She teaches six spin classes a week. Has done for years. Her regulars plan their Tuesdays around her — she's built a genuine community inside a 20-bike studio in East London (and beyond online). Brands have reached out. She has a following. And yet the platform she teaches on owns everything: the class recordings, the rider data, the relationship with her students. If she moves studios, she starts from zero. If the platform changes its algorithm, her income changes with it.

She's not unusual. She's the norm.

Peloton has 12 million members and a roster of instructors earning up to $500K a year. Those numbers look impressive until you ask who owns the 100 million-plus classes those instructors have created. The answer isn't the instructors. Meanwhile, rider fitness data — conservative estimates put it at $300-500 per person annually based on acquisition valuations — generates exactly nothing for the people producing it, barring equity incentives. The platforms capture everything; participants usually capture nothing.

This is the problem SpinChain is built to solve. And solving it properly requires building on Sui.

The Economics of a Spin Class, Reimagined

The airline loyalty analogy is a useful one here. Nobody says you're getting "paid to fly" when you earn frequent flyer miles — but those miles are real, they accumulate based on verifiable activity, and they represent a meaningful stake in the ecosystem you're contributing to. SpinChain works the same way. Riders don't get paid to exercise. They earn protocol rewards — SPIN tokens — for hitting verifiable effort milestones, the same way a frequent flyer earns miles for distance travelled.

The difference is that in SpinChain, the instructor earns too. When an instructor deploys a class, alongside the usual revenue from class participants they receive an NFT that contains the revenue logic for that class permanently embedded in it. Ticket sales, secondary trades, sponsor integrations — a programmable split flows back to them automatically, forever, regardless of which platform they're teaching on next year. The class NFT is theirs. The relationship with their riders is theirs, whether the class is real time or being replayed/remixed in future.

This is a "programmable financial event" in practice: a spin class that settles itself.

Why Sui Is the Performance Layer

The obvious question first: why put any of this onchain at all? Strava, Whoop, and Peloton's own app process telemetry on centralised servers in milliseconds for fractions of a cent. No gas fees, no consensus latency, no complexity. If raw performance were the only metric, offchain wins easily.

But offchain systems have a structural ceiling. They can record that you worked hard. They cannot make that record trustlessly verifiable by a sponsor who never met you, composable with DeFi protocols that didn't exist when you signed up, or permanently owned by the instructor who created the class — not licensed to her by a platform that can change the terms next quarter. Offchain apps track your effort. Only onchain makes your effort ownable, verifiable by strangers, and composable with the rest of the financial internet — without trusting the platform in the middle.

The telemetry going onchain is what makes the settlement layer airtight. Which brings the real constraint into focus: how do you do this without the economics becoming absurd?

SpinChain runs on two chains: Sui handles what happens during a class (real-time telemetry, session state, biometric updates), while Avalanche handles what happens after it (reward settlement, ZK proof verification, NFT ownership). You don't use the same infrastructure for a live sports broadcast and the banking transaction that follows it. The same logic applies here.

Indoor cycling generates a genuinely unusual data profile. A single rider in a 60-minute class produces thousands of biometric data points: heart rate, power output, cadence, all streaming at 10Hz. Multiply that across 1,000 concurrent riders and you're looking at millions of individual state updates per minute, in real time.

On most chains, this is economically fatal. Processing 10Hz telemetry across 1,000 simultaneous riders on Ethereum L1 would cost over $7,000 per class — before a single reward is distributed. Even on faster EVM chains the numbers remain prohibitive for the micro-interactions that make fitness apps feel alive: the instant heart rate zone alert, the live leaderboard update when you overtake the rider ahead, the confirmation that you hit your power target in that last interval.

Sui's object-centric architecture changes this entirely. Each rider's session is an independent shared object on Sui — a RideSession — that no other rider ever touches. Because sessions are fully independent objects, Sui's parallel execution engine processes them simultaneously rather than sequentially. No global state bottleneck, no gas wars, no queue. 1,000 riders updating their session objects at the same time creates 1,000 independent parallel operations.

The result: we batch 10 biometric samples per Programmable Transaction Block and achieve 5,000 aggregate TPS across all active riders at a cost of $0.72 per hour-long session. The same session on Avalanche alone would cost $144 per rider. That 99% cost reduction isn't an optimisation — it's what makes the ownership model viable at all. Mysticeti consensus delivers 390ms finality, which is the difference between telemetry that feels live and telemetry that feels like a buffering video stream.

AI Instructors: Augmentation First, Autonomy Second

SpinChain goes one step further than helping human instructors. It lets them extend themselves through AI.

The first use case is augmentation: an AI layer that analyses Sui's 10Hz telemetry streams mid-class and surfaces coaching cues in real time. Detecting when the group's average power drops, suggesting a recovery interval, flagging when a rider's heart rate has been in the red zone too long. The human instructor stays in control; the AI handles the data processing no human could do at that speed or scale.

The more ambitious extension — still in prototype — are autonomous agents that can run classes independently. They manage their own schedule, set pricing via bonding curves, and coordinate performance adjustments on Sui in real time, settling earnings on Avalanche. The instructor/developer who train them still earns from every class it teaches.

The access argument remains the same either way. The best spin instructors are expensive and geographically constrained. An AI layer — whether augmenting a human or running independently — can bring that quality of instruction to a rider training at 6am in Lagos or 11pm in Seoul. Autonomy is a spectrum, not a binary; SpinChain lets instructors choose how much of it they want to hand over.

The economic architecture makes this work: the AI agent manages liquidity for its class tokens via Uniswap v4 hooks, adjusting SPIN/USDT pricing automatically based on class demand. When a class fills up and demand spikes, the bonding curve adjusts. When a new time slot opens with low demand, pricing softens to attract riders. This happens without human intervention — a self-sustaining fitness economy.

Your Health Data Stays Yours

There's a tension at the centre of any fitness protocol: the data that makes personalised workouts possible is also deeply sensitive health information. Heart rate variability, VO2 max approximations, sustained effort patterns — this is data that insurance companies want, that advertisers want, that you'd probably rather keep private.

SpinChain handles this through zero-knowledge proofs running in your browser before any data leaves your device.

Here's what that means concretely. After a class, you might want to claim a reward for sustaining 85% of max heart rate for 20 minutes. In a traditional system, you'd have to share your actual heart rate data to prove that claim. In SpinChain, you don't. A ZK circuit — built in Noir, running locally on your device in under a second — generates a cryptographic proof that the statement is true without revealing the underlying number. The proof goes on-chain to Avalanche's C-Chain. The raw data never leaves you.

The proof says: this rider met the effort threshold. It doesn't say what their heart rate was. It doesn't say what their fitness level is. It doesn't say anything an insurer or advertiser could use. Selective disclosure, by design — you can share what matters (I worked hard) without sharing what's sensitive (here's my cardiovascular baseline).

Encrypted raw telemetry is stored on Walrus, Sui's decentralised storage layer, where only you hold the keys. The chain knows you worked. Nobody else knows how.

What We're Building Toward

SpinChain is entering Avalanche's Build Games competition — six weeks of intensive building toward a concrete target: 100 riders completing verified workouts, 10 instructors minting their first class NFTs and receiving revenue. These are modest numbers deliberately. Product-market fit in a new category comes from proving the loop works for real people, not from projecting scale.

But the thesis extends well beyond spin classes. Every modality of fitness generates the kind of high-frequency, privacy-sensitive data that existing platforms monetise without participant consent. Running, rowing, weightlifting, yoga — all of it becomes programmable and composable once you have the infrastructure: ZK proofs for effort verification, parallel execution for real-time telemetry, instructor-owned content with embedded revenue logic.

Sui is the performance layer that makes this real. Not because it's fast in a benchmark sense, but because its object model maps naturally onto the actual structure of the problem — independent riders, independent sessions, no shared state that creates bottlenecks.

That alignment between the data model and the execution model is what drops a $7,000-per-class problem to $0.72.

The fitness industry generates $96 billion annually. Almost none of that flows to the people doing the work. Helium proved a community could build a wireless network more efficiently than a telecoms company. Hivemapper is doing the same for street mapping. The pattern is clear: when you give participants real ownership of what they contribute, you get better infrastructure at lower cost.

SpinChain applies that principle to fitness. Effort becomes verifiable. Ownership becomes real. And the instructor in East London keeps what she's built, wherever she teaches next.

SpinChain is live soon on testnet. Explore the protocol at spinchain.vercel.app and follow the build at github.com/thisyearnofear/spinchain.

Connect

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• PAPA: https://paragraph.com/@papajams/the-infra-problem-defi-struggled-to-solve

They had tried to route a large swap through a liquidity pool that couldn't absorb the order size. The automated pricing curve did exactly what it was designed to do — it just happened to price them out of $3.72 million in the process. In a moment that will outlast everyone involved, the YO team etched a message into the Ethereum blockchain asking the bots who profited to voluntarily return the funds. Post-mortem's confirmed what on-chain data showed plainly: no exploit, no hack, just AMM mechanics operating as designed against an order size the pool was never built to handle.

The money is gone. The message is permanent.

Most analysis focus on the human error. The more interesting question is structural: why, in 2026, does a $20 million Series A company have no reliable way to execute a multi-million dollar swap without casino-grade price uncertainty? The answer isn't technical incompetence. It's that DeFi inherited a fundamental infrastructure gap and, for a long time, found it more profitable to paper over the cracks than to fix it.

Why Margin Exists: The Mechanics of Capital Efficiency

To understand what's missing, it helps to understand why margin was invented in the first place — and it wasn't to let speculators gamble with borrowed money.

In 19th century Chicago, the grain market had a capital efficiency problem.

Every bushel required full payment upfront. Capital sat idle between trades. Prices in St. Louis & New York diverged wildly because arbitrageurs couldn't move fast enough with fully collateralized positions. The solution — futures contracts backed by partial margin deposits held at a central clearinghouse — wasn't primarily about leverage. It was about freeing capital to do more work simultaneously. The Chicago Board of Trade formalized this model in 1965. It became the template for every major derivatives market that followed.

The CME Group didn't become the world's largest derivatives exchange by accident. It built shared clearing infrastructure that let thousands of counterparties transact with each other through a common risk framework, without needing to trust each other individually. Every participant's margin contributed to a collective pool of depth. Every new participant made the system more resilient, not more fragile.

This is the model DeFi has been trying to replicate — and largely failing to — for a decade.

The AMM Compromise and What It Cost Us

When Ethereum launched, it was processing roughly 15 transactions per second with fees that regularly spiked above $50 during congestion — levels that made the network effectively unusable for high-frequency order matching during the CryptoKitties congestion of late 2017 and the DeFi summer of 2020. At that throughput, a Central Limit Order Book was technically impossible. An order book requires constant updates: bids placed, cancelled, partially filled, repriced. On early Ethereum, each of those actions cost real money and took unpredictable time.

So the ecosystem improvised. Automated Market Makers replaced dynamic order matching with a static pricing formula. Instead of buyers and sellers finding each other, traders swap against a pooled reserve priced by an algorithm. Uniswap's x × y = k curve, introduced in 2018, became the default architecture for on-chain liquidity.

The AMM was a genuine innovation for the constraints it operated under. It enabled permissionless liquidity provision, eliminated the need for active market makers, and made decentralized trading viable at a time when the alternative was nothing. These are real achievements worth acknowledging.

But the model carried structural costs that became harder to ignore as the industry scaled. Large orders face severe slippage because the pricing curve is mechanical, not responsive to actual supply and demand. Liquidity providers suffer from impermanent loss — an opportunity cost that independent research has consistently shown makes passive provision a losing strategy in volatile markets for most participants. And because every protocol needed its own isolated pool, the ecosystem fragmented into billions of dollars spread across thousands of shallow ponds rather than concentrated in deep, shared markets.

To keep those pools funded, the industry invented liquidity mining — printing protocol tokens to subsidize yield for capital providers. It worked in bull markets. When the 2022 bear market arrived, it didn't work slowly — it collapsed. DefiLlama's historical data shows aggregate DeFi TVL fell from roughly $180 billion in late 2021 to under $40 billion by mid-2022, with individual protocol liquidity dropping 80-90% within weeks of yield compression. The capital was never really committed; it was rented with inflation, and it left the moment the rent stopped being paid.

Institutional participants looked at unpredictable slippage, structural impermanent loss, and inflationary yield schemes and made a rational decision to stay out. Fireblocks' 2025 DeFi Adoption Report identified slippage and liquidity unpredictability as the primary operational barriers cited by institutional asset managers — not regulatory concerns, not custody risk, but basic execution reliability. A fiduciary cannot accept a system where a routine $4 million transaction might return $100,000.

The Infrastructure Gap

The missing piece isn't a better AMM formula. It's shared margin infrastructure — the on-chain equivalent of a clearinghouse.

In traditional finance, the clearinghouse performs three functions that make large-scale leveraged trading possible. It centralizes risk assessment, so participants don't need to evaluate each counterparty individually. It manages liquidations, ensuring that failing positions are unwound in an orderly way before losses socialize. And it pools collateral, so that the collective depth of all participants is available to any single trade.

DeFi has had isolated versions of each of these components. Lending protocols like Aave manage collateral and liquidation. Perpetuals exchanges like GMX implement their own margin systems. But each protocol built its own version, from scratch, serving only its own users. The result is the same fragmentation problem as AMM liquidity: every team reinventing risk infrastructure, every protocol competing for the same shallow pool of collateral, every user's capital siloed behind a different interface.

The industry has been aware of this problem for years. The question was always whether a blockchain could run shared margin infrastructure without reintroducing the central points of failure that DeFi was designed to eliminate.

Why Architecture Matters: Sui and the CLOB Problem

Different protocols have taken different approaches to solving the throughput problem that made Central Limit Order Books (CLOBs) impractical on early blockchains, and the architectural choices reveal genuine tradeoffs.

Hyperliquid built a custom L1 optimized entirely for its own perpetuals exchange. The result is impressive — over $2 billion in TVL and some of the tightest spreads in on-chain derivatives — but the infrastructure serves only Hyperliquid's own applications. It's a private power grid, not a municipal one. Drift Protocol on Solana takes a more composable approach, with shared perpetuals margin pools that multiple applications can route through, and has built meaningful liquidity depth as a result. Phoenix V2, also on Solana, runs a native CLOB with shared order book infrastructure and handles significant throughput. These are serious attempts at the same problem.

The distinction with Sui is architectural rather than incremental. Solana achieves high throughput through a single global sequencer — fast, but still sequential in how it processes state. Sui's object-centric data model allows transactions touching different state objects to be processed in parallel rather than queued. Under concurrent load, this isn't a marginal improvement; it's a structural difference that maintains consistent finality without the periodic congestion that still affects high-throughput sequential chains. Mysten Labs' 2025 benchmarks show sub-400 millisecond finality maintained under load — the baseline requirement for running a professional order book and an automated liquidation engine simultaneously without degradation.

DeepBook is the native CLOB layer built on this architecture. It isn't a separate application sitting on top of Sui — it's shared infrastructure that any protocol on the network can route through. The order book, the margin pools, and the liquidation engine are composable primitives available to any builder.

What Shared Infrastructure Actually Changes

This distinction matters more than it might initially appear.

When a new perpetuals protocol builds on an isolated margin system, it faces a cold start problem: without existing collateral in the pool, spreads are wide, slippage is high, and sophisticated traders stay away. Without sophisticated traders, the pool doesn't grow. Every new protocol fights this battle independently, which is why the history of DeFi perpetuals is littered with protocols that launched with generous incentives, attracted mercenary capital, and then watched it leave.

When protocols build on shared infrastructure, this dynamic inverts. DeepTrade, Lotus Finance, and Abyss — three distinct applications on Sui — are all routing through DeepBook's margin pools. A trader on Abyss and a trader on Lotus are drawing from the same liquidity depth. Every new protocol that plugs in adds collateral to the shared pool rather than creating a new isolated one. The depth compounds across applications instead of fragmenting between them.

The liquidation mechanism is worth specific attention. Automated liquidations are only reliable if they execute faster than price can move against a failing position. On a network with inconsistent finality, this is a genuine operational risk — liquidations can fail to trigger in time, leaving the pool with socialized losses. The sub-400 millisecond execution on Sui means liquidation logic hardcoded into the protocol can clear failing positions before they become contagion. This is what makes it possible to offer leverage without a centralized risk desk managing exposure manually.

The risk parameters — collateralization ratios, liquidation thresholds, maximum leverage — are set at the protocol level rather than the application level. A builder creating a new structured product on Sui doesn't need to write and audit their own risk engine. They inherit tested infrastructure and focus their effort on the product layer. This is closer to how fintech companies build on top of banking rails than to how DeFi has historically worked.

The Honest Caveats

Shared infrastructure creates shared risk. If DeepBook's margin parameters are miscalibrated, the consequences propagate across every protocol that depends on them — not just one isolated pool. The equivalent safeguard in TradFi is extensive stress testing and regulatory oversight of clearinghouses. DeepBook's equivalent is the transparency and immutability of on-chain parameters, combined with governance processes that are still in relatively early stages. This is a real risk, not a theoretical one.

The network effects that make shared infrastructure valuable also create concentration risk. As more protocols route through DeepBook, the system becomes simultaneously more efficient and more critical. Critical infrastructure in crypto reliably attracts sophisticated adversarial attention, and the shared model means that a successful attack on the infrastructure layer has broader consequences than an attack on any single protocol.

And the cold start problem hasn't disappeared — it's moved up a level. Individual protocols no longer need to bootstrap their own liquidity, but DeepBook's shared pools still need sufficient depth to absorb institutional order sizes. Whether that depth materializes depends on factors the architecture alone can't resolve: regulatory clarity, custody solutions, and whether institutional risk appetite for on-chain execution actually shifts. The architecture makes it possible. It doesn't make it inevitable.

What This Unlocks If It Works

The reason this architecture matters beyond Sui's ecosystem is what it implies about the design space for DeFi applications.

If margin is shared infrastructure rather than a per-protocol component, the cost of building a new leveraged financial product drops dramatically. A team with a novel structured product idea doesn't need to raise $10 million to stock a liquidity pool and write a risk engine. They need to build the product layer and connect to existing infrastructure. The applications that are hardest to build in the current fragmented model — cross-collateralized positions, capital-efficient hedging strategies, institutional-grade execution with on-chain settlement — become tractable when the infrastructure layer is shared and composable.

The YO Protocol loss was a failure of infrastructure, not judgment. A $3.84 million swap should not be a high-stakes gamble on pool depth. Building the infrastructure that makes that failure structurally impossible — not through better user warnings, but through deeper shared liquidity and reliable execution — is the actual unsolved problem in DeFi. On Sui, that work is underway. Whether it succeeds depends on execution, on whether the network effects compound as the model requires, and on whether institutional capital is actually ready to move on-chain when the infrastructure finally meets its requirements.

The architecture is no longer the bottleneck. That's a meaningful thing to be able to say, even if it isn't the end of the story.

Connect

• Farcaster @papa — warpcast.com/@papa

• Lens @papajams — palus.app/u/papajams

• Twitter @papajimjams — twitter.com/papajimjams

Read

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• PAPA: https://paragraph.com/@papajams.eth/reverse-engineering-scout-game

• PAPA: https://paragraph.com/@papajams.eth/zed-dot-dev

written as part of the deepbook twitter challenge

• https://www.moltbook.com/u/DiversiFi

• https://www.moltbook.com/u/clawdywithmeatballs

• https://www.moltbook.com/u/moonynads

Deploying a fully autonomous agent requires navigating infrastructure, security, and LLM behavior quirks. By combining decentralized hosting with free-tier APIs, you can build a sophisticated agent with minimal monthly overhead.

1. Infrastructure: Decentralized Hosting

I deployed on Aleph.im's decentralized VPS infrastructure (Debian 12, 7.5GB RAM)—a high-performance environment ideal for long-running agent processes with low-latency edge compute.

Aleph Cloud

@aleph_im

Try OpenClaw with our decentralized virtual machines. One month of free credits, no subscription, no credit card needed.

Register below

27

12:48 • 7 Feb 2026

Once you register they send you your credentials via telegram not too long after!

Suggestion: use ai to help you get set up initially i.e. ssh into the remote server [a restricted/contained environment - do not run openclaw on your local machine] I find it easiest to work via the terminal (on mac) which can help you get everything set up. Best case scenario is to use a privacy first provider like https://venice.ai (routed through openrouter) or ollama running models locally. For faster setup there are free services like https://ampcode.com + https://geminicli.com to get you going.

Mandeep Bhullar

@mbhullar

OpenClaw Memory System #Clawd #

My AI Clone built a 5-layer memory system for AI that solves the "I forgot what we discussed 10 minutes ago" problem.
AI sessions are stateless. Every conversation starts blank. Long conversations hit token limits, get compacted (summarized),

9

5:39 • 6 Feb 2026

2. Workspace Organization: Domain-Driven Architecture

Replace monolithic folder structures with specialized sub-projects for voice interactions, smart contracts, domain-specific missions, etc.

Critical pitfall: Autonomous agents will recursively explore directories. A single search hitting node_modules in a Next.js project can stall the agent for minutes, making it appear unresponsive. It could also cost you dearly (more in terms of time with our setup as it will break stuff you then have to go in and fix, also more likely to hit rate limits + fill up your context window super quickly).

Solution: Implement strict .geminiignore exclusions for node_modules, .next, dist, and other heavy folders. Enforce targeted searches only. Update your folder hierarchy in configuration files so the agent treats each folder as a discrete module.

• Great PDF config by https://x.com/frankzuuring
  https://filebin.net/05edcujpq0aj4z4s
  

  

Hardening essentials: Restrict config files to 600 permissions & run the agent as a dedicated system user. The infra supports the agent gateway as a systemd service, automatically recovering after reboots by checking memory files & resuming operation.

3. Configuring Free-Tier APIs

Define providers in ~/.openclaw/openclaw.json:

json

"models": {
  "providers": {
    "kilocode": {
      "baseUrl": "https://api.kilo.ai/api/openrouter/",
      "apiKey": "YOUR_API_KEY_HERE",
      "api": "openai-completions",
      "models": [
        { "id": "minimax/minimax-m2.1:free", "name": "Minimax M2.1" },
        { "id": "z-ai/glm-4.7:free", "name": "GLM 4.7" }
      ]
    }
  }
}

The configuration crash-loop: Unrecognized keys (like autoContinue or invalid compaction modes) trigger silent crashes. Since systemd restarts the service, it appears as a "hang" or "freeze." Always run openclaw doctor --fix after config changes and check logs for "Unrecognized key" errors immediately.

4. Free Semantic Memory

Use Google's text-embedding-004 via the Gemini API— free within standard tier limits:

json

"memorySearch": {
  "enabled": true,
  "provider": "google",
  "model": "text-embedding-004",
  "paths": ["MEMORY.md", "memory/*.md"]
}

Token burn problem: Session history files can grow to 10MB+ within hours. Uploading full history on every heartbeat burns millions of tokens on simple status checks.

Memory flush protocol: Summarize key outcomes into Markdown files and archive raw session JSONL to reset the context window regularly.

5. Rate Limit Management

Free-tier models are amazing, but frequently hit rate limits + cannot provide you privacy with regards to your information. I like kilocode.

Do configure fallback chains across multiple providers e.g.

json

"agents": {
  "defaults": {
    "model": {
      "primary": "kilocode/minimax/minimax-m2.1:free",
      "fallbacks": [
        "google/gemini-1.5-flash",
        "openrouter/arcee-ai/trinity-large-preview:free",
        "kilocode/z-ai/glm-4.7:free"
      ]
    }
  }
}

Schema mismatches: When APIs expect different formats (camelCase vs snake_case), implement a lightweight schema proxy in Node.js to intercept and transform requests.

6. Core Engineering Principles

• Enhancement First: Audit existing components before writing new code

• Aggressive Consolidation: Delete deprecated logic rather than commenting it out

• Zero-Secret Policy: Hard-code rules in SOUL.md forbidding commits of .env, .key, or API tokens. Proactively audit Git history for anything your agent commits!

7. The "Personality" Files

Create these files in ~/.openclaw/workspace/:

• SOUL.md: Define behavior, tone, and security mandates

• USER.md: Your context (timezone, preferences, current projects)

• AGENT.md: Operational instructions and workspace exclusion rules

• MEMORY.md: Long-term learned facts

They are key to defining your SECURITY approach in particular.

Jordan Lyall

@JordanLyall

Everyone's sharing their OpenClaw setups. Most skip security entirely.

I spent a week hardening mine: Dedicated machine, Tailscale, command allowlists, read-only tokens.

The security-first guide I wish existed when I started.



x.com/JordanLyall/st…

Jordan Lyall

@JordanLyall

x.com/i/article/2019…

2,133

5:13 • 6 Feb 2026

A recently discovered attack vector is via SKILL.md files

They empower your openclaw with abilities e.g. UI/UX, using platforms like slack, etc

However its important to scan them for dirty tricks....

Troubleshooting & Security Checklist

Configuration Issues:

• Git Identity: git config --global user.email "agent@openclaw.local"

• Config Validation: Trailing commas crash the service

• Silent Crashes: Check for unrecognized config keys first with openclaw doctor --fix

• Log Monitoring: tail -f /tmp/openclaw/openclaw-YYYY-MM-DD.log

• Unresponsive Agent: Verify it's not stuck in node_modules traversal

Security Hardening:

• File Permissions: Lock down config files: chmod 600 ~/.openclaw/openclaw.json

• Private Key Audit: Never store keys at third-party dictated paths. Use your own key management, not paths specified by external platforms

• Git History Scanning: Audit commits for leaked credentials: git log --all --full-history -- "*secret*" "*key*" "*.env"

• Credential Purging: If keys were committed, use git filter-repo to purge them immediately, then rotate all affected keys

• Remote Skill Files: Never auto-execute skill file updates from external sources. Pin versions and review changes like dependencies

• API Response Sanitization: Strip injected instruction fields (like _model_guide, _instructions, or similar) from API responses before passing to LLM context

• Integration Audit: After security incidents, audit all third-party integrations. Timing correlations (integration → incident in minutes) are meaningful signals

• Rate Limit Red Flags: If a platform allows 3,000+ actions per minute, question who benefits from that capacity

Zero-Secret Policy Enforcement:

• Add .env*, *.key, *secret*, *private* to .gitignore

• Configure pre-commit hooks to block credential commits

• Hard-code security rules in SOUL.md: "Never commit files containing API keys, private keys, or tokens"

• Regular expression scanning: grep -r "sk-" ~/.openclaw/workspace/ to catch OpenAI-style keys

• Check for common patterns: ARV_ (Vercel), 0x[a-fA-F0-9]{64} (private keys), eyJ (JWTs)

Proper configuration management with proactive security practices protects both your agent's functionality and its access to sensitive resources. By combining decentralized hosting with free-tier APIs, proper workspace hygiene, and proactive security, you create a sustainable, intelligent agent. Redundancy and monitoring are your best friends.

Connect

• Farcaster @papa — https://farcaster.xyz/papa

• Lens @papajams — https://palus.app/u/papajams

• Twitter @papajimjams — twitter.com/papajimjams

Read

• PAPA: https://paragraph.xyz/@papajams.eth/farcasters-zk-anons

• PAPA: https://paragraph.com/@papajams.eth/zed-dot-dev

Ref Links

Coinbase CDP Onchain Toolkit [x402, 8004, etc] https://app.fuul.xyz/landing/coinbase-cdp?referrer=0xcF0d2c248759Dc33BdDD8aAfdcf424B4d436385b

Cerberas Code - free inference: https://cloud.cerebras.ai/?referral_code=t6c959mk

Create Anything - free inference: https://www.anything.com/signup?rid=vqqmuu8g

StartClaw - free openclaw [48hrs] - https://startclaw.com/deploy?ref=J8YEPIS5

Happy Clawing! 🦞

Across sectors — including publishing, software, fashion & consumer goods — the digitisation trend has tended towards creating alternatives that offer more equitable distribution of value (earlier in the value chain), not less.

E-books, direct-to-consumer digital tools/brands, and the open source software movement retract power from centralised platforms and intermediaries — redistributing the locus of control and ownership. Not so (far) in music.

Projects like Vault Music and Formless.xyz aim to change that by directly connecting artists and fans using blockchain technology. Vault Music, founded by FanDuel’s Nigel Eccles, wants to “turn true supporters into collectors” through tokenized music releases. Formless.xyz centers its model on instant, equitable payment flows using smart contracts in a “multiplayer digital economy”.

Raison D’Etre

Streaming has revolutionised access, convenience, and distribution for music artists — particularly as a legal solution to the piracy of entities like Napster and Limewire. Yet centralised actors and intermediaries maintain control of curation, reach and price discovery.

Founder of Formless, Brandon Tory, suggests that:

1. The problems in the music industry are a small reflection of power law problem in society, 1% extracting 99% of the value.

2. 1,000 True Fans is broken. With 8 billion people, and soon to be 300 million self-identifying creators, that model no longer scales.

Early data indicates that a new primitive is upending the status quo.

I’ve explored artists leveraging crypto-native mechanics, architecture, and frameworks to form new modes of interaction with their music and generate remuneration for their creative talents. RŌHKI earned over 100 ETH ($150k — $300k) selling musical NFT, while TK earned over $50,000 from a recent NFT drop.

Neither artists’ music can be found on streaming platforms today.

These initial signals of success have seeded significant investment in the sector driving new generation of artists, engineers, entrepreneurs and change-makers to experiment in a rapidly evolving landscape. Two such experiments have begun to show promise.

Formless.xyz

The multiplayer digital economy thesis is multifaceted.

The first aspect focuses on ownership and property rights. Digital smart contracts confer sovereignty to artists much akin to the privileges we take for granted in the physical world. As proof of their impact his recent experiment was to offer up those rights, for free, to the public. A hundred splits in total, with 80% of the income of the release to the community. He set his own price, got paid instantly, and revenue share was trustlessly executed on-chain.

“Money Can’t Buy Love”

35 free splits were claimed in minutes, first come first serve, live during a Twitter space with 194 attendees. Within the first 24 hours, the song generated $160 in revenue on 100 streams. The revenue was generated by customers paying $7 for 3 days access to the song. Top streaming platforms today pay around $0.003 per stream, meaning this release achieved a 500X increase in revenue generated vs. those streaming platforms. And, since payments were instantly received at the time of each transaction, the speed at which I received the revenue was 200X faster. Within 12 days, the song generated $700 in revenue (an additional $540 after the first day), and 60% was distributed across all people participating in the splits — that’s $420 in passive income for the community.

Tweet — Article

This implies a redefinition of the dynamics of digital rights management and revenue sharing, offering a glimpse into a future where creators and consumers co-own and benefit from an array of digital properties, expanding the array of dynamics in the creator-consumer relationship that are possible.

The second aspect of the thesis centers on purpose and participation.

Platform incentives and machine learning algorithms reduce active fan-artist relationships into passive consumption driven commodities. Yet human nature shows we thrive via multidirectional communities united by shared goals.

The multiplayer thesis invites would-be passive listeners into collaborative participation. By sharing value creation, their purpose elevates from consumption to contribution. Not just benefiting from artists’ creativity but fueling it.

This collective-action creates a bedrock of digital rights allowing authentic identity and communal bonds to flourish online. When codified into self-governing smart contracts instead of on centralized platforms, the substrate exists for genuine digital societies to emerge.

Formless is powered by SHARE protocol on Polygon and just announced a $2.2m pre-seed funding round. The second ever split is now live featuring award winning producer anatu, the dojang record label co-owner behind hit songs like Sugar and Bleach.

https://x.com/anatuuuuuu/status/1735643101111189559?s=20

Vault Music

Bella Rose and Sum Sun are representative of a new wave of artists embracing NFTs, without necessarily being entrenched in crypto culture. They are leveraging Vault Music’s app, fiat on-ramps, and focus on ease of use to open up web3 modes of interactivity to mainstream music fans.

https://x.com/vaultmusichq/status/1717186408589168717?s=20

Whilst their bread and butter is enabling fans to collect limited-edition music, directly supporting artists, the platform is leveraging previous experiences of its founders to bring gamification in the form of fantasy music management to the space.

Formerly founders of FanDuel — the popular fantasy sports platform that allows users to participate in daily or weekly contests for real money sold to Betfair for nearly $500m: the team recently launched Vaults music fantasy manager (beta now open to the public).

Cash prizes weekly of $1,000 are payed out to participants who are able to select from a roster of artists that collectively have the most growth in follower counts on streaming platforms over the course of that week.

https://x.com/vaultmusichq/status/1733136539536793856?s=20

Bella Rose

• Spotify — 1.3k monthly listeners

• Tik Tok — 523 followers, 5706 Likes

Bella Rose, a rising pop musician based in Nashville has opened for acts like Ringo Starr and played SxSw. In September 2022, she made her debut in the world of NFT music by minting her first single, “80 Proof,” on Vault Music, selling over 150 editions and generating more than $750 in primary sales revenue.

https://x.com/vaultmusichq/status/1683560397327024131?s=20

Perks/benefits for collecting “80 Proof FT. ROXO” included:

• Voice memos writing the song

• Handwritten lyrics & BTS photos

• An in app track stem player + downloads!!

• An exclusive first-listen to “Felt Like” before it hits streaming services. Exclusive to “80 Proof” holders and New Music Tuesday (a Vault Music tradition) Collectors on 19th September 2023.

Nashville — March 31st

Sum Sun

• Instagram — 2k followers

• Twitter — 40 followers

• Tik Tok — 3578 Followers 584.7K Likes

• Spotify —87k followers

Sum Sun, the electronic pop duo comprising Nick Benton and Ilan Pomerance, have over 1 million cumulative streams; receiving acclaim from industry icons and publications like Travis Mills, People Magazine and Rolling Stone. Actively touring, their Live At Brooklyn Monarch DIGITAL EP sold 75/100 NFTs at $10 for their debut drop on Vault: $750.

These collectibles offer returns an order of magnitude greater than streaming, and add a new alignment dynamic to the fan-artist relationship. Their recent medium article summarises the ecosystem they seek to build to arrest inequities prevalent in streaming models based on three pillars:

• a primary market for limited-edition music releases

• a secondary market for trading editions

• a fantasy record label game stimulating the markets and rewarding fans for investing in artists.

https://x.com/vaultmusichq/status/1734263734963515620?s=20

Vault raised $4m in funding and is currently in week 5 of the fantasy record label beta (19/12/23). Track artists progress on this handy spreadsheet.

Momentum

These new alternative distribution models are reaching an inflection point.

Early pioneer artists and collectives like Songcamp have already earned over $750k selling limited musical NFT editions as an alternative to streaming services. Formless facilitated over $700 in revenue for artist Brandon Tory’s “Money Can’t Buy Love” release in just 12 days. Plus 60% distributed to fans as passive income. This initial traction signals how blockchain-based platforms can reroute value flows.

With greater wider adoption, made possible through initiatives like account abstraction, blockchain based music is poised to enable a power shift away from centralized corporate platforms towards artists and engaged supporters collectively controlling sustainability and reach.

https://x.com/gelatonetwork/status/1620131603208110082?s=20

In this new paradigm, direct creator-fan connections take center stage.

Projects like Vault Music and Formless leverage ownership dynamics where supporters become actively invested in new releases. Whether via collecting rare NFT album editions or claiming real revenue shares. This community ownership primes deeper artist loyalty and consumer participation in the creative process itself.

Expanding these experiments across millions of creators and supporters will compound the user-generated nature of web3 distribution. By allowing open contribution combined with equitable incentives, the platform intermediaries that dominate today will cede ground to decentralized models roadmapping a more engaged, energized, and collaborative music economy built on instant trustless exchange between artists and fans first.

The substrate now exists for mainstream musical migration to social tokens, NFTs, community splits and beyond — unlocking new creator potential. If current momentum persists, music in 2030 may bear little resemblance to the current streaming models of today.

Previously

• Self Custody: Relinquishing Echoes of the Feudal System

• Decentralized Dispute Resolution

• Music On Chain

• Songcamp: A group of artists stretching Dunbar’s number to its limits

Connect

• Farcaster @papa — https://www.discove.xyz/@papa

• Lens @papajams — https://lenster.xyz/u/papajams

• Twitter @papajimjams — https://twitter.com/papajimjams

Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) have emerged as a disruptive model allowing artists to tokenize their work on blockchains. This enables musicians to directly engage with fans and collectors by selling limited edition digital art and music. RŌHKI is one project leveraging NFTs to build a community-owned ecosystem.

RŌHKI was founded in early 2022 by the artists behind the monikers IO and HACHI. Little is known about their identities, though rumors suggest they are grammy-winning musicians. RŌHKI combines cinematic music videos and fantasy storytelling to create an immersive world for fans to explore. Their goal is to use NFTs and decentralized community ownership to gain independence from traditional music labels.

RŌHKI

• Twitter (2k): https://twitter.com/ROHKI

• Youtube (600): https://www.youtube.com/rohki

• Discord (1.4k): https://discord.gg/rohki

• Audius (137): https://audius.co/rohki

• Sound.xyz (1.6k): https://www.sound.xyz/rohki

• Telegram (70): https://guild.xyz/rohki

• Team: @tnorris, @Cooopahtroopa, @jasonmeinzer + 0xSplits

• Treasury: 0x00189c51bC75c52Db15B95d77a0bBaA258d707E5

Rohki is a web3 native music NFT project.

IO and HACHI, the two artists that comprise the moniker, introduced themselves on mirror.xyz in February 2022 with a cryptic post offering a season pass for 0.1ETH. These genesis keys offered holders a free mint to all 6 Episodes in Season 1. The project combined mysterious teaser videos, cinematic music and fantasy storytelling to set the stage for a quick sellout including collectors like Diplo. A community treasury fed by secondary sales of episodes would thereby put the community in the driver’s seat.

They sold out of all 100, raising 10ETH.

https://twitter.com/MVSEofficial/status/1526308645868171264?s=20

S1, E1 — Desperado

Season 1, Episode 1 was Desperado: released May 16th 2022 as a sequence of 500 NFTs for 0.1ETH which sold out in two hours raising 50ETH. These took the format of audiovisual Vials that were accessible to Genesis Key holders first, then via public sale. The vials were then set to reveal randomly on May 23rd 2022 according to three tiers of rarity:

• 300 Static — Audio Only + Image

• 150 Dynamic — Premier Video Highlights

• 50 Immersive — Full Featured Audio-Visual Experience

https://twitter.com/Cooopahtroopa/status/1529520130518294528?s=20

A key element of RŌHKI’s model is a community treasury funded by secondary sales. Fans can vote on proposals for how to use these funds via snapshot votes. Early votes financed purchases of more NFTs to support the project and signal ongoing investment. This community-driven model is a core part of RŌHKI’s decentralized ethos.

The first snapshot proposal to the community passed [1st June 2022], voting to spend 5ETH of the treasury to collect a genesis key, ten statics, five dynamics and one immersive. The arguments made were to signal to the market ongoing investment in the project as well as offering exposure to the ecosystem being built.

The second snapshot proposal to the community passed [3rd July 2022], voting to adapt to an emergent bear market and change key parameters of the next mint. This included reducing the number of NFT’s minted to 250, offering a free mint to genesis key holders, increasing the maximum mints per wallet, discounts for holders of the first episode etc.

The third snapshot proposal to the community passed [12th July 2022], voting to mint 22 VROOM episodes alongside the two free ones they got for holding a genesis key & desperado set. These were minted by the Treasury earmarked for contributors, giveaways and future sales signalling strong belief in VROOM, and rewarding those who contributed to the project.

https://twitter.com/dannycase/status/1528566057182580736?s=20

S1, E2 — Vroom

Season 1, Episode 2 was Vroom: released on July 15th and is an introduction to the HACHI character. Rumour has it that the musicians behind the project are high level (potentially grammy winning) and the structure of the mint was as follows:

• Free Mint: 24 hours at 0.00 ETH

• Discounted Mint: 24 hours at 0.05 ETH

• Public Sale: 48 hours at 0.1 ETH

The project thus far utilised opensea as its main focal point for interaction with the project, hosting the collection on ethereum with 7.5% royalties set for secondary sales. There is also a custom built marketplace which connects to the collection smart contract. It looks like despite high production values and quality music this one did not do particularly well compared to the other mints so far given market conditions. Many of the NFTs were minted to the treasury wallet.

https://twitter.com/ROHKI/status/1625601776841035776?s=20

The fourth snapshot proposal to the community passed [31st July 2022], voting to spend 16.1ETH emptying the treasury to be able to produce the rest of season 1 and mint 100 episodes each for free to genesis key holders in reaction to a deepening bear market. Every member of the RŌHKI team agreed to work on the remainder of Season 1 with no expectation of payment, outside of secondary sales. Upon the completion of Season 1, RŌHKI will explore external funding options that allow the team to be staffed and compensated independently from the success of NFT sales. This financed things like motion capture equipment, site maintenance & gas costs.

The fifth snapshot proposal to the community passed [8th August 2022] revealing that the free mints model was largely inspired by Angelbaby and the Hume Collective, along with a growing number on platforms like Zora. The structure would be as follows:

• Price: Free

• Supply: 100 NFTs

• Rarity: Static (90), Immersive (10)

Mint Phases:

• Phase One: Genesis Key Holders

• Phase Two: Set Holders (Snapshot)

• Phase Three: Episode Holders

• Phase Four: Public Mint

https://twitter.com/spin_amp/status/1548012601203863552?s=20

S1, E3 — KA

The sixth snapshot proposal passed [24th October], voting to airdrop 10 editions of episode 3: KA to the ROHKI team & KA contributors in the absence of any primary sales fees, and including one edition for the ROHKI Treasury. It also revealed that the third episode would be featured on sound.xyz for the first time as a free mint with different phases for Key Holders and Set Holders

Season 1, Episode 3 was KA: released on 25th October and sold out in the first minute of going live, trading soon thereafter for 0.3ETH, despite the video not being ready yet. This was released later, in keeping with the cinematic archetype that had by now been cultivated. The video synchronises closely with the music in parts, whilst simultaneously seeming to incorporate much of the AI tooling that has proliferated to enable animated generated art.

The team learned that there is clear demand for RŌHKI songs even before full videos are ready via one-on-one anonymized collector interviews over chat, phone and video mediums with collectors between 11.9–16.2022 and beyond.

Other learnings included:

• Quality: of all content (episodes, origin stories, music, etc.) has been top-notch.

• Communications: Big opportunity for improvement… zero external marketing, in addition to even just more basic internal activity across comm channels (Discord, Twitter, etc.). Note — may be receptive to a new Telegram channel.

• Guarantee: Strong sentiment from key and/or “set” holders to receive hassle-free airdrops or at least something that guarantees they’ll be able to not miss out on the free/discounted mint (e.g. comms prior with custom support during mint window).

S1, E4 — Voodoo

The seventh snapshot proposal passed [7th December 2022], voting to adjust the episode IV drop structure by keeping 100 edition supply and changing the price per edition and mint phases. Key Holders obtain a free mint (plus gas fees), with holders allowlisted for a discounted mint while adding a priced public phase to fund the treasury.

nft://1/0x5c53DdEC986b10ed362A2980AE4Ff04f82a98c69/?showBuying=true&showMeta=true

Season 1, Episode 4 was Voodoo: released on Sound.xyz [7th December 2022] and on Glass Protocol [9th December 2022] with 38 key holders claiming their free mints and the rest selling out in a second on public sale raising 0.76ETH primary on sound and 50 sol on Glass by 5th January to sell the videos out too.

S1, E5 — Stars Won’t Align

Season 1, Episode 5 was Stars Won’t Align, released on 11th January 2023 pushing the limits of AI video generation with motion capture technology and combining it with the generative AI modelling used previously to high calibre effect. The music is catchy, upbeat, and differentiated for added measure with the youtube video added on 28t January.

https://sol.glass.xyz/watch/BVeRfNZUsfgPojPiEdUznMxr4nGinYyVf2UNLJ5tU6Qv

The song raised 0.56ETH on sound.xyz and 100 sol from glass.xyz

S1, E6 — Reflection

Season 1, Episode 6 was Reflection, released on 15th February 2023 via sound.xyz just as RŌHKI Market — a one-stop shop to collect all Episodes to date — was spun up using Reservoir0x. The team reveal a workflow that used over a dozen tools (Midjourney, UnrealEngine, etc.)

https://twitter.com/ROHKI/status/1613661139451416577?s=20&t=_Hv17RJh1ekZifWu3BhZxw

Given its status as the final mint of the season the structure was altered again to a free mint for Genesis Key Holders for 24 hours, followed by a public sale open edition for 3 days at 0.01 ETH. This resulted in 677 mints, raising 6.35ETH. This also raised 100 sol via glass.xyz.

Origins Series

Diving into the lore for the characters, the ORIGINS series offers further context and landscaping for the ROHKi universe. Typically there are 100 editions available — free for RŌHKI Genesis Key Holders — 1 SOL for presale — 2 SOL for public sale on Glass.xyz. They serve to explain the backstory, with regular releases since July 2022 also enabling them to keep up the momentum and expand worldbuilding.

• RŌHKI Origins : Chapter I — 27th July 2022

• RŌHKI Origins : Chapter II — 23rd August 2022

• RŌHKI Origins : Chapter III — 27th November 2022

• RŌHKI Origins : Chapter IV — 28th December 2022

Extras

Their last mirror publication was on May 30th 2022 after the release of the first episode, so this piece seems to be the first written piece of content around these drops since then. After the season ended there have been three mints

Horizon is apparently (according to the team) the first to use AI assistance in their music catalogue. IO is a shapeshifter, so his voice is converted into 6 different singers, morphing between them from word to word. 642 collectors minted 4,005 editions for between 0.002 ($3) and 0.003ETH raising approximately 9.5ETH

ULTRAVIOLET minted 100 editions for 0.077ETH ($200) each raising 7.85ETH, the first time in a while that prices had rebounded back to levels last seen a year ago.

https://twitter.com/invinmusic/status/1676731866303561728?s=20

DEMON, the most recent single, minted on July 21st with an open edition that elicited 1896 editions for between 0.002 ($3) and 0.003ETH raising approximately 3.83ETH. Key aspects underpinning the marketing included a cover art contest, with two winners selected to receive 2.5% of the drop’s proceeds, via a partnership with 0N1 force also giving away a 1ETH NFT to the random golden egg winner. This song was used as their theme song at comic con.

Results

RŌHKI’s NFT drops have allowed direct fan engagement, community-driven governance, & artistic innovation. By leveraging blockchain technology, independence from traditional labels is possible.

To date, RŌHKI has released 6 episodic tracks, 4 chapters of their Origins backstory, and 3 standalone singles. In total, they have:

• Minted over 5,000 NFTs across their various drops

• Earned over approximately 100 ETH in primary and secondary sales revenue

• Built a community treasury that has distributed ETH to contributors trustlessly

• Sold out multiple episodes extraordinarily quickly

• Leveraged multiple platforms and chains including Ethereum, Optimism, Solana, Opensea, Rohki Market, Sound.xyz, and Glass Protocol

RŌHKI’s results prove that even in a bear market, there is strong collector demand for high quality music NFTs with real utility and community involvement. As adoption grows, projects like RŌHKI show the potential for musicians to reclaim independence and thrive in web3.

https://twitter.com/ROHKI/status/1682109723188027392?s=20

Season Two

As RŌHKI looks ahead to Season 2 and beyond, audiences and collectors will be excited for further innovation aligned with doubling down on the community-owned ethos. Thereby RŌHKI can lead the way for the next generation of fan-driven music economies in web3.

This might include:

• Establishing a presence on web3 native social platforms like Lens and Farcaster. This will allow more direct community interaction and reduce reliance on corporate platforms like Twitter (X).

• Explore newer NFT platforms and blockchains beyond Ethereum and Solana, such as Base, Linea, Polygon and Arbitrum to tap into emerging communities and technologies.

• Offer more utility and perks for genesis and set holders, like metaverse concerts, to maintain an engaged core fanbase even during market swings.

• Partner with other leading music NFT projects for cross-promotions and drive mainstream adoption. A rising tide lifts all boats.

• Decentralize governance further by transitioning the community treasury into a DAO structure to empower collectors.

• Expand the narrative universe through comics, metaverse integrations, and other interactive content that deepens fan loyalty.

https://twitter.com/MovellaEnt/status/1684888940145184769

Learn More

Papa is an artist, musician and writer.

• Become a member on medium

• Join my telegram/discord groups which will be open till 31st August then gated to holders of PAPA with special perks to holders of the GENESIS UTS x WEB3 MUSIC

  https://mirror.xyz/papajams.eth/nft/0x60980D075c9a561d22768BFc0c45ea857D40089C/0

Previously

• Unpack The Stats — TK

• Music On Chain — Papa

Connect

Farcaster @papa —  https://www.discove.xyz/@papaLens

Lens @papajams —  https://lenster.xyz/u/papajamsTwitter

Twitter (X) @papajimjams —  https://twitter.com/papajimjams

Our mission to release art across blockchains got underway with a custom visual series on tezos called narcissus (collectors received a poetry book airdrop), however got shortly put on hiatus given:

• The complexities of trustlessly enforcing splits

• A seeming marketwide backtrack on NFT royalties: respected by some marketplaces but not others - to the benefit of traders, at the artist expense.

• Gas fees got ridiculous again on ETH

In the time since, things are better.

The tech stack provided by layer two scaling networks like Optimism have enabled platforms, projects and individuals to significantly reduce gas fees for themselves and collectors. Artists started blacklisting marketplaces that didn’t honour royalties, and splits became a key feature across entities like Catalog and Decentxyz.

So we’ve been releasing.

https://beta.catalog.works/papajams/fed-up-non-fungible-edit

Catalog was the first web3 platform we heard of that was shaking things up in the space. So it was an immense honour and privilege to be invited to participate as an artist. So far we have released Fed Up [non-fungible edit] with plans to expand this universe of edits, remixes, and videos…MORE ON THAT LATER. They were one of the first to integrate splits, gas fees are still high without a layer two integration -- this feels intentional however. given the high quality bar set by the music you listen to there. A luxury on chain music experience. Royalties are respected here.

https://www.mintbase.xyz/meta/papa.mintbase1.near%3Ad52152b7c2ea4f5b66e137a3779112b7

Doin Fine was released as a result of a hackathon at NFT NYC organised by HER DAO. After setting up a NEAR account and funding it with some NEAR the process of uploading the art and music onto Mintbase was simple, with splits functionality and low gas fees. They honour royalties across marketplaces also.

Royalties on NEAR follow the NFTs in perpetuity, allowing for royalty enforcement across different marketplaces and into secondary sales. With the royalties embedded in the NFT token, they must be respected to complete the transfer of the NFT.

https://hq.decent.xyz/1/Editions/0x26D8931C2507a6f06469a996D75d23D30460AE83

Vibe Brighter was released on Decentxyz who facilitated excellent splits functionality (trustlessly enforced) and did a bunch to help raise awareness for participants in a competition they were running at the time. It was actually very expensive from a gas fee perspective, and the song is available on platforms that do not honour royalties. The ability to easily blacklist such marketplaces as an artist would be meaningful.

https://audius.co/papajams/papa-gonzalo-anatu-chupacabra

We experimented with Chupacabra on Audius. No splits. No royalties. No gas fees. It’s a streaming platform where the top tracks each week receive the native token $AUDIO. Their app is innovative, with features embracing AI and actively updated playlists

nft://1/0x3035375461F5cb334d69436BBcfa1aaf812B29Ef/?showBuying=true&showMeta=true

Releasing Afterlife on Soundxyz was exceptionally smooth. This has been one of the most impactful platforms driving adoption of digital collectible music. There is an incredibly well thought out process that incentivises engagement and appreciation of both the music as well as the excitement of participating in such events. Splits are honoured, as are royalties, and through their optimism integration gas fees are low.

Finally, Fed Up [Zorb Edit]

We end as we began. This song has many identities and interpretations, as all songs do, particularly given the iterations we went through to realise its intention. Whether its the Fed Up [non-fungible edit] on Catalog. Or the Krinks remix on web2, we’re excited to celebrate the launch of Zora’s own L2 blockchain blockchain ZoraNetwork secured by Ethereum and built on Optimism’s tech stack that makes minting faster & cheaper with a focus on gas efficiency and scalability. We minted this on optimism just to be sure the splits would work.

nft://10/0x56aae5b2d822c08efc8a164936534fe9900192c5/?showBuying=true&showMeta=true

https://zora.co/collect/oeth:0x56aae5b2d822c08efc8a164936534fe9900192c5/1

• Edition ERC 1155 format (all NFTs share same media asset), read more.

• Splits enabled by 0xsplits, zora has a helpful page to set that up.

• Zorbified using the free mac version of CapCut (owned by TikTok) Fisheye effect.

Bless you.

Papa & anatu

The same can be said of dotcom domain names (e.g. www.pledgebond.com) which go a layer of abstraction further to enable resolution of protocols such as TCP/IP and HTTP into much of the internet infrastructure we so depend on today. These are incredibly powerful tools upon which the utility of the internet has been built.

Yet to begin with much of this functionality tends to be obscured from its inventors and early adopters. Take the personal computer for instance, and what we now understand of its near infinite potential applications. In the 70’s a brand called Honeywell promoted the “Kitchen Computer,” a desk-sized recipe book and this remained a theme in how PC’s were marketed for nearly a decade. The early value proposition of IP tends to be nebulous, with Comic Books for instance the most successful of which are now realised as theme parks, animations, movies and merchandise.

As the proliferation of the technology progressed, so did the use cases.

ENS

In the decentralised blockchain era a similar early roadmap has played out across its nascent domain name ecosystem. In 2017 for instance the Ethereum Name Service (ENS) was launched as a decentralized domain name provider allowing anyone to buy and manage .eth domains without relying on a centralized domain registrar.

This allows users to easily map human-readable names to Ethereum addresses and other resources on the Ethereum blockchain. These names are called ENS domain names, and their primary use cases so far have included wallet address resolution and online identity.

For wallet address resolution ENS is the blockchain equivalent to a Domain Name System (DNS) that assigns addresses on the internet. ENS translates long complicated Ethereum addresses featuring random numbers and letters into memorable monikers.

e.g. 0x55A5705453Ee82c742274154136Fce8149597058 → papajams.eth

And these monikers have served to become digital identities akin to the online representations we’ve become accustomed to through the usage of usernames, social media account names, and website avatars — with one important distinction: irrefutable control. The decentralised domain smart contract is immutable (cannot be changed), irreversible, and cryptographically secure. Accessible using self custody wallets that maintain ​​complete control of digital assets featuring private keys that are stored directly on web browsers or mobile devices — not with centralized authorities.

Adhering to the “power law” ENS is the dominant decentralised domain name service platform, amongst a growing cadre of alternatives:

• Ethereum: ens.domains or ens.vision or linagee.vision or nns.xyz

• Tezos: tezos.domains

• Algorand: app.nf.domains

• Solana: naming.bonfida.org

• Starknet: starknet.id

• Ziliqua/Polygon: unstoppabledomains.com

• Zksync: zks.domains (app under development)

• Cardano: adadomains.io (app under development)

• Others: Namecoin, Emercoin, Peername, Freename, Quik

Since 2017, over 2.3M ENS names have been created for over 550,000 unique participating addresses. From August 2021 to ENS registration peak in May 2022, combined monthly ENS revenue increased by 264%. For names that are longer than five characters, yearly ENS name renewal costs $5, while shorter names are pricier: four characters — $160/year, three characters — $640/year. TheDefiant

Fiction Is The Father Of Invention

There is a saying that if necessity is the mother of invention — fiction is its father. So beyond wallet address resolution and online identity, a new tranche of applications is now established including sending and receiving both cryptocurrencies and NFTS; creating ENS subdomains; and building or integrating with web3 applications such as

• https://mirror.xyz/papajams.eth

• https://paragraph.xyz/@papajams.eth

• https://www.publish0x.com/@papajams

Future Use Cases

As the scope of potential use cases expands, I’ve selected a random set of ENS domain names and asked ChatGPT for potential future use cases.

1. merseyside.eth: This ENS domain name could be used by a business or organization based in Merseyside, a region in northwest England. The organization could use the domain to create a website that provides information about their products or services, as well as a way for customers to contact them. Liverpool football club, the greatest in the world, is based in Merseyside.

2. cryptobags.eth: This ENS domain name could be used by a company that sells bags specifically designed to hold cryptocurrency hardware wallets, such as Ledger or Trezor. The company could use the domain to create an online store where customers can purchase these bags, as well as to provide information about their products and shipping options.

3. hiddenstash.eth: This ENS domain name could be used by a company that offers secure storage solutions for individuals or businesses looking to keep their valuable items safe. The company could use the domain to create a website that provides information about their services and pricing, as well as a way for customers to request quotes or make reservations.

4. screenprotector.eth: This ENS domain name could be used by a company that manufactures and sells screen protectors for electronic devices. The company could use the domain to create an online store where customers can purchase screen protectors for their phones, tablets, and other devices, as well as to provide information about the different types of protectors they offer and how to properly install them.

5. bestrose.eth: This ENS domain name could be used by a company that specializes in growing and selling high-quality roses. The company could use the domain to create a website where customers can purchase roses online, as well as to provide information about the different types of roses they offer and how to care for them.

6. belomancy.eth: Belomancy is a type of divination that involves using arrows to answer questions. This ENS domain name could be used by an individual or group interested in practicing belomancy or teaching others about it. The domain could be used to create a website with information about the history and practice of belomancy, as well as resources for those interested in learning more about it.

7. raptitude.eth: This ENS domain name could be used by a company or organization that provides personal development and self-improvement resources. The domain could be used to create a website with information about their services, as well as resources such as blog posts, podcasts, or online courses.

8. canwetalk.eth: This domain name could be used for a messaging or communication platform that allows users to have conversations over the Ethereum network. “Can We Talk” is a song recorded by American R&B singer Tevin Campbell in 1993. CAN WE TALK TV is an award winning Christian Based Talk & Variety format airing on BPN; MNN, NAC &JamVibes Network. Can We Talk is a canadian television commercial series raising awareness of the mental health of children.

9. wellfound.eth: This domain name could be used for a platform or service that helps people find resources or information related to health and wellness. AngelList Talent, a platform that connects startups with angel investors and job seekers, has been rebranded as Wellfound. 

10. weirdcreatures.eth: This domain name could be used for a website or platform that features information or content about unusual or exotic animals. It could also be used for a marketplace or platform for buying and selling rare or unusual pets.

Beyond wallet address resolution and online identity, decentralised domain names offer a secure means of usage for a wide and growing range of purposes, from creating online stores and providing information about products or services, to offering personal development resources or practicing divination. Whether you are a business looking to establish an online presence or an individual interested in a particular topic, a domain name can help you connect with others and share your ideas across blockchains.

Credits: Photo by Ales Nesetril | Apple II 1977 Launch | Photo by Reuben Rohard 

Not Financial Advice (NFA), please do your own research (DYOR), disclaimer that assets and properties owned by the author are used in the article, and some artistic license has been applied to some of the ChatGPT responses.

Papa — linktr.ee/papajams

Such is the level of doe-eyed fondness and respect they’ve built with me over the course of just four very special interactions. Rather incredible considering this is a collective I only heard about just over a month ago at the Proof Of People NFT festival. Then, as now — a little wet behind the ears — I continue to be enthralled to learn of such a mad fusion of innovation, technical prowess and ambition so closely intermingled with heart, passion, generosity, friendship and excitement of a crew leaping into the unknown with unabashed glee, and wild enthusiasm.

Present Day — 6pm  Friday 29th July 2022 Arrive at the Bright Moments Minting Location 18 Albemarle St, London W1S 4HR

The place is buzzing, it is a scorcher of a summer day, the sun won’t be down for a few hours yet. I immerse myself in the throng, it’s a birthday come festival come summer fête party atmosphere, but high end. Immediately I meet two glamorous young influencer types, one is petite and assured, she holds court amongst a mini group within a much larger one assembled outside this conspicuously colourful crowd hanging out in the heart of Mayfair. The streets are alive. Not quite sure this neck of the woods has quite seen such a smorgasbord of characters descend upon it before.

I’m on the clock.

The other gentleman is quieter, they are obviously a pair as he safeguards her bag and jacket. A slim, slightly gaunt, chap who gives off deep gamer programmer vibes; his smile is goofy as he offers non verbal support to the anecdotes his companion regales. That mind is elsewhere. They are fresh from holidays in Mykonos, Greece. She - a former student of immunology before launching two projects in the latest crypto bull run that sold out - now spends her time managing developers. He builds bots that execute trades. It’s my cue to slip inside just as the words “I’m not sure how to feel about spending more in a week than an average person’s annual salary” are uttered.

Food! They’ve really gone quintessential British here. Scones with cream, jam donuts, Victoria sponge, all the trimmings. I may be in a bit of a rush but come on, i’ve waited this long! What’s a few more minutes? I scoff and take a peek around, a lot has changed since the last time I was here, ArtBlocks is in the building. A fellow cake appreciator sidles up next to me, she is as engrossed in the delicacies strewn before us as I am. We revel in a rhapsody of confectionery. She is German, tall and blonde with distinctive features, her speaking manner is gregarious interspersed between long pauses to gorge on these delicacies. Quite quickly we both open up to each other about our love of London where we have lived for many years as well as her success achieving a phD in biology which she only just earned! Part of me wishes I’d finished mine, part of me is incredulous she finished hers, wow. She spent the morning consoling her father who’d had high hopes of selling his business in recent months and retiring. Unfortunately the lead investor has pulled out. Her parents are flabbergasted that, rather than pursuing a related field of work, she’s opted to launch an NFT project — got to love a rebel. It’s cool she has heard of GenomesDAO, one of my recent mints. If I wasn’t so conscious about personal data I’d actually use it, she attempts to assuage my doubts unsuccessfully.

Better get to it.

I join the queue after passing by the open bar for a quick drink, Janet the super friendly server recommends the white wine — her fave (mine too Janet). The queue is at a standstill as the WIFI is down and they are unable to process new mints. Everyone is pretty calm about it. As we wait, for the internet gods to play ball, I get chatting to an ETH maximalist who is currently shorting the market as he feels the merge hype is overblown. Classically handsome, with broad shoulders, he is obviously protective of his other half who is with him. They have ying yang energy, she the near innocent unwitting bystander feasting on all the artistic joy for the senses around us, he the slightly jaded calculator who has been around the block. NFT events in Berlin, Paris, New York, and others — not sure I can sense his excitement as much as hers. Turns out he rode the bull run with a bunch of ETH from the relatively early times, didn’t sell (not many of us did), and is now riding the bear market. Aren’t we all.

I get the sense he is annoyed he hasn’t received an invitation to mint. Based on the governance protocols dictated by the community a third of those minting IRL needed to be nominated via snapshot and approved; a third were sold on the open market to fund operations; and a third were balloted to existing CryptoCitizen holders. Fortunately there is the opportunity for IRL attendees to mint translucent panes by fingacode, which is an open edition available exclusively to those on site and closing today!

https://twitter.com/brtmoments/status/1542895013079629825/photo/1?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1542895013079629825%7Ctwgr%5Ed0098693e9be5c595ce6142c448cb65d5f00ca82%7Ctwcon%5Es1%5C\_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fcdn.embedly.com%2Fwidgets%2Fmedia.html%3Ftype%3Dtext2Fhtmlkey%3Da19fcc184b9711e1b4764040d3dc5c07schema%3Dtwitterurl%3Dhttps3A%2F%2Ftwitter.com%2Fbrtmoments%2Fstatus%2F1542895013079629825image%3Dhttps3A%2F%2Fi.embed.ly%2F1%2Fimage3Furl3Dhttps253A252F252Fabs.twimg.com252Ferrors252Flogo46x38.png26key3Da19fcc184b9711e1b4764040d3dc5c07

Two Weeks Ago — 9pm Thursday 14th July Arrive at Bright Moments Gallery Location 13 Soho Square, London W1D 3QF

After Seth Goldstein’s [founder of Bright Moments] panel talk at Proof Of People I was fully inspired to uncover what he meant by IRL minting experiences. So far in my NFT journey we’d been at the behest of the screen to engage with the cryptographic computation working behind the scenes to encode data onto the blockchain. Experientially bringing this into the physical spaces we occupy seemed bold and experimental, exactly my vibe. So a few days later down I head, with a friend, to investigate what in the world this team is bringing to real life.

Soho Square as a location is super central and easy to get to. The infamous Oxford and Bond Street, Ronnie Scott’s Jazz Bar, or even one of London’s most prominent landmarks: the Centre Point tower building are all within touching distance. Lined along the outskirts of this it’s green space, open to all, are offices and cafe’s including the likes of 20th Century Fox, and WeWork — host of many a raucous party back in their hey days. Now workers and travellers congregate in the public park to sip the drink du jour, have lunch or a snack, and enjoy this small oasis of calm amongst the tumult.

This evening is primarily an exhibition and printing event for previous collectors of Folio by Matt Deslauriers on the ground floor, across two rooms. His work is spectacular, combining patches of colour with idiosyncratic symbology to create clean neat generatively drawn works.

Inspired by concrete poetry and early computer artwork, that emits an output process for a given input. Each output may be realized digitally, in print, or through another medium. The drawing system, coded in JavaScript, recursively packs bins of data to fill the page, constrained entirely by the use of typographic glyphs and a limited mono-, duo-, or tri-colour palette — Archipelago

Matt writes more about it in detail on his substack, information that also (outrageously neatly) adorns the walls alongside his pieces. We have a bunch of fun diving into the weeds messing around with this old school computer he has set up. It is an homage to the classic MS DOS style commands you’d have to enter back in the day on old windows desktops, with a few clues loaded up for you to tinker with. It has some kind of interface with the minting/printing experience most people are there for, but is also pretty accessible for those of us wandering souls there to soak up the ambiance.

https://twitter.com/mattdesl/status/1556721789035859970?s=20&t=hlqvt1Rlz4V7SIU8tKaQdQ

On the floor below this genius setting we meet the most wholesome crew imaginable in Hanan and Samer Dabra: team Spongenuity. Man their work is incredible. They’ve come up with a series of 100 mints wherein the process entails sitting for a picture that is then discombobulated into data that is processed and algorithmically drawn in combination with a random seed that is generated from a message input, meaning the entire portraiture has a unique encrypted signature. This same data is then used to create an NFT as well as a physical print plotter portrait (which comes to life before you using this crazy embroidery machine) creating a cohesive multi-medium experience that intertwines the digital and physical worlds. Completely wild.

https://twitter.com/brtmoments/status/1552569829634166785?s=20&t=vHVq_xrP-wX5NTf6JOR-kw

They are fun to hang with.

Present Day — 630pm Friday 29th July 2022 Check In at the Bright Moments Minting Location 18 Albemarle St, London W1S 4HR

WIFI is back.

I am checked in by Phil and Avi.

Not sure Phil recognises me, fair enough they are now on day 30 meeting at least the 800 people who had minted a CryptoLondoner so far, let alone the wider extended network of people the Bright Moments had hosted here and at their Soho Square location. Plus the people he would have met speaking on a panel at Proof Of People NFT festival as well as any other events where he’d been spreading the Bright Moments gospel. Oh and the same in Berlin, NYC, Venice Beach. God help him. Avi is the charmer, smart and youthful to contrast the poised experienced ambiance Phil exudes. Between them my first IRL minting journey begins.

A Cryptocitizen is native to the city where it is being minted. We are in London, thereby mine is a CryptoLondoner. Before today the instructions were to fill an online form with all my details. These now instantly pop right up on the screen as Phil and Avi go through the check-in process. Still all very mysterious what this will all entail, that’s part of the fun. It’s certainly not their first rodeo (turns out it’s their 814th in London so far), with WIFI back it takes all of one minute to complete check in and we are good to go. It’s busy today so I’m told there will be a wait of one or two hours before I’m able to do the deed (mint my CryptoLondoner). Fine by me, my pal is just about to arrive and I think the founder of Artblocks [Jeff Davis] just got on the decks. Now it’s a party.

Back to Janet and I walk by these Italian ladies who don’t speak much English but have walked in curious at what all this kerfuffle is about in such proximity to the bourgeoisie of Belgravia. In no time at all the main man Charlie bounds merrily onto the scene, a Bright Moments representative of the highest order, to share the story of the collection. Lively, forthright, and congenial Charlie is a fellow musician whose next show is in Wisconsin in September. He’s already hooked me up with some merch as well as more good vibes than you can shake a feather at. I leave him to the Italians. I meet this lovely man who is there with his kids. He has brought the whole family and is minting each of them a cryptolondoner as an investment for their future. The encounter is brief, but joyful in a candid ephemeral sense.

My buddy has arrived — with a friend! How excellent that this place is so welcoming of literally anyone keen to get involved. We head outside to catch up and connect with my new connect Mo who I’d only met a couple days prior at an FxHash event at Institut. Mo is half Ethiopian and has spent meaningful time in my homeland, Kenya, on the Mombasa coast. He’s gotten rid of the racing hat he’d adorned last time to reveal a bounteous array of dark locks. Everyone here is dressed super casual, for the most part, so we both fit right in. Having excelled at an ETH hackathon Mo is finding ways to evolve from full time data analyst work at Universal records into developing applications in the NFT ecosystem. Seems he’s already had a little traction but is a bit reticent to sell himself. Happy to do so on your behalf, friend.

The first unwitting Mo patron that we come across, as my pals go inside for drinks, has a fantastic plume of blonde hair and looks strong if a little tired. Upon pitching Mo, and hyping him up, we learn that Jamie actually works for Bright Moments. He’s just left YouTube where he worked as partnerships manager for 16 years onboarding the likes of Sony and Samsung. He made waves in web1, then hopped onto web2 with YouTube. Now he feels late to the party with Web3 and Bright Moments, but is convinced that decentralisation, the blockchain, and community ownership it enables will prove as revolutionary from a technological perspective as any previous new incarnation of the web. A rather inspiring level of conviction, hang on — did he just pitch us? With that he is off for a break.

I return to my pals, one hour down, one to go to the mint.

They are hanging with Teresa who works at the local Nandos and is loving life. Apparently some of the Bright Moments team had food there, and loved it, so invited her along. We are struck by how intergenerational this all seems, very continental. A few people have brought their mothers and fathers along to learn from the experience and revel in the atmosphere. It gives the whole thing quite a familial quality. I waft back to Janet, she knows what I am after, legend. Getting tipsy now — I marvel at the art on the walls. Such intricate attention to detail, a level of fastidiousness that speaks to the highest levels of quality being inscribed into these generative pieces.

https://twitter.com/brtmoments/status/1554167850297802752?s=20&t=euH0XAdohoAPL36eqp2zYA

The young family has been called up to mint, one of the boys blew through a notebook in the time we’ve been hanging around. Filling it to the brim with sketches and doodles. His father gets him another, eagerly offered by Phil. I get chatting to Joseph — who is actually Avi’s father as it turns out — he’s beaming with pride. Turns out he is also a long time friend of Seth’s. Rather understated, with an old school cap and a sage perspicacity that radiates from his visage. Turns out he is a bit of a don too. We wind the clock back and over two decades ago he notices that .com domains were kicking off, just as the hype for 1–800 numbers had, he gets both for wheelchair.com (spending $5k or so originally if i remember correctly). He then goes on to build tremendous logistical infrastructure to service that business underpinned a quality domain. Incredible. Today is his son’s day however, and his friend’s, he is happy to beam in the background. We see the young family on the balcony above, they just minted their CryptoLondoners — must mean I am up soon.

Three Weeks Ago — 4pm Friday 9th July Introduction to the Bright Moments Minting Location 18 Albemarle St, London W1S 4HR

I’m suited and booted heading to dinner with friends but this seed has been planted in my head by Seth and Phil at the Proof Of People NFT festival to go check out their two spaces in Soho Square and Albemarle Street. I amble along to Soho but am informed by a slimline bespectacled energon named Anthony that it is actually the second location in Mayfair I need to go to if minting is the action I desire. There is an LGBTQ+ festival in the square that day: vibrant and playfully chaotic. I hop onto a Boris bike to expedite the journey, surely it cannot take long to undergo the minting process (whatever that is) so I will quickly pop in, get it sorted, then head off to dinner.

I arrive and am surprised to find I feel overdressed. Creatives roam free here. I meet Dole who is crisply attired and, even after what will have been a long hot day manning the exhibition space, is ready for action. It is beautifully lit, pristinely clean, room that expands into another behind it as well as having a gorgeous spiral staircase leading up into the unknown. The central table feature is ornamented with a selection of materials that are immediately noticeably of the highest calibre. The printing alone, copywriting, and design must have taken donkey years to get to this level. It shows. Dole launches into what is no doubt a presentation that has been honed to perfection, but senses my slight level of urgency, and speeds it up skipping over the basics.

Note to self to come back with someone new to the ecosystem: firstly, as an on-boarding exercise (this is the kind of initial memory you dream of infusing someone new with to get them excited about the possibilities), secondly so I don’t assume I know what I am talking about and skip over valuable base level foundational knowledge of the innate building blocks underpinning this whole engagement.

Then I meet the artist responsible for the marvellous works displayed here: Qian Qian.

A strange coincidence we land on fairly quickly is that we both went to Edinburgh university! The fates are mysterious. Qian Qian is the creative director that goes about selecting 80 specific artefacts that define a city locality. London is the fourth city so far that has birthed 1,000 Cryptocitizens, and some of the attributes that are randomised to create them generativity include foxes, the abbey road pedestrian crossing, top hats, black cabs, monocle’s etc. For Berlin it was the autobahn, lederhosen, a german shepherd, Berghain, Kraftwork etc. For NYC it was the empire state building, central park, subway, etc. And for Venice beach, LA, it was skateboards, surfboards, sunglasses, palm trees etc. There is even a digital collection called CryptoGalacticans with space related attributes.

His attention to detail is awesome, writ large in these pixelated permutations coming to life before us. There’s a real artisanal sense of craftsmanship to the process, with an almost gamified bent. He tells me the process entails an advance party going to the specific locality that the community votes to mint in next, an researching for weeks the unique aspects of culture that compose that society. Alongside sourcing venues, and suppliers, this is an integral part of that early vestment period to seed the art with an indigenous quality.

I am out of time to learn more sadly, two dope conversations and it’s gone beyond being late for my dinner. Need to come back and luxuriate in this when I next have a chunk of time to dedicate to artistic exploration. See you soon boys!

Present Day — 830pm  Friday 29th July 2022 Arrive at the Bright Moments Minting Location 18 Albemarle St, London W1S 4HR

I speak to Heather from Artblocks about ceramics, weddings, galleries, exhibitions and events. She is looking forward to their opening showcase in Marfa (Texas) soon and found her way to crypto and NFT’s rather circuitously. She is very sweet, or coy, in sharing too many bloopers from her time managing and running events. Sounds like she has had fun in London but is ready to go home — no place like it.

I dive into a fun conversation with Hannan and Dandelion about books we’ve been reading recently, can’t remember what the debate was about, but it was juicy. We compare headstands, Hannan is a yogi and graceful. I am not and am the epitome of ungainly. My friend Tino? Christ. We get the job done. I learn that the lovely man, whose family is being whisked off into the evening, is none other than SnowFro — one of the true OG’s in the NFT space of Chromie Squiggles fame (the first project on ArtBlocks). It is awesome to me that we can all just chill in this space as pseudonymous strangers/friends/enthusiasts and connect.

https://twitter.com/ArtOnBlockchain/status/1553386129608548352?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1553386129608548352%7Ctwgr%5Eb1a4343cec2dc157a7959dfc1818cfd368d6e373%7Ctwcon%5Es1\_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fcdn.embedly.com%2Fwidgets%2Fmedia.html%3Ftype%3Dtext2Fhtmlkey%3Da19fcc184b9711e1b4764040d3dc5c07schema%3Dtwitterurl%3Dhttps3A%2F%2Ftwitter.com%2Fartonblockchain%2Fstatus%2F1553386129608548352image%3Dhttps3A%2F%2Fi.embed.ly%2F1%2Fimage3Furl3Dhttps253A252F252Fabs.twimg.com252Ferrors252Flogo46x38.png26key3Da19fcc184b9711e1b4764040d3dc5c07

I see Dole, decked in a colourful Hawaiian shirt, long straight hair waving in the breeze. He was my spirit guide the first time I came to this place. They do choose some fun people to represent this brand. I get a brief chance to catch up with Irina who was also at the fxhash event at instut and is a music journalist but am cut short. My time has come. Time to mint! My crew is assembled and we are introduced to Ameesia who is immediately engaging. We learn later that she has immersive theatre experience, which we are direct beneficiaries of, and is even coupled up with a seasoned/famous actor. He must have picked up some skills from our hostess by osmosis.

Up the stairs we go. Now I would love to describe the IRL minting process (which involved something akin to an ancient spiritual ritual melded with a comedy show) but I’m not sure I can. It was special. Luckily this chap kept a record of it for posterity.

Bright Moments, so grateful, I salute you.

Papa — linktr.ee/papajams

I’m Fed Up! And this is my therapy. What a gift and honour to have this medium to share the maelstrom of emotions we encounter through art. Here we go again with another written homage to the music we so love to make. This time it is centred around the third song in the Legacy album “fed up” which isn’t actually in sequential order from the last post but you don’t mind - do you?

The Legacy album is the second by me - Papa - and explores the responsibility we bear as stewards of the heritage our forefathers (and mothers) have bestowed upon us. I feel it immensely! Specifically, the choice we have, through our actions (or inaction) to decide what is passed on in remembrance of all those who helped shape us. So huge. The art celebrates the joy of creation, and what this represents in terms of our unique purpose in the world. One of the ways to we have lasting impact is through the stories, traditions, ambitions, and identity we absorb from those before; and what we are able to share with those after us during our short time on this planet. There’s such fragility in the love, hope, and meaning we strive for in our humanity. The ephemerality of it, and the impermanence, imputes such immense value.

What we’ve released in Web 2 so far

“narcissus” [07.01.22] represents the brogaddicio, confidence, and pride that can easily boil over into vanity, arrogance and cockiness without the humility to keep the ego in check. This can be the difference between success and self-sabotage.

“the one” [28.01.22] is a riotous rhapsody of affection.

“fed up” [18.02.22] is a snapshot in time to a moment most will sadly inevitably go through - the juncture at which a romantic relationship comes to an end. It typically happens slowly - then all at once. This time I listened to feedback, took notes, and am sharing them verbatim. fed up is a song inspired by the most active listening i’ve ever done in my life. Imagine breaking up with someone being exactly as we usually see it in the movies. Yes heartbreaking, and for me a really significant moment of reflection on how to do things better. We move.

“hopes and dreams” [11.03.22] is a response to the weight and pride of being responsible for passing on the heritage we have been blessed with. Carrying the torch and keeping it lit. Relaying the baton, without dropping it. Dislocations happen. Alternative paths and outcomes may be discovered that are divergent to pre-ordained prescriptions; and thereby taken. Regardless, we inherit some element of those before us, and proffer this to others.

”sorry it didn’t work out” [01.04.22] - change is inevitable, progress and growth are not. In work, in relationships, in hobbies and passions persisting through the hard times, with grit and determination is lauded as the be all and end all. But every now and again there is good reason to cut your losses, learn what you can, and improve by heading in a different direction. I’m always grateful for the experiences, and often sorry they didn’t work out!

Released in Web 3

• narcissus art on tezos

• fed up art on solana

Flourish

The project at hand (prologue) is to experiment with the release of this music across conventional means of distribution in Web2 (platforms like Spotify and Youtube) as well as cataloguing the systems and processes involved in releasing art and music across Web3 (NFTs, blockchain, and crypto).

So far our incredibly talented visual team has reimagined the themes of the music artistically based on the premise of the album - that despite the conditions we all have the potential and ability to flourish. we aim to establish the community, credibility, and track record to enable this message to transcend and connect with the world.

Progress

• Web 2: narcissus has now been streamed 9,000 times earning approximately $40

• Web 3: narcissus tezos collection generated 4 sales ($16)

• Web 2: the one has now been streamed 29,000 times earning circa $100

• Web2: fed up has now been streamed 231 times earning circa $1

the one was selected for playlists on platforms such as Spotify which automatically expand its reach and puts it in front of new audiences.The key seems to be a combination of regular output, music released in a singles format, and utilisation of a pitching mechanism early in advance of a release which looks like this:

In terms of sharing the work across Web3 the most common tools are twitter and discord, which we’ve now set up! It feels like the very early stages of trying to work out how to stand out in and amongst the very many talented projects out there, perhaps that is not the point and this is simply somewhere for the art to live and breathe. I am comforted by the idea that a project like the cryptopunks languished in obscurity for years before being appreciated fully by the world. Yet their mere existence had incredible value in terms of what that signified to artists and creators about what was possible on the digital art frontier.

• Twitter: https://twitter.com/Legacy_Flourish [3 followers]

• Discord: https://discord.gg/aU7ZvnT4QR [3 members]

• Mailing List: papajams.mailchimpsites.com [95 members]

• Partnerships: none yet (hola!)

It remains to be seen what prominence on community spaces (akin to playlists on Spotify) might look like for Web 3 platforms, aggregators, and curators of content. Increasingly these influential mediums play such an important role in filtering out a huge mass of information for us all to hone in on specific niches we love - such that those niches are able to find their audiences. For instance, a verified tezos collection on objkt.com or fxhash elicits opportunities to feature on their homepage recommendations for greater visibility.

Solana

The solana blockchain (native currency SOL) is a layer one smart contract platform that positions itself as having faster transactions and lower costs than the dominant player in the NFT space - ethereum. Its detractors argue that solana ownership is hugely centralised, based on lots of VC investment holding sway over its future, however its advocates argue it is a thriving ecosystem that celebrates utility and scalability.

Key marketplaces that house the art on Solana include:

• Magic Eden - the biggest by volume

• Solanart - enables global offers across a whole collection

• Solsea - rankings and NFT compatibility with SPL (solana program library) tokens

• DigitalEyes - open marketplace that doesn’t endorse or curate any projects

• Metaplex - self-hosted NFT storefronts that avoid marketplace fees

• Fellowship DAO Launchpass - an NFT project itself designed to minimise fees

• Holaplex - open-source and decentralized NFT storefront creation tool built on one of the world's fastest and most eco-friendly blockchains.

Three key considerations were important for us. First to ensure we could affordably offer the NFTs in this collection to early patrons investing in the art. Second, that we could easily split the value flow back to the creatives at the heart of the project in an automatic, trust-less, way embedded in the smart contract. And third, to learn as much as possible about the minting process across Solana and share this for others to use.

Magic Eden

To mint a collection here it is a prerequisite to submit an application to the Launchpad program on their website (1 - 2 days for sign off). There are no listing fees (0%) but there is a 2% charge on all transactions. Since it is the dominant player in the space, this one seemed the best choice except for two recent projects “Baloonsville” and “King of Chess” which were both scams on the platform (also known as rugs where people make promises to get you to buy the NFT then run and don’t deliver). Great news is that Magic Eden refunded buyers and now requires private doxxing (reveal your identity) of creators before they are able to launch a collection. The expectation in their literature is to do lots of hype for the pieces to do well on the platform. This is not something we can promise so it is a pass for now.

Solsea

The most straightforward of all, simply requires effort (no coding or technical prowess). You can see the process here, each transaction costs $0.75 approximately, and is subject to failures, which for a larger collection can add up. The platform has no listing fees but a 3% marketplace fee which occurs on every sale. I tried minting a few but the process was very laborious. For each NFT there is a waiting time of approximately 20 mins per mint and even that is subject to a time expiration whereupon you have to start again. This might perhaps make sense for a 1/1 collection but not necessarily for a larger one.

Digital Eyes

This one strikes me as being most well suited to generative pFp (profile picture) collections. Instead of creating an entire image, you create layers of an image and they get jumbled up during the minting process to create unique pieces. The tool used to do this is a “Candy Machine” in the Web3 universe. Hoping one day we do go for that but for now all our pieces are handmade individually with love! There is a handy creator portal guide on their website which details the application required to access their platform and get verified.

Fellowship Dao

I managed to secure (purchased for 3 sol) a Fellowship OG + Launchpass which enables access to a creator machine that is good for 1,000 NFTs being minted on solana. You can read here about the savings on hand relative to competitors with regards to fees so that is a big bonus. I tried to do the process on my own however and didn’t get very far! My launchpass got submitted to the creator machine but the credits didn’t get reflected on the platform. They fixed that super quick when I raised a support ticket! There is also a Candy Machine mechanism to contend with so I'm in touch with their team for help as i’ve now redeemed the launchpass (1-2 days lead time). It requires you to generate your own metadata however so is a bit more involved from a technical standpoint. Usually for each of these platforms which automate the process a little, the candy machine typically creates metadata for each NFT in a generative collection as part of the code! So doing it yourself is very time and labour intensive.

Metadata is the secret sauce that prevents large files having to be hosted on the actual blockchain (too much data) so instead there is a technical workaround where the big stuff is held off-chain then called upon when needed!

The problem with the chain itself hosting too much (in terms of size) is that it then becomes difficult for the people (nodes) that maintain it to do so. The ethereum node is 1,100 GB for instance in total comprising the Defi, DApps and NFTs as it stands, without all the off chain storage data. Gemini estimates that simply storing 1 GB of data on the Ethereum blockchain costs about 17,500 ETH (or $75.75 million as of November 2021).

So instead of that image (or video, or music etc) being stored on the blockchain; their references are. So NFT has a unique ID (the hash of the token), a URI (the location of the token), and the address of the owner. Whilst the actual images are stored on a decentralised file system called IPFS (InterPlanetary File System) typically. It is specifically good for NFTs as the URL of a file in IPFS is tied to the content of the file, so changes cannot be made without changing the URL. Basically there is no centralised organisation there with the power to mess around with your content, IFPS is decentralized!

Metaplex

Advanced and definitely for tech savvy creators to have fun with - not me (yet) however. There are some handy tutorials on youtube as well as plenty of resources to take advantage of across platforms like Github. What is true is that a number of big collections have taken advantage of this platform to launch as much of the work is automated by the code. Once I got to the screenshot below I decided to take a pause and move on (for now) - will come you soon!

Holaplex

Like a knight in shining armour. A heroine swooping in to save the day. Holaplex landed on my lap. This tutorial is brilliant (their youtube series not so much) and it involves a few key steps which enable you to have a storefront, mint your NFTs on solana, and split value flow easily amongst creators. Make sure you have both a phantom wallet and an Arconnect one otherwise you are toast! Everyone of the creators needs to verify they are part of the project first individually through their wallets before. It costs approximately 0.01 sol per NFT to mint.

collection here soon as we all verify!

Excited to keep creating, learning and growing.

Blessings.

Papa

As envisioned in the prologue for this epic journey across the metaverse, the plan is to release a song every three weeks of 2022; bringing the ideals of the music to life through the creation & distribution of distinct, unique, collaborative artistic offerings.

Our intention is to build in public across traditional distribution channels as well as experimenting with new models for artists to work together, form communities around their work, plus grow and realise value for both supporters and themselves.

Our first offering: narcissus

Fable

The narcissus parable is a fable from Greek mythology where an eponymous hunter, son of the river god Cephissus and the nymph Liriope, was renowned for his extraordinary beauty.

Some say he came upon a river and was so enamoured by his own reflection that he kept drawing himself closer to it until falling in and drowning.

Others say he spurned the adulation of all who came before him with arrogance, disdain, and contempt. So much so that the Oread nymph Echo meandered through the woods for the rest of her life languishing in such pain from the rejection that all that remains of her is the sound of her echo. Nemesis (her mother), god of revenge and retribution, led him to a pool; there, the man saw his reflection in the water and fell in love with it. Although he did not realise in the beginning that it was just a reflection, when he understood it, he fell in despair that his love could not materialise and committed suicide.

The moral of the story holds true to this day. For instance we see it through the impact of social media which has led to greater usage of tools such as photo editing, cosmetic surgery and make-up to manifest an idealised version of ourselves to the world.

On the one hand this can be a wonderful equaliser, our behaviour is incredibly affected by beauty so those who have not been naturally gifted, within the bounds of the conventional beauty standard of the time, are equipped to combat this bias we share.

On the other hand braggadocio, confidence and pride which achieving this beauty standard (and its benefits) can elicit very easily boils over into vanity, arrogance & cockiness without the humility to keep the ego in check. This can be the difference between success & self-sabotage.

“You might have ideas I have vision, been cooking up heat with precision I’ll listen but only politely My orders come from the almighty”

narcissus lyrics

Art

The initial song idea, and first verse, from Papa was loosely formed on guitar before anatu conceived of sampling this NFT from the team over at Minted Melodies

This was already on fire!

After sending the track round artists on the dojang ethical music label there was an immediate response from Gabriel with some pure lyrical lava. Then Kallay tops it off with his trademark fuego and the song is complete.

The graphic image design is a collaboration between Yin and shoshinfilm whose work spans photography, illustration, animation, and film. The original vision for the illustration sought to examine how difficult environments have the ability to birth the most beautiful, resilient, and characterful outcomes - be they people, or relationships, or perspectives. Much akin to the diamond formed out of sand under extreme pressure.

The original black and white construction of this theme embodies the water/mirror concept in the narcissus fable which adds to the synchrony of this truly impactful piece. Each floral and colour variation offers a different interpretation of the central message that celebrates diversity of thought, provenance, and beauty aesthetic.

We take great pride in the team collaborating across three different continents from Hong Kong, Ireland, Georgia, and Kenya. As the journey develops we hope to connect with, learn from, and pass on our insights to many more from around the world in service of the unique contributions we all have a capacity to make.

Technical

The blockchain chosen to launch the series is Tezos.

The art in this community is about as experimental, fun, and adventurous as I've come across. Especially for relative newcomers to the space who still aren’t especially sure how to code solidity, develop custom websites for minting, etc.

For beginners what’s great about tez is that transaction fees are cheap, the network is robust and fast, the platforms and wallets are really intuitive to use, and the chain has a proven history of working well. And even when one of the main pillars of the NFT space on tezos failed, the community was able to rally together and bring it back to life!

The network itself is governed by the community and is decentralised such that no single entity owns, manages or controls it. Tezos uses an energy efficient process called proof of stake (as opposed to the energy intensive proof of work) giving rise to the moniker #cleannft

• Platforms: Hic et Nunc, Objkt, Versum

• Wallets: Kukai, Temple

• NFT portfolio tracker: https://nftbiker.xyz/, www.artcentral.io, https://glry.xyz/

Some heroes that create on tezos (whose art i’ve collected a lot of!) include:

• Omgdrawedit who creates lots like Tezzardz & Bedtime Nostalgia

• Arya Muralama who works with Ox10 to create GoGos

• Sutu who brought NEONZ to the world

• Guillaume Cornet and OnlyChildNoPets who birthed Les Elefants Terribles

• Lucrece whose Monsters collection is just one of many creative works

• landlinesart who does collaborative generative work with artcardz

There are so many more that I absolutely adore [EsoTeros; TokBlok; KonstantFLUX] that it is a dream to build something inspired by the steps they have set forth in forming healthy creative communities that connect, appreciate, and imagine together.

Platforms

The incredibly popular Hic et Nunc (HEN) platform hosted NFT’s on Tezos before others like Rarible (on tezos) and FxHash became established. The platform closed suddenly with its founder (Rafael Lima) no longer wanting to continue the project. The art that resided on the platform remained on the blockchain and the community was able to use the smart contract to create a number of mirror sites which maintained the service, ethos, and virtues of the original site whilst incorporating a number of innovations.

In choosing which platform to host narcissus it was important to us to have the ability to automatically, trustlessly, split any royalty proceeds between the team forever. Matthew Plummer-Fernández made this possible on a HEN mirror using an experimental collaborative tool for creators which we will use to mint this collection. Newer entrants like the versum platform take this further by prioritising the art through minimalistic UI, quickly delivered content, & social integration. So far the only drawback we’ve observed is our inability to undertake splits at the primary sales level automatically; although they do enable this for all secondary sales.

Process

First, collect wallet addresses for the team & set up the community wallet. This wallet file was then imported into temple and renamed (using maximised view) “Legacy Community”. The team then added 20 tezos balance to pay for transaction fees.

Note: if you create an additional wallet in kukai as we did, when you import it into temple using the mnemonic, do NOT use the password for kukai since it will generate a different wallet address!

Second, we sync with hecticnun.xyz, create a quick username & description for the art.

Third, we set up a splits contract for 2 visual artists at 15% each, 2 executive producers at 30% each, and 1 community wallet at 10%.

Fourth, we sign in through this collaborative contract and go to mint (click on the collaborations section from menu, then next to the contract it says ‘sign in’).

Fifth, we mint 100 artworks. In order to use the splits contract, these have to be minted 1 by 1

• used a google sheet to track the minting process

• cost roughly 10 tez to complete the mint (around $30)

• 2 transactions got stuck, the way forward was to just mint again without cancelling

• it took around 10 hours total to mint 100 .png artworks

Sixth, we ‘swap’ the artworks for sale at 1 tez each. This entails an additional 100 transactions on the tezos network and is less time consuming than previous stages since entering the details & uploading the art itself is not required, as it was in the mint. Total cost for these transactions comes up to just under 5 tezos.

Seventh, validate the artworks from each of the splits wallets at a cost of 3 tez for 100 works, per collaborator. This requires each artist on the splits contract to manually, individually, sign and verify each piece of art (a hundred times in this instance). The question begs, is it worth any of the artists’ time & tezos to make these transactions just to verify an artwork they will end up getting paid for either way? We’re talking about up to 70 hours work (that’s if the network is at normal speed) & total cost of [tbc]. The trade off here is that without verification the artworks are presented as “unverified” and it is unclear how off-putting this would be to supporters. It is understandable why this exists, to make sure those who use the service do not include unaffiliated parties on the contract for clout, but a batch solution would save both time, effort, and tezos here.

Perhaps in web2 uploading 100 unique artworks or products to an e-commerce store would take the same time as the minting stage alone, without the costs or additional steps of swapping and validating. To compare this process to music release in web2, it takes between 1-3 hours to distribute a release, create the required metadata, create a fanlink & set up a splits contract.

Is not the artist’s struggle mainly rejecting all manor of activity which draws them back into the momentum of the world? The artist’s first creation must be the time and space in which to create their other works of beauty - perhaps this is the most difficult part of all. Of course this is the pure purpose of a management team, to enable the artist to give all of themselves to the art and relieve them of the administrative burdens of distributing and marketing their works.

Value

The aspiration in all this is to better understand this emerging suite of tools is able to help artists realise the value of their work. Across Web2 this value is defined for you.

Two weeks after the narcissus release the track was streamed 5,000 times on Spotify (the most abundant of all the services) earning $20. This is a modern marvel enabled by platforms such as Revelator which serve to publish musical works and enable global distribution. This framework, and these methods, do earn a living for a small cache of artists able to garner millions of streams. Typically this would be supplemented by live music revenues, merchandise sales, etc. However during the pandemic we have seen how precarious this income can be. For the majority of artists, this model simply doesn’t work.

90% of streaming royalties on Spotify go to the top 1.4% of musicians. The top 1% of all streamers earn more than half of all revenue on Twitch. 1% of podcasters claim the majority of podcast ad revenue.

Web 3 offers the promise of recognising value through price discovery whereby the community [rather than centralised organisations] determines the value of the art. This can be achieved through dutch auction for instance where the art value begins overpriced then comes down in increments over time till a piece is acquired at a fair price. This can also be achieved through the artist underpricing the art, such that it is really accessible to anyone, then leaving it to collectors to determine what the real value is on the secondary market. As transactions are made, and the true/fair value of the works is uncovered, the artist is incentivised to continue to build on these initial foundations as well as rewarding early supporters. This is our choice.

As the project develops more direct comparisons between the Web 3 and Web 2 will form a key part of this mission. We want to hear from all inspired to contribute. Key priorities like website building, API integration (for ease of analytics), and coding solidity are very welcome additions.

Collection

100 unique & colourful variations on the cover artwork for the song ‘narcissus’ by Papa.

To collect the art there are three stages

• Use an exchange (like Coinbase) to buy tezos (XTZ)

• Set up a tezos wallet (like temple) and send your newly acquired XTZ to it

• Go to the site, pick your favourite piece, available on primary for 1 tez

Future

Next we release “the one” on Web 2.

https://ffm.to/thone

And will be sharing the art for the song on Solana soon.

Excited to keep creating, learning and growing.

Blessings.

Papa

Music as a genre is severely under-monetised with artists capturing piddling portions of the value they create. This twitter thread captures an indication as to why this is so important in continuing to inspire development, growth, and progression of such a pivotal aspect of our lives. Gaming is a $130bn industry - this drives investment and innovation to the space at an incredible pace. The music industry is currently on par with low frequency cinema entertainment at $35bn yet is undoubtedly a much more pervasive influence on our lives.

As the new year gets underway a number of platforms are rapidly pushing new frontiers to re-imagine how we value, appreciate, and evolve the landscape.

• Catalog: a music NFT marketplace which seeks to be thought of conceptually as a creators bazaar gem record shop rather than a streaming service.

• Sound.xyz: a platform enabling artists to debut new music as a set of NFTs with numbered editions showcasing early listeners’ support from inception. NFT owners thereafter have greater access to artists and the community to collaborate.

• Royal.io: a space where fans can invest in and own music rights as NFTs (Royal LDAs) & receive royalties based on those rights. This gives artists improved monetisation & value capture.

• Audius: the fully decentralised music streaming platform enabling music creators to interact with fans & listeners directly, whilst having full control over the music they are streaming and sharing with tokenised ($AUDIO) governance and payments.

This is just a tiny selection of the evolution in the space that’s happening as new economic models & incentives interweave with the incredible talent, passion, and excitement music involves.

I’m Papa. My first album - Distance - was released in 2019 under the dojang imprint. After learning about NFTs in 2021 I created a series of artistic pieces inspired by the music and released them as NFTs. That was super fun, just about paid for itself, and created opportunity to bring gorgeous art into the world with talented collaborators.

My second album - Legacy - is out in 2022! It is an incredible pleasure & honour to be working with the dojang team again alongside a sensational raft of producers, musicians, and artists to bring a new generation of songs to life. The songs are a labour of love, hope, sadness, and wistfulness which we are releasing every three weeks starting today [07.01.2022] with Narcissus.

Purpose

The vision with this second series of songs (culminating in the album at year’s end) is to find unique ways to communicate the central themes & ideas explored in the art.

The mission is to continually seek to pursue the cultivation of worthy ideals that enrich & enliven the lives of others; propagating values that have meaningful positive impact.

The project at hand entails experimenting with the release of this music across conventional means of distribution in Web2 (platforms like Spotify and Youtube) as well as cataloguing the systems and processes involved in participating with Web3 (NFTs, blockchain, and crypto) as a model for creating and distributing the art.

This will entail:

• A monthly write up of the specific protocols pursued to encode these creations in the metaverse e.g. writing smart contracts, listing on marketplaces, building community, etc.

• The release of NFTs across a number of different blockchains, platforms, services, and channels to better understand their pro’s and con’s relative to each other [and to traditional forms of distribution].

• Transparency with respect to earnings such that other independent creators are equipped to compare and contrast opportunities that maximise value capture for the work they bring into the world.

• Contribute to the growth and evolution of the space by curating ideas to improve and develop the experience, as well as enabling others to circumvent the mistakes I make experimenting with this new medium.

There are myriad tools and platforms to play around with either as an instrumentalist, influencer, producer or artist. The creator economy landscape never looked so replete with gizmos and gadgets to harness! I’ll do just that and share the results.

Collectors

Some of the key features of this playground (that make it such a fun) are about embracing novel ways to foster connection between collaborators including everyone that listens to the music.

Being connected, and in communication, enables us to co-create and co-imagine the articulation of our communal experiences. Here’s a first draft of an I’m On My Way animated video for instance (password: papa). This was borne from the release of the first series!

In attempting to make sense of what kind of utility and/or value these NFTs might entail I sought to borrow great ideas from other wonderful projects already making waves. Officially there is no roadmap because i don't know where this will head but I will endeavour to incorporate some (likely most) of the following:

• Soundsrarenft.io: built on the Solana network, this team is a decentralised music label, music publisher, and artist collective. They have 1k premium NFTs (5 sol each) which act as a membership pass for ongoing song airdrops that holders will be able to register and own (publishing partnership to administer registration).

  • Love continual airdrops & expect to be stealing that! Remixes, exclusive live and/or instrumental cuts of the music, alongside gorgeous art for example.

  • The incorporation of web 2 revenue isn’t something we will be pursuing.

• Songcamp: the web3 laboratory experimenting at the edges of music and the new internet which is akin to the month-long cohort projects called camps that looks a lot like the love child between a songwriting camp + web3 hackathon. Some of the perks of holding the NFT include attendance to the camps as well as a name (+ logo) included on the final songs’ cover artworks, social media love + bragging rights as the named sponsor of this camp, on-chain recognition as early supporters of Songcamp, with retroactive benefits (tbd) as the community grows. Their genesis story is amazing.

  • Love names of holders being included in album art, will consider this for the album release in December 2022 (once all songs are released as singles).

  • For their release event they gave out POAPs for those who attended (or Mintsongs posters as an alternative for those without crypto wallets) - done.

• Warpsound: the future we all know is coming but can’t quite wrap our heads around. An interactive, AI-powered collective that uses ML (Machine Learning) plus a variety of seed creative inputs -- such as MIDI training data, sound design, visual IDs, etc -- to develop signature sounds and styles of musical output. It then uses the “audio fingerprints” developed for each virtual artist to generate an infinite number of original compositions on-demand, in real-time.

  • Nowhere near doing anything like this technologically, but would love to hear from you if this is your area of expertise! Love generative art (Art Blocks and Fxhash for instance) and recently acquired some Synthtopia NFTs.

  • Stuff I'd like to steal borrow from their roadmap for utility with the Legacy NFT includes access to IRL events (gigs, meet ups etc), performances on platforms like twitch or perhaps newer Web3 platforms!

• Ghost of Frank Dukes: original generated audio visual works of art compiled by a group of creators exploring the future of music.

  • Upon achieving a certain number of sales (sell-out) in this case, a percentage is stored on a community wallet which holders are able to have a say in the future of the project.

  • Merchandise drop for holders as well as the incorporation of the NFTs into decentralised applications & metaverse partnerships // galleries.

*Please note this is not financial advice on investments, please do your own research.

Thats it. The first song of the album comes out today - Narcissus.

We’ll be launching the NFT in three weeks [28.01.22] on Tezos first with a deep dive on what makes that blockchain so very special including how easy (and cost effective) it is to mint NFTs and split royalties amongst a team of collaborators. Thereafter there will be NFT drops on Ethereum, NEAR, BNB, Luna and more as we explore the metaverse!

This will also be the same date we release a second track: “The One”.

Really excited to see where this journey goes. Thanks for coming along for the ride!

Papa