participants, we should still praise such endeavors. In trendy terms, these movements have always been acts of resistance against algorithms, they represent the third space in life. Students have a place to go besides home and school; workers have a place to go besides home and the office. In the past, there were social norms at home and social systems outside, an algorithm evolved from societal culture, with attention and limited time captured in a linear world. Today, we have entertainment algorithms at home (like TikTok) that users can easily get lost in, and profit-oriented high-efficiency algorithms at work. In fact, many people are now actually working alongside AI algorithms. This is a characteristic of a high-efficiency industrial world.

However, a third space is still necessary, and it doesn't necessarily need to be efficient. In fact, it is ineffective, noisy, and often futile. But these are important characteristics of the public sphere that direct us not towards profit, but towards facing communities and constructing culture, resisting algorithms, and even things that algorithms must learn from events that machines cannot create. "Palaces for the People" writes that people need a third space, using "Social Infrastructure" to reverse the coldness and indifference of civil society, like libraries, parks, and fountains. As the public enters digital life, the digital world's DAOs are gradually taking on the benefits of such infrastructure.

In fact, there are precedents for digital spaces serving as social infrastructure, like online-game guilds, forum moderators, etc. These are places that resist algorithms and generate a lot of digital life memories. In this context, Facebook Groups and Facebook News Feed are completely different concepts. The massively multiplayer online game "Eve Online" has seen widely-told stories like Chappy78's birthday party. When veteran player Chappy78 was diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer, his final birthday wish was to fight an epic space battle. Many gaming guilds and over 2000 players burned resources they had accumulated over time to fulfill Chappy's dream with a space firework show in the digital space. This isn't something an algorithm can do, it can only happen in a third space without too many conflicting interests and social responsibilities.

Just three weeks ago, the American forum Reddit was facing a dilemma between operator profits and community protests over shutting down forums. The operators, in order to profit, decided to start charging for their originally free API service and implemented it after a very short announcement. In response, the community began shutting down their sub-forums. This is the dilemma of decentralized governance and operation. It's not just the web3 world that faces such problems. In another interpretation, web3 can be seen as the internet's third space. Users work in the first space, rest in the second space, and create a culture in the third space.

The Third Space of Web3

An excellent example in the world of Web3 is JPG.Space. JPG is a digital art database created from the ground up through collective intelligence. It started operating in 2021, but unfortunately, it shut down temporarily in June. As a curatorial experiment that lasted over two years, JPG was not constructed by art historians, renowned curators, or artists themselves, but was a curated collection created by crowd stacking and voting. It was not like a typical open-source collaboration platform, such as Wikipedia. Instead, it consciously undertook curatorial and contextual work, involving a large number of subjective factors and manipulative interpretations. It resembles a community-oriented new media art institution, Rhizome, mixed with the surfing spirit of the 2000s. This time, not only creators are involved but also a large number of collectors and amateur critics.

In an interview with the media Right Click Saved, titled "The Power of Community Curation", the leaders of JPG emphasized that NFT is a method of deconstructing the art ecosystem. Community action is based on such infrastructure like NFT, and for JPG, most actions took place on the Discord platform. Discord, a platform loved by the gaming community, gaming circles, and Web3, is relatively closed (you can see the content only after joining), chaotic (non-linear content, prone to multiple channels happening at the same time), and scares away many users who are accustomed to traditional social platforms, yet it is widely welcomed by information surfers. Various Discords often have different live streams, broadcasts, and AMAs (Ask Me Anything) at night (the night in East Asian time zone).

JPG emphasizes the importance of Discord, even with its imperfections, but it is still the "third space" for intense discussions in the web3 community. Wade Wallerstein said: "This is not the tyranny of the masses, but a tool for community mutual support and education." This is consistent with the concept of the "Future Art Ecosystem 3: Art and Decentralized Technology" published by the Serpentine Gallery. The Serpentine Gallery believes that the Web3 community operation model creates a methodology for resistance against institutions. Whether it's the technical bottom or the cultural level, it generates unique creative meanings and cultural values ​​specific to the community, no matter what this community represents.

Returning to the third space, the overseas experience of JPG and my personal experience in Taiwan are consistent. Recently, with the help of FAB DAO (Formosa Art Bank), local group "Huangxi Environmental Education Programme (HEEP)" conducted a series of environmental education actions, proving that social infrastructure and digital solidarity collaboration are possible to unite. Huangxi is a river located in Taipei, the capital of Taiwan. Due to urbanization, the river has gone through stages of natural ecology, landscape, and concretization. The Huangxi team is slowly opening the public participation process through a lot of curation, research, and conversations with local communities and schools. The "Huangxi Environmental Education Programme" had a fun river RPG with primary school students at Mingde Elementary School at the end of June, discussing what the river near their homes looks like. Using the interactive "Tamagotchi at riverside " NFT as a medium, they try to create a process of interaction between students and parents through this symbolic token.

The creators, actors, and planners all come from DAO, and it happens that these participants have different local memories with Huangxi. The cooperation process of these people is concretely and microscopically displayed on platforms related to Discord. In the past, FAB DAO has helped teachers and students of Taipei Municipal Zhong Shan Girls High School to deal with the time and space tokens of campus historical buildings, helped teachers and elderly people at Longtan Elderly Center to create paper-cutting creations, and cooperated with museums and art villages to practice the possibility of chain community interaction. These non-profit projects are attempts to incorporate NFT, symbolizing a certain spirit, into the third space.

Internet Autonomy Region

This month, we discussed the concept of the Network State with Mask Network founder Suji Yan. The Network State is an emerging concept, initiated and written by Balaji, and has now become a social movement in the Web3 world. This theory suggests that when a digital community's technology, culture, and economics mature, an autonomous body without borders or territory is likely to emerge, overlaying traditional sovereign nations. Suji believes that our generation has not yet reached this mature state. At best, we are the generation before the founder’s grandfathers. When the infrastructure of a virgin land is not yet mature, it is a necessary measure to exchange resources from the colonial motherland (real economies and enterprises) (see the full interview: Suji Yan talks about the generation of Network State).

This prompts us to reexamine, is digital solidarity really happening? Whether it's the exceptional state of the third space, or the public domain in a democratic society; in terms of the development of digital culture's basic infrastructure, is the emerging Web3 toolkit an inevitable path? Beginning from protests and war zones, we have seen official cryptocurrency wallets and peace-supporting Ukraine DAO in Ukraine, attracting global supporters' funds for practical help. Similarly, on the subject of Russia, the famous protest group Pussy Riot issued the NFT "Putin’s Ashes" and produced a protest-style MV, and they were wanted by the Russian government because of the issuance of the NFT.

In cross-border issues, NFT is an effective advocacy tool, and DAO is a collection of effective tools for coordinating cooperation and asset management. Urgent situations often bring about creative and effective "connection" methods. Back within a single national boundary, whether local communities can benefit from DAO at this stage to achieve substantial cooperation, such as digital asset management, cooperative division of labor and profit sharing, issue communication and marketing (at this point it must be reiterated, as a Buzzword, the wave of DAO is no longer in place), these are within the scope of culture technology and how to continue to create unique culture for the digital public domain, surpassing the algorithm dominating the first and second spaces, this is a phenomenon worth observing at the moment.

Together with the director of the Taiwan Labor Front Research Department, Hong Jing-shu, freelance translators Liu Wei-Jen and Liao Pei-Xing, we discussed how cooperation should happen in different fields under the theme of The Dynamic of Cooperation at the beginning of the year. We have studied whether the landing of DAO in Taiwan can apply the Cooperative Law. According to the database of laws and regulations of the Republic of China, the Cooperative Law was promulgated in the 1934 and last amended in the 2015. It is no longer applicable in the digital or cultural field. Hong Jing-shu pointed out that the context of cooperatives in the Taiwan is different from the tradition of cooperatives in Europe and America, which can easily be misleading. In fact, there are precedents in Taiwan for initiating cooperatives as legal entities in the field of arts, such as the Co-Art Co-Operative initiated by Huang Sunquan, and the still-operating Scutoid Coopertion, and others like Les Petites Choses Production, a performance art group that has entered substantial cooperation under a non-cooperative legal entity.

Conclusion: Independent and Persevering

From the overseas experiment of JPG, the domestic state of Huangxi digital solidarity, to the Taiwanese cooperatives in form or substance, and finally back to the Network State, we can clearly see that the legal sources and tools of physical society are hardly able to meet the needs of digital communities. The infrastructure is not yet mature, but the third space is still present.

Through the observation of Web3, we have the opportunity to examine the influence of non-legal entities on social culture. We can probably affirm that the infrastructure of the Internet space is inherently decentralized and is naturally conditioned to continue towards a state of multi-centric and diverse heterogeneity.

Perhaps the best cultural tool is one that allows everyone to independently develop culture. As a reality condition for digital solidarity, be independent and persevere.

Return to the Dunbar's number, remove the fantasy of infinitely extending time and space of magic web3, and pay attention to digital experiences that have boundaries! When new things are easier to create than old ones, enduring old things can acquire immense value.

This is my first article joining the GreenPill.Network, with the Chinese version concurrently published on Matters.town (mashbean). The GreenPill.Network Writing Program publishes one thousand-word article per week for three consecutive weeks, and everyone can participate in writing about web3 public actions from all around the world. Kevin Owocki, the founder of Gitcoin, launched the Green Pill Movement, calling on everyone to transform from Degens (traders) to Regens (cultivators). The movement is now in its second chapter - Global Local Connections, inviting web3 public actors from all around the world to write and interact.

In 2022, our organization, FAB DAO (Formosa Art Bank DAO), conducted a series of web3 experiments in Taiwan for different types of non-profit organizations, activists, and advocates. These were mainly local actions to assist fundraising, advocacy, and digital experiences. Some were successful, while others were not as satisfying. We have cooperated in various forms with art museums, art village, large-scale charity platforms, coral restoration organizations, animal protection groups, public schools, organizations for the elderly, human rights advocates, and others in Taiwan. I believe we have the credentials to provide some preliminary guidance for the local 'regens' in Taiwan.

For those willing to try in mid-2023, it is essential to see the pandemic era as a special event, with phenomena that are hard to replicate. The once-famous projects have now become moldy, and legends have turned into jokes. In that era, when we talked about blockchain or web3, we encountered a series of dreamlike words, such as decentralization, permissionless, trustless, scalability, etc. These blockchain features still exist today, but they don't have much to do with the solidarity of local communities.

Decouple these concepts from the actual people you interact with, and your mental burden will not be so heavy. While these concepts are indeed important and are the cornerstone of the public blockchain operation, they successfully created amazing miracles on a global scale during the pandemic, such as cross-border showing off wealth, war donations, etc. But now, as people live face-to-face again and see continuous warfare as normal, these underlying innovative concepts won't help you achieve advocacy or fundraising effects.

In a permissionless blockchain, everyone can join, but bounded communities are what create real action; trustless smart-contract machines can't automatically produce spiritual tokens that connect each other's trust, spiritual value needs proper context by local actors for the tokens to carry value effectively; in the progress of scalable blockchain technology, actual digital communities shouldn't emphasize rapid expansion of membership, as it will only diminish the chain of trust between each other. If we pay too much attention to the quantifiable benefits generated by tools, platforms, and tokenomics, local actors can easily fall into the anxiety of formalism, and we should now focus more on the process of actual solidarity. How to introduce resources, and how to use them well.

Therefore, in terms of cognition, it is very important to decouple the technological innovation layer from the decentralised society (DeSoc) layer. Community actors don't need to worry about how to improve the terrible user experience of web3, web3 tools are as hard to learn as they are to teach, when you want your participants to learn how to use it. Honestly, our past forcing the public to learn digital wallets, collect digital assets, was like "using a complicated period of growing pains to create a common life experience for members." Before the digital infrastructure related to public fundraising and public advocacy is mature, like local regulations, digital habits, and UI/UX, digital communities should focus on creating impressive digital experiences. This is the only intersection of the technology and society layers at present.

As the world enters an era of attention scarcity in digital life, we should focus on the people and things around us through the process of digital production. Like the virtual treasures in video games, the qualitative changes generated by digital creations give rise to a sense of ‘a sense of ownership’ in subjective consciousness. "I have that, do you have it too?" The sense of social identification created by these virtual items is a completely new mode. ‘A sense of ownership’ and 'rights of possession' are two levels of status, with the latter being defined at legal and social levels. When we own private property, that is a right of possession, such as cars, houses, intellectual property rights, naming rights, etc. However, the right of possession does not necessarily completely overlap with the subjective inner 'sense of ownership'.

Sometimes, we can even jointly own a piece of work, for example, a work has a hundred editions, each of us owns an edition, but we do not think we only own one percent of it. Often, we each feel like we all own one piece, even though it is identical in its bit data, and this can even create 'community identity' because we own the same thing together. This is what is referred to as 'positive externality'.

For instance, in 2022 we co-launched the Vanishing Family series with human rights artists. This is a series of the artist's past oil paintings. The image is a series of family portraits, with family members in the middle disappearing, being locked up in jail, or becoming death-row inmates. This was a very important period in Taiwan's history, ruled by China's dictatorial government, creating countless political prisoners. And to this day, Taiwan's political situation has been liberalized for less than 40 years. The artist and his works are excellent mediums for reflection on human rights.

We issued 100 copies of different works in this series, priced in dollars, and they were snapped up within a few blocks. This was because what we wanted to create was advocacy, and fundraising was secondary. The community members who participated in the collection did not think they only collected one percent of the fragments, but rather a story and a whole segment of history that actually happened in Taiwan.

The 'sense of ownership' is less like 'ownership rights' and more akin to the dissemination of knowledge. When we impart the knowledge in our heads to others, it does not diminish the value of our acquisition of this knowledge, just as a candle's light illuminates a room, these are all non-competitive and non-exclusive public goods. When public-interest or advocacy-type NFTs operate successfully, although their owners are of a limited number, their 'sense of ownership' increases exponentially through the process of user conversion. The best part is that the generated cash flow can be directly returned to the activists.

That's why I would urge non-profit activists who can afford to pay attention to NFT digital experiences at this time, because when new things are easier to create than old ones, enduring old things can acquire immense value, whether digital or not. This is my initial appeal from Taiwan to Regens around the world.

The reason lies in Digital Public Goods (DPGs).

In the world of open and permissionless public blockchains, if developers provide good services that attract more users, the blockchain will gain higher value.

Users live on the blockchain (transactions, exchanges, agreements, etc.) and need to pay a small fee to the maintainers of the distributed ledger. However, maintainers are usually not the developers, so developers and maintainers often become two sides in a blockchain, engaging in a struggle for maintenance and upgrades in public governance.

Developers create open-source digital public goods to create more use cases for the blockchain. But where do developers get their money from? On the one hand, developers can create their own tokens (although the tokens may not necessarily be useful) to attract investors willing to take risks and grow together. Alternatively, they can receive funding from public chain foundations to provide services for specific public chains.

The former invention created the ICO mania and numerous fraudulent cases. The latter is a common occurrence where emerging public chains attract developers by distributing tokens generously, as seen with recent well-known public chains like Aptos and Sui. After all, a public chain is like a sovereign government. Without stable and usable public resources, it will not attract immigrants.

I have had conversations with friends who worked on highly successful ICO projects, such as Mask. I have also chatted with grant reviewers from different public chains, such as the Solana Foundation, Tezos Foundation, Ethereum Foundation, and others. Although their initial intentions may differ, they all play a role in funding digital public goods to some extent. Different investors with different ideologies or policies will bring extremely different prospects to the ecosystem.

Since the world of blockchain changes rapidly, and if you know and are familiar with these decision-makers, these cases of "public decision-making, public funding, public outcomes" iterating rapidly can help us think about which funding directions can benefit or destroy the ecosystem.

For example, recently, the founder of the Tezos Foundation created a website to subsidize victims of high Ethereum gas fees with small amounts of money, around 5 USD. I am extremely skeptical of this subsidy-based marketing approach, but whether it is good or not is not for me to decide. However, it is possible to infer its public outcomes quickly based on the number of users and price fluctuations.

Are there any smarter variations apart from conventional investment/grant mechanisms? The answer is yes, and they have become almost the norm in the world of blockchain.

For example, the well-known Gitcoin Grant recently launched its Beta Round. Gitcoin is probably the most successful web3 organization that applies Quadratic Funding to digital public goods. The simple concept is this: Gitcoin Grant collects a large sum of money from wealthy individuals or entities but finds that the "expert review system" cannot identify the best open-source projects. Therefore, they allow everyone to vote, and the allocation of grants is determined by the number of votes. However, everyone must use their donations to vote, with each dollar being a vote, and all votes cast must be square-rooted to prevent wealthy individuals from manipulating the voting process.

After several successful rounds of experimentation, Gitcoin recently underwent a major overhaul. They developed a new "Gitcoin Passport" that verifies social graphs to eliminate fake donations from Sybil Attcks. Due to the remarkable success of previous Grant rounds, some people have questioned Gitcoin's manipulation of Grant operations, including the review committee and marketing activities, suspecting favoritism towards certain projects, similar to clientelism from local government. In order to address these doubts, Gitcoin decided to open-source all their services and make them modular so that anyone can use Quadratic Funding to create their own Grant.

In a recent discussion with their director, Kyle, he mentioned that Gitcoin never intended to become an organization that decides who is a "real person" or who is "qualified" to receive funding. Gitcoin is the creator of the underlying mechanism for digital public goods. The system they built is always ready to be forked and used by everyone. This statement deeply moved me.

Optimism, a Layer 2 public chain service, also collaborated with Ethereum co-founder Vitalik to develop Retroactive Public Good Funding (RetroPGF). The core concept is that even experts find it difficult to predict which open-source services or protocols will have significant impact in the future. Therefore, retroactive funding is more effective than predictive grants. Predicting success is the job of risk investors because in a capitalistic society, successful predictions yield high returns. However, it is not easy for open-source communities to attract funding.

Initially, RetroPGF entrusted an expert committee to evaluate the impact of various public goods (mostly infrastructure, including education) through retrospective analysis and provide funding. Now, it is gradually transitioning to a decentralized autonomous distribution model, and its effectiveness is evident. With the goal of "attracting more users to the public chain with good services," Optimism's public experiments have produced fruitful result.

Protocol Lab, the creator of IPFS, recently launched HyperCerts through its Network Goods team. HyperCerts serve as certificates of digital influence or social impact bonds, allowing everyone to determine the influence of others, particularly applicable to public goods. Of course, different certifying authorities bring different levels of authority, but the market for digital public goods' influence, similar to the recent booming fields of the Regenerative Finance (ReFi) and carbon trading, involves trading products that abstractly yet tangibly affect the real world.

However, due to regulatory risks from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Protocol Lab has made HyperCerts semi-liquid to mitigate the risks of securitization. HyperCerts can only be traded once in the secondary market, significantly reducing the liquidity of influence.

Read more about: Hypercerts: A new primitive for public goods funding

Furthermore, the emerging public chain Canto recently introduced the concept of Contract Secured Revenue (CSR) and became EIP-6969 (Ethereum Improvement Proposal No. 6969). CSR does not refer to corporate social responsibility but rather a model for distributing fees through a contractually secured income allocation. In other words, developers who provide digital public goods receive certificates that allow them to collect tolls. Of course, developers can sell these certificates and realize profits in advance. This solution achieves a compromise between the two factions mentioned at the beginning of the article. Validators and developers can both receive rewards for providing infrastructure services, with validators ensuring the security of the public chain and developers enhancing its value.

Read more on Introducing CIP-1 Contract Secured Revenue (CSR): Tokenized Fee Sharing for Canto Builders

From ICOs and traditional grant funding to emerging methods of distributing rewards for public goods such as Gitcoin's Quadratic Funding and Passport, Optimism's RetroPGF, Protocol Lab's HyperCerts, and Canto's CSR, these attempts have emerged from the mutual influence between the open-source community and blockchain services.

With the introduction of the “Act for Promotion of Private Participation in Infrastructure Projects” (link) just revised in 2022/12 in Taiwan, entering the era of "Promoting Public Participation 2.0" (commonly known as PPP, private-public partnership, which includes Build-Operate-Transfer, or BOT), "digital infrastructure" has been included within the scope of public participation. Whether it's BOT, OT, or any other form of public-private partnership, the benefits of open-source digital public goods for society should be considered.

Moreover, the concept of compensated public participation, originally developed as the Private Finance Initiative (PFI) in the United Kingdom, has a legal basis in Taiwan, and there are now various demonstration projects and pilot cases being implemented in the physical world (such as long-term care facilities and office buildings). We may be getting closer to a world where public funds are used to develop and operate public programs and services, leading to the concept of PM/PC (Public Money/Public Code).

Read more on: What Did We Learn at “Public Money? Public Code!” Releasing Event?

In simple terms, Quadratic Funding addresses the issue of effectively allocating public funds, Retroactive Public Good Funding addresses the relationship between public goods' impact and funding incentives, HyperCerts deals with the marketization of influence, and CSR addresses the issue of users paying for public goods. These four solutions address specific aspects of the sustainability of an ecosystem.

It is not necessary to adopt web3-related tools at this stage. The adoption of web3 in everyday life is still a long way off. However, the world of web3, particularly the experiments of public chain organizations in funding public goods, is worth observing and monitoring its effectiveness from the local government at this moment.

From collection exhibition to curating by a collecting collective experiment.

It's been a year.

Before generative AI became popular, Volume DAO planned an all AI art exhibition called "Can Machines Dream of NFTs?" in March last year. (3D Exhibition Archive Website) Can you imagine that Taiwan already had a DAO that collected hundreds of AI artworks before midjourney and stable diffusion appeared?

This exhibition in the Taipei Wetlands not only features NFTs as the medium for all artworks but also all of them are the collections of DAO members. "Can Machines" showcases early works in the AI field by internationally renowned digital artists. These works were minted on the blockchain world because the artists were eager to try new media, and we in Taiwan collected them. It's truly a magical coincidence.

The significance of "Can Machines" exhibition lies in its handling of the intersection of "technology, art, and society." It covers the relationships among technology and art (early AI+NFT evolution), technology and society (blockchain decentralized community), and art and society (international production, collection, and exchange movements). These three relationships are essential.

The reason why "Can Machines" is labeled as early is that few people use GAN models in image AI nowadays. But because GAN was the mainstream tool in early 2021-2022, it brought an eerie and surreal style to the exhibition, resembling cosmic creatures on LSD, vividly colored caves, or dark and humid industrial cities. These works have become a cross-section of the technological era.

After a whole year, NFTs fell while AI rose.

For the past year, this collecting group, Volume DAO has been discussing digital art objects day and night, focusing mainly on generative art, and continuing to engage in collecting and creative work. Their aesthetics and worldview have influenced each other.

This influence is profound because continuing to spend money on collecting during the bear market is like huddling together for warmth. Different aesthetic views and mindsets have ignited the fire of creativity. The pressure on artists within the group is even greater. Collectors can close their eyes and return to the real world to work, but artists who gamble with their lives to generative art must work harder to create and manage. It has been a profound year for them.

As a result, the development of artists within the group is impressive. Some artists have successfully landed on first-class gen-art platforms, such as Artblocks, some have made great achievements in physical art exhibitions, and some have gone overseas to work and teach at universities, while others have been invited to curate exhibitions. In addition to their creative work, these members continue to review and discuss international works and collect them.

This year's brainwashing process has allowed artists and collectors to influence each other, pushing discourse, aesthetics, and techniques to the next level.

This new exhibition, "Generative Taipei On-Site: The Archipelago Hashed 2023,” elevates the collection exhibition to collecting collective curation. This exhibition not only showcases a cross-section of the era, but also demonstrates the practice of "decentralized autonomy" through the curation process, displaying algorithmic beauty in different forms.

Starting from the earliest discussion of "recursiveness," the members derived quite different discourses and split into 4 pods.

The Recursiveness section showcases the works of 14 domestic and international artists, displayed on handcraft technique (algorithm), including Fractal Trees, Subdivision, and Cellular Automata. In addition to the visual beauty, it also has a geeky educational significance.

I recently finished reading the book "Complexity" by Melanie Mitchell, which gave me a new shock regarding the interaction mode of cellular automata (non-VonNeumann architecture). The algorithms created by generative art are quite similar to the randomness of natural products in many states. Some seemingly random patterns produce regularity at a higher level. The visual experience of a mechanic world is also like this. If you click on the link on Volume DAO's website, you can also enjoy these controlled randomnesses by clicking on the original webpage of each work.

The Interpretation section showcases Miao-embroidery (苗繡), a cultural heritage, collected from the Hong-Gah Museum, reproduced digitally by digital artists Bonana King and Lin Yi-wen using algorithms. At the same time, Rev Dan Catt's YYYSEED is also displayed live with a Plotter, imagine a vertical floor-sweeping robot not sweeping the floor, but instead drawing the algorithms written by the artist on the wall. Thus, Miao-embroidery, on-site depiction, and generative art interweave into the Interpretation theme.

The Interactivity section focuses on live minting, inviting viewers to experience algorithms, blockchain linking, and hashing to fix the artwork. The final works will be bound to their own account permanently, and this section features works by Huang Hsin and Lin Yi-wen. The entire live minting solution was produced by Huang Hsin, making the artwork and the original artwork part of the curation.

Finally, there is the Theme Artists section, featuring Canadian artist Matt DesLauriers, Bruneian artist Yazid Azahari, and Aluan Wang from Taiwan.

Aluan Wang's After the Cave, as usual, has many hidden codes (a truly cryptographic artist). This time, it includes early cave mural calendars and cattle counting methods mixed with Plato's Cave Allegory, which I have yet to decipher. Matt even provides a complete Folio system, including front-end and back-end and the work itself, allowing the audience to experience the entire generation process and bring early computer systems to the exhibition site. The curation team restored the work to be almost identical to the Bright Moment exhibition site in the U.K. at the time. I can only say that being able to experience the English site in Taiwan is really cost-effective.

For other details, please visit the Hong-Gah Museum in person.

If someone asks why not just view the "online" digital works on the internet, then they must visit the exhibition in person. 

In the context of digital art, the final work and the entire system can both be part of the artwork system, and the on-site exhibition can properly dissect the system components and display their intricacies to the audience.

However, this curatorial process tests the working tacit understanding between curators and artists. One inadvertent mistake can cause systemic errors and cause the work to lose its original flavor. This exhibition does not have this problem. As mentioned earlier, the daily production and collection process of this year has created a close collaborative culture to the collective, Volume DAO, which is ultimately reflected in the exhibition.

Therefore, "Generative Taipei On-Site: The Archipelago Hashed 2023" opened today and will last for one month. From collection exhibition to curating by a collecting collective experiment. If you are curious about what kind of physical exhibition a curatorial group with a "decentralized autonomous organization" structure will create, please visit the exhibition in person!

Event Information:

Generative Taipei On-Site: The Archipelago Hashed 2023, Taipei Location: Hong-Gah Museum, Taipei, Taiwan Date: 2023/4/22-5/21 Opening Hours: Tuesday to Sunday, 10:30-17:30; Closed on Mondays. Official Website:

https://www.volumedao.xyz

(Regular guided tours, as well as weekend lectures, please visit the official website for details)

https://twitter.com/VolumeDAO

Photo Credit: Volume DAO

Written by mashbean (FAB DAO)

https://akaswap.com/akaobj/8142

“Kng” is an NFT project derived from the exhibition “Lumiere - The Enlightenment and Self-awareness of Taiwanese Culture” at the Museum of National Taipei University of Education (hereinafter referred to as MoNTUE), and is the first museum NFT project in Taiwan to integrate the concept of mass participation. In addition to Kng NFT, Kng DAO is a digital community of art run by MoNTUE with the goal of becoming a DAO (decentralized governance organization).

The main goal of this article is to discuss how cultural institutions such as art museums can use NFT (non-funglible tokens) as an extensional tempt of galleries, exhibitions, and artworks to become a new type of cultural activity. This article is a single narrative and a case study of the process from March to June 2022, starting with the conception of the project and ending with the action, including the objectives, methods and results.

NFT is a digital asset that is recognized by a relatively large number of people. It is similar to the concept of digital property that has not been widely recognized and distributed in the past, such as the issuance of virtual tokens by private companies and virtual treasures by the online game. FAB DAO (Formosa Art bank DAO) focuses on the research and practice of Non-Profit NFT, which is a "spiritual value" of culture. We use NFT as strengthening the function of cultural property transaction. This article is a case study of Kng NFT, a collaboration between MoNTUE, the curating team, and FAB DAO.

In fact, it is not a new idea for museums and galleries to exploring the feasibility of NFT, as WAC Lab (Unlocking Web3 for the Arts and Culture, a initiative for cultural and exhibition discussions on the Tezos blockchain, run by We Are Museum, eight European museums and the Tezos Foundation) published a conversation in April in 2022. In April, We Are Museum published a conversation summary entitled NFTs Aren't A Get-Rich-Quick Scheme, Here's How Museums Can Use Them In Fundraising. Here's How Museums Can Use Them In Fundraising," an article that analyzes a number of museums' "failed" distribution cases in an attempt to sanitize and demystify the cultural workforce who is in the entrance level of NFT. The article concludes that “mass participation" will be the key to the success of museums' NFT launches. I think Kng NFT is a successful and early attempt.

Perhaps it was a coincidence, or perhaps we were deeply nurtured by Taiwanese culture and justified naming our organization Formosa Art Bank. This exhibition, Lumiere, is an exploration of the dawn of the Formosan Art Era (quoted from the first chapter of the catalogue of the same name as Lumiere, entitled "The Prayer of /Water of immortalilty/ - The Dawn of thege of Formosan Art" by Ms. Yen Chuan-Ying). I am very fortunate and humbled to thank MoNTUE and the curating team of “Lumiere” for allowing us to participate in this exhibition.

Before we get into the story, let me introduce Taiwan, the museum, and the significance of this exhibition for international readers. (If you are a Taiwanese, you can skip this paragraph)

What is Taiwan?

Taiwan is an island located on the eastern coast of the Asian continent, known by the name Formosa (Portuguese for beautiful island, a name associated with Age of Discovery). There are currently 23 million people living on the island, with Chinese as the main language and a majority of Taiwanese self-identifying (94%, according to the National Chengchi University Election Research Center 2021). After being ruled by the Chinese dynasty for hundreds of years, it was ruled by Japan for fifty years from 1895-1945 A.D. and then by the government of the Republic of China (R.O.C.) after 1945 A.D. Despite being the 18th Economic Sovereign Entities in the world, it is still not recognized by most of the countries in the world. The reason for this is that the People's Republic of China (P.R.C) does not recognize two Chinas and unilaterally does not allow Taiwan to become independent. In the past few decades, Taiwan has moved from an authoritarian regime to an era of democratization, and all sectors (such as sports, politics, arts and culture) are often confronted with issues of self-identification and unification. In a nutshell, Taiwan is located on the border of power (The U.S vs. China), and even though the economy is booming, it is still an orphan in Asia. (アジアの孤児, published in 1946, is a Japanese novel by author Wu Cho-liu, describing the dilemma of Taiwanese identity at that time)

What is "Lumiere - The Enlightenment and Self-awareness of Taiwanese Culture"?

This is an exhibition from late 2021 to mid-April 2022 showcasing archival research on modern art and the Taiwan Cultural Association movement.

The year 2021 marks the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Taiwan Cultural Association(TCA). The TCA was a cultural organization founded during the Japanese Colonizarion, influenced by the 1920 petition campaign for the establishment of the Taiwan Council (an action by Taiwanese intellectuals to petition the Japanese Council, the colonial motherland, for the establishment of a colonial council). The TCA is cultural in nature and aims to contribute to the cultural development of Taiwan, with the goal of enlightening the public and enhancing culture (quoted in the article in the catalogue, by project leader Wan-Yao Chou). In the 1910s, when the world was experiencing a surge of New Thought, Taiwan was not left behind, using "cultural upward mobility" as a means to fight for basic human dignity and autonomy in a colonized society, the first cultural self-awareness in Taiwan (quoted in the catalogue's general commentary, chief planner Man-li Lin).

In 2021, various cultural organizations and institutions in Taiwan, both private and official, held exhibitions under the theme of “Taiwan Cultural Association", which can be called the year of Taiwan's self-awareness activities. What makes "Lumiere” interesting to the public is the discovery and debut of the statue of “Water of immortalilty” after half a century of silence. Because of its image of a young girl standing proudly out of a shell and the historical status of the artist Huang Tu-Shui in Taiwan's art history, the public media has called it "Taiwan's Venus". “Water of immortalilty”, created by Taiwanese artist Huang Tu-Shui in 1921 was selected for the Imperial Exhibition. In the same year, Huang Tu-Shui wrote the article "Born in Taiwan" to express his love for the land of Taiwan. In her concluding remarks, Chief Curator Mun-Lee Lin said that, exactly one hundred years later, in the prototype of the "Lumiere” exhibition in 2021, “Water of immortalilty" is the most solid and powerful work reflecting the times.

“It is human nature to love the country you were born in, and to love the land you were born on. Although it is said that art knows no national boundaries, and can be created anywhere, we all ultimately long for the land on which we were born. Our beautiful Taiwan, the Ilha Formosa, conjures even more longing.” . - Huang Tu Shui, “born in Taiwan,” 1922.

The reason why Mun-Lee Lin called it a "phantom work" is that “Water of immortalilty" disappeared from Taiwanese society for decades and was hidden in the Chang family's factory. In his speech at the opening of the exhibition, Mr. Chang Shih-Wen said, "I recall what my father once said: When the people of the land know how to respect each other, then it is time to return “Water of immortalilty" to the country. Isn't today the right time? (In the past, Taiwanese society used to refer to local people as Taiwanese and foreigners as people who immigrated from China to Taiwan in 1949, but now, after several generations, this binary classification is less common.)

In addition, the exhibition covers the period from 1881 to 1949, and features the works of several participating artists, documents, and historical research findings, including many works that are difficult to see before, as well as well-knit academic analyses of Taiwanese practices of enlightenment and modernity during the Japanese colonization.

The exhibition also features a Contemporary Revisits section, created by a team of young artists. The exhibition includes an interactive video installation led by Huang Bang-Chuan and Lin Chunni, a video display by the Cultural Association, and a documentary film of the same name entitled “Water of immortalilty,” as well as a production by the Our Theatre in the form of an imitation exhibit entitled "People Who Joined the B Club.

The Contemporary Revisits team is also the Kng NFT production team to be introduced later.

What is MoNTUE?

MoNTUE, established ten years ago, is a university art museum located under the National Taipei University of Education. In the year before "Lumiere,” the museum had already planned the exhibition “The “Everlasting Bloom, which was a phenomenon among the general public, and one of the works, “Bust of a Girl” by Huang Tu-Shui, was invited from Tai-Ping Elementary School to the museum. The exhibition showcases the spirit of the times in which this generation of artists pursued "spiritual immortality" through artistic creation over the past century (quoted from the museum's website).

At the same time, as a school established more than a century ago, the National Taipei University of Education(NTUE) nurtured the elite Taiwanese and the first generation of modern Western painters in Taiwan. During the period of the Cultural Association Movement, there were also two major waves of student activism at NTUE, during which the Taiwanese language (Taiwanese, at the time, had to be spoken in Japanese) was used as a means of resistance, and a number of students were expelled as a result, including the artist of the Lumiere exhibition. This young art museum's handling of the Cultural Association’s centennial is something that I personally would like to consider.

I think it is worth mentioning the structure of its staff at this time, which may be related to why the Kng NFT project was finalized in just one month and then actually built. The MoNTUE, which was established only ten years ago, was masterminded by Professor Lin Mun-lee, who has now retired as an honorary professor and is now the chairman of the National Culture and Arts Foundation. In the past, she served as the director of the National Palace and the director of the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, giving rise to the Taishin Art Award and the International Biennial, and so on, and as a representative of Taiwan's art and culture sector, there is no need for detailed analysis. In the middle of 2021, Wang Ruo Xuan (Rocean for short) became the new director of the museum, and the soul of the project and the smooth operation of the administrative machine are Mun-lee and Rocean (information quoted from the article in the Artouch.com - Fengjia Museum of Fine Arts and the MoNTUE initiated a vertical movement of talents, and Ye Jialong and Wang Ruo Xuan took charge of the new atmosphere of the organization). Of course, the administration team at the MoNTUE took a lot of time in this project, which is also the key to its proper operation.

Without sufficient flexibility and courage, many public/educational institutions are easily stuck in the early stages of cryptocurrency financial accounting recognition (in Taiwan, it is mainly recognized by virtual goods) when venturing into the new world we call web3, not to mention the richer and more varied attempts with NFT, which, according to personal experience, often defies the flexible and variable planning. A complete NFT project, whether commercial or non-profit, will have a large number of non-NFT activities, such as physical activities, online activities, marketing systems, community operations, etc., which requires the participation of a diverse team and invisible personnel expenses. With all the challenges, I think it is no coincidence that Kng NFT has been accomplished by MoNTUE.

Lastly, the MoNTUE is located off He-Ping East Road in Taipei, with a large beautiful floor-to-ceiling window and a subway passing by. It’s another important setor to success.

The born of the Kng NFT

With the previous introduction, let's go back to NFT itself, how was Kng NFT created? Or, based on the above basic information, how do we plan a digital asset that fits the context of “Taiwan Cultural Association and Modern Art"?

This time, the Kng NFT series is the work of artist Huang Bang-Chuan and Lin Chunni, produced by the Contemporary Revisits sub-unit of "Lumiere.

Back in early March, one month before the end of the Lumiere exhibition, we were introduced by the CEO of Taishin Art Foundation, Ms. Ya-Lee Cheng, and made a short presentation on the possibility of cultural NFTs with FAB DAO members, Hao-Ning Hsu and Wen-Chun Huang, at the MoNTUE. After reorganizing the context of the “Lumiere” exhibition, I was moved and humbled by the young advocates who were in their thirties a century ago.

The following week, the MoNTUE and the Contemporary Revisits team, Huang Bang-Chuan and Lin Chunni, began to discuss the feasibility and preliminary planning of the NFT of “Lumiere” exhibition. When discussing non-profit NFT, I usually like to start with three directions: What is the goal of the NFT project? existence to, conversation to the crowd, or to make a profit? "Existence" is the digital preservation of a vanishing object; "Dialogue" is an opportunity to create more positive mutual interaction with new collectors or old viewers; and "Profit" is the simplest concept: to obtain funds to actively implement projects that would otherwise be impossible.

From the WAC lab and my own experience, most organizations that want to use NFT for exhibitions often do so for profit, but only a few are truly successful. Success often requires detailed design and a deep understanding of the ever-changing marketplace of web3. Therefore, in the field of contemporary art, successful art NFTs are often executed in collaboration with or on behalf of web3 agents, such as Takashi Murakami, Banksy, Guo-Qiang Cai, Damien Hirst, etc. (The generative art market isn’t included here in the context of contemporary art).

From the above context, it seems that MoNTUE is quite unique in that it is a dialogue process from the very beginning, and that the NFT project is mainly an exhibition. This gave me a lot of peace of mind, because any classic artwork that is violently minted as NFT for sale would face a lot of problems, such as legitimacy (why me?) , conflict of interest (who gets the profits or losses?) The problem of ownership (who is qualified in the physical world?). Not to mention the fact that in the mass media, Water of Imortality is as sacred as the Venus of Taiwan, and if the process is not done right, there will be a public relations crisis.

Museums and galleries often translate classic IP, and the NFT world is no exception. For example, the collaboration between the National Palace and Lootex is a combination of the creator of the online popular artwork and the classic collection (e.g. Travelers amid Streams and Mountains) for sale on the shelves; in the UK, there is a pop-up store between the British Museum and Katsushika Hokusai as a case study; if the artist is commissioned to recreate the work, I call it an artwork model. The Kng Project at this time is the example. We commision young artist to re-create to exhibition as a NFT. It’s totally different concept compared to the precious model. Although the two processes are the same, the target audience, the expected benefits and the feeling of ownership are completely different.

The idea of Kng NFT originated from the artist Huang Bang-Chuan and Lin Chunni’s first idea for the exhibition “Lumiere”, Die Wege (from the left-wing poet Wang Baiyuan's poem "The Way of the Thorn"), when even the Water of Immortality had not yet been rediscovered. Die Wege first wanted to create a path of light by tracking each viewer's movements with the technique of trajectory location and photogrammetry. In 2019, artist Huang Bang-Chuan used photogrammetry to make the documentary Last Year When the Train Passed by, which won the first prize in the Experimental Competition at the Clermont-Ferrand Short Film Festival in France and the Million First Prize and Best Short Film Award at the Taipei Film Festival.

As a result of the appearance of Water of Immortality , Director Huang Bang-Chuan and Lin Chunni focused their production on the documentary of the same name and the Contemporary Revisits of The Way of the Thorn (quoted from the conversation between the two directors at the Kng DAO and FAB DAO online seminar). In addition, director Huang Bang-Chuan and Lin Chunni and the MoNTUE have a long history of collaboration and trust, having worked together since the days of immortal youth. At the end of the exhibition, Director Huang Bang-Chuan and Lin Chunni reintroduced photogrammetry as the backbone of the Kng project. Several rounds of tests were conducted to verify that the technique was feasible and that the spirit of the project was compatible with “Lumiere” exhibition.

In the past, photogrammetry was often used in forensic science, archaeology, meteorology, and other disciplines to reconstruct objects into three-dimensional objects by using multiple flat photographs. This time, the directors are using photogrammetry to recreate the “Lumiere” exhibition as a Point Cloud, which is also presented in the exhibition Water of Immortality . However, the three-dimensional point cloud file on the shelf is the only way to present the spirit of "Light" in its entirety. Similar creative methods have been used by Taiwanese artists Hung Yu Hao, Aluan Wang, and Jerrythepopper (Hung Yu Hao's work was acquired by Kevin Abosch for a high price only the months before). For example, Artogo has also used technology to scan exhibitions to reproduce the business model in the digital world.

What makes Kng NFT special is that this NFT is assembled through the gaze of the crowd and the photos taken by the participants' smart phones. This is the core feature of Kng NFT.

According to Huang Bang-Chuan, the 16mm film used in the Water of Immortality documentary is a kind of light sculpture, a subtraction. "The sculpting of light through the lens into the film's light-sensitive layer is also a subtractive technique. If the film used in the documentary "Water of Immortality " is a carved marble, then the reconstruction of the exhibition site through photogrammetric techniques and photographs taken by the public is more like a clay sculpture. （Kng NFT's creation is a kind of addition, reshaping the exhibition through the co-creation of multiple centers.

The creating process of the Kng NFT is a carefully planned After Party and workshop. On the day after the end of the exhibition, a 24-hour event was held at the MoNTUE, with workshops held in three-hour increments for eight sessions, resulting in 24 NFT works.

Participants could view the exhibition at midnight or at the dawn of the day, moments they would not normally see. At different moments, the light will appear differently on the exhibits, especially for the sculptures. As you can see in the catalogue summary, Mun-Lee Lin emphasizes the placement of "Water of Immortality " in the natural light exhibition space, in response to the artist Huang Tu-Shui 's initial production in natural light.

To quote the MoNTUE fan article, "On the closing day of the exhibition, the MoNTUE will hold a 24-hour co-creation workshop, inviting you to enter the museum at a time when you can hardly see it, and record the natural appearance of light and shadow that falls on the exhibition site at different times.

In addition, Kng NFT has a number of delicate production processes. The English name of the exhibition "Light" is Lumiere, and the name "Light" NFT is "Kng", which is derived from the Taiwanese for light. The Taiwanese language was considered the mainstay of the cultural movement in the 1920s, and many students were expelled for using Taiwanese in their speeches during the Student Movement. In addition, each NFT is named by the poet Tsai Wanxuan, such as Kng #02 Light the Lamp - the intersection of the new era of the queue, Kng #14 Frozen Dew Water - the Cultural Weed Fellowship, and Kng #17 Daylight in the Sky, all of which are symbolic elements in response to the exhibition and the Cultural Association.

Each NFT is accompanied by a vocal-free recording of the audience's voices by music/sound creators Yujun Wang and Zhen Zhou, capturing the emotions rising from the audience's hearts towards the “Lumiere” exhibition (quoted from MoNTUE fan article). These sounds were recorded in the background of the workshop and a recording device placed in the corner of the exhibition, allowing the audience to listen to the background sounds and hum along with their hearts. Afterwards, some participants said that they seemed to hear the sound of waves in NFT, and the artist Zhou Zhen said that it was the sound of the MRT passing by in the morning.

The final video post-production was made by Wu Kejun and Jiang Phish, and Kejun is also the digital video producer of the second floor exhibition The Path of Thorns. Basically, the whole contemporary reverberation team is back to work on Kng NFT. With the rhythm of proposal in mid-March, workshop in mid-April, and airdrop in May, it's really a tight schedule.

These NFTs cannot be collected through direct purchase. There are two types of Proof of Love that must be obtained. The first is to participate in the workshop, to take part in the final exhibition and filming, and to receive NFTs for the session in which you participate, for a total of 400 people; the second is to purchase the catalogue of the “Lumiere” exhibition, which sold out in a few days after it was released. Those who collected the catalogs were given a free random airdrop from Kng NFT.

With this premise, we can precisely grasp the most engaged group, which is beneficial for the subsequent community management and development. The cost of a catalogue is over NT$1,000, and the late-night workshop is a great way to filter out passionate fans who are willing to sacrifice their sleep to participate. The workshop ended successfully before the number of confirmed cases of the epidemic increased exponentially.

There were also two workshops that were particularly interesting.

The first one was a test workshop before the official 24-hour workshop to verify the feasibility of the photogrammetry method in practice. Since Kng NFT was published on the Tezos blockchain, nearly 40 collectors and art lovers on the Tezos blockchain were called to participate. They did not know what they would actually be participating in until they actually arrived at the event. The Tezos collector community was called because they were already familiar with NFT ownership and trading, and there was already a tight-knit community of over 1,000 people in Taiwan. It was very touching to see how many people could come on a weekday afternoon with only a three-day early call. And the test workshop became the No.0 work "Kng-huà-oo". These friends also became the early helpers in building the Kng DAO community in the future.

The second session was the first session of the 24-hour workshop, a special session for the artist's descendants. If you look closely at "Kng#01 Light up - Queuing the Noodle Stall in the Dark", "Kng#02 Light up - Queuing the Intersection of New Age" and "Kng#03 Light up - Queuing the Boat on the Black Sea", you will find that these are the only NFTs with human figures in them, who are the descendants of the artists in the exhibition and the exhibition research team. They include Chen Cheng-po’s granddaughter, Li Mei-shu’s son, Tân Si̍t-kî grandson and great-grandson, Chen Qing-fen’s son, Pu Tian-sheng's son, Lu Yunlin's son, Ran-In Ting’s daughter-in-law and grandson, and the Zhang family, who preserved the Water of Immortality. They also happen to be in front of the self-portrait exhibit, which was painted by their fathers and grandfathers and is now a treasure of the world. "These people, who usually make great efforts to preserve the artists' works, let us preserve their figures and voices this time. We hope that you, too, can feel the long moment in the boundless river of time. （If you are familiar with the history of the preservation and discovery of Water of Immortality , and if you re-read Chang's speech at the opening ceremony, you will be warmed by such a careful design of NFT.

https://akaswap.com/akaobj/8142

In addition to the Kng NFT body, there are some peripheral NFTs in this whole operation, such as the Hao Bang (Good Clam) and Galaxy Match series, both of which are air-dropping mediums.

https://akaswap.com/akaobj/6658

https://akaswap.com/akaobj/7815

One hundred years ago, the first aviator in Taiwan, Hsieh Wen-Ta, airdropped a petition for the Taiwan Parliament Movement over Tokyo.

The initial idea of a Good Clam was actually a consideration of experience design. We wanted people who had the catalog to get immediate feedback when they finished the airdrop application process. However, Kng NFT had to wait until the workshop and post-production were completed to get it, and the catalogue was available for sale much earlier than the workshop, hence the birth of Good Clam. The Good Clam is taken from the marble mussel shell at the foot of "Water of Immortality ", Huang Tu-Shui’s mussel shell is spitting water, and the Good Clam is a 3D interactive NFT, when you click on it, it will reluctantly open, but only when the time is up will it open fully and let you see what it looks like inside.

When you hold the clamshell, the address will receive the real Kng NFT when the time comes, so the clamshell becomes the exchange ticket, and the exchange ticket can be circulated in the market, if the ancient coins like shells in the past.

The Galaxy matches are souvenirs of the Kng DAO Discord event, the name of which is taken from the Galaxy Bar. The two directors also made a short film on the subject, "Before the Dawn", which is now used as a meme for the community to create a new type of lecture/salon.

The Kng DAO

The Kng NFT project has attracted an active audience thanks to the aforementioned community-oriented design, which has made the Kng DAO Discord run smoothly from the beginning, with the Kng DAO structure being run by MoNTUE, with two directors as the sub-channel Galaxy Bar hosts, holding regular events and dialogues with the audience. The entire Discord attracted about 700 people in the first month of its existence, and the first opening of the Galaxy Bar with 100 attendees was astonishing. Although the scale of the project was not large compared to commercial NFT projects, it was a good result for an arts and cultural event, a non-profit NFT operation.

In retrospect, the "dialogue" that we set out to achieve must have been achieved.

Kng NFT has a redemption rate of about 60%, which is beyond my imagination in terms of picture redemption. Compared to the AiSMR NFT exchange rate of A-Mei's concert, it is about the same. This may be the limit for the traditional world to enter the web3 community.

As for the future of Kng DAO, let's look forward to where MoNTUE will lead us.

Discussion

I have written a long paragraph above in order to describe the details as much as I can, and I think it may be a little exemplary for subsequent NFT releases by arts and culture organizations, or at least a little precedent to follow. Of course, it is easy to be one-sided or subjective, but I still think that Kng NFT is a relevant, quality and moving NFT project. Please feel free to correct me if there is anything wrong.

Conceptually, it is a variation of POAP, which stands for Proof of Attendence Protocol, a way to prove that you have participated in an event and receive a badge, the best known overseas example being POAP.xyz. Kng NFT is designed to be more genuine than POAP in that the collector's actual participation becomes part of the artwork itself (you can see it on the website). The actual participation of the collector becomes part of the work itself (you can see the name of each participant in the floating box, which is one of the photos they took). This presence, like a converging snake, is connected at the beginning and end, and you must participate in order to claim it, and by claiming it, you become a small part of the activity you have participated in, a part of the consensus, and even your voice. A simple analogy is that when you were a child, you would stamp your name in different areas of the museum; nowadays, the museum uses new media and technology to make the proof of participation more permanent, and the participant also casts the moment of the exhibition into eternity, and it is officially issued with a certificate.

In terms of presentation, this is an interactive, three-dimensional point cloud with sound. It is a time-based work, and must be rotated, zoomed, and panned by the viewer's hand to reveal the three-dimensional composition of the particles, otherwise it is merely flat from a visual perspective.

In the sense of the times, this is a record of the exhibition, but from the viewer's point of view, this is the first time that "Water of Immortality " has been reintroduced to the public, and it is also a collection of works of enlightenment from the era of the Cultural Council Movement. If you click on different Kng NFTs, you will find that the starting point is a different perspective, which is from the viewer's point of view, different from the traditional global view of Kng NFT. It is a collection of vital gaze.

Such a detailed NFT operation is not something that can be done by an agent, and it can only be accomplished through the collaboration and communication between the official museum, the curatorial production team, and those familiar with NFT (in this case, FAB DAO). I still find it a great challenge to complete the NFT project with limited funds and time.

I am an optimist, and I think there are still very many possibilities for NFT, and there is still a lot of room to explore in the field of art and literature, it could be a ticket, it could be a shareholding, it could be a work itself, it could be an unofficial mindmaking vehicle. At the same time, I also think that new forms of web3 services have great potential for community and social progress, especially digital tools that apply radical market theories. Thanks to MoNTUE and the production team of “Lumiere” exhibition Contemporary Revisits Team, I was able to participate in the project and explore the NFT project from scratch in just a few months, which fits so well with the exhibition.

I hope that Formosa Art Bank will slowly take off and explore more new ideas and implement them at the beginning of the web3 era, just like its predecessors did 100 years ago.

This article is dedicated to the MoNTUE team and the two directors.

(The picture is a four-sided screenshot of NFT's "Kng#01 Light the Lamp - The Noodle Stall in the Queue")

Written by mashbean (FAB DAO, Formosa Art Bank)

Taiwanese artist Aluan Wang (also known as Ileivoivm) recently presented the third and final chapter of the Chaos series, Chaos Culture, at Art Basel Hong Kong. Chaos Culture is a collection of vibrant colors and diverse shapes housed in a circular frame that looks like a petri dish. The collection is available to collectors who visit Hong Kong for free.

Aluan, an artist who rarely talks about his work, reveals many hints, and “Culture" is like a treasure map that attracts collectors to unlock the codes of the Chaos series. Chaos Culture is described as follows: “Research > Memory > Culture, with each work re-growing through the remnants of the previous work, depending on its image.“ This is an appropriate opportunity to explore, as a collector, the unspoken secrets of Aluan Wang.

After all, this is the era of crypto art, and crypto art itself is not only "a digital art market through the medium of non-fungible tokens", but also "the encrypted art" is an important issue. As the concept of “Controlled randomness" is gradually accepted by collectors, the collection of generative art generated by codes and specific hash has become a mainstream branch in the field of crypto art in these two years (another trend is the Profile Picture, PFP, market).

Generative art is generated from code, which is suitable for encryption and decryption. Encrypted art, therefore, creates reflexivity in the crypto art market. Just as Kevin Abosch's cryptographic alphabets of the past few years have been a bold and colorful compilation of ciphers, presenting a riddled political and social agenda, so does Aluan Wang's work suggests various secrets through unusual curves, signals, and sounds.

The following perspective is the result of correspondence with Aluan Wang and self-research. To sum up, Aluan’s code is like an encrypted version of “The Travels of Marco Polo”. I have been collecting encrypted art personally for almost a year, and have spent the last six months engrossed in the process of generating art collections, not being a programming professional by nature. Many of the secrets of Aluan Wang are still to be discovered by more professional collectors.

Let's start with Good Vibrations (GV), which was published in Artblocks last year because I always feel that the frame of Chaos Culture is derived from GV.

"Everything in Life is Vibration" - Albert Einstein

Last August, Pristante, a PhD-researcher in surrealism, wrote on a Twitter thread that GV and Wang Aluan could be "the next big thing". He believes that Wang's work combines early twentieth-century Western geometric abstraction with Eastern socio-political realities through the sound and vision created by generative art. This may be the first article to discuss Wang's "crypto-creations" in English.

Indeed, Aluan Wang later produced the second act of GV, where he airdropped the B-sides of GV to all GV owners. Each B-side corresponds to the sound and visual logic behind the GV and can be considered as a musical sheet or a recipe. Aluan Wang has said that all his works are three-act plays, and such a concept can be verified by his works during his Audiovisual Artist period, such as Transonic (2012) and Moving Resonance (2011). If the B-side is the second act, then the future final act may continue to derive from the information implied by the B-side.

But the next big thing, as Pristante calls it, didn't come then. Today, nine months later, I think the Chaos series is more suitable as the next big thing, a complete three-act play that crosses the pulse of crypto art, the history of personal works, and the technical development of generative art in NFT. Before that, let's go through the history of encryption and decryption of Aluan’s artwork.

"Algorithms are used to remodel history and point cloud to subvert conventional thinking.” - Aluan Wang

When interviewed in the past, Aluan once said, "Algorithms are used to remodel history and point cloud to subvert conventional thinking.” These words may be the core spirit of Wang's creative process. Even the address of Aluan Wang's published address, Ileivoivm.tez, is encrypted from Aluan Wang's characters. The name, which looks like random code, is encrypted by the Enigma machine.

Prior to the release of GV, Wang had already published many works on the Tezos blockchain about encryption and social intention, the most famous of which is GeoPunk, which was exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MoCA) in Taiwan a few months ago.

GeoPunk is an extra part of the three-act play Path to the Past, Future & End. For more information on the Path series, please refer to Exploring the Space-Time Borders of Flowing Memory: An Interview with Aluan Wang on His View of Otherworldly Spaces( P.Y. Chen 2019, Chinese Article), where you can learn more about Wang's pre-NFT period works and philosophy. The Path series is also a series of Wang's early NFT works, published on the HicEtNunc.

GeoPunk is a series of encrypted digital landscapes, whose sounds and descriptions are Morse code, whose contents point to specific world GPS locations, and whose contents can only be decoded by the NFT owner. But if you open the code behind GeoPunk in another way, from the data stored in the IPFS system, you can see 159 address IDs, including China, Taiwan, USA, UK, Canada, and so on. If you are interested, you can search on the map on Google and you may see some hints of geopolitical and religious-related information from Wang.

In an interview for the Paths series, Wang said that Atlas des géographes dʼOrbæ was an important book for him and had a profound impact on his work.

I myself love the three books of geography (yes, it is also a kind of three-act play) and have read them since I was a child. This book transforms 26 letters of the alphabet into 26 maps and 26 fictional stories about foreign countries. Wang's works also conceal many fictional contexts.

Therefore, we can find that before the Chaos series, Aluan put a lot of effort into encryption and decryption as a form of creation. In the Chinese world, Chao means the same as A-Luan's Luan (亂), so it is likely that this work is a career masterpiece in terms of naming. Chaos contains the encryption of artistic development, the encryption of Aluan's personal experience, and the encryption of images and meanings.

The Chaos series is a three-act play composed of Chaos Research, Chaos Memory, and Chaos Culture, all of which are generative artworks. The three works were released in December 2021, April 2022, and May 2022. The series is published on fxhash, an up-and-coming generative art platform on the Tezos blockchain, and Chaos Series happens to be in sync with the history of fxhash. Chaos Research was released less than a month after fxhash was founded, while Chaos Culture was released when fxhash was already collaborating with Art Basel, featuring eight outstanding artists in a special section. One of which was Chaos Culture by Aluan Wang.

These three works represent the epitome of the artist's history, starting with Chaos Research. Chaos Research is actually a rebellion against Perlin Noise, according to Aluan. Perlin Noise is a noise-generating algorithm that is often used in generative artworks to create relatively complex visual forms by stacking seemingly randomly generated shapes, such as the well-known Artblocks work Fidenza.(For more information if Perlin noise and Flow Fields, recommend reading the article by Fidenza artist Tyler Hobbs)

Chaos Research's code not only uses Perlin Noise to generate a flow field to fill the frame but also adds a unique method of adding Wang's private NFT collection to the Perlin noise base. How did this work?

We can find publicly hosted IPFS files from Chaos Research's code, where we can discover the morphed versions of the Aluan’s personal NFT collection. These works serve as the reference for Chaos Research's dynamics, particles, colors, and shapes. In retrospect, Chaos Research can be said to be the evolution of Aluan’s collection. Perhaps due to my inability to do so, I am unable to recover which artist's work Chaos Research was derived from.

Theoretically, using Fourier analysis, any sound and music can be resolved into the purest sine wave. If we look at the cryptographic art, sampling and extraction are essentially similar to encryption and decryption. "Sampling" deconstructs the original object into a new work. Everything has a vibe. All sensory experiences are made of signals. There are many reasons why humans need unrecognizable objects, including political purpose, social purpose, and financial purpose.

Thus Chaos Research, as a generative artwork, suggests a challenge to the mainstream noise method (there is not just one way to make a flow field), suggests how the message is transmitted (a creator cannot be independent of other artists' creations) and suggests the way of seeing it (only those with the ability can crawl behind the hidden message). Chaos Research is a natural fit in a crypto art where permissionless and trustless is the essence.

Chaos Research is a "self-sampling" and a "self-encryption". Who is Aluan himself? It might be a personal collection of crypto art, which eventually becomes a personal creation of crypto art, presenting a new type of chaos.

Four months later, Aluan released his second work, called Chaos Memory, which is saturated with more colors and shapes and has more intriguing secrets.

First of all, the description appears as an erroneously encrypted ILEIVOIVM, with the words "The cause comes before the effect. That's just the way we saw the time." That's all. There are no instructions on how to operate or view it, and you can only see more changes by clicking on it accidentally. If the Q, W, E, and R buttons are pressed when opening a view page, Memory will appear in different frames, including rectangles, squares, and circles. In response to this collector's discovery, Aluan said that a single scale and perspective cannot fully represent a Memory's appearance and that the complete picture cannot be covered by thumbnails.

In addition, if you dig deeper and find the files hosted on IPFS, you will find a bunch of bitmaps, and the files look like Chaos Research. So this is the second sampling and compression process. Chaos Memory is a derivative work of Research. In the Chinese world, generative art is also known as derivative art, and Chaos' work may be an attempt to deal with this translation-generated pun.

And what are these bitmap files? When I asked Chao about them, I found out that they are artworks created by 19th-century English Romanticism landscape painter William Turner.

As a graduate of Arts and Crafts School, Wang first wanted to become a watercolor artist, and Turner was the object of his lifelong pursuit. Later on, he moved towards the creation of digital art, audio-visual art, and generative art. In the photo, you can see a watercolor sketch of Aluan at a seminar on open source tools in Zurich. Watercolor has a place in Wang's aesthetic development, including the treatment of textures, textures, and materials. A softer gradation can be observed in Chaos Memory, which may originate from the translucent clouds, light, and waves of Turner.

If Research is the encryption and sampling of "self-collection", then Memory is the encryption and sampling of "self-cultivation". The former is an oriental style of an impressionistic form, while the latter is closer to the West. The two are in an iterative relationship.

The last work to be presented at Art Basel, Chaos Culture, also reveals a secret from the IPFS file. Once again, Culture takes the contents of Research and Memory and produces a circular work with a higher degree of completeness. Research generates memory, and memory generates culture. Chaos Culture is like waiting for an uncontrollable chance outside of the "controlled randomness" to create an unpredictable result unique to generative art. Culture is like a contour map, an overhead satellite map, which may be a reference to Atlas des géographes dʼOrbæ and Aluan's landscape creation, or a new kind of Flow Field, full of life traces, from the pre-crypto-art era to this new era.

But to sum up, it is the process of sampling and decryption that gave birth to Wang's amazing three-act play.

Aluan always emphasizes that all creative processes cannot be far from the direction of faith and that a great director will spend his whole life just talking about one thing. For me, Aluan's exploration of symbols and ciphers has become a very suitable creative medium because of the emergence of crypto art, which includes a discussion of socio-political, personal experiences, and collecting tastes. This could be a very good opportunity to discuss the reflexivity of crypto art. I have probably deciphered less than half of the secrets of the Chaos series so far.

In addition to his creative work, Aluan also runs the Asian Tezos NFT platform AkaSwap, which is currently developing a market with different aesthetic styles from Europe and America. It's a very special and necessary thing for the Tezos art world. Thanks to AkaSwap, there are now Tezos-based DAOs in Taiwan, such as FAB DAO (Formosa Art Bank) and Volume DAO, among others.

The web3 world is decentralized/polycentric and can produce a diversity of attempts. Aluan was born on a politically turbulent island, Taiwan, akin to the T of Atlas des géographes dʼOrbæ with an extra chapter. His past crypto art such as GeoPunk and current generative art such as the Chaos series reflect an implicit declaration of smuggling. It just so happens that crypto art is the most suitable stage for Aluan to play.

Crypto art or generative art community is iterating its own taste. This is a market that mixes western aesthetics, eastern imagination, meme, free and open-mindedness, and rebellion. And it is difficult to apply the established context of contemporary art to it for the time being.

In the case of Aluan, this obscure principle of encryption and sampling needs to be understood from the production technology (what is blockchain, what is decentralized hosting, what is Perlin Flow Field). After peeling off the concept, we can finally find the core of the artist's creation. I believe that Kevin Abosch, the pioneer of crypto-art, will understand the romance of this.

Aluan’s Chaos three-act play has come to an end, so let's continue to look forward to the next three-act play by him, perhaps it will also relate to the nature of crypto art.

(End)

This article is dedicated to Aluan.

The original article is written in Chinese 《混沌三幕劇 — 解碼阿亂的加密、取樣、演算謎團》