At the same time, this thing of ours called cryptoart is in labor, trying to give birth to itself, again.

Or maybe, as I think the case may be, cryptoart was already born more fully into life.

Whereas cryptoart previously felt like a cohesive movement where everyone pretty much knew everyone else, this current phase, because it’s so much more than it ever was, feels fractured and fragmented. As if our whole world exploded out from under us.

That’s where Clods come in.

I can’t think of a better symbol for what cryptoart was, is, and - most importantly - will be, than Fabiano’s universe of Clods. It’s almost as if Fabiano saw the post-Eden future of cryptoart from within the early garden of cryptoart, and reflected it early and often in every one of the 400+ Clods he’s minted since September 16, 2018.

Clods

Like cryptoart, each unique floating Clod fragment was originally part of a single world. At some point that world exploded. The lives of its inhabitants all splintered off into space atop Clods - literal clumps of the old world - each with unique, random trajectories floating off into the cosmos. No longer a single community; all simply adrift. All alone.

Some clods are home to veritable cities. Others hold single occupants. Thriving clods exist, while others are barren, their inhabitants either long gone or never existed. Regardless, a profound sense of sadness saturates each and every Clod - a permanent reminder of what once was, and perhaps can be again. Perhaps.

Cryptoart

Like Clods, cryptoart changed always and forever when the tight-knit Eden-esque world of digital art exploded (in popularity, attention, and a massive influx of crypto capital) around the end of 2020. This monumental period of explosive growth created a constellation of self-sovereign artists and collectors that collectively comprise an emergent digital universe of space art. Each artist their own marketplace, inhabiting separate artful worlds.

There is no going back to what once was, because what was is simply no more.

Out of that single originating reality, now just a faint dream a lucky few remember, a wide range of realities have emerged that each contains an infinity of future potential and opportunity.

Cryptoart is now in the permanent collections of LACMA, The Guggenheim, MoMA, The Whitney, and the Centre de Pompidou to name a few.

Immutable rockstars like XCOPY, Pak, and Refik Anadol have attracted tens of thousands of passionate collectors who’ve injected hundreds of millions of dollars into the orbits of these artists.

Punk artists like Max Osiris, Miss Al Simpson, Norrie Harman, and Robness float on, make art, and give no fucks.

Pinder Van Arman and Matt Kane are pioneering art on and uniquely enabled by blockchains like Ethereum.

The American absurdist artist die with the most likes creates art and experiences that bridge the irl-url divide capturing the entirety of the American experience - the good, bad, and bizarre.

Fine artists like Skygolpe and Thankyoux curate their artistic worlds better than a well-manicured bonsai forest tended by the Buddha himself.

Video artists like Sarah Zucker mint dank digital art viewed billions of times.

Worlds created by artists like Alotta Money float on despite their originators passing on, ascending to the heavens beyond.

The artful worlds inhabited by Helena Sarin aka Neural Bricolage, Coldie, Hackatao, Emily Xie. Alimo, Bryan Brinkman - each indescribably unique and special - to name just a small handful of the enormous ocean of artists, to say nothing of the platforms and tool builders like SuperRare, Transient Labs, Manifold, Nifty Gateway, AsyncArt, KnownOrgin, Hic Et Nunc, Opensea and others are simply too numerous to list in one place now.

To be sure though, a ton of plots previously inhabited by grifters exist, leaving behind collectors holding bags of questionable art.

Many, many more artists & collectors float on in between. Their fates and fortunes TBD.

The opportunity for more to join and create artful worlds the size and scale of modern cities or single-occupant tents is literally just a couple of clicks away. We’re in the early years of this new universe of space art.

So, to wrap things up, Cryptoart lost everything that it once had. This cannot be denied. And yet, everything has been gained. That is the tragic beauty of profound change that Fabiano Speziari’s Clods & Cryptoart both serve to remind us of.

Cover image: “Lost Clod 049 - Multiverse #5” by Fabiano Speziari

Other images featured:

• Lost Clod 343 [2022]

• In the Clod 070 [2022]

• Clod 843 [2020]

• Clod 735 [2020]

• Traveling through the Clods #1 [2024]

• Clod 553 [2023]

• Lost Clod 404 [2022]

• Clod 365 - The Motel [2021]

• Small Clod PC662 [2021]

• Clod 130 - a place for lazy minds [2021]

• Small Clod PC704 [2021]

• Clod 318 - UncleSeize Rememed [2023]

• Our Life Is A Loop [2018]

Why do I love digital art?

Maybe it's because it does so much with so little. I mean little literally here as in the single little files that digital art comes in allowing for internet-scale impact.

When combined with blockchain tokenization the little digital art files become universally ownable and verifiable, forever.

Pure incorruptible culture available to the whole world in a single click. That's a bright future.

At least that's the future I've seen illuminated by the bright moments that've erupted and been collected onchain by other seers of the digital future including, fortunately, yours truly.

Out of all the places I've collected digital art, I find myself returning to my personal Tezos collection again and again. To me it's the single best example of the bright moments I’ve managed to collect onchain.

While great digital art collections from afar may appear more furnace-like ablaze with fire art, up close they tend to resemble the growth and change of a well tended bonsai tree. That’s how I’ve come to think of my collection of art on Tezos.

Every artist is like a branch, of which over 100 exist in my Tezos collection at this point. Each branch has its own fantastic shape that's a function of specific collector decisions of what to collect.

I pour over this collection more often than any other. There a many reasons why. But every artist in my collection is unique and special to me. Some are incredibly well known, while many others are not, at least not yet.

While I wish I could have easily captured the liveness of many of the moving works, the following list of 20 artists captures the spirit of what’s led me to go deep collecting these artists. So please, when your eye gets caught, click through to the artist's complete works on Tezos, peruse, and with any luck you'll find a work or ten to collect.

1. Neural Bricolage aka Helena Sarin

Helena's art is ethereal. It's otherworldly yet human, and always - always - distinctly Helena. When I first came across Helena's art on SuperRare I never had a chance to collect. When HEN launched early 2021 and I saw Helena releasing editioned work there I jumped in and have been adding more works of hers (including prints) to my collection since.

2. CyberMysticGarden aka Marcelo Pinel

Marcelo creates art depicting ancient futures. Their works are rich with ancient symbols presented within a psychedelic set, looping infinitely, awaiting their next viewer. It's hard to overstate how amazingly intricate and detailed Marcelo's creations are, but if you are unaware of Marcelo's process it's easy to simply get lost in the spell binding visuals, so please make sure to watch this process video by Marcelo.

3. Richard F. Yates

Richard is an American artist based in the Pacific Northwest who has been creating found art for decades. Most of their work is created physically by hand on top of found materials like cardboard that are then digitally transferred and manipulated until they are finished. Intentionally de-skilled his works are like potent bursts of dankness highlighting primitive emotions and fragmentary episodes taken from everyday life.

4. Joji

I came across this artist when a fellow collector shared them. For as long as I can remember I've been a fan of architectural / interior design renders. Joji's art is that, just very dank.

5. Ben Clarkson

There's nothing more badass than a talented artist with a fuck you attitude. When I first came across Ben's work (a frog smoking a joint titled "Frog Smoking") on the Twitter timeline back in 2021 I raced to HEN to collect. I was devastated to see that someone else collected it already, but I was introduced to an array of dank very limited to super rare work by Ben. He created one of my all-time favorite works called "Tubes."

6. Renato Marini

When I think of surrealist video art that stops me in my tracks, two artists come to mind: Joe Pease and Renato Marino. Joe's artworks are Melvillian in their symbolic density whereas Renato's creations are hypnotically simple poetic vignettes.

7. figmentz

"The pixels are alive." Every time I encounter a work of pixel art by figmentz I am always struck by how alive and energetic the pixels look and feel; a sharp contrast to the dead, dull, small, and static associations most folks who even think of pixels may have. The interconnections and digital energy conveyed by the pulsating infinitely looping pixels reminds me of the energy behind all of our interconnected digital experiences with one another.

8. don't Buy

I've always appreciated the process that artists - not all, but many - go through on their way to finding their signature style. One common element that's stuck out to me admiring this artistic journey is that, no matter how divergent works separated by time, experimentation, and refinement may seem, often there is a thread common across most of their body of work. When it comes to the ai artist don't buy, their use of sky blue immediately stuck out to me across their minted works leading up to their most recent computer window x cursor x blue screen creations that imho feels like a signature style, and I wanted to collect works that while stylistically all different, help show that progression and change with that constant through line.

9. luluxxx

Lulu creates sexy, seductive, and often playful looping gifs that are just pure...dankness.

10. Max Capacity

The era of tube TVs was full of glitchy interference. Max's art reprises that "bug" of a bygone era, injects it with dank color distortion, and makes art that punches you in the face.

11. David Koblesky

Early cryptoart is full of digital art that applied stock glitch filters. No comment on the merits or demerits of artists that used and may still use that approach, but I've always been a fan of hand crafted work. As soon as I first came across the Chicago-based artist David Koblesky's work on the old Cent, my first thought was, "Omg this is artisanal glitch work," so naturally I cold DM'd David to jump on a call to confirm and share his process. All of the work I've collected highlights his approach to hand crafted glitch work.

12. Elbi

Video art. Vibey aesthetic. Glitched out. Dankness. Sometimes that's all it takes.

13. mek.txt aka Michale Micasso

Mek.txt and their art perfectly embody the "doing a lot with a little" ethos of digital art. They typically create works of pixel art depicting poignant and emotive scenes using 1~2 colors max. Excitement around the metaverse and virtual worlds has cooled significantly, but many of mek.txt's works look and feel how I imagine being physically inside the internet would.

14. Dacosta Works

I have no idea what is going on in Dacosta Works artworks or what inspired them, but that doesn't matter. They look dank, and that's enough for me.

15. ???

No, ??? is not the name of this artist. I'm still trying to identify their socials to tag them accurately, but that doesn't change anything about the art. The color popping illustrations gave me Jenisu vibes when I first saw them.

16. diewiththemostlikes

This is one of the unknown artists I mentioned above. Terrible joke, a thousand apologies. But I digress. There may be no more important American artist alive today than diewiththemostlikes. Full stop. The prolific Indiana-based artist may have minted their first digital artwork on Ethereum mainnet in early 2021, but their seminal style - the baggy eyed silhouettes, skin melting down to the ground - along with the bulk of their early work including the iconic Consume Your Adoration series all happened on HEN. Before VVD hoovered up most of the listed work I managed to collect some iconic limited editions (including TWO editions of "fuck your energy") and a (free)based 1/1 from the Consume Your Adoration series.

17. Obxium

Obxium has minted or inscribed their artwork on basically every chain that supports it. They also give zero fucks. I will collect everything they mint, so I always have to restrain mayself. But if tokenized sarcasm lathered in dankness is your thing, you'll dig Obxium.

18. Pop Wonder

Tezos is basically a sandbox for tokenized experimentation. A lot of artists that started minting in a particular style on Ethereum mainnet came to Tezos to mint in a new style using the digital distance of a new blockchain to distinguish their art on Tezos from their other work. Pop Wonder is a great example of this. His Tezos mints are almost unidentifiable from his mainnet mints featuring his iconic Poplins - almost. The same restraint he practices in terms of using a limited color palette for mainnet mints is woven through all of his Tezos mints as well.

19. hAyDiRoKeT

PLEASE click through to Objkt to see these hAyDiRoKeT works in their full animated glory. They are out of this world. Hallucinating hallucinations with 16 bit video game vibes.

20. Yuri_jjj

I came across Yuri_jjj thanks to the stellar curation that Fakewhale has been engaged in with their Fakewhale Gallery on Objkt. What struck me most about Yuri_jjj's work, outside of the dank still-life they capture in their art, was the textured veneer that coats many of the objects in his work. That veneer reminds me of the Korean handicraft of 나전칠기 where shells from abalones, for example, are combined with black lacquer and applied to the surfaces of furniture. It's a very particular style that I never would have expected to encounter digitally, but thankfully it's become a defining element of Yuri_jjj's art.

A space is a location that’s always fundamentally open to human presence and activity, but not intrinsically or necessarily a home to that as such.

Places then, by contrast, are locations where folks are doing things.

When you go on vacation you go some place. You return to the best places. Places that many return to and desire to go become destinations.

Destinations can be physical as well as digital. IG, TikTok, YT, your favorite blog, site or app are all examples of digital destinations.

Now, let’s return to my initial assertion: Smart Contracts are onchain spaces native to blockchains.

Onchain Spaces

Every crypto asset you’re familiar with - from shitcoins to memecoins to NFTs and everything in between - originates from a Smart Contract.

Despite that, and with the exception of DEXs (i.e. Decentralized Exchanges) like Uniswap, historically, crypto users have very rarely interacted with Smart Contracts. When they do, for example when engaging in a token claim, it’s fleeting and essentially a one-off interaction.

About a half century ago in crypto-time, way back in 2020, DeFi Summer kicked off a new meta called ‘Yield Farming’. Yield Farming required users to perform the blockchain-native action of staking (i.e. depositing & locking a specific crypto asset into a staking Smart Contract) in order to harvest a new crypto token. Duration and amount of crypto assets staked typically corresponded to amount of yield earned.

Yield Farming introduced a new way of relating to Smart Contracts. It incentivized users return (i.e. interact) to the same Smart Contract more than once across a non-trivial time horizon - ingredients necessary to evolve a primitive space into an interesting place.

Onchain Places

At the end of 2023, an onchain streak-powered crypto product named StreakPoints launched. Users sign a simple onchain transaction (i.e. interact with a Smart Contract) once every 24 hour period to maintain their streak and accrue onchain points that determines the distribution of a daily $SP token allocation. Simply put, the StreakPoints Smart Contract is an onchain place that users return to daily to checkin onchain.

A couple weeks ago, Cameron launched a thin staking protocol that’s powering Rebase.Finance, a token launchpad built on Base that’s currently incentivizing stakers by distributing a protocol token called $REFI. Folks stake eligible tokens, currently consisting of $DEGEN, $HIGHER, $BUILD, $AERO, and $ETH, and until July 4th continuously earn $REFI. The place-ness of Rebase will grow as the incentive for stakers to return (e.g. when new tokens launch and stakers need to perform an onchain interaction to receive that new token) increases.

My surmise is that in the not too distant future, a massive onchain destination will emerge that leverages multiple onchain places (i.e. Smart Contracts/protocols) by merging them supercontinent-style into a single app UI.

Onchain Destinations

To save time and perhaps for the sake of our industry, let’s agree that apps and clients built atop the Farcaster protocol are all onchain places that folks can go to and do things atop today. Of those onchain places, one client in particular currently stands out as a proper onchain destination that users return to daily.

Part of why that particular client has emerged as an onchain destination is because it looks and feels a lot like popular web2 destinations like X and Reddit. The positive result of that familiarity is that it has made onboarding a larger number of users, relative to what a typical crypto app has been able to attract, easier. The downside, however, is that it’s placed itself squarely in the same war torn battlefied as those popular web2 destinations fighting for the limited resource known as q/daus or quality daily active users.

Onchain destinations can be designed for completely different types of games, though. More importantly, it can reward participants in new novel ways that web2 destinations can’t even begin to conceive of.

A natively onchain “q/dau” could, in theory, look and feel COMPLETELY different from the typical q/daus that return to social media sites. And let’s not not forget about consumer-users.

Let’s take StreakPoints as an example and run a little thought experiment.

Imagine for a second that daily active streakers on StreakPoints jumps up to 100,000 unique onchain streakers. The total wallet value of all those streakers is somewhere in the neighborhood of $10~25 million dollars. That’s an incredibly valuable audience. It’s like a small digital city. Remember, every streaker earns $SP each day they successfully extend their streak.

Now let’s imagine there is space for a single digital billboard on the StreakPoints site that anyone can take out an ad for by paying some amount of $ETH. Where should the $ETH go? Since all the streakers, by virtue of returning to and interacting with the same StreakPoints SC each day, are the ones adding value to the site literally making it a valuable destination, it makes perfect sense - and is perfectly possible, technically - to split those $ETH payments pro-rata amongst $SP holders.

Are you excited now, anon?

That’s just one simple hypothetical example of where onchain destinations may end up going. To my mind at least, there’s an infinity of instantiations an onchain destination could take. The era of creating, building, and living atop onchain destinations is going to be incredibly dank and exciting. So, prepare accordingly and get your onchain passports (i.e. crypto wallets) ready.

Cover image: “BRAVE NEW CIRCUITRY #4/15” by SUTU [Curated by fakewhale]

Maybe it’s the warmer weather. Maybe it’s the verdant and flourishing environs.

Whatever the reason may be, to me at least, American Freedom peaks during the summer months.

This past weekend in particular I was struck with a feeling of total freedom and the immense amount of golden opportunities available to citizens of this great country at any given time.

I was so struck with this feeling that I started jotting down a running list of items and experiences I had this past weekend that embody and feel like American Freedom.

Not sure why, but the list quickly became alliterative and S-based - or should I say S-tier - which I’m sharing below:

• Summer weekends

• Sardines + Cider

• Shrooms

• Sunset drives on Sundays

• Smashing Pumpkins “Here Is No Why” + 311 “Beautiful Disaster playing on loop

• Short Forest Park hikes

• Sudden yard-work

• Super market strolls

• Slices of key lime pie

Cover image: “Subtle Dropoff” by Max Osiris

This piece of writing was originally published on Cent back on Dec. 18, 2018 under the title “New Governments & New Communities.” I’m re-publishing it here because the promise of proper crypto social products is again palpable, and I believe the tenets of infinite care & unbounded attention are as pertinent as ever for founders of crypto social products in particular to embody and exhibit.

To form a new government requires infinite care and unbounded attention, for if the foundation is badly laid, the superstructure must be bad.* ~ George Washington, 1776*

I love that quote because it drives home the ungodly, gargantuan, all-encompassing effort needed to get a new community (or product) the initial traction needed just to have a fighting chance at becoming something more.

Infinite care

You need to have god-level consideration for every new user and their experience. Every pain point needs to be identified and sanded off. When you talk with users, you need to really hear what they're saying and show them love back. And then you gotta follow through and deliver on what you talked about and heard!

Caring infinitely is a self-sustaining practice though. The more you care, the more positive feedback you'll get. Product updates, new features, different perspectives, novel use cases you hadn't considered before - all of these things become possible as a result of providing infinite care that in turn fuels you so that you and your team can continue to move forward and develop the product.

Unbounded attention

The internet never sleeps. Likewise, your product can be used and mentioned anytime, all the time. Your attention needs to always be on your product and users. The time you spend thinking about and monitoring your project is never enough. What's more, you need to pay attention to everything else going on around you (unbounded ftw) because external changes and risks can be just as, if not more consequential than internal or local factors.

Paying attention without limits also means biases and pre-judgments need to get set aside. Seeing things as they really are is paramount. If takes more effort to convince yourself that you are seeing one thing instead of another as opposed to simply seeing one thing or another. This clarity and energy-conserving attention are as self-reinforcing as the benefits of infinite care.

And all this effort is just to ensure that the foundation is properly laid.

We're talking about basic table stakes. There is still so much more to build and so much more that can go wrong!

But if infinite care describes you and at least a couple other members of your team, and if you and your partner-in-crime(s) can focus your attention on anything and everything all the damn time, well then those next features or mechanisms will start to present themselves in a way that begins to make sense within a bigger picture that in turn continues to be revised and checked against reality at every step of the way.

Historical Leadership

During the First Continental Congress in 1787, Washington said he, “Attentively heard and read every oral and printed information on both sides of every question that could be procured,” while intervening in debates or making final decisions infrequently. The foundation laid as a result of that meeting is legend.

That's a leader. That's someone who, even if they aren't responsible for making every single decision, can influence the right decisions and help make everyone else better by example.

Leaders are responsible for laying the foundation. Thus leaders must show infinite care and display unbounded attention. If they don't, well, it all falls down.

Cover image: “Reluctant Hero #1/3” by Jesse Draxler

The following piece of writing was originally published Nov. 4 2020 over on my old Cent page reflecting on my then half decade being a part of crypto (3 years as a builder and 2 years digging down into the rabbit hole). Honestly though, this piece feels more relevant now than ever, so I’m re-sharing it and putting it onchain.

"I saw a vision of us move in the dark; all that we did or dreamed of..."

That quote is from The Tower Beyond Tragedy by Robinson Jeffers.

What a trip.

I've been reflecting on the last 5 years of living and working in crypto-land and the early metaverse. It's crazy how far things have come. But it's mind-blowing how much further we can go.

Almost 5 years ago to the day I went on a walk with a workmate on the outskirts of Seoul. On that walk, I learned about Ethereum and smart contracts for the first time.

Down the rabbit hole I went. I read, listened, and watched everything on crypto I could get my hands on.

Then I started working at Cent in March of 2018.

Since then, a lot of folks have asked me, "Why?"

There's a long and short answer to everything. Let me try the short version.

Never has there been a time more pregnant with possibility than right now.

The birth of all the new golden ages is upon us.

Art. Business. Music. Humanity.

And they'll all bloom in crypto-land and the metaverse.

• The next Basquiats, Monets, Renoirs, Warhols, and Picassos will be crypto artists. Several are probably creating cryptoart right now.

• The next Jobs, Welches, Bezos', Fords, and Rockefellers will revolutionize business with crypto-powered systems and tools. I'm probably rubbing shoulders with a few of these characters in the metaverse right now.

• A new paradigm for music and the arts will emerge and explode in the metaverse and spill out IRL.

• Universal cooperation systems and networks will unlock ideas and ignite collaborations that know no barriers or restrictions.

• The political dams hoarding global power and governance are starting to leak. Soon power, opportunity, and the promise of a better way will pour out into the waiting wanting cups of the every person.

Don't get me wrong. Great stuff will continue to happen IRL. But the best stuff will happen in the metaverse and crypto-land.

The previous golden ages have all been bounded to earth. The next golden ages will be earth-proof.

Now look up, look out, and imagine your role in these impending golden ages. Then go make it so.

subscribe://

Cover image: "Sun dancer" by rama

After a few days of onchain social posting on Farcaster - or to be specific, Warpcast, my Farcaster frontend client of choice - that’s exactly how I’m feeling about life today on the internet, or at least our neck of the internet, metaphorically speaking.

By “our neck” I’m talking about Ethereum’s End and the loosely affiliated grouping of crypto-powered digital villages - NFTs, DeFi, Devs, Builders, Degens, and more - located on the bleeding edge of the niche-y fringier end of the internet alongside other crypto projects, sub-Reddits, certain gaming universes, and Twitch Fandoms.

The Digital Villages of Ethereum

Note that I said “digital villages” and not “digital neighborhoods.”

Calling them neighborhoods would imply that the inhabitants were somehow more united around or part of something greater than the group of folks who reside in their same village. The reality is that they were more like villages co-located in the same general region, but existing as distinct and self-contained atomized groups.

Historically speaking, the emergence of villages is a strong signal of a healthy environment conducive towards establishing community and growing culture. That said, they have proven to be extremely weak organizational and structural containers for protecting those communities over long periods of time.

A quick review of the history of modern state formation and the often bloody background of how early villages ended up being “incorporated” into larger administrative districts and states clearly shows this.

Eternal September events that mark the end of early communities on social networks that experience viral growth, while not as well documented as their IRL counterparts, may be less bloody but are no less violent and often more destructive to early communities who are entirely at the mercy of the platform overlords if they even survive the deluge of new entrants following the viral tsunami of attention.

While Ethereum has grown into the second largest market cap in all of crypto at $300B benefiting many of the digital villages who have been building atop it, no single group or individual within Ethereum - not even Vitalik - has managed to develop a sufficiently strong enough voice to influence a critical mass of hearts & minds on a global scale, let alone crypto-wide basis.

Crypto literally is collaboration, and every single wallet address or crypto holder or builder is either literally connected via onchain transactions or potentially may be, however, the social interactions that occur within the Ethereum ecosystem specifically and crypto space generally have been fragmented and largely occur in the isolation of the digital village unit tucked away in the dark forest of different apps and platforms making it near impossible to activate a larger portion of the disparate digital villages in a meaningfully unified way.

A Purple Light at the Edge of the Dark Forest

That’s changing now thanks to Farcaster.

Farcaster is a sufficiently decentralized protocol for digital nation-state building. The first case study is being written in real time as the Ethereum ecosystem consolidates its web of emergent communities and groups atop the Farcaster protocol.

Over the past few months in particular, but gradually over the past few years, we’ve seen a critical mass of villagers - artists, builders, collectors, degens - from across the Ethereum space come out of the dark forest, literally, to join Farcaster.

Farcaster is architected such that it effectively synthesizes the best of Twitter along with Reddit and Discord - the three main platforms and tools Ethereum digital villages have used - by providing a public forum in the form of the main feed populated by casts from other users you follow (like Twitter and very popular sub-Reddits) along with quieter, less immediately public spaces for community members to foster connections and share info between in /channels (like Discord servers and very specific sub-Reddits).

By merging the public forum of the main feed with spaces aka /channels that provide cover similar to what you find in the dark forest, everyone is in one-click proximity to one another instead of being a click, clack, or tap away on a totally separate app.

All of that said, we still need to watch how (and if) these groups start to interact and collaborate with one another more and more over the next few months.

More users will inevitably continue to flow onto the protocol - will that growth continue to be absorbed in a way across the public and more private ares of the protocol that lets users access the information and individuals they align with and feel closest to while exposing them to individuals and ideas from parts of Ethereum they may have previously had no idea about?

We’ll need to monitor this, but luckily, since Farcaster is literally built differently and protocol data is public, anyone interested has the ability to monitor the ever changing situation by utilizing one of the many dashboards created by the community or core team, or alternatively, creating a brand new dashboard to monitor these changes and responses over time.

What a time to be alive and building together with friends on the internet at the bleeding edge of digital community, culture, and nation-state formation.

Cover Image: “the society of mind” from Reflections by Pindar Van Arman

But digital life is another matter.

Multi-tasking in the digital realm isn’t multi-tasking as we have typically known it; it’s more like focusing on multiple different things each in their own way, click by click.

Click by click.

It’s hard to convey how much more is possible, click by click.

But it’s true.

Anyone in the crypto space understands this. Making money on the internet with friends is, in my opinion, the best meme on the internet. It highlights the best of what folks should be focusing on while living in the digital: your friends.

Instead though, most folks seem to want to pursue solitary modes of interacting digitally. Surfing the web. Email. Shit, blog posting even.

That’s skeuomorphic living in the digital realm. And irl living is so lonely. But everyone does it, especially when they first first transition from living a predominately irl life to living primarily digitally.

Paradoxically though, after living digitally for a period of time, any thinking person quickly realizes that they can work digitally in a way that fulfills all expected obligations, and that also leaves a significant amount of “extra” space for other things.

This extra space is what I really want to touch on.

Extra digital space isn’t like free time irl. Free time irl is something that’s occupied with some thing or no thing.

In the digital realm, however, extra space can by occupied by multiple disparate things, potentially.

Extra digital space is built different.

Attention space is another way to describe this sort of extra digital space. Attention space is as wide as we want to allow it to be based on the amount of things we are able to split focus on.

StreakPoints is an evolutionary global game that only asks Streakers to check back in once - literally a couple seconds maximum - a day. It’s a game you can do while doing many, many other things.

Surprisingly though, very few products have optimized themselves such that they can be done alongside multiple other digital actions. But the possibility always remains.

And that’s pretty much all I have to say on this subject. Much more can be said, but honestly, I fully expect to see other digitally native human beings living multifarious digital lives in a way that inspires others to live multi-dimensional lives very soon.

Cover image: Silent Conversations #45/46 by Thomas Stokes III

Crypto is full of potential. I’m personally convinced it’s the future, but it’s important to remember how dark it is in the future - it ain’t the bright metaverse of snow crash just yet - so unless you’re up close and personal with it, it really is rather hard to see.

Add to that the needless complication, amongst other things, that Coopahtroopa mentions in his latest article The World Hates Crypto and it’s easy to understand why so many folks can’t understand let alone see the potential or point of crypto today.

So then, what can we do to illuminate that potential and present the bright future of crypto for others?

Make things stupid-dumb

Simplify, simplify, simplify. And simplify some more. Whatever you do, avoid over-complicating things. Honestly trying to make something stupid dumb is probably the best place to start.

Creating something that the left-curve can understand immediately is key. If a crypto-powered idea is that easy to understand that means it should be dead simple to engage with, and that’s the next step to focus on.

The quicker folks can go from ‘What’s that (crypto thing)?’ to actually using it the better.

To me this means not requiring folks to purchase anything upfront. That said, I think folks take it too far when they advocate against requiring users to download or install an EOA (Externally Owned Address) like Phantom or MetaMask.

Empower users new to crypto early on

EOAs are the passports of crypto.

They’re your crypto identity even before they’re a container for crypto assets, and over time they’re an essential tool that highlights the power of crypto.

That said EOAs are kinda unfamiliar at first to folks. So starting simple is key. Simply requiring users have an EOA to a) log in and b) sign a message with their private key for some in-app action helps build that association that EOA = identity that they control and carry with them.

StreakPoints, a game where users earn onchain points for keeping up a streak of daily onchain check-ins, does this better than any other crypto project I’ve seen. In order to sign up for StreakPoints just need to have an EOA. No email required. But crucially they also don’t need any crypto to get started.

Thanks to EIP-712 and the gasless metadata transactions it enables, when users check-in using their EOA, all they need to do is click a sign message in their EOA and boom, they’ve committed an on-chain interaction that results in a public transaction on the blockchain.

Lean into crypto-native incentivizes early

Each daily onchain check-in also results in them receiving a share of the daily $SP tokens that gets distributed amongst all users (called Streakers) that check-in onchain within a 24 hour period.

Tokens are strangely powerful incentives. Even tokens that are worthless and useless like $SP have an uncanny ability to attract users. StreakPoints is up to around 140 daily user checkins off the strength of users joining to farm $SP.

Leaning into those sorts of crypto-native incentives in a crypto-powered app designed to appeal to newbies is crucial. Don’t keep the crypto-native aspects away from new users too long, otherwise the crypto aspect will seem boring. Leveraging the sticky aspects that crypto incentives unlock really is the way. And we’re constantly discovering new ways to make those effects stronger, so designing an app or product that is open to evolving is also important.

Cover image: C³ #201/256 by Han

Think about all the early attempts at internet search. A lot of semi-successful names like Netscape and Yahoo come to mind, but ultimately Google with their focus on an uncluttered UI, speed, and accuracy won that early battle.

There were several attempts at e-commerce early on as well. Book Stacks Unlimited was an online book store founded in 1992 (two whole years before Amazon!) that focused on curating a small selection of new books - around 500,000 to be precise which is much larger than a regular brick and mortar book store to be sure - informed by recommendations from their 35 well read employees. It had some early success, and after a series of acquisitions eventually went on to power Barnes & Nobles’ online storefront.

Amazon, on the other hand, was focused on offering ALL the books (or as close to ‘all’ as they could get) regardless of whether the books were new or used. We all know what happened after that.

You can see this all over the SaaS space (e.g. AirTable vs. Notion) and the crypto space is no different.

Back in 2020 multiple projects created products that let folks mint Tweets into NFTs. Tokenized Tweets (their original Twitter account was suspended) and Eternal.Report were two early examples that launched around the middle of 2020 that allowed anyone to mint any Tweet into an NFT.

A couple of months later in November 2020 Cam, Katie, and I created Valuables, a site that also let folks tokenize Tweets, but with one, simple twist - only the original Tweet author could digitally autograph (i.e. cryptographically sign and mint) their Tweet. Sweet, sweet Tweet provenance baby!

Thanks to that simple but significant twist Valuables rode a couple of viral waves powered by the early participation of foundational crypto artists like XCOPY, Coldie, Artnome, and Robness that minted a solid grip of NFTweets that peaked when Jack Dorsey, co-founder of Twitter, minted his genesis tweet and which sold after a bidding war pushed to price to $2.9M. Yeah, 2021 was kind of insane.

In a similar vein around the same time, cryptoart and NFT collecting started to pop off. A number of on-chain marketplaces starting with KnownOrigin and SuperRare launched early on in 2018 that provided whitelisted digital artists access to a minting smart contract to mint their digital work into NFTs for people to collect.

Sales steadily increased, slowly but surely, from 2018 to 2019 and into 2020, but around the end of 2020 a new hybrid marketplace called NiftyGateway (full disclosure: where I still work after leaving Cent/Valuables late 2020) that allowed collectors to pay with ETH or credit card blew up and saw artists earning millions just minutes after releasing new art.

In addition to making it easier for non-crypto natives to collect cryptoart, the drop-model of multi-work collections and and working with artists to create new novel release mechanisms (e.g the Open Edition release format conceived by and developed for Murat Pak) were subtle changes that led to insane returns.

To be clear, SuperRare and KnownOrigin were not failures - not at all - and NiftyGateway was not without it’s own challenges, but that initial viral boom happened at NG and not SR or KO thanks to a seemingly simple deviation in their approach to creating a digital art marketplace.

The generative art juggernaut that is Art Blocks, launched at the end of 2020, uncovered another same same but right vein in the cryptoart space with their focus on long-form, often procedurally generated at-mint, 1/1/n on-chain art releases; instead of the limited edition or single 1/1 releases.

A lot of folks like to throw shade on all the “silly seeming” ideas that get created in new, trendy digital sectors, gain a little bit of traction one day, and seemingly have a million same same but different copy cats the next because of the waste of it all. But that’s how digital innovation works, for better or worse, and as long as there is a there there, at least one of those projects will stumble upon a same same but right model that hits, delivers a ton of value to a lot of users, and explodes onto the zeitgeist.

As a builder or creator it may seem frustrating, often painfully so, especially if your same same but different idea is just a couple of degrees different from the same same but right competitor that’s the belle of the ball instead of you, but that’s also the fun of building something brand new and trying to fit all the pieces together perfectly. It may seem like you have the puzzle figured out, but if you look closely - and are honest with yourself - very often you’ll see a piece that doesn’t quite fit or an empty space around the border. The fun lies in tweaking things until they fit just right. Nothing can beat the feeling that happens after that.

And sometimes all it really takes is tweaking just one single thing to go from same same but different, to same same but right.

Cover image: Good Women Drink Good Beer, a Diptych (ed. of 30) by NeuralBricolage

It’s been a month since I started streaking on StreakPoints, a new crypto-powered site built on Polygon where users check-in daily to earn a portion of the one million $SP tokens distributed every day.

What’s $SP you ask? According to Cameron, founder of Cent and the developer behind StreakPoints, it’s a token without a product. And that’s accurate, at least for now.

So, why am I writing about StreakPoints? Like I said, I’ve been checking in on StreakPoints for about a month, BUT a couple of weeks back after starting out strong with an initial 14 day check-in streak, I messed up and missed a check-in window. Then a day later I missed it again. The 14 points I accrued those first two weeks were slashed by 50% for each miss (the more points you accrue the larger your daily $SP allocation).

Despite $SP literally being worthless and having zero utility, I was legit gutted. But now I have a calendar alarm set at 4 pm PT to remind me to check in.

And it’s not just me checking in regularly either. On average around 15 folks have been checking in every day. There is zero ability to interact with others on StreakPoints. If you visit the site you’ll see a simple running ledger of daily check-ins with a streakers current streak and accrued points. That’s it. But when you see a familiar name who has been streaking with you miss a day, the frustration is palpable and you can clearly see their new resolve when they start streaking again.

Even Cameron missed a few days. When I asked him about it his response was just like mine - he was surprisingly bummed.

Without any public marketing or promo or any real word of mouth anything, every day multiple hand fulls of folks are connecting their crypto wallets and paying a little bit of $MATIC to sign a transaction to keep their streaks alive and receive a bunch of worthless, useless tokens.

While others may be scratching their heads at this point wondering wtf I’m on about, my mind has been racing with ideas for simple ways to update StreakPoints.

Anyone that’s been in crypto more than a short while knows that even truly worthless and useless tokens can act as an uncannily powerful incentive . And when that incentive is tied to a simple and straightforward habit, a stickiness is created that’s surprisingly hard to break. With a growing number of streakers returning every single day to keep their streak alive it isn’t hard - at least to me - to see the potential in something like StreakPoints.

Updates are coming soon too. Word on the street is an incentivized referral system, gasless (i.e. free) check-ins, and a box that $SP holders will be able to update are coming soon.

Beyond that, I’m super keen to see if subtle tweaks and additions can be made to StreakPoints such that it becomes a digital destination more conducive to social interactions.

I’d personally love to see more focused check-in windows that increase the likelihood of multiple folks being on the site checking in concurrently. If StreakPoints becomes a place where groups of folks regularly come together at the same time, a lot of things become possible. Moreover, if the crypto token they’re earning accrues any sort of value and/or utility, I’d be really keen to see if any sort of social speculation dynamics emerge.

But for today, I’m just stoked to increase my daily check-in streak to 18 and amass 20 points.

Cover image: Fragments .03 <{the cønver$ation}> by Max Osiris & Keenan Perren

The above may be the most unexpected phrase to be uttered onchain this year (at least by me lmfao). But trust me, there’s a crypto connection baked in there - just let me cook for a second.

I’m not sure exactly when I first took notice, it may have been on a long winter semester home with the family outside of Philly a year or so after starting university in Seoul, but at a certain point in his life, every year around Xmas time my father started to binge watch Xmas movies on the Hallmark Channel. Like all the time.

Of course, I thought it a bit odd, at first, but truth be told those movies are lowkey addicting. They’re pure as snow - no cursing, idyllic Xmas atmosphere, predictably entertaining in an endearingly cheesy sort of way.

Fast forward to Thanksgiving break last week.

After my wife and I put our daughter to bed on Thanksgiving day eve, we were lounging on the sofa perusing the tv guide on tv when what do I see? Two Hallmark Channels chock full of Xmas movies. So, we watch a movie that had just started. Then another. And I thought, “Damn, I could watch this with my daughter and not worry about her seeing or hearing anything terrible.”

Next thought was, “I wonder if I could buy some stock or invest in Hallmark somehow?”

A couple of clicks later I saw that Hallmark Media (the subsidiary of Hallmark Cards that handles the tv-side of things) and its parent company Hallmark Cards were both privately owned. Based in Kansas City they grossed $5B - with a B - in 2020. Damn. Who’d of thought?

So, I dug into Hallmark Cards a little more. Founded in 1910, they originally rode the latter end of the boom around postcards. You read that right - postcards.

Postcards experienced a bit of a global golden age from the latter part of the 19th century until around 1915 thanks, in large part, to a speculative boom based on the collective belief in their collectibility as souvenirs. Postcards emerged at a time when postal delivery efficiencies unlocked rapid delivery even to remote parts of the country-side, but also thanks to advances in photography, printing, and mass production, folks were simply enthralled with all of the novel images on high-quality paper sprinkled with sentimental value derived from the fact that an acquaintance took the time to write something heartfelt on something beautiful they spent money on.

After the postcard boom waned a few short years later, Hallmark pivoted to greeting cards beginning with “Christmas cards” - that’s where the Xmas connection and Hallmark began. Quickly they expanded supplying greeting cards for all occasions around the nation and then internationally very shortly after. A decade or so later, they arguably invented Christmas wrapping paper - I kid you not. Fast forward to the 80’s and they acquired Crayola. Crayola!

Hallmark Cards has run an incredible business and made epic business decision after epic business decision for over 110 years. In an age when print-anything is seen as dead or soon-to-be-dead, Hallmark remains unfazed, moisturized, in their lane, and criminally (imo) under the radar.

But let me get to the crypto connection before this gets too long.

Looking at the history of postcards, specifically their emergence and early boom around their speculative collectibility thanks to very specific communication-related technological developments, it’s hard not to think of parallels with NFTs and the blockchain.

NFTs are like postcards in that they are associated with images, thanks to the 6551 standard have the ability to hold other valuable digital assets (like Christmas cards are synonymous with holding cash), they continue to grow in popularity largely due to a speculative fueled hype cycle, and they are INSANELY easy to send and receive.

All that’s to say, when Christmas NFT Cards?

Other Thursday Bitties

• GFY Remix by Eclectic Method

• OS Revenue Jan. 2022 vs. Nov. 2023

• Sage advice from a lawyer to help decide if you should pursue litigation or not

• The Visa Episode of Acquired Podcast

Cover Image: Chronophotograph 131 by 0xDEAFBEEF

On the internet though, there is zero native perspective. Perspective here is emergent, and is only added later, by those who use it.

Anyone who has taken part in the emergence of cryptoart over the past 5 or so some odd years on the internet has for sure felt the bubbling kinetic energy that's powered a tidal wave of artists creating new art works that've landed in the collections of collectors all over the world.

We've all felt it. Maybe we've been lucky enough to see fragments of this growing thing we call cryptoart here and there at conferences or different irl & url meetups.

For me, personally, it wasn't until last year that the full, beautiful scope of cryptoart - the growing number of exciting and important and impactful yet unique and divergently different artists - and what it was growing into came into sharp relief when the Argentinian artist Panter Xhita released the first wave of A HISTORY OF CRYPTOART on Nifty Gateway featuring the portraits of 90 unique artists arranged in a style inspired by Mexican muralism.

Artists are seers, after all, so it's quite poetic that an artist and their work helped us finally see what we've all felt.

Visual perspective isn't the only thing that artists help provide though; often times an artists living, breathing experience provides much needed contextual perspective.

A HISTORY OF CRYPTOART was made for the screen on a screen by an artist located literally at the bottom of the world that was collected and talked about by hundreds of folks who reside on every continent save for Antarctica.

That is the perspective of cryptoart. And it doesn't stop at this work.

The cryptoart space is dynamic, and despite the best efforts of the bear market, we've continued to grow. Many more artists, collectors, and builders have appended themselves to the blockchain that is recording the history of cryptoart in the interim.

What started with a few wayward pioneers who started minting work using tools originally created to breed digital cats, grew into a small village of interconnected artists-collectors-builders captured in A HISTORY OF CRYPTOART (2022), and today the cryptoart space feels like a mini-metropolis set atop a digital pangea, ready to split off into its own uniquely divergent directions.

But we're still all here together. For today at least.

Before this moment passes, Panter has again captured the Perspective of this very special, particular moment in time in her new collection A HISTORY OF CRYPTOART - SECOND WAVE featuring the portraits of 110 artists (and some easter egg signs of important projects and builders) who are all a part of the history of cryptoart.

You can check out and dive into the detail of A HISTORY OF CRYPTOART - SECOND WAVE over on Nifty Gateway ahead of the primary sale set to launch this Wednesday (11/29) at 6:30 pm ET.

subscribe://

Listening to: “GIVE UP THE GOODS“ by Coast Contra
Drinking: Aecht Schlenkerla Rauchbier Urbock by Schlenkerla (Germany)

Life is no longer rooted in reality.

For some time now, but the last three decades in particular, we’ve been living in a permanent state of surreality. Our consciousness is constantly vacillating between the irl and url - reality and unreality.

This has resulted in a modern experience that is definitionally absurd. Chaotic. Pointless some say. The American context stands out as the country representing the zenith of our shared absurd existence.

As society has shifted every deeper into the url though, a shift that many old timers have long lamented since they assume the url has no connection to the irl, it’s become surprisingly apparent that the digital space doesn’t merely represent, but is in fact our generation’s infinite frontier in a very real way.

Today a critical mass of humanity is connected to the internet, the front door of the metaverse - any digital space that folks can live, work and play in - and many are making the trek out to the infinitely expanding bleeding edges. The literal background atop which all of this is happening is the screen.

American realists like Edward Hopper came of age simultaneously defining and being defined by the the modern urban city, the dominant background of their generation that supplanted the wide open wilds of the old, romantic American west that was captured most beautifully by artists like Thomas Moran that in turn captured the hearts and minds of the nascent frontier spirt of Americans triggered an explosion of westward migration in the early 20th century.

From romantic and rustic landscapes to liminal scenes of urban living - the leading artists of each of our preceding eras told no lies by including the dominant backgrounds of their times in their artworks.

Hard cut.

I’m not sure what the triggering event may have been, but whatever the reason, over the last few days Jerry Saltz, an old person who says things about art they don’t collect, shared some “critical debate” on Refik Anadol’s art pejoratively calling it a “banal screensaver.”

First of all, as I wrote in a prior Thursday Thoughties post, critical debate led by “the art critic” has absolutely zero value or import now that anyone can collect any art they want from anyone thanks to NFTs and the internet.

But that’s beside the point.

The pixel artist Nicolas Sassoon, sub-tweeting Jerry, gets closer to the point by shedding light on a fact that Jerry’s old ass is blind to when they wrote:

Nicolas highlights the omnipresent relationship that humans are always in with screens of all sorts in our hybrid irl-url realities.

Screen are our generationally defining background just like the urban city was to the boomers and their immediate predecessors and like the American west was for late 19th century gilded age America and their successors.

As such it’s natural - no expected - that such a powerfully important background has started to make its way into the art of our time. You can see this explicitly in the “PiP Art” of artists like Ripcache, hAyDiRoKe, and Jack Kaido.

nft://1/0x5d4978bC3670eEe2bB6379C2A0512B723c0f2870/322?showBuying=true&showMeta=true

The Indiana-based diewiththemostlikes though, makes the relationship most explicit in thank you for your service where they hilariously yet depressingly used the Windows XP background as a canvas for their absurdist PiP artwork. It’s some sort of nostalgic sting one feels when they think through the fact that the now universally recognizable image of the verdant California hills seen in the iconic XP background is probably as close as most folks will get to experiencing the wide open beauty of the American west (if they even realize that the image is of an irl place that was once open and accessible to anyone brave enough to venture west in the 19th century).

But like i said at the outset of this post, the url is our infinite frontier, today. And the artists that are capturing the spirit of that background are amongst the most potent seers of our time and will wield the most influence on other artists to be sure, but also on society as a whole as their cultural value seeps out and is absorbed by other culture creators.

As Bryan Brinkman pointed out, you can already see this with Refik as their art has been installed in the MoMA permanent collection, used as the backdrop for the Grammys, featured on the Vegas Sphere, sold for millions, and criticized by Jerry Saltz (lmfao).

So, Jerry, while Refik’s work may strike you as nothing more than a “banal screensaver,” and while I’m sure many actually use his work as a literal screensaver, you have failed to understand how generationally important screens, and in turn screensavers are to our human relationship with our surreal modern condition and how the great artists, as they always do, capture allllllll of that messiness so succinctly and potently in their art, screensaver or otherwise.

Other Thursday Bitties

• If you need to laugh but also want to vibe out give the Rizzle Song by Eclectic Method a watch-listen

• Coinbase Verifications - is this a building block for a new type of identity? Negative identity (a la David Birch) perhaps?

• A lot of marketooors are shitting as hard as they can on the launch video of the hu.ma.ne ai pin while failing to imagine any of the possibilities this totally new approach to

Cover Image: thank you for your service #3/9 by diewiththemostlikes

Listening to: “Homeless Lottery Freestyle“ by 347aidan

The other day I was hanging out in the Tezos district rifling through the secondary market on objkt.com scooping some absolute gems when I realized most folks probably hadn’t seen my collection of art minted on Tezos.

It didn’t take long for me to think that my collection of art minted on Ethereum and L2s like Polygon wasn’t any different since I collect across multiple wallets.

I’ve only ever collected one piece of art minted on Solana, so folks for sure have no idea what wallet I used.

There are sites and services like Firstmate.xyz and Deca that help aggregate collected works across multiple marketplaces and blockchains, but to be honest I don’t have time for all that.

So, here’s my attempt at bringing my cross-chain collection all together in one place.

Below are links to pretty much all of my wallets that I’ve collected from. If I collect from a new wallet I’ll update this post, but I probably won’t, so yeah. Happy perusing.

Ethereum + L2s (Polygon + Arbitrum + Zora)

• niftytime-vault.eth

• niftytime.eth

  • SR, NG, MP, KO

• immutablerockstar.eth

Tezos

• niftytime.tez

Solana

• niftytime.sol

Other Thursday Bitties

• Jin aka dankVR is always thinking about the metaverse and what the transition strategies that will bring the world into the webXR future we all know is coming. His latest musings on a potential transition strategy is focus on custom animated vrm avatars

Cover Image:  LVL1.RAD #20/28 by Chepertom

2023 Nov 2

Listening to: “Breathe And Stop Freestyle“ by Coast ContraDrinking: Imperial Hard Cider by 19 Acres Cider Co. (Sherwood, OR)

The new home for Truth is onchain.

Until recently, Truth could be found in universities around the world and in countries that embraced enlightenment ideals.

Today though, Truth seems to be in short supply. I’m not sure when it started, but the dominant trend around the world these days seems to be one of privileging feelings over everything else; especially Truth.

Leaders around the world focus more on feelings than anything else; especially the Truth, since shored up public sentiment is what reinforces incumbent power. The natural effect of this is for leaders in any capacity to avoid Truth whenever possible since Truth is intrinsically and supremely indifferent to feelings.

Janet Yellen, current secretary of the treasury, saying shit like “[the] US can afford to support two wars," as the national debt rockets ever higher at record speeds with not even a whisper of potential negative implications on future American’s lives or plans to eventually revert course is just one of many such examples.

Once you open your eyes to this reality it’s wild to see how often folks will literally do or say anything to avoid telling the Truth, even when confronted with written or recorded evidence! And somehow we just accept and move on.

Part of the issue is that Truth as we know it today isn’t static nor is it particularly easy to verify.

Many institutions of higher learning espouse latinate mottos that often include the word ‘Veritas’ which we all know is Latin for truth. This type of truth is more closely related to empirical truths that are verifiable after running experiments in controlled settings. Valuable yes, but again, not the most accessible or approachable type of Truth.

Aletheia (ἀλήθεια), on the other hand, is the Greek word for Truth that originated in ancient Greece. Literally translated it mean “not-concealed” implying a dynamic relationship between what is true and any give individual’s perception and lived reality. One could argue, as an older, more fundamental experience with Truth, the Greek conception of Truth thought through as Aletheia is closer to how most folks experience Truth.

Last week the horrible (with a wh-) Liz Warren leaned in to a shitty WSJ article that claimed $130M+ in crypto payments made their way to crypto wallets controlled by terrorists.

The only problem with this claim is that it was based on a mis-interpretation of onchain information (i.e. Truth). Everyone can see what happens and where onchain transfers are going, so if a particular address is linked to a particular person or entity (e.g. terrorists) it’s trivially easy to blacklist said address from accessing centralized exchanges and converting crypto to fiat.

Nic Carter and an ad hoc army of bitcoin bounty incentivized onchain data researchers are still working on getting to the bottom of what a more likely number is, but that’s not the point. The point is that the Truth is there, on the blockchain, open and available to anyone with an internet connection. While concealed to the folks who may not be aware of the reality of the blockchain, it it very much not-concealed to everyone in the know.

The degree of separation between Truth and any given individual now is merely understanding how provably decentralized and transparent public blockchains work. While not trivial, the gap is orders of magnitudes closer than it’s ever been in recorded history.

That feels massive. And I think it is. What’s more is we’re at the begining of an inflection point that will much of our lived realities recorded, in some shape, way, or fashion, onchain.

Truth is moving onchain. For always and forever.

Other Thursday Bitties

• Breakdown of how onchain Cyberbrokers by Josie are

• 2002 seems like forever ago - check out this video of Shakira encountering a camera phone in Japan for the first time

• Evolution of Non-Fungible Tokens (October 2023) by the World Economic Forum

• Web3: The Future of Loyalty? by Marc Baumann

• Sam Altman on bending the world to ones will

subscribe://

Cover Image: primordial octoGAN #76 by Pindar Van Arman (part of the 100% onchain “les trois bleu” byteGANs in my collection)

There’s a habitual itch that collecting definitely scratches, but just like any other habit forming activity, it’s crucial to set redlines, especially when the medium of exchange is crypto (aka the slipperiest and easiest form of money ever invented) to ensure things remain consistently fun for the long run.

Thankfully, my redline is simple: I only collect what I love - or at least I try to as much as I can.

Over the last month I had the great fortune to produce drops for Kitty Bast, Gabe Weis, Ben Hopper, and Starbucks which I collected an edition each from in addition to a few editions of some dank onchain writing by William M. Peaster and WASD.

But my favorite piece I collected in October was DAOsaka Etherean, a surprise limited edition mint from the Suriname born, Netherlands based artist Jivinci.

This particular mint marks and directly references the four year anniversary of Decentralized Samurai (2019), a work that Jivinci created for DAOsaka, the first DAO-powered crowd-commissioned multi-work collection of digital art that, in addition to Jivinci, included works created by a small group of pioneering artists like XCOPY, Miss Al Simpson, MLIBTY, Shortcut, Ophelia Fu, Abysms, and Troy Fitzpatric aka Gary Cartlidge aka Lazarus2571 in collaboration with KnownOrigin and Pet3rpan.

Each artist contributed a unique work of art, with two works editioned as 1/1s and the remainder a mix of either 15 or 25 editions each. The crowd commission event raised $900 from a group of patrons (myself included) that submitted funds into a proto-splitter smart contract that routed funds directly to the group of artists to compensate them for their contributions.

It took a little while for all of the editions to sell out after the primary sale kicked off in line with Devcon 5 which was held in Osaka that year (hence the project name). After splitting 5% of the $1400 in gross sales amongst the participating artists, the original patrons were able to sign a cryptographic message using the same ETH address they used to contribute their initial commission, proving they were indeed and original patron, to trustlessly claim a percentage of the gross revenue on a pro-rate basis equal to the share of their original contribution.

I can’t overstate how fucking badass and revolutionary this whole project was. It represented what I thought the future of DAOs could be (and prefaced future onchain DAO-powered projects like NOUNS).

DAOsaka Etherean is a reminder of that beautiful promise from an incredibly exciting, formative time in crypto. It holds that spirit of pioneering collaboration on a global scale made possible by code, artists, and true believers.

Never forget.

Purchases in October 2023

DAOsaka Etherean #1/25 by Jivinci (KnownOrigin)

NFTs and VRM Avatars 🤖 16 by WMP (Mirror)

The Power of Onchain Media 10 (Mirror)

You Can’t Kill Snow White #5/5 (Nifty Gateway)

The PSL® Collection: Iced Stamp #1598 (Nifty Gateway)

Self Portrait #2/21 by Ben Hopper (Nifty Gateway)

Sam #4/5 by Gabe Weis (Nifty Gateway)

Prunings in October 2023

No prunings to report for October; November, on the other hand though, is shaping up to be a different story 👀

Cover Image: DAOsaka Etherean by Jivinci

Listening to: “Rejoice & Everybody Does - CARDINAL SESSIONS“ by Julien Baker Drinking: Cuvée des Jacobins Rouge (Flemish Sour Ale) by Brouwerij Omer Vander Ghinste (Belgium)

I’m pretty sure I have one of the best jobs on planet earth.

For those of you who may not know, I’ve worked at Nifty Gateway for almost three years. In that time I’ve had the great fortune to work with the world’s premier artists (as well as brands like Starbucks more recently) conceptualizing, ideating, advising, structuring, and launching collections of digital art that’ve grossed nearly $300M in primary market sales.

In between drop days you’ll find me on a waterfall of calls with artists.

And just to put as fine a point on it as possible, artist calls are the BEST. Especially when I talk with any of the artists I’ve known (and collected) for years and years going back to my days at Cent, the legendary old crypto-powered home for tinkerers, builders and artists that I helped co-found.

Sarah Zucker, a powerful artist who creates future art using withered technologies like VHS and old tube TVs, is one of those artists I love, love, love hopping on calls with. Every call with Sarah is like a shot of NZT-48; afterwards everything just makes sense.

A couple of days ago we jumped on another of those calls and we talked about a lot, including, as we often do on many of our calls, the great Matt Kane. Specifically, we talked about his two latest multi-layered releases: Anons.Art & Contractual Obligations.

While we were analyzing and thinking through Matt’s wizadry with his latest projects, I was very profoundly struck by one seemingly mundane aspect I hadn’t really thought through until then (or seen anyone mention for that matter): the intentionally slow, staggered batch schedule - a release format I’ve started calling ‘slow-release’ art - that Matt is releasing Anons/Multitudes.

As of this writing only 45 works including original portraits and their Multitudes (which will one day total in the hundreds according to Matt) have been released in two chapters since September 19th.

A major reason why I was struck such as I was by the ‘slow-release’ format is two-fold.

First off, it’s a novel approach that I don’t think I’ve seen others employ in the way he has (i.e. Matt created a bespoke webpage that will serve as the collection home for every new batch release minted from the ANONS minting smart contract). It’s not being released on another marketplace or on his old website - it’s a new stage where collectors will gather every few weeks for at least a half a year if not much longer. Subtle, yet significantly different from how most everyone releases new work or projects.

Second of all, the slow-release format is designed to reinforce the magnetic pull that’s become a signature trait of work that Matt has been able to imbue across previous collections of his that all have the same result: bringing the viewer back to his work over and over across time.

For example, Right Place & Right Time (2020) brings people back to see the new daily volatility art based on the always-on nature of Bitcoin and the constantly fluctuating 24hr price; Gazers (2021) is series of living art works that evolve every second and across lunation cycle; The Door (2021) is a series of 27 artworks (incl. Detours) that were all pre-minted but let to market via reserve auctions, buy-now prices, or other means over time; Proof of Origin - Picture of the Planets (1985-2023) is a series of living art works that see a new star added every month (and probably contain many many more easter eggs that will manifest over time); and Contractual Obligations (2023) is itself a multi-act performance that is still unfolding bringing viewers back with each subsequent act.

And what’s the result of bringing folks back to a single collection over and over? I think I put it nicely in this tweet from a few days ago:

Other Thursday Bitties

• Everyone loves to fade the NYTimes for their bias and when they make major editorial fuck ups (as was the case the other week when they used straight up Hamas propaganda to inform a major(ly misleading) headline) - no argument from me there - but I do have to say I’m still a subscriber to the NYTimes, but ONLY because of their NYTimes Audio offering. It’s a standalone app (only for iOS, still) but my go-to for audio podcasts these days. The Daily and more recently The Headlines (which has converted temporarily to focus on succinct but potent boots-on-the-ground updates of the Israel-Hamas War) are everyday must-listens. There is something about the audio element that helps cut through the bullshit of bias that print seems incapable of.

• Async Art announced they will wind down their venture by years end. Check out this tweet from NFT NOW that highlights many - but not all - noteworthy collections released on Async over the years.

• If you’re looking for a laugh check out this tweet parodying (with some cutting accuracy) what it must feel like to be a new art collector joining our space.

Cover Image: Right Place & Right Time - Bitcoin Volatility Art [May 5, 2021] (2021) by Matt Kane

Looking back at my onchain & offchain purchase history, I don’t believe there’s been a month since the summer of 2019 that I haven’t collected at least one digital artwork.

And yet, no matter how long you collect, you always remember your firsts. Of course there can only by one ‘first work I collected’ ($COLR by MLIBTY), but especially as you go deeper into your collector journey and have a solid collection built up, it’s always special when you’re able to add a new artist’s work to your collection.

September was my month to add the American Absurdist par excellence otherwise known as diewiththemostlikes to my personal collection. And not once, but twice! I have a feeling it won’t be long until I add another piece of theirs to my collection either.

Last month also saw a few sales, mostly over on the tezos-based marketplace objkt.com. No crazy prices, but I made a little profit on the tezos works I parted with.

Sometimes in order to help get a market going, folks need to let go of some works lower than they’d like. You’re never going to get a 100,000% return on every piece in your collection, and if you try to you’re never going to sell anything, and newcomers will never be able to acquire anything.

Well, until next month. Happy collecting in the meantime.

Purchases in September 2023

Beef Brothko #96 by diewiththemostlikes (OpenSea)

thank you for your service #3/9 by diewiththemostlikes (Nifty Gateway)

The Scout #6/59 by Metageist (Nifty Gateway) [.glb VR Sculpture]

Midrange Hawkings #32/65 by bongdoe (Nifty Gateway)

Synth.05 Spagoot Twist #17/20 by Roger Kilimanjaro (Nifty Gateway)

Exit.MAD #72/79 by Chepertom (Nifty Gateway)

Orbit #52/79 by Stefan Große Halbuer (Nifty Gateway)

AND! 6 by OONA - feat. SamJ, Violet Bond, Edgar Fabián Frías, David Henry Nobody Jr, DADAGAN (Manifold)

FEWO #15334 by fewocious (Nifty Gateway + Manifold)

CodeTrip #94 by Paradoxx & NineOverZero (prohibition.art)

Prunings in September 2023

• Chaos #89/108 by Vhils Dec 22, 2022 (Nifty Gateway)

• how_far_can_the_soul_swim_out_through_the_eyes_004.gif (ed. of 45) by sintang_ligalig (objkt.com)

• Ping Pong, the Isolation Games (ed. of 100) by Neural Bricolage (objkt.com)

• 036 (ed. of 10) by Elna Frederick (obkt.com)

• Internal Differences (ed. of 10) (objkt.com)

Cover Image: Beef Brothko #96 by diewiththemostlikes

p.s. loving the NFT embed feature on Mirror, but wish the embed referenced the artist associated to the linked NFT collection instead of the deploying address.

I collected some gems including a brand new Sarah Zucker [pictured above], some amazing works off of Nifty Gateway by a few artists I have long admired and finally had the great pleasure of producing, as well as my first cryptoart on Solana over on the Exchange Art platform.

You can peruse all of the works I collected below.

toucher de l'herbe #10/30 by Sarah Zucker (Manifold)

heart + craft #13262 by Snowfro + Jordan Lyall (Prohibition Art)

heart + craft #13260 by Snowfro + Jordan Lyall (Prohibition Art)

MOCA Fundraiser 2023 by MOCA (and 713 artists) (Manifold)

8 Protocols & Platforms on which to share Your Art 1 by Obxium (Mirror)

Spaghetti Bones #320 by Joshua Bagley (Art Blocks)

Ceremony #2/20 by Griff (Nifty Gateway)

Where All Things Happen #17/23 by kolahon (Nifty Gateway)

purgatory. #7/19 by Dead Seagull (Nifty Gateway)

banguh #22/25 by Desultor (Nifty Gateway)

Ocean View by fatih öztürk (Exchange.Art)

In the context of collecting pruning can mean two things: selling work in your collection or curating it. August pruning was all about the latter.

I had been planning on it for awhile, but I finally consolidated most of the work I consider most precious in my multi-sig Safe. This entailed sending works from multiple hot wallets + NG to a single account.

After that I updated the OS profile associated with it. I set my pfp and background (all Matt Kane of course) and most importantly I set up my featured lists.

OS allows you to set 10 distinct featured lists. I made the decision to break each featured section out by artist starting with Sarah Zucker and followed by Max Osiris, Panter Xhita, XCOPY, CryptoCubes & Creators, Bryan Brinkman, Skygolpe, Giant Swan, Matt Kane, and the complete LACMA collection.

I think the results look great and added it to most of my public social profiles.

You can check it out HERE.

subscribe://

Cover Image: Spaghetti Bones #320 by Joshua Bagley