With the introduction of Farcaster as the social feed in Coinbase Wallet, it’s worth asking what exactly it means to be a social layer in crypto. If we’re not just the communications and propaganda branch of Coinbase (and hopefully we aren’t) who are we? What are we doing with Farcaster? It’s hard to say, because on the one hand I’m not sure there has been a thing quite like what we want to be - but there are lots of examples of what we are not that we can use as instructive examples.

We Aren’t Mass-Social Media

For a minute in early 2024 it felt like maybe Warpcast would be what people flocked to as Twitter slid into being X which slid into an awful lot of posts that were (rightfully) off-putting to advertisers and people less comfortable with xenophobia. It’s good at times like this to have friends who are very cynical about crypto or friends who participate in things like the Fediverse or Mastodon or Urbit or whatever that is an alternative to the web2 social media giants. That is - some of us have been so obsessed with crypto since 2017 that our perspective is very bent on how much of a niche it is compared to global subcultures. Warpcast was doing a very good job of making the experience of a social protocol not feel tedious: I won’t name names but other apps tried things that meant running wallet transactions for every post and every comment and every interaction - it’s not just tedious, it’s unsafe (you start clicking Confirm way too fast - imagine doing that with a non-hot wallet!).

The initial hype saw a flood of Farcaster users* and the feeling that this might be The Next Big Thing. Some of us had been there before that wave and were content to more or less continue paddling our surfboard whether or not the waves were moving. Later in the year BlueSky suddenly became the heir apparent to a certain demographic of former Twitter users. So the landscape we see now, it seems to me, is that there’s a relatively blue app that doesn’t want to discuss or engage in crypto at all, and a relatively red app that has a legacy crypto culture that is at least somewhat weaponized against its own users to bait them into being exit liquidity for a few memelords and insiders. If we acknowledge that simply by being integrated with crypto we are participating in a niche culture (for now and maybe for the foreseeable future) - I think it’s instructive that we acknowledge we are not either of those other two options.

We do not want to be a social app that is easily leveraged for political rhetoric, botted as a sybil face of mass propaganda. We don’t want to be a social app that is clearly owned by any combination of oligarchs with any particular disposition. In this respect it’s not even about disagreeing with Zuckerberg or Musk - it’s just about acknowledging how insane it is that we spent decades railing against the small group of powerful private interest owned media companies only to have people enthusiastically embrace that as a paradigm in 2025. We probably shouldn’t anticipate the masses joining up on something that is uniquely tooled for security (that is, as opposed to accounts you can recover with emails and phone numbers) and linked with cryptocurrency. So what do we want to be? Something else.

We Aren’t Cypherpunks

This one ruffles me just a little, but a social protocol that isn’t totally zk-secure or something - not to mention the pseudo-anonymous nature of Farcaster culture - we simply aren’t the people on the bleeding edge of encrypted privacy as a priority. With that said, one of the really interesting developments within Warpcast has been the SuperAnon bot and how it gets used. People use it to call out grifters, crack off-color jokes, sometimes to bullpost or bearpost.

When I say that we aren’t cypherpunks what I mean is that I don’t really think we should aspire to be one of the internet subcultures that is completely anonymous. On the one hand those places bring out honesty and hot takes that might not be shared otherwise, on the other hand they bring out the worst in people who have no concern for any kind of social shaming for being awful. Not to mention the reality that serious opsec enthusiasts put a lot more effort into their online activity than most of us (in the already admittedly-niche subculture) have the time or expertise to manage.

Also consider this: the nature of the public ledger game we’re all playing means that things like castmoney.xyz and ZachXBT’s chain-sleuth adventures are sort of two ends of the trust spectrum. Castmoney has been interesting - I was really fascinated by seeing what coins my social network were buying and how much, and then being also informed of “big” purchases and moves by whales. That’s the public-facing aspect, though, right? I have no idea what percentage of the total portfolio spread across wallets and real world assets these “whales” are spending on random Base memecoins. Their conviction in the token is really determined by the percentage of their net worth - so when they make a big buy that’s really a relatively miniscule buy for them (for all I know), I may be deceived into really risky bets. It’s a similar problem with ZachXBT - for the uninitiated, he’s made a hobby/career out of connecting blockchain dots to point out bad actors, scammers, or hackers or people otherwise being scumbags that is technically public and just hard to map out. The problem for me is that Zach gets anonymous tips (why?) or sometimes will excoriate people who are something closer to serial entrepreneurs than grifters (many such cases). It’s not really about ZachXBT being wrong a lot, it’s more about selective public shaming being a really dangerous tool.

What I mean is this: anon accounts and sort of sponsored public investigators are both the sort of thing where the use case is also the abuse case, the public/private asymmetry is meaningful. ZachXBT might get a tip about a competitor’s dev history or past dealings. SuperAnon posts an aside that suggests this personality or that market is insolvent. If we assume everything we are doing is public, that’s when things like castmoney deceive us: we don’t know the real worth or every action of market actors. When we assume everything we are doing is private that’s when selectively pointing out chains of actions or balances amounts to corporate sabotage. That said, most of ZachXBT’s major work - I think - is pretty justified: Lazarus group, SIM-swappers, Phishers, etc.

We Aren’t A Multi-Media Layer

The last tendency I think worth mentioning is to think of Farcaster as a replacement for Instagram, TikTok or uhhhh Flickr, Tumblr - I don’t know but a place to share video and images and art that is all sort of content-creator-centric. This might sound insane for a minute, because what is a post feed if not a stream of content from creators? I think the apps that have already integrated with Farcaster, though, have demonstrated that things like Rodeo and Drakula make more sense than trying to post everything directly to Farcaster - that the tokenizing and web3-ownership paradigm makes more sense if Warpcast just integrates the apps rather than trying to make everything exist inside itself. In a word: the interaction is what is key, not the native hosting.

Video takes a lot of storage, uncompressed images (which artists are always complaining about) take storage - sharing all these things with all the users takes a lot of bandwidth; but this is all common sense. The problem is rather that sharing all this content without any tokenizing has traditionally been paid for (in web2) with advertising. Each suggestion I see for how to grow Warpcast or Farcaster in the way it handles media seems to me to begin to require some kind of subsidized storage/bandwidth (venture capitalist money or advertising) or even worse, devolves into short-form video churn influencer and lifestyle branding (a few more steps, but also advertising).

In my mind, the paradigm that Farcaster is using the crypto legos - the modular app integration that makes up the variety and depth of all the users can dream up - this is the important thing to return to. Developing a very ornate and particular lego piece is fine, but the whole ethos of legos is the ability to recombine them and create new things. If we don’t want to be a platform that is just bait for mercenary financialized interactions that quickly dump, we have to embrace some kind of meaningful identity. This is why we are still figuring out who exactly it is that we are and what we’re doing being integrated into apps like Coinbase Wallet: we’re not the media - independent or otherwise, we’re not the place for radical privacy, and we’re not the mass social app. That’s all “what we are not” - so what are we? What will we be?

What is IANGAC? It’s a fictional HyperCard stack that is an example of one person in relative isolation trying to map their own internal “memex” - their own Xanadu of ideas that are probably wrong or inaccurate in all kinds of ways, that even when they are right they are so particular and limited and conjoined to all sorts of other unrelated things. It is meant to shine a light on how we think - and what’s more - how we delude ourselves into believing we think more clearly and singularly than we really do. It also, I think, tries to offer some pointers to how to engage in a culture that is in the dip of rhetoric and humanistic ideas and has lost faith (for a time) in the institutions of demonstration and rigorous logic.

How do you explain a non-linear text? How do you lead someone through a series of ideas that aren’t in sequence, but instead layer on each other or repeat or link? There are a lot of questions like that in what I have been calling “I Am Not Good at Computer” (a reference to a meme about a joke mis-printed advertisement and the Fenslerfilm GI Joe parodies). This project started out in the aftermath of the sprawling doyouwanttofeelsomething.com exploration of Windows 95 and mid-90’s Windows aesthetic GUI stuff. That project could not be explained in text. I figured so long as I was into retro stuff that I knew as a child, why not start exploring the world I wasn’t a part of: vintage Macintosh. What was there? I was willing to let what was there show me what I should try to make.

What I found was that early Macintosh - “a bicycle for your mind” - felt much less businesslike than Windows. It was not an attempt to create a featureless digital desktop for you to do work at: it was its own creative expression that Susan Kare and Jobs (of course) and Bill Atkinson et al created to show you how they imagined you could use computers at home. Exploring all the old software in emulation form showed what an interesting aesthetic experience it was: black and white, creative graphics and interaction. When I was a kid all the smart computer-savvy types considered Macintosh computers the equivalent of Playskool toys: not for the serious coder. What I found in the programs on them felt very much like they tried to build a little tool for you to express yourself in MacPaint, to learn in programs like Culture 1.0, and maybe to do other tasks that felt somewhere between work and play.

I took a lot of the tiny graphical elements combined with original shapes and textures and worked with my friend {protocell:labs}, and PartyDAO helped get us rolling on creating a generative project that expressed the excitement and flowing confusion of an amateur sitting down at a vintage Macintosh to try to use and manipulate this creative world of static ideas. This is the generative backdrop to the front end web experience.

The cultural programs and HyperCard stacks I found were fascinating because it was like looking at little miniature encyclopedias and essays. It was all so limited when you compare it with the vast amount of information on Wikipedia or available in blogs and posts and articles on the world wide web. There was a period there of about 6 years between when HyperCard was launched and the Internet proper took over where people at home were creating and sharing these little “stacks” of creatively dressed and interactive information that was so limited - this is just what some particular person somewhere knew enough about to make. The culture program was a bunch of typical printed encyclopedia entries that now seem dated. Yet - knowing these contents is what constituted your ability to think - your ability to ride the bicycle.

I had just finished Workstation95 with my collaborator pfeffunit and I pitched the idea of expanding the generative IANGAC project into something more conceptual with all these stylized fake HyperCard images - trying to pretend that these cards were real mini-essays that fit into that era. The pitch probably took me a few weeks to refine with him into something workable, but pfeff is a consummate professional and took the ideas and helped me create something really original: interactive stacks linked by metadata connections between subjects. Mintable to be used as a part of buying these generative behemoth designs.

Thematically: I wanted to make a project that was about our own limits. We have the broader internet now - but we have delegated so much of our internal knowledge to this apparatus I wonder if it works the same. When I think of something, it connects in my mind to all the other things it makes sense for that to link to (or arbitrary connections that are totally personal). If I have not memorized any of the content of so many countless wiki articles, how can I connect ideas? How can I think clearly if my own mind is only populated with a tiny handful of ideas?

In addition to this - I was thinking about how we have talked a lot lately about “post-truth” or “post-fact” America. That facts or truths no longer determine public discourse. You would think this would be a very one-sided conversation, but in the polarized political climate it seems everyone is leaning into their own opinions and their own facts, and the broader consensus has collapsed. In the maps I drew in early days of how this could all be made sense of - instead of just getting angry I started asking “well, have we been here before?” and also “how do we prove something is true?”

These are like, Philosophy 101 questions maybe. Here we are though: in the world we actually live in I proposed some themes that make up this project. We want capital T “Truth” but it can be very hard to get, very hard to prove, very hard to share, impossible to communicate. We want “Facts” - but in the absence of being able to get all the facts about everything, we rely on pragmatic choices, convention, tradition, whatever it is that lets us feel we are still making sensible decisions when we are not all-knowing.

I think society as a whole probably moves between these two poles - (1) being pragmatic and just having to get on with things and (2) convincing ourselves once again that the great project of Knowledge is not worthless - that we can know accurately and robustly enough to make a rational society function regardless of mass opinion. Since HyperCard was a neat metaphor for my own little ideas and thoughts to combine and hold in tension - the project hangs together as a network of ideas. Bill Atkinson himself seemed to envision HyperCard as a way for people at home to construct their ideas and share them. I think also that in history at one time we as a culture give up on logic and fine distinctions and demonstrating our beliefs (for example, the Renaissance) - at another (for example, with Isaac Newton) we again believe that our reason and experience can all be united into a system for understanding and predicting the world around us. All of that is muddied waters with all the art and music and little ideas that mix as we try to sort out a system and instead end up thinking in fruit salads of notions.

Will it end up being forgotten amidst the flood of NFTs, the vitriolic political discourse, the bottomless pit of delegated wiki wisdom? I don’t know, but I had to try to get it out as a visit to the vision, to the dream of HyperCard.

A lot of artists don’t bother with this second leg, and they stay at the first market they found any success in and mint there forever. Sometimes they throw a temper tantrum after a while when their endless posting about a new piece there received little traction (all their posts are usually about their newest piece, nothing else). Some artists take the leap of trying new platforms, but generally just make one or two things in the new place and lose heart when the platform itself doesn’t manifest an audience for them. Artists who are patient and engage will realize something: if you grow an audience, they follow you - and only a few collectors really invest their attention into a particular platform. Getting just a few people engaged from that small market-native audience helps grow your overall body of interested people that may then follow you elsewhere.

You don’t have to take a course on social media strategy to know some of the basics: consistency, variety, leveraging hashtags/meta strategies (e.g. using unique channels on Warpcast, hashtags on Twitter), and participating in what other people are doing is all key to growing a following. Artists who want to helicopter in and drop art and then leave will get discouraged - or worse - they will become tedious to the rest of us who don’t want to subscribe to advertisements with no substance. More advanced users will do the work of strategizing replies, follows, posting across channels. For some people like myself I tend to straddle the general and specific engagement strategies: aggressive growth strategies (I think) can cause burnout just as fast as the toe-dippers who lose patience. If you’re brand new, however, it couldn’t hurt to have a real plan: one of the real benefits of seniority is being able to afford being inefficient. Mainly: be interesting, don’t be always selling things, and also don’t avoid selling things, or the attention becomes a loop with no purpose. Make friends because you like people, not because you want to use their popularity.

With that advice and collection of observations out of the way - I wanted to highlight three artists I’ve seen in the space who have made a second-leg leap into being full-blown participants in interesting and engaging ways. Generally, you can tell how much an artist has really adopted the ethos of tokenized art by how many places and established forms their art has ventured into. They have a style, but have they moved beyond their favorite chain? They have a method, but have they also tried a generative version of their art? Sure they have an account, but do you actually find yourself reading their posts just to see what they are up to and not necessarily to buy something?

1. MEK.txt (@michaelmicasso, @michaelmicasso)

Michael Micasso (see mek.gallery) is incredibly interesting. A Peranakan Chinese artist living as a religious minority in Indonesia and a former member of the KMSR art collective, his style has a very unique perspective on western tradition woven into it. A remarkable clarity of thought and purpose comes from a professional artist who has had to pragmatically think through how he goes about making art, and art as a product and not just a flourish of the imagination. In a sense, all the things I talked about in the introduction to these artists are things MEK must have realized in the process of becoming a participant here: not allowing the natural distaste we all have for social media dictating our actions with algorithms to keep us from succeeding, forming regular practices, letting passion push us to create rather than distract. It means not letting it bother you what a square you have to be to consistently make art and follow-through to the point of having a delivered project.

I first discovered MEK in passing back in 2022 or so, seeing his brilliant dithered pixel work show up in OBJKT feeds on tezos. Each one that came through my feed of new art minted made me pause and admire it. You get the distinct feeling that this is not just an artist who makes whatever comes to mind, but that these works are the work of someone who feels themselves part of a tradition: it’s staggering the number of references in his art to classical latin themes, characters, figures - likewise greek or religious iconography. You could argue at least some of these are plays on a theme in the way that a virtuoso musician might make their own very idiosyncratic recording of a classic folk song or orchestral melody. The whole Archaics collection on Tezos is breathtaking in technique and composition.

The main vibe here is pixel/retro/dithering - a lot of it done manually in ways that are difficult to artfully reproduce with automatic processes. Aseprite makes a lot of these pieces come to life with flickering animations. The attention to detail is irreproachable. Let me take a moment to use MEK further as an example of an artist who embraces the “second leg up” I’ve been describing. His art is on Tezos (mainly, firstly) but he has several generative collections on fxhash, he has fantastic 1155 tokens on Solana, and work on Foundation and ETH L1 (as expensive as gas can be!). MEK has posted across marketplaces and chains and formats - all in what are developing as new “traditional” forms of NFT art. Again, MEK is trying different marketplaces where he can grow and move his audience, not just staying in familiar places.

Besides all that, MEK is also making what I’d consider the final leap into being a full-fledged participant in the space: building novel mechanisms in new places. His newest widget/toy/art is your.garden where users can create from his original wingding style glyphs little “gardens” - something completely unique and original and yet fitting in his overall style and ethos. In my opinion, it’s once we see artists making this last step into contributing new conceptual approaches that we’re following someone who is a web3 native, a tokenizing contributor, an artist that has become a crypto artist and not an artist dabbling in crypto.

It’s not just that I would recommend MEK as an artist based on his previous work - but I can wholeheartedly recommend following him as someone who is a positive contributor to the space both in quality of art and his ability to envision new things in new places - all while having one foot in the flowing waters of tradition that informs his work.

2. elle (@riotgoools, @riotgools)

Whatever your hot take is on the whole milady/remilia phenomenon, one of the major strengths of that community is creating derivative projects that sustain and contribute to the overall culture rather than dilute it. To stand out within that competitive world is difficult, but elle created Very Internet Person - my personal favorite Milady-related PFP project that takes the neochibi mood and translates it to iterative pixel art that looks seamless and (IMO) more cohesive than the original collection. VIP are not - by elle’s description - derivatives, but are a secret third thing where the Milady PFPs have their own (layer 2?) profile pictures. In elle’s words, these are a pixel contribution to the milady “chaotic mystery” aesthetic.

That this collection that caught my attention, though, is just part of a fully robust engagement with the space that elle takes on. The riotgoools website is a real vibe - as is the veryinter.net/person/ site - all of it showcasing the kind of feverish creation, memory, evoking method that nostalgic web-based art in the present does so well when a high-effort artist dumps their creative energy into it. This is a part of the engagement, as well - the front-end and the delivery of these tokenized works isn’t an afterthought: it’s an entire experience, and all of it is linked and dances its way through internet subcultures, edgy NEET lounges - thriving in corners of the internet in the way that art thrives in the real world in some of the sketchiest alleys and modes that only a consummate maven would know about.

This is not me projecting on the artwork, either - elle also writes and explains all of this tipping her hand as a thoughtful artist and not just a lunatic creator. Again you can see the earmarks I’ve been describing for a true crypto artist: open editions in a novel printout format on Zora, Goools on tezos, participating in an ASCII exhibition, even a very cool collection on Fantom called Goool Bands - generally trying things out in different places. Not being content with the first attempt to understand how to do things here.

The main reason she’s included here, though, is that besides just having demonstrated the ability to do a generative/iterative project, finer 1/1 work, and showing versatility in chains and markets elle is actively imagining new internet spaces that recall the wild and wooly days before the flattening influence of the web2 paradigm. User created sites, spaces, and nooks that embrace all the weird and wonderful possibilities of a user-centric internet. In a word: a return to self-expression as a mainstay of internet culture and not being crammed into Wordpress templates or secondhand formats or even worse, the sterilized anodyne canon of acceptable self-expression that the internet of yesteryear dictated to us. elle is someone to keep an eye on just because she seems uniquely tuned in to a very vibrant pulse of chaotic mystery energy that she channels into genuinely good art and novel mediums.

3. julierose (@crystalspaceship, @crystalspaceshp)

Julie Rose (see julierose.co) has been moving in the same orbits that I have been for a few years now, and I’ve seen a ton of work come from her that dazzled me both in the commitment to an aesthetic and the diversity she’s managed to press out of that aesthetic. Without knowing her well on a personal level, she comes across in the way that an older sibling does who knows the sort of art and design she’s about and can rattle off a dozen references to artists and designers she admires. Her feed on Warpcast has been great to see all the fantastic pieces she shares from artists of the last 60 years or so - almost all of which you can detect influences of in her own work. In my own words, I would describe her style as a kind of whimsical 1960s/1970’s abstract revival. It feels very contemporary while also being tied to the aesthetic from that era that proved so timeless in VHS collections and posters and t-shirts people held onto as valuable vintage.

Julierose is yet another one of these artists that came to the fork of burnout or expansion and chose to keep learning, keep trying new things. A subscription (the newest thing!), art on Tezos and ETH L1, 1/1 style work in addition to branching out into generative/iterative processes. Exploring the new traditional formats and trying new ones. Not to absolutely beat this point to a pulp - but julierose is in this list because she participates:

All of her work is just so damn satisfying to look at. Some artists like myself have really divergent styles and techniques and we struggle to have a cohesive style - others like julierose have a style that is so polished that it floats effortlessly into different final executions with apparent ease.

This is all great, but following julierose on social media is its own reward because she retweets/recasts so much good art - she shares great designs with artist names and dates, shows interesting behind-the-scenes sketches of stuff she has yet to finish. Her social media timeline is interesting for its own sake, and isn’t just a perpetual feed of advertisements.

This is the final point I’ve been really at pains to illustrate - in each of the three artists I talked about here they have been absolute paragons of several ways of being that I think are the way forward for crypto art:

• They try new things across chains and marketplaces and bring their audience.

• They are willing to lean into new established “traditional” NFT art formats.

• Presentation isn’t an afterthought.

• They have a stream of culture that informs their work.

• They try the newest ways of doing things and when those don’t exist, they build their own.

These are totally made up by me, but maybe a part of the new energy of crypto art is just having faith in the stuff you made up that you think is backed by serious consideration, informed by art you’ve seen being practiced rather than just in theory. These three artists are all immensely talented and, in my opinion, represent the crypto-art paradigm being established by active participants in the space. There are some artists featured at major events or in galleries and parties, but I think the future is really the digitally native types that are fully comfortable with their work embracing the digital-only ethos and the mood of internet as a place to live (at least part-time).

One of the surprises of working on a Windows95 themed project was to sort of discover an implicit world behind the system images Microsoft (and later other third parties) created. They have familiar icons in 2d pixels, but they also had a collection of graphics and icons and system images that were consistently in an isometric perspective - graphics that implied an entire pixel-rendered sort of 3D world. I realized just how rich that world was while exploring all the install wizards and setup operations for software and tools as I searched for graphics. Creating as complete of a collection in a PSD of native-resolution graphics from every software company that copied Microsoft’s isometric style and fleshed out that little universe. The default graphics and some rare finds and some little custom tweaks became a part of DYWTFS that I called “Everything In Its Place In the Network” - a giant Where’s Waldo-esque poster broken up into desktop sized pieces.

The vibe from that 95-era stuff was that the internet was coming: there are connections, network lines, globes everywhere. Phones and modems and cables and so on - everything felt like it belonged in some kind of giant computer network that we too had a place in. That felt like a very good metaphor for organizing your emotional life: maturing into understanding that you and your feelings (both good and bad) have a place in your overall network.

There were simply too many themes and too much nuance to discuss all of the meaning of DYWTFS in any write-up. What I wanted to do, though, was to find a way to explore the isometric little setup world and let it mirror a much more narrow real life theme: our own desktops. Expanding and growing and making modular the whole world of Windows95/98 setup graphics and tools starts to stimulate the imagination or maybe the memory: are you old enough to remember beige mediocre computers you had to work on? Did you ever have a job where the mainframe or server racks were within sight while you tinkered on your machine? Did you have a stack of VHS tapes you were scrubbing through - or DAT cassette machines? I asked my friend Tartaria Archivist if he would help me build a system for integrating our new objects and graphics and mixing and matching them with the found graphics from any number of Windows program setups. Trying to blur the lines between what was authentic era software tool graphic and what is art. (lol).

What’s more - what about the whole world of fetishized nostalgia for that era, or a fictional one that is sort of like it? I could only think of one artist who had really shared that interest in little workstation renderings from fantastical imagination and that was Iteration with her fantastic AI-utilizing workflow in creating Vapor Workstations. Since I was creating sort of glum imaginary ordinary desktops, I asked if she would consider letting her collection be akin to one of the creative additions to Microsoft’s graphics and blend in isometric pixelized Vapor Workstations that reflected a complex paradox that is built-in to our desktop relationships: we both love and hate the spot where we work and play on computers.

“Workstation” is a fun word because it’s genuinely a part of the old era of Windows, with Windows NT Workstation, but also it’s kind of funny that you can call something as fun and cool as one of these Vaporwave creations a “workstation” and still be accurate. Are desktops for work or for fun? If they’re for both - how can we distinguish when we’ve had enough and should do something else? What else is it you want to do, and where?

The collection was being built just as Frames were taking off on Warpcast, so I asked around looking for developers to help us build a neat workaround to mint through a Frame, and pfeffunit connected with me. Mixed in with the previewing version that Frames will support we added some very overt DOS/BIOS/SETUP type screens that are meant to echo the DYWTFS setup sections. That is, meta-modernist style directness combined with playfulness. In fact, there’s a few DYWTFS themes and styles that make cameos.

The remaining major task was to make the project actually comment on something in a meaningful way. We did this with the text selection. Each time a workstation is created, it looks at the mood values we have assigned the different parts of your workstation and decides how positive or negative your mood must be and chooses from our library of pre-written texts (which we did write ourselves). The texts are short and hopefully a little cute - but they’re meant to be one or two sentences that encapsulate a mood somewhat indirectly. Little things you may have thought or said to yourself at your own little workstation that reflect the complex variety of feelings you have about your spot where you work (and live). The results, so far, have been a huge collection of engaging little tiny workstation compositions that we, as the creators, are also excited to explore and see just what kind of sentiments match what kind of desktops and imagine ourselves living and working where they are.

While the Frames experience is meant to explore that new format with previewing and mixing in the setup screens, the main site is just for people who want to also collect and see some of these while they are minting - but something more like batch collecting and blind-minting from the main site.

Come see the cool art and think - if not seriously, then half-seriously about your workstation. Our mint site should be world-class when it’s finished thanks to pfeffunit’s wizardry.

Workstation95

At your desk again?

https://workstation95.xyz

Current Scene: Fragmented

For one thing - everything everywhere is getting harder to track. With the advent of services like Manifold to create contracts, it seemed like every marketplace developed their own function for artists to create their own smartcontracts for their own collections. On the one hand this is great! Artists’ work can be assessed from other platforms, metrics like volume and floor prices and total supply all make sense now compared to when an artists’ work was just some token IDs on a shared smartcontract with a larger marketplace like Superrare or Makersplace.

On the other hand, however, being able to show volume for a particular portal is much more complicated: should the volume of a marketplace be all the contracts created there that are bought and sold there? Should it be tokens from contracts created elsewhere that happen to be bought or sold on their marketplace but didn’t originate there? If an artist is doing really well - won’t their sales be distributed across different actual storefronts and confuse the metrics of any one place they are being bought? With contracts no longer being tied to storefronts (which in theory, they were not before either - it just took more effort for collectors), it’s beginning to feel a little anarchic and untraceable.

All that to say - the metrics that made sense to measure a year or two ago seem difficult to pin down now. What looks like just a tiny trickle of volume may be more, but just spread out. That is - for example, if you look at one of my collections on KnownOrigin or Makersplace it might look like I’m not selling anything lately, but you’d have to go to my Zora or custom Manifold contract to see a different story. It could also be that smaller artists looked better when they shared a contract with the big names that were buoying the overall smartcontract volume - how much buying and selling is going on with smaller projects that have less mindshare? Obviously not as much as the few artists whose work is changing hands at 10x the value of the small one and doing so every week or even every day. If an artist creates a new contract for each project they work on - how do we assess neatly the average value that artist demands. By contract? By particular piece? We have found a way to be more precise about what tokens we are looking at and what they are worth on the open market, but it could be that having done that we’ve blown away the smokescreen of success to see the much more ordinary amounts that the average or even sub-average artist can command.

Volume and Reasonable Expectations

It’s hard to say exactly what the typical crypto artist expects for returns on their work these days. Some artists seem clear-eyed, aware, and have some idea of what the general atmosphere is. Some artists have their head down most of the time working and only pop up to guess at whether their newest project will succeed. Newcomers to the space generally seem really confused at valuation, reputations, networking, and just in general the mechanics and tech of tokenization.

The artists who have their heads down have a lot of respect from me - of course, our vocation is to create art and not to conduct market research. That said, I’ll take a look at some kinds of data that might be relevant.

Minting on Eth mainnet seemed a little cheaper, at least for a while there in 2023, but it’s still nothing to sneeze at - especially if you’re asking what you can ask for a piece that cost $20 or more just to mint. Consider, though, the kind of money changing hands at giants like SuperRare and Foundation - both marketplaces down considerably in volume. Millions of dollars down to hundreds of thousands for SuperRare, hundreds of thousands down to tens of thousands for Foundation. It’s not about being bleak - it’s about asking a non-famous artist how much they expect to make as a piece of one of those pies that are considerably smaller than they were even just a year ago.

The Death of the Middle Class

My current theory is that the “middle class” of NFT artists is slowly dying out. That is to say, sincere collectors and speculators alike are going to be polarized into two positions: art that is expensive from a famous artist that may appreciate in value and art that is cheap from a relatively unknown artist that may or may not appreciate in value. It’s not that hard to grasp, really - if we just think of real world fine art: even if someone has the money they probably won’t spend fine-art money on a relatively unknown artist. They may spend a lot on a famous artist even if they have no intention of flipping it for profit, just because it feels like an act of cultural acumen to own and enjoy it. They may buy lots of relatively cheap art from artists who are relatively unknown because they like it, or on the off-chance that person ends up becoming very popular years or generations from now. What a person will probably not do is buy expensive art that is by someone relatively unknown on the off-chance of fame. It was perhaps the general novelty froth of the 2020/2021 market that led to people buying up this new asset and new medium for art like mad, and not a sustainable thing.

On the other hand, I could be wrong about all this. It could be that there was always a larger art market for digital art than we realized - but there was no ownership format agreed upon (like tokens) and no global marketplace (crypto) that connected these aesthetic goods with buyers. It could be that we’ve seen the birth of an internet of digital goods that just hasn’t quite reached maturity and like any token pair launch we’ve witnessed the initial insane spike and dump followed by a slow growth back from near-zero. Maybe there’s room for a middle class again. Who knows?

If I’m right, though - about the death of the middle class - we can expect two things to take off as new meta. Lots of virtually free art on the one side, and an increasingly sophisticated market for art as a luxury good on the other. Sealed.art is doing an amazing job of building new AI-assisted search tools to help curious collectors discover art they genuinely love from across marketplaces and refine even further their sensibility for what to collect and from whom.

One quick note on AI-generated art: it will absolutely fill to the brim every corner of the market that isn’t too expensive to mint to or barred by gatekeepers. The Optimism art contest entries I was looking through, since they allowed minting on L2 chains (cheap) there was an almost limitless number of submissions of AI generated pieces - even in categories that were explicitly not for AI or were for generative art that wasn’t AI rendered. The lesson to take from this isn’t necessarily to never use any AI art for anything (although I personally use virtually none) but just to remember that unlike the early days of NFTs where you at least had to be able to grab and hack together an image - there is going to be a ready supply of near infinite renderings in any place where the market upside is enough to make spamming that art profitable. Setting your AI-generated pieces apart as something unique or better than the elemental force of visuals that has been birthed is going to be very very difficult.

New Strategies

So, what are people trying now since it seems like some of the old cups that used to overfloweth are running dry? Let me point out a few significant changes and novelties in the NFT art space. For one thing, generative art is being made more public. Fxhash.xyz is pivoting from Tezos only to Eth and Tezos, and since they’re sort of self-service it means that releases are going to flood in, no longer gated by the onboarding and support process that platforms like Artblocks manage for their creators. Same goes for new BTC ordinal markets like generative.xyz for generative art, except gas prices are going to make both ETH and BTC options expensive for newcomers. L2 tokens on Base or Zora chain actually seem to be selling here and there for significant amounts - has the stranglehold for value consensus that Eth had weakened a little? As the hurdles for entry get shorter and shorter, will we see a bloom of good new work or will the potential supply flood with cheap minting fees suddenly burn out collectors? Who knows?

So is it worth it for artists to try free mints on L2? Zora is incentivizing it right now by essentially paying you the platform fee for creating claims there. Did it work for me? Yes and no. I had the good fortune of being promoted for a mint by DWR from Warpcast and Kugusha from Gallery and some fans of the DYWTFS project promoted my mint until it was in the top 4 for 24 hours for a day or so. That led to around 800 mints - which is an awful lot by my standards (and most people’s) and frankly I can’t command that kind of attention with my own twitter/warpcast following by itself. Still, though, when DWR tweeted about it and shared through warpcast (with direct “mint with warp” inside the app) it still took until multiple people on twitter shared to start to take off. By the numbers, DWR had about 85k followers on twitter at the time, and being the founder and dev of Warpcast had another 45k there. Since that time Warpcast has exploded. Gallery.io posting on twitter about it has another 25k followers - so you’re looking at a reach of around 100k people or so, give or take - not including the myriad other friends and followers who shared. Most artists have nowhere near this kind of following - even if they rode through 2020-2024 and were successful in their own lane. So at about 10x my following it was looking to be worth $130 for a couple days of work on a nice piece before it got to the front page and then became something more like $800 for a couple days. By my standards, this is good pay - but can I make it to the front page of Zora trending each time I spend a few days on a piece? I cannot. The average artist cannot. Warps with mints inside Warpcast may be a good way to get an initial flurry of mints, but it’s probably not sustainable if you need to repeat that performance over and over to make it worthwhile. The discovery feed is fun to watch on Zora, but at best an average artist can only expect a trickle from it - and only that if they aggressively post about their piece short of annoying everyone enough to mute them. All that to say: the Zora free mint meta may look better than it is because it works once in a while for a few people - but probably won’t work consistently for any one person, especially if they aren’t super famous.

Subscription services like Warpcast native Jonny Mack’s hypersub.withfabric.xyz or sealed.art/subscriptions are trying out a new model. What if you didn’t have to compete in a pvp marketplace at ‘Buy Now’ prices or auctions to guarantee a stream of art from your favorite creators? What if as a creator you don’t have to guess what art will sell for or worry whether you can sell the next thing you’re devoting time to? It could be that relaxed expectations for both sides will prove a little more sustainable and healthy relationships can be built. It could be that collectors prefer to effectively DCA into artists rather than feast and fast, and artists may end up enjoying creating as a regular habit rather than panic to create and then beg for sales.

Also, as more tools for managing DAOs and controlling their membership and governance are created and refined, NFTs that have a readymade audience of investors in projects or tokens may be more worthwhile to create for. This is one of the interesting conundrums; in 2021 it felt very much like “community” was what was created after people bought into a collection. It could be that 2024 will see more communities that already exist creating things together and managing their own “product.” In that sense: it would be smart for artists to look for communities that need art rather than try to create one around their art. This may sound awfully mercenary or frankly just like having a design job again, but if the question is “what are people buying in the NFT markets” that’s where the market may be. I recently did the Degen Haberdashers collection specifically because a DAO community manager put out a request for artists to help make some NFTs.

Another thing that has suddenly skyrocketed is ERC404 or DN404 tokens - functionally liquid NFTs paired with ERC20 tokens - art coins that can be swapped and burned for the art itself. Some marketplaces are already pointing out that these ruin a lot of standard ERC721/1155 etc functions - but people are anxious to try new paradigms. With async.art having closed not so long ago, it seemed for a minute like NFTs were settling into a just a few formats that people understood and could quantify. The thing that is surprising is that novelty seems to have come back into vogue for a minute - but what kind of novelty? Did the Pandora’s box NFT do well because it was in a new format or because it was similar to loot box gambling? Did DeFrogs leverage that novelty without quite the same mystery box mystique or are they just coasting on the DeGods latecomer FOMO in the wake of the Solana resurgence? More than that - how could the average artist even hope to create a 404 collection without a developer working side-by-side with them? Those tools will probably exist soon. The question is whether DN404 makes any sense for things that aren’t larger collections. Would it make sense to mint a series of 16 serious artworks in DN404? Probably not.

My last suggestion I can make is for artists to consider very carefully how to build the body of art they want to sell. It could be that collectors are just bored of standard storefronts, standard experiences. When you’re talking about the collectors who aren’t in the game for a quick flip - the ones who want to seek out some kind of new collecting interactions and new ways to think about NFTs, maybe the best move is to just try something you haven’t seen done to the limit of your ability. All too often this ends up in knotted contract interactions, complex systems of token staking / derivative airdropping / user remix experiences that people get bored of. How can you tell when something is going to be boring because the learning curve to use it is too steep? How can you tell when the technical lift for your idea would require a team of solidity developers and front-end magicians that you just can’t afford? My encouragement would be to think of what it is that you want to do artistically that hasn’t been done and only then sort out the mechanics of it. Complex interactions that you think of and then try to reverse-engineer into art are almost always going to be boring.

As usual, the main suggestion I can make is for artists to consider the ability to scale as paramount. If you do the thing you want to do to make artful NFTs - does success mean you are being paid well enough to keep doing it? That’s the question; is it possible to succeed doing this thing you enjoy in the way that you are doing it.

Epilogue: The 2024 Tezos Context (skip this if you are not a tezos die-hard artist)

I have a considerable amount of friends - consummate artists - who were swept up in the Hic Et Nunc craze that eventually transmogrified into objkt.com and Teia, who insist on still using Tezos chain NFT marketplaces and creation tools. The same went for Tezos last year (and 2022, really), shared contracts become custom contracts - shared volume started being narrowed into particular collections.

Before I even address that marketplace - I’ll use this DefiLlama chart to point this out - Tezos itself - all of Tezos as a chain, has likewise gone from hundreds of thousands to tens of thousands - seeing a little more life and edging on $100k volumes again this last month or so (December 2023). The point here is that if NFT activity is only a part of a chain’s draw, and Tezos has that little volume each month - take these hundreds of thousands and make them hundreds of millions and you’re starting to see the kind of volume you see on Ethereum Layer 2s - not even mainnet. Artists on Tezos do great work, I would never denigrate that, but they are becoming brilliant artists selling their work in a slum where less and less aristocratic tourists visit.

Let’s say, though, that you’re a man of culture like myself (lol) - so to speak. You have a nice Tezos collection, you’ve made several yourself - and even if all your developer friends hate it, it has a soft spot in your heart. Gas is so cheap! Why not just make something there for giggles? That’s fine. Remember, though, that OBJKT.com is likewise down in volume from around $100k total volume in January 2022 to around $20k in volume in December/January.

What does that mean on a concrete level for artists? I’m not sure, but to hazard a wild guess - there’s 2,366,866 users on OBJKT.com - let’s say that 1/5 of those is a creator (just guessing). Further, let’s say 1/5 of those artists uses multiple accounts - so we’ll subtract that much - that makes 378,700 creators or so. At the beginning of the year if they each got an equal share of the total platform volume they’d make 30 cents, and if they each got an equal share of the total platform volume in December/January you’re making something more like 5 cents (for the month). Obviously that’s not even close to how it works, so maybe you’re in the top 100 artists on Tezos and they see $20k volume for the month - and being generous let’s say $5k of that is secondary sales on work that’s very very popular or speculative, so that’s $15,000 volume divided evenly by 100 artists - that’s $150.00 each. For the month. As less and less volume flows into Tezos in general, though, I think more and more of those collectors who were fellow artists will realize they are trading the same few dozen tezos back and forth and eventually cut their losses and quit playing hot potato. Even if you’re selling for just a couple dollars or pennies, it’s that there are no new buyers at any price and not that you’re asking for too much money. By all means enjoy Tezos - I love it too - but I wouldn’t expect it to be a significant source of income at this point in time.

One thing I feel like we saw a lot of in 2022-2023 was groups that had a coin that took flight for a moment, and everyone was scrambling to try to figure out some kind of cloud of neat images to swirl around it, cool ideas and references that would glom onto the outside of their shitcoin of choice and give it momentum. Just reading the words “meme contest” is enough to make a lot of us retch.

I saw what had happened with $POINTS as the Warpcast crowd seemed to want that to be their meme in the wake of $WIF going parabolic on Solana - and lost a little chunk of change immediately buying the top. What I saw though, was that Warpcast started building tools around $POINTS right away - I didn’t have to leave the app to see updates on price or notes on who was buying etc. After having gotten used to Twitter being more like a hub to branch out from, I wasn’t used to having meaningful information in the place that I went to chat and post. That’s what made it seem suddenly important: we can integrate things here.

I was surprised as anyone that Vitalik posted in the /degen channel. Purp seemed like he was going a mile a minute and connecting with people in backroom chats from all across the extended network of early Farcaster users. I was messing around with a few projects with my partner Tartaria Archivist and thought, “okay, this could be something.” So we dropped everything to focus on the hats - and just as we were doing that DWR made custom react hats a thing. So that re-iterated the idea for me: in-app defacto recognition of the memecoin. It’s not advanced functionality that mattered, it was the fact that it’s there in the app. Tartaria and I have a custom engine he built that we use to make custom rules for kinds of hats possible, rarities etc. that make sense.

Now, the hats themselves (“haberdasher” sounds a little more playfully foppish) - you have to ask a couple questions I think about what makes cultures work and what makes them fail. I may just be waxing eloquent at this point, but I think a good well-developed culture has to embrace touchstones that would occur to people normally: so you don’t fight people making Bill the Butcher a hat reference, you recognize him as one of the hat-wearing icons. So we did: we recognized Bill the Butcher, Scrooge McDuck, Crocodile Dundee, Slash, Willy Wonka, The Cat in the Hat etc etc - any really meaningful hat reference from pop culture isn’t outside the culture because it’s what people will meme anyways, so make it yours. If you try to form a community by narrowly sticking to themes: if we only did the “degenerate gambler” poker chips, money, slot machines etc etc - it feels dry and artificial even if those are the totems of the movement. This is why meme contests suck: you can’t take such a narrow artificial definition of what makes a thing what it is and expect it to feel organic. Your culture needs to be strong enough at the core that the weirdos that will inevitably inhabit it can be embraced by it rather than defined outside of it.

So we started making hats: standard was Warpcast purple, of course. Then maybe a robot one, a nice classy black one … We drew on every reference that occurred to us, and tried to make everything feel like it fit into a cohesive little pixel world. No backgrounds on them so that people could (if there wasn’t stuff in the way) just copy and paste them onto their avatar for giggles. Plus, these hats are wherever the user is, right? They don’t exist in some other setting. Degen Haberdashers aren’t a PFP so much as they’re imagination stimulators for the PFP you probably already adopted (it’s 2024!)

One thing we wanted to include in the project was the McDonald’s hat, the red candle, the pauper hats - memecoins go up but they also go down, rapidly. The Warpcast crowd seems a little more savvy, at least early on it does, so hopefully people who buy into the coin (it’s a gambling theme, get it?) understand that this is going to be a ride. Purp and Wake and the rest of the DAO are going to try to make it fun and worthwhile to be in their DAO, but they can’t control the whole market and wouldn’t dream of promising it would only go up.

For myself, if $DEGEN was going to really be a thing on Warpcast for a while I wanted to see the culture be a little more robust than just endless tipping, a little more broad and thoughtful than “NUMBER GO UP.” A dash of style will at least make another localized memecoin season more pleasant for all of us. I hope people show each other a little grace in what has been a pretty long PVP bear market leading up to 2024 (which feels just a little different, no?). I think as the crypto space matures, it’s been interesting to see that it reserves for itself a corner of sort of recognized immaturity. There’s still $DOGE, there’s $WIF and $BONK on Solana, right? It’s like the attempt to build serious cryptocurrency functionality maintains a pet memecoin within their own arena - and $BASE has their own sort of bald affinity coins, but are those going to end up being the Base chain or Warpcast pet meme? Time will tell. Good luck out there.

I stumbled across Kit Valo somewhere on OBJKT - I don’t really recall how. I don’t know them personally and haven’t seen them in any network we share. Sometimes you just see something and it strikes you in such a way that you think, “I have to see more.” I’ve tried to figure out what Kit Valo is about. If you go back long enough in an artist’s instagram feed you can start to see the likes dwindle off into obscurity alongside their earliest graspings at a style. Well, if they’ve sort of developed on insta like I did and apparently Kit Valo did you can. The earliest posts I found were still from 2021 though, so we’re not talking ancient archaeology.

Kit has a few running themes you can pick up on: a MASK the recurs -

-- there’s generative/iterative elements in the art, wild neon palettes, occasional retro computing elements, and rough-edged pixellated things. Honestly, some of the same things I would use to describe my own art - so I sensed a kindred spirit. Some of these compositions even look like ones I would make with triangles and circles and so on. Generally speaking, I’d say scrolling through their 2021 art was occasionally brilliant and rarely bad.

Around May of 2022 you can see a slight change of direction. One thing I’ve noticed in surveying all the wild art of the new web is that there’s a palpable difference between a randomly chosen spectrum palette and a slightly adjusted custom one. Consider these three works from early to later (roughly) side by side, and notice how the first one is a rainbow and definitely the other two are as well, but slight changes to the palette and sequence make the second two much more interesting:

I have no idea what Kit’s process is like - looking through their work archived and for sale you can see stuff using ROM glitches like I’ve used, stuff using generative elements, and some that I can only guess is using retro paint style programs. Kit also goes back and forth between full canvas pattern work like the above (on the right) and more deliberate and occasionally simple compositions. Consider these two brilliant but very different works from August 22:

I love and use similar mechanical/circuitboard textures in my own work sometimes, and the simple yet just complex enough composition with FAUST text is brilliant. Kit’s output is pretty impressive, and the quality and variety of the work should impress anyone. There’s a challenge here - and that’s to define what it is that makes this disparate body of work feel cohesive (and it does).

Almost all of Kit’s work feels like contemporary accomplishments in a heightened retro style. That is - things that would have taken ages on old computers (but was possible) Kit Valo wields with the energy and ease and sense of exploration that is only possible with newer gear. It feels like the sturdy detail-rich designs of a chunky period more than a decade or two ago with all the sensibilities of what a person exploring digital native art today would hope was made back then. Kit sells a lot of work for incredibly affordable prices on OBJKT.com - and anyone who takes the time to subscribe and buy a few will keep coming back over and over, keep being surprised by what Kit comes up with on a weekly basis.

2. Bitebybit

If Kit Valo earned my admiration for their complex and crazy-colored work - Bitebybit’s simple blocky basic-colored minimalist designs are a complete contrast that shows how this same retro computing style can be used in a very different way to achieve a totally new effect.

You can explore a lot of different kinds of things from bitebybit, including some animated versions of stuff built with the 1988 Fantavision program. This is all very subjective here - but my absolute favorite works of theirs are the simple but perfect little compositions made with pc paint 3.1 . There’s some on Solana too - I don’t really shop there but some of these are just as genius as their Tezos offerings. It’s interesting that some artists are really forthcoming about what programs they use and some are embarrassed or try to keep it a trade secret or something. Bitebybit is pretty transparent, which I think is a display of confidence. Some of the earlier work really pushes the format and makes contemporary looking designs (again, kind of like Kit Valo):

These are fantastic, and I hope to see more of that kind of thing from them, but at the same time what drew me and what I hope to collect more of is the simplest designs - to share a few:

My only worry is whether Bitebybit realizes just how powerful these simple designs are, and how much people like me will be here to just consume and delight in near-endless variations of the simple designs. It’s something that seems narrow in format but actually has incredibly deep possibilities built into it. The fact that it’s actually being done on really old software means that we’re not bored of seeing anyone else use those tools to exhaustion yet. Keep your eyes on them, and maybe tuck a way some of these brilliant statements before the broader market sees them for what they are. Or maybe the broader market will never figure it out and you’ll just own these gorgeous arrangements and have a richer life for it.

3. SV3ZR

While working on Inaccessible Worlds and Inaccessible Worlds: Lost Levels - I explored some of the art I ran across that was similar to what I was trying to make. SV3ZR has some really interesting work that I tried to imagine the process behind. By their own account: “…various old software are emulated to create artwork, each fragment of the composition is relocated in contemporary software so that the final work has a square shape.”

This is really familiar to me, since I.W. is essentially cherrypicking the best glitches of old NES games and combining them to make hyper-interesting versions. SV3ZR has taken cool failures of multiple pieces of software and made square compositions out of them. Exploring the details of these is pretty satisfying, and my personal favorite thing to collect from them. They are apparently using analog sources somewhere in the process too - so you get these delicious screen artifacts to go with the software crashing ones.

SV3ZR also has some absolutely definitive everything-in-one-place animated kind of compositions (I don’t know what people are calling this style yet) that I’ve seen in different markets. I’m just making this up, but the new window after window space next to space style compositions feel like a mature internet development. People used to spending big portions of their day looking at a dozen different windows at once find it only natural to have art that does the same rather than present one actual view of a scene. Our daily experience is fragmented and windowed a lot of the time, so to have a dozen different little expressions of art in one piece is just taking that familiarity and dressing it nicely. I don’t personally pick up a lot of these, but it’s obvious that this sort of composition is really striking a nerve right now.

Definitely dig deep into SV3ZR’s back catalogue to see a wide variety of stuff - but like Kit Valo, a surprising consistency in quality despite the different styles.

If there was a consistent theme for this episode of art picks - it’s showing how diverse the world of retro-computing as an aesthetic can be. Even when you’re looking at artists that are heavily biased towards Tezos and all working with computer software or artifacts from about a 10-year period, there’s patterned or arranged compositions, wild colors or primary simple colors, minimalist designs and maximalist windowed realities - all of it leaping back and forth between early computing and the boring tired endless internet we see now. Is it just nostalgia that makes these old aesthetics interesting? I don’t think so.

Without just waxing poetic forever: I think it’s a little like asking a modern accomplished musician to make a good 1960’s protest ballad. The tropes, the techniques, even the substance has all been catalogued and analyzed by so many people that to make a retro protest song today - a good one even - could be made by a musician who was determined. I think this is what we’re starting to see with retro computing graphics: modern techniques and available material is reaching the point where a good artist can make great designs using those old styles. It’s like an artist from back then tripped and stumbled across all the enduring and emblematic elements that stood the test of time and became the signatures of the mood. A contemporary artist has the advantage of hindsight and can exploit it to make incredible retro designs that only the rarest of visionaries could have accidentally made back then.

Depending on how successful the series is, maybe it will evolve.  It feels like it would be helpful to have an ongoing artistic series of short profiles of the movers and shakers to be wary of for artists entering this world a little overwhelmed.

*Disclaimer: sgt_slaughtermelon is a crypto enthusiast with reservations. He is not an expert, and these attempts at explaining various people and events in crypto may be inaccurate. In the event of a gross error, please do let him know because he’s trying his best.

Sam Bankman-Fried

“Some of this decade’s greatest heroes will never be known, and some of its most beloved people are basically shams.” - SBF

His name is everywhere right now, you practically can’t get away from it.

Why should artists care about Sam Bankman-Fried? If you want someone to actually buy your art, be warned that he essentially deleted $40 billion in assets from the ecosystem. Of course not all of that was ever real money - a lot was hyper-pumped tokens that couldn’t be swapped for any meaningful currency at scale. As a result, lots of potential collectors find that they suddenly have no FTX account from which to withdraw if they wanted to buy some art - their FTT tokens turned out to be even more illiquid than some of rug-pulled PFP acquisitions. Add to that FTX’s aggressive media and promotional campaigns targeted at the outside world, and one can confidently assume they are predatory ponzi operators. If you read the statement by Mr. Ray (the lawyer from Enron who has taken over their accounts in bankruptcy) you’ll find that FTX was also ridiculously irresponsible with their book-keeping and their users’ money, using their exchange as a piggy bank for their trading entity Alameda Research. If all this weren’t bad enough in terms of making all crypto (and by extension your art tokens) look shady - they cast aspersion on their competitors at the same time that SBF was schmoozing with politicians and the SEC and trying to push forward his own vision of US federal regulation of crypto. Compounding all these insanely destructive events is one more that matters for artists: all NFTs created through FTX are essentially stuck there in perpetuity (as far as we know). Since they managed those assets instead of the users, many so-called “utility NFTs” including Formula One, Tomorrowland, and FTX’s own Coachella NFTs are all lost to a frozen exchange. Moreover, FTX’s importance to the overall Solana ecosystem has caused significant damage to the price of $SOL and the general market sentiment about the overall chain.

Consider for a moment what all these factors mean for artists: the narrative of NFTs being owned by users and immutable was damaged when FTX kept control and then froze these assets. Popular art markets like Exchange.art and Formfunction.xyz on Solana can keep selling art for $SOL but FTX’s partial responsibility for Solana’s current decline means artists are having to constantly relist their items for higher $SOL prices. Given the token continues to decrease in price, artists are making increasingly less money for each sale. It’s like trying to sell furniture out of a house on fire. Because of this, at least a few of our collectors are probably reeling and trying to figure out what to do now that their stacks have been decimated. Opportunistic politicians will use the collapse of FTX and the bad optics of SBF colluding with the Securities and Exchanges Commission (SEC) as an excuse to push through anti-crypto regulation as fast and recklessly as they can.  Crypto-savvy collectors are now keeping an eye on the newsfeed for announcements that might freeze assets or select tokens to be labeled as securities or who-knows-what, exacerbating the ambient rot of “fear, uncertainty, doubt” that makes collecting art feel like maybe an endeavor for calmer waters.

Sure, you can still make it as an artist in this space - but SBF has made it a lot harder for a while.

Gary Gensler

Even artists who have been trying their hand at tokenized art and crypto for several years now may be unaware of the power games going on around cryptocurrency and how it affects them. An idea of when the tides are going out or coming in can help artists set realistic expectations of what the near future holds, what their potential is, and what issues they might want to be in touch with that profoundly affects their future (at least, their future as cyberpunk artist-types).

Gary Gensler, the head of the SEC, has drawn a lot of criticism from crypto enthusiasts. On the one hand, he’s been scorned for seeming out of touch with the economic situation of young people. The SEC published a PSA video where Gensler advises students to save a few dollars a week and does some fast math suggesting they make 8% Annual Percentage Yield on their savings. This video drew outright mockery from crypto circles that pointed out that “high-interest savings” at most banks are below 1% APY. Add to this the recent action wherein the SEC threatened Coinbase over offering even 4% APY to users for their savings. High inflation means that those estimates about the relative worth of your savings may be grossly inaccurate as well. To his credit, however, savings on centralized exchanges have proven to be a bad idea in the last year. Keeping any significant amount of money in centralized exchanges - even supposedly reputable ones like Gemini and Blockfi - has proven to be a risky endeavor.

The other aspect of Gensler’s leadership that is currently drawing criticism is his regulatory vision for crypto - specifically, its inconsistency and self-serving nature. He doesn’t seem ignorant of how cryptocurrencies work, despite what a lot of the first and most popular comments on Reddit may tell you. His statements on his vision suggest he understands and believes that Bitcoin functions more like a commodity than a security, something bought and sold without any centralized ownership or control. He keeps hinting that anything associated with Ethereum (and by implication, any smart contract focused currency) may be considered a security, but thus far the strategy seems to be to suggest entities register as securities and only enforce and penalize particular ones when it suits the SEC to do so. The case against XRP, the random and weirdly publicized case against Kim Kardashian over some promotional nonsense, and the vague suggestion from Gensler that we need to think about how commodities and securities intermingle in marketplaces and who should regulate them and how… It all seems like he is angling for the SEC to be in charge of a broader sphere of economic policy than their charter indicates. Not only that, but enforcement by lawsuit style leadership can appear capricious: it looks like you’re trying to be the de facto kingmaker of the financial Wild West, and having meetings with Sam Bankman-Fried about just that kind of issue (whether or not Gensler actually had any intention of favoring SBF’s schemes) looks awfully bad.

What does any of this mean for artists? Gary Gensler seems to be posturing as the expert policymaker for US crypto regulation. He is the head of the SEC, but art - and by extension art as NFTs - is legally a commodity. That is, ideas and creativity as digital goods without centralized control. These waters get muddied even further when NFT projects like, for example, Mutant Ape Planet, promises utilities like development of a metaverse, additional drops and rewards - all the sorts of things that last year the popular YouTuber Legal Eagle was asking about: what is the legal status of a roadmap? The point here is that if art as art is a commodity, but NFT art that functions as a legally binding promise ends up working more like a security (or some other new thing we haven’t come up with a regulatory label for like a contract), then it may eventually and reasonably fall under the jurisdiction of the SEC.

In a word: Gensler seems utterly detached from the lack of economic mobility that paycheck-to-paycheck Americans face. He suggests returns on savings that only serve the wealthy. His public stance on cryptocurrency seems to suggest that he’s deliberately blurring lines and making power plays. NFT projects eager to find buyers that aren’t interested in art at all but more in returns on their NFT investments are actively playing into his hands by making more and more complex value propositions that push art NFTs out of the traditional legal assignment of commodity into foggier and more legally dangerous areas of definition.

As an artist, you may find eventually that your art project that earns future airdrops or rewards for collectors ends up being considered something other than a commodity, and because of that your status as an artist (eventually you may not actually be able to deliver the benefits you wanted to) may become a different status subject to legal accusations of fraud. In addition, you may find that instead of staying in the crypto ecosystem and earning modest interest on your art sales, entities like the SEC may do their best to ban any kind of reasonable returns on your income under the threat of labeling it a security.

Do Kwon

Lots of new crypto artists seemed only peripherally aware of the collapse of Terra/Luna and what it meant for them. Terra was one of the first major dominos to start a series of crypto liquidity crunches (read: bank runs) in 2022. Somewhere around $60 billion was lost in a matter of days when a stable coin de-pegged and everything started shaking the collateral backing it was too intimately linked to it to hold value. Crypto enthusiasts probably recalled the similar failure on a smaller scale of Iron Finance. One of the worst aspects of the Terra collapse under Do Kwon’s “Lunatic” leadership was that Anchor protocol had been heavily pushed with “promotional rates” of almost 20% on their $UST stablecoin. Note that this was an algorithmic stablecoin — a sketchy departure from fully backed currencies pegged to the US dollar. Lots of average investors who were curious about crypto asked around about stable investments and were quickly pointed towards Anchor on Terra to hold their stablecoins. People wary of volatile tokens like Bitcoin and Ether (never mind meme coin insanity like Doge or Shiba) were given the impression that this was a relatively safe investment. More like a savings account for money that you didn’t want to invest in any market, but were content to earn outsized APY on as an early-adopter bonus with the expectation that it would taper off once the total value on Anchor had made them a success.

This really may not matter to a lot of artists who are new and didn’t and still don’t have a lot of crypto they want to save and are just trying to pay some bills in the real world. What does matter is that $40 billion evaporating (one way or another) means that lots of NFT art collectors had their savings go up in smoke. They may have thought this was a relatively safe place, but this was the safety net money, not their play money for investing in art: now they need to be more conservative with their investment funds until they regain some of their massive losses. Not only did that collapse probably affect lots of collectors, but it was one more domino in the bad optics campaign being run by our beloved industry. Anchor was promoted all over the place (it was hard to go far in subreddits about crypto without seeing people mention it as a good place to hold stable coins) and touted as a safe entry point to cryptocurrency for outsiders. If you follow Coinfessions on Twitter, some of the content is definitely made up for entertainment, but some of the stories coming out around the Luna collapse sounded real enough and downright tragic. Investors burnt by LUNA and Anchor are probably not going to double-down and explore elite asset management like art collecting.

It’s also worth mentioning that the collapse of LUNA has cast a shadow over the entire Cosmos multi-blockchain network. Artists intimidated by expensive fees on Ethereum experimenting on other chains may find that the confidence in Cosmos’ narrative of a multi-chain future has been seriously shaken. Not just in the sense of bridges from one chain to another being hacked - but in the same way that a very tall post in a large tent getting put through a woodchipper may not collapse the tent, but it certainly deflates it a little and makes everything feel shakier.

The silver-lining, if there is one, is that algorithmic (and native-token backed) stablecoins may become unwelcome in crypto. The apparent stability of DAI and USDC in contrast means that in the eventuality of a future where buying and selling art with volatile currencies seems silly and difficult, we may have meaningful alternatives as artists. What it means in the meantime, however, is that the collapse that happened while Do Kwon was tweeting taunts to his detractors and making empty promises to his following made all of crypto start to decline in 2022 because confidence in the entire crypto ecosystem was weakened. That much money crumbling meant that other foundations that were built on it, quietly, began to also give way. It was called “contagion” for a reason, and a part of Do Kwon’s cockiness was based on his belief that Luna was too big to fail - that they were too interlaced with other funds and protocols to fail without dragging everyone else down and so the users would defend the UST peg with him. Ultimately, they did not, and since the collapse of Luna we have seen a long unwinding process where other funds admitted they were spread too thin as well.

For artists: if you were watching the collapse of Luna as it was happening, your expectations of what kind of NFT market there would be in the coming months was probably dampened. Art is not independent from the larger market conditions, even if it defies them sometimes. Big tectonic shifts affect you too, whether or not the horizon shifts for you with every ripple of catastrophe.

Brady Walker:  So okay. Back to it. collaborating with strangers, you guys were randomly paired up, you Didn't choose each other. It was chosen for you. Tell me about this process and getting to know each other and trying to figure out what to do.

Luka Piškorec:  As soon as GlitchForge came up, I got acquainted with the platform over Twitter. I was very impressed with the tech because I was already quite familiar with everything else on Tezos, and I found Glitch Forge is quite cool. I got quite fired up and then started talking more with the guys there. Even though I didn't do glitch art before, I did work with shaders and dithering and so on. So, I got quite obsessed with that. Then I just said I would like to work on something for the platform.

Somebody suggested I should collaborate with Jarid, and I was on board. So that's kind of how it started. It was all basically done over Discord. The initial idea was that we can sort of leverage our different skill sets and split the work to image generation and generative post-processing and glitching.

I think most coders would say that it's a challenge to collaborate on code with somebody else because it is quite a custom process. But, if you manage to pair up in this way, using different skill sets, like image production and post-processing, I think the collaboration can be quite productive.

Though I have to say I did, in a way, collaborate on the code with the Glitch Forge developer, who I think is quite a pro coder because pro coders can collaborate with somebody who is maybe a bit on a lower level than them. He would optimize my code, we would ping-pong Github pull/push requests, and it worked great, I enjoyed it and learned a lot along the way.

Brady Walker:  Jarid. What was it like for you making images that you knew would be glitched? You're usually the glitch artist taking somebody else's images, but this time you were in charge of making the images that would be glitched by somebody else.

Jarid Scott: It was a lot of fun. It was a very different experience for me. Generative art has always been something that's fascinated me but I know nothing about coding. So I always kind of wrote it off as like, Oh, that's something I'll always be able to appreciate from like the viewer side of things. I probably won't be on the creation side of things. And I know I had very little to do with the actual generative aspects of this other, than, feeding source imagery. But it's really cool to be part of it.

To Luka’s point, the platform that sgt_slaughtermelon and Tartaria Archivist and the developers at Glitch Forge came up with is genius because they really are doing the hard work of finding really good coders and really good visual artists and pairing them together to make something that no one has ever seen before.

Slaughtermelon and I go way back. So he was telling me all about Glitch Forge before it came out. He was really inspired coming off of his big ArtBlocks release, which for him was kind of like the V1 or V0 of this. He's got a little bit of coding experience, but he's mostly visual artist. And his big ArtBlocks release was very much so that him in a coder teaming up to release his Auto Rad series. And they took that energy and brought it over to Tezos.

In the early days, he was like, I want to get you on Glitch Forge. Don't worry. We'll find you a coder.

My particular flavor of glitching is very much informed by this amazing artist named Kim Asendorf. He wrote this ASDF pixel-sorting code way back in the day that everyone uses, and it's amazing. The developer was trying to figure out a way to get ASDF in real time onto Glitch Forge. It was looking like it would be a lot of work. Then Luka came onto the scene.

So after that, the question was, well, should I make an image for this? I have a lot of glitched imagery that I’ve already done, but then we’d be glitching already-glitched stuff, which would probably be a bit too noisy. But right around that time was when this big Midjourney/AI fascination explosion came up. And I'm working on this weird little sci-fi story project, and I've generated thousands of kind of like this concept art in this 70s sci-fi cyberpunky style.

So I was like, Do you want to use this? And Luka loved it. So I gave him thousands upon thousands of Midjourney outputs, and he went to town on it with his awesome code. He and the people at Glitch Forge somehow made this amazing thing where you can click a button and all of a sudden, this AI image is dithered and glitchy and just awesome looking. So it's been super inspiring and fascinating and I'm just really excited to roll this out and let more people see it because I think it's really awesome.

Brady Walker: Luka. I'm curious how you got involved with GlitchForge and and glitch art in general. Looking at your website, your work as an architect and designer seems deeply intricate and geometrical and clean — it doesn’t call to mind glitch. Not to say that anybody should live in one given style, but it doesn't seem from an outsider point of view to be an intuitive jump from the kinds of architecture and design projects that you do to GlitchForge.

Luka Piškorec: Yeah, true. I came to it in a roundabout way. I was always drawn to retro digital aesthetics. That attracted me. I was strongly pushing Glitchverse towards a kind of retro pixel aesthetic.

I'm also a big fan of pixel art, but I cannot really do pixel art — pixel by pixel art. I can’t do that. So, I just collect work like that. And yeah, the best way that I could describe my interest in glitch art is maybe the closest it comes to pixel art, with dithering as a graphical technique. If you think about it, architects don't really work with graphics. For architects, graphics is considered to be a superficial thing. It's a representation you can use to convey your designs, but this representation has nothing to do with design’s materiality or spatiality. It's even a little bit frowned upon if you deal too much with graphics and you're an architect. I always hated that, though I'm also not really a typical architect even though I founded an office that also does standard architecture stuff — well, it's maybe not that standard, but we do build stuff.

I was fascinated a little bit with the work of A.L. Crego. He does a lot of dither pieces, and I kind of drew a lot from him. He's not a glitch artist, but I subscribe to his philosophy — this idea that we are now working on a computer, and as an artist your starting element is not a point anymore, like in art, but it's a pixel, which is like a square, a basic discrete unit of representation.

And for me, dithering is the technique where you take the simplest of elements in graphics, which is a pixel, and you create complexity by giving it structure. You can get more for less — more fidelity with fewer colors. You can take the simplest color palette, like black and white — one bit of information, and you dither it, and this way you can get all the shades of gray.

It's somehow like structural color in biology. The material itself does not really have that color; it’s the way the light reflects off the microstructure of the material that gives it the color through light interference patterns. This is a topic in biology, and it's in some sense also topic in architecture.

Because if you think about what architecture is, take small basic elements — bricks, whatever — and you put them together to get larger structures. You build complexity by using the simplest of elements. Louis Khan, the famous Estonian-born American architect said: If I take a brick and put it on the ground, I have a brick, but if I put two bricks on top of each other, I suddenly get architecture. It's a bit far-fetched, but you know, for me, that’s kind of how I think about pixels and graphics.

With dithering, you can use black and white pixels, but when you start putting them together in a certain pattern, you can get shades of gray. And with three bits of information, you can get basically what we did in Glitchverse. There’s only three bits, eight basic colors: black, white, red, green, blue, cyan, magenta and yellow. Everything is constructed from that. In a way, that's maybe the second-smallest color palette you can have in computer graphics where colors are allowed to be combined.

This feeds into this gen art idea that everything is computation, even everything visual is computation. I have a deep belief in that kind of description — that you can describe the whole world through mathematics and computation. That's basically what coding is. Computers only understand math. If you know math, and if you know how to describe the world through math, you can actually simulate the world on a computer but also create art and basically almost anything else.

Once you have this realization, then everything derives from that. I think this is also quite a radical idea because some decades ago, there were artists who would say that art has nothing to do with computers because you can't create art with computers. Of course, we cannot subscribe to that, otherwise we would not be in this field. Art has the unique ability to go beyond any definition we impose on it.

That kind of thinking also changed quite radically in the last decades, separate from the blockchain. But generative art has been there already for quite a while. Now, certain things have come together, like gen art and blockchain. As Jarid said, the fact that you can have this text-to-image generators is like operative dreaming, as you can use language to create images directly. When this technology appeared, the artist community fell into a crisis. The question was, “What do we do now?”

I think that's why I liked collaborating with Jarid. I love what Jarid is doing with — I don't even know how to call it, imaginations? Setting building basically. The standard mode was always, if you want to create a image, you need to spend a week working on it. If you want to create a graphic novel, you need to spend, I don't know, a few months on it. If you want to create a blockbuster animated feature film, you need a team of people and a year or longer.

Now you can use this technology to compress that time and effort. So maybe now you can actually create a graphic novel in a weekend. You don’t have to be like Moebius who draws for months. Does that cheapen your work? Not really. It just increases the output that one artist can do. You don't have to be a crazy guy who's working for months without pay and your wife leaves you, your kids hate you, et cetera. Now, it's a viable means of creation. So now, we'll see way more things than before. I see this as a positive development.

One last point, I think the human capacity to consume imagination is almost insatiable. In terms of fiction, we can absorb so much. It's storytelling, watching movies, reading, gossip, all these things. We can just consume it endlessly. In Japan, some people consume one manga comic per day or whatever, few of them per day, and then they throw them out. We binge-watch Netflix, a couple of shows per night maybe, and so on and so on.

Now we have this AI tool that enables us to create more and faster and somehow that's a bad thing. I don't think so. I mean, it will make us more prolific for sure. And then we can actually see the visions of singular artists in those mediums where you couldn’t create things alone. You don't need a studio anymore to create big. So yeah, I think it's positive development, although certainly disruptive for some creative disciplines.

Brady Walker: Jarid, I’m curious about how you go about trying to create something unique within with something that allows you to ostensibly create endlessly unique things but, you know — we've already all seen enough AI art, to the point that I feel like pretty often I can spot that it's AI before anybody tells me. Can you speak to your developing interests and perhaps unique style with this tool?

Jarid Scott: Yeah, for sure. Being someone who's labeled as a glitch artist, I think glitch art has a rich history in — I want to use the word like thievery, but most of our techniques and our source materials are borrowed. Someone learns a new glitch technique, then a bunch of people flood to it, try to use it and make it their own.

To have a glitch artist who produces their own base imagery is pretty rare. It’s usually someone who's either using stock photos or even just blatantly taking something that has a copyright on it. You can go down rabbit holes of remix culture and ownership and appropriation and reusing and revitalizing, but it kind of goes hand in hand with glitch art.

I already hinted that like the thing that I'm most famous for is using Kim Asendorf's code. So it's already something that someone else made. I'm not trying to toot my own horn, I'll just quote sgt_slaughtermelon. He said that I stick out as a pixel sorter because I use it in a very painterly way. I'm not saying that no one else does it. But I've done it enough — and I think if you use any of these tools enough, you can start to learn how to put your own spin on it. I see AI art as the next logical stepping stone here.

So, you know, starting out as an artist trying to stand out in the endless sea of noise of other artists. Most of my fellow glitches were using stock sites like Unsplash and Pixel Bay and Pexels. So we're all using the same stock imagery. With AI I'm not limited to what some kind person uploaded on a stock site. I can literally make anything I can think of, as long as I can put it into language, and then the AI can spit out something. And then that's literally just my basis of how I'm gonna mold it.

I understand the arguments and conversations and back and forth about is AI art real art. And what does this mean for the future of artists? But — and maybe this is a weird thing to compare to — but when television first came out, everyone thought it was gonna be the death of radio. Radio still exists today.

I simply think that digital artists have a new tool on their arsenal belt to make art from. Now, especially in the NFT space, you're seeing a lot of like raw outputs minted straight to Tezos or Ethereum. But people are getting an eye for it. It’s getting to the point where, if someone mint’s something straight, it’s like, Oh, that’s DALL-E mint, that’s a Midjourney mint, that’s Stable Diffusion.

And I think people are gonna get bored. The hype's gonna die down, and the few people who continue to hack away are going to be the ones who use it as a stepping stone to the final output that they want. I think Glitchverse, what we're doing with GlitchForge, is a great way to use AI imagery as a basis and an interesting way — to Luka’s point — to make the timeframe so much shorter. Now, like, if him, and I had tried to collab and AI hadn't been involved. I can't even tell you how many months it would have take me to make that many base images for to create our collaboration.

This infinitely expedited the process and allowed us to spend more time — well not I say us, but Luka and the developer had more time to refine the code, making it perfect, getting really nice quick outputs with interesting looking results, and that wouldn't have been possible — at least not on the timescale that we had — if AI imagery hadn't been involved.

We're just going to keep seeing more and more people develop a unique look with AI imagery and using it as a basis to start somewhere, whether it's to be just a reference sketch. A lot of people using it as the basis for glitch art, which is a great thing and it's gonna do wonders for people who love post.

The other thing that I'm excited about is what new types of art are we gonna see born from this? I think there's this giant pool of just potential creativity, and there's gonna be new versions of post-processing and editing apply to it, stuff that we haven't seen yet. So while a lot of people are running around panicking because they think it's the death of the artist. I'm seeing just tons of untapped potential. And we're just gonna see cool things that we didn't get to see before, so I'm nothing but excited about the future of AI art being married with creatives.

Luka Piškorec: Can I add a few things there? I fully agree with you, Jarid.

Few other examples. You know, when collage art became a thing at the beginning of the 20th century, when photography became cheap enough that anybody could snap a photo and then cut it out, there was a lot of “well, that’s not real art” talk. And then there was pop art. You can create prints, cheap prints, and start collaging them into your pieces. That's what Warhol did. His studio was called The Factory, like the Art Blocks Factory.

You know, thousands and thousands of prints, very cheap – Warhol produced in total 19,000 prints throughout his career. The art establishment was shocked, because first you’re reappropriating other people's work and then you're reproducing that on a massive scale. It was seen as the art of commercialization. But Warhol was basically redefining what art is, and today you have something very similar to this collage technique, but in an even more operational way with all these AI engines.

Of course, the AI models learn from all the imagery that is fed into them. Most often, simply all the images that are available online. And then you create this latent space and during generation you’re just basically exploring the latent space of these images

In a way it’s a very high-level type of collage. This is also controversial because you can restrict yourself to a certain part of that subspace, and you can create images in a style of another artist. That’s controversial because you're sort of stealing the style, but that's just on a high-level what Andy Warhol was doing in the 60s and 70s.

And again, in the 19th century the radical technology was photography. The problem with photography was that now suddenly every dimwit can snap a photo, so what about all these artists who made money by painting portraits?

This created a crisis, but from that, the Impressionist movement was born. They redefined what artists should be doing. I think this is what our space needs right now as well, time to mature. And it’s not about displacement, as nothing really dies out when it comes to culture. You know, we still have classical alongside modern music. We still have painting and photography and radio (plus podcasts!) That's just a little bit of the context that I think needs to be addressed as well.

As Jarid said, it's about pushing it to the next level. Where is that? And how does it look like? Who knows? People will push it further and new things will also come along in the future. The cycle of reinvention is unending.

I stumbled across Bay Fragile in the course of taking an interest in every person involved with Dos Punks DAO. If you’ve not really paid any attention - it’s mostly just a collective of friendly sincere artists taking votes on what new artist to the scene they want to support each month and then talking about that and whatever else is going on artistically in Tezos and Ethereum markets every Friday.

One artist from that collective that I hadn’t previously explored much before was Bay Fragile - an artist making glitch/ascii/dithered flavored art among other things. A very tempting rut to get into as an unofficial critic is to start just looking for artists who do what you would do, only different. It’s kind of silly, like a person who likes their own reflection so much that they trick themselves into thinking they like other people when they just like their own vague resemblance. Bay Fragile does some work that looks like things I’ve done and like, and I’m going to try to not just like my own reflection in what I see here that’s beautiful.

I think it’s a lot easier to immediately appreciate artists who have collections organized at least somewhat well somewhere. It can be tricky to control when marketplaces auto-populate, but say you’re like me and you’ve seen something by an artist and you think “Okay, clearly they have some talent - what else have they done?” Something like this or a linktree is just so helpful:

Now you can take the time to process something. It strikes me that what Bay Fragile does very well is take what could otherwise be just kind of aimless blotchy expressionism, and dial the knob back just far enough that it’s expressive and has the kind of details your eye wants to wander over rather than being a either a wash of noise or a slippery series of nothing gradients (the glitch art scylla and charybdis). Consider some very simple designs in my beloved red black and white:

These pair as well as any meticulously selected expressionist painting from the last several decades in my estimation. The precise amount of detail we want, the amount of composition with broad swathes of shape that doesn’t disintegrate into just boring or nauseating constant movement.

This is just one style, but Bay Fragile has also adopted using the familiar (or at least, I assume that’s the tool) Playscii for making ascii-filtered compositions. That tool’s creator has come out very anti-NFT (despite Max Capacity’s best efforts) and I think it’s a shame because most of the reasons that programmer didn’t like NFTs have become moot or are disproven by the decidedly non-scam efforts of sincere artists. At any rate, the results speak for themselves because an artist that pays close attention to how the details are rendered through this technique can make incredibly cool stuff that feels fresh even though it’s mimicking a technology that’s obsolete.

Here’s just three pieces set side-by-side to show how solid the color selection is:

My advice: take the time to let your eyes pass over it maybe 1/6th at a time. Notice how satisfying this stuff can be if you accept it as something like a new ascii-flavored Rothko:

I’m not just dropping Rothko’s name to be provocative - it’s a very real and normal and natural response when someone asks what makes a Rothko any different or better than any other series of brush marks that looks more or less like slightly non-flat shapes. When it comes to glitch art like this made from ascii and colors and it looks at least a little like what other people are doing with their own random shapes and colors the answer is: it’s the subtleties and the choices. It’s the details. It’s the impression that this art produces as a complete experience when you set it in front of you that makes it different - not necessarily the technique that other people could also try to use. Who knows, it could also just be art critics picking one they like and desperately trying to come up with reasons why.

I don’t usually do this, but after writing the above I asked Bay Fragile what they thought of Rothko, and their response fit perfectly with what I thought I saw in their work:

“It is not the lines but the sublime obscurity that catches my eye. Look at the           uneven application of paint — it has an incomprehensible soul in it.”

This is precisely it - Bay Fragile says when composing these pieces it’s not a deliberate arrangement, but more of a “flow, a kind of meditative trance.” It’s not exactly any detail or particular thing that makes a piece “finished,” but as Fragile says, “it's more about measuring visual aesthetics with my own eyes and selecting an edition from a batch.”

The most recent work I’m seeing from Bay Fragile is the Walking Bass line Solana stuff - something like a combination of ascii textured art with wavy hard-edge compositions that make those two styles feel more like one. Wavy lines and ascii art don’t make sense together - but Bay Fragile makes it happen and makes it interesting and the color choices are just that slight kick of the color wheel to the side that makes them feel just right.

I feel like only with the advent of digitally native art that tokenization made possible would this delicate synthesis of styles have come into existence, and I’m looking forward to whatever Fragile does next - it’s bound to reward close inspection.

2. Yepstt

Yepstt is an artist I know almost nothing about, and if I remember correctly I just saw one of their collages and said “oh wow.” If you trace their work back, you can see their first mint to the Hic Et Nunc contract (just general tezos contract now, functionally) was in October ‘21. You can follow their work and tell this is someone who has the financial incentive to really explore their artwork and keeps at it. There’s a flurry of work in different directions, but to me some of their best work begins here in late December with collages like the black and white design below:

You can see on into January some of the styles of compositions I think are their best work coming into existence - and you can still buy some pieces from their back catalogue at really reasonable prices:

Following Yepstt’s work, there’s still a lot of development and experimentation before they get around to creating some objkt collections I’d recommend. The work that first caught my attention was some of these black and white collages that demonstrate a really solid intuition on what-goes-where and contrasting patterns.

I’m going to take a second to talk about a thing I often tell artists asking me about good composition. I don’t think that I’m the master, but I have some ideas about what I think makes things appealing and interesting and what I find dull.

Take for example these two designs:

I’ve told lots of different artists (who asked) that their design was boring because it was mostly symmetrical. I yawned when they showed it to me, and I think lots of collectors do the same. The interesting thing is - this isn’t so much about art theory or having really refined tastes: it’s an immediate impression. We like to talk a lot about art appreciation being subjective - and it really is - but you can shout until you’re blue in the face that every artist has the right to make whatever they want and find whatever they want beautiful, but in another style (reminiscent of Ciput) Yepstt uses below you can see the same pattern at work:

All things being constant - the stippled textures, the palette, the simplicity of the arrangements, “purple 04” just seems undeniably better to me. This is one of those fascinating things about abstract art: it can be as subjective and non-referential as you like, and yet still some things are simply more appealing. At a certain point they’re more appealing to enough people that you’ve got to admit some kind of qualitative difference between one collection of shapes and another.

Yepstt seems to be one of those restless souls that tries thing after thing, and I recommend that anyone who likes any of what they see here go through their work on OBJKT and try to find some of the many hidden affordable gems. There’s a whole treasure chest of them laced throughout Yepstt’s work - but if you don’t have the spirit of adventure deep in your heart you can cut to the chase and see several of the really good collection contracts on OBJKT.

delusions: on OBJKT

Alter ego (with Ateliê 407):

Murals: on OBJKT

Any one of these collections has great works at dirt cheap prices. What came to fruition by the time Yepstt was working on these recent collections is an apparent general competency at abstract work. Different styles and a prolific output seems like it’s really helped shape a sensibility you just can’t argue with.

3. Pixel_Nachos (aka the_side_hustle)

I met Pixel_Nachos (from here on “PN”) when I saw some of their really raw rainbow-on black retro pixel animations and instead of having a seizure I messaged them about working together. PN says in their descriptions that they’re using grafx2 - a style that I’ve seen some neat work from Sabato in that harkens back to 90’s home PC games I still recall. Sometimes you could get these kind of trashy discount CDs that had 150+ games on them and you could tell just from a few seconds of playing that no executive had ever wandered into the development studio to tell them to tone down the colors or make the in-game visuals more palatable for a real estate office or a coffee break room or something.

Anyways, I worked on a thing with PN and I think we made a nice project together where I composed some of their patterns in arrangements, but what I wanted to really showcase was their really in-your-face animated rainbow work. It’s so immediately pleasant - the best examples of it are also wildly alien and showcase what sosogutter calls “asemic” writing, bricks, little follies and staircases combined with totally 2d abstract spectrums without adornment.

You can just feel the immediate blast of rainbow energy that the_side_hustle stumbled across, and the feeling you get from looking at these is that the only reason PN can hold back from even more full on brain melting dazzle is that the full effect of the rainbow blast works better when it’s framed and contextualized in shapes and settings and patterns. It reminds you of early Windows screensavers that utilized fractals and random color palettes and just generally blew the minds of kids everywhere when their family computer let them peek into the whole spectrum come to life. The whole thing of it is that the_side_hustle takes these blaring waves of color that could overwhelm your brain and make it just cancel your eyes and instead he tames that energy just enough to let us take it in at a heroic pace.

Speaking of break rooms - you can also kind of see that PN established this rainbow and black aesthetic and then gradually branched out a little into slightly altered palettes and set those in place with these wonderful little model studio style designs:

I think this is some of his best work: little rooms that highlight the artifice of presenting a little room where the black and white theme is sometimes flipped upside down to present clean white surfaces again lit with prismatic shapes and decor. It’s thrilling to see how many permutations of the concept produces exciting results, but I don’t think Pixel_Nachos the_side_hustle will be done any time soon, and I hope they keep sculpting these incredible hue-shift serpent demons and virtual apartments of computing past for a while.

Each of these artists is doing work in a really different way, and I’ve begged each to drop a collection on glitchforge.xyz/ondemand. Whether they will or not, I’m going to be here for their art either way - and I hope I’ve managed to sell you on these artists being really impressively talented and worthy of being followed.

1. Drewmadestuff

   I discovered Drewmadestuff when he started posting his Moving Midcentury Geometric collection from Opensea. I’ve always been a fan of midcentury designs, and although motion isn’t a make-or-break kind of thing for me, it was eye catching to see them build on and melt away. The compositions are complex enough to sustain interest and the color choices show restraint. They could equally work as still frames that you printed out to put on a wall - and to me that’s a good measure of whether a moving piece of art is gimmicky or well done.

I’ve been following Drew since this series and he likes to experiment (another thing I personally enjoy seeing). He does some 3D work that I also think is good, but as a non-specialist it can be hard to tell what’s sort of generic (and good) and what’s original, unique, or technically difficult to make (and better). That doesn’t necessarily mean that what’s generic isn’t worthwhile, it just means that if you want to be discerning it takes some insider knowledge, and if you don’t have that knowledge you just let your opinion be loosely held. With that in mind - I still think these are pretty good simple 3D designs:

You may notice I’m not posting individual works here yet - this is another reason I think Drewmadestuff is a great artist - the ability to make a cohesive series is valuable. There’s something to be said for the standalone masterpiece, but in my mind a single work can’t express everything on a particular subject or theme. Drew is a master of taking a simple idea and working it into collection that feels like it belongs together without being too repetitive to be interesting.

I asked him (kind of bluntly if I recall correctly) to make a collection for Glitch Forge On Demand and he obliged - without knowing exactly how he did it it’s some kind of 3D generative-ish (I think it’s particles in a 3D engine) stuff using bubbles and X and O as a design theme. The color schemes are again kind of simple, but the texture and detail on these is so solid.

A good artist doesn’t just have ideas, though - you have to bring it home with craft. The full-resolution look at these reveals a lot of detail and texture on otherwise basic-looking designs, and it’s not hard at all to imagine pairing these together for interior design that would belong in any well-furnished urban apartment. This is what makes design-as-art artists interesting to me: it’s less like trying to write a perfect sentence as a complete thought and more like trying to think in paragraphs. Trying to express yourself as a series of distinct thoughts that are explained in different turns and twists of the same concept.

2. Ina Vare

I’m going to double-down on mediums I don’t really have a very good technical handle on. Analog video glitch is so satisfying to look at from just a basic “this looks awesome” kind of angle. There’s something immediately gratifying about it. Internal video feedback, hardware video synthesizers and dirty video mixers produce really delicious lo-fi and rich imagery that you can keep tinkering with using digital methods and programs, but it’s hard (in my experience) to fake the kind of crunchy details native to the format without having the gear (although Jared Bruni with Acidcam was making a solid go at it). Even the gear - I’m told - is recognizable eventually by people working in the medium. Signature effects that can only really be made with certain bent or modded hardware has become a mainstay of artists like Tachyonsplus - known (at least by me) for their equipment for sale as much as for their end results. The real tragedy of the format isn’t the quality or variety or incredibly high skill ceiling - the tragedy is that unless it’s relegated to live performance it has to be in galleries either captured as digital material and played back on projectors or LCD screens or you’ve got a bunch of big boxy CRT monitors playing it in what feels like a very “are you shitting me” kind of experience in the actual gallery. Don’t get me wrong - it looks very very cool in person, but trying to imagine buying it if it’s possible and what to even do with it (put a CRT on permanent loop in your foyer?) has meant that as a medium it’s remained sort of lowbrow or temporary in the popular consciousness. I think it deserves much more attention.

The advent of crypto art has meant many things, but among those it’s been potentially the birth of digital collecting of digitally native formats. That is - if you can somehow capture the analog video process and make it a digital file you’ve gotten halfway to a meaningful collector experience and tokenizing art on the chain has gotten us the rest of the way. The evergreen analog video work of Sarah Zucker as one of the most famous and very early artists on the chain testifies to the reality that this is a medium that has finally found a reasonable logistics method for going from an artist’s brain and studio into a kind of ownership that art appreciators value.

It’s going to seem really self-serving to say that we’ve built something great at Glitchforge.xyz/ondemand to help with this kind of medium - but I have no budget for advertising and so this is it. One of the most successful genres of art in crypto has been generative work that could be created at mint (sort of game-ified/vending machine) and created at scale so that it could function more like a currency. Artists working with non-automatable systems like analog video have been at a real disadvantage: not only because you can’t easily make it run on autopilot or tie it to hash variables, but also because the video format takes space and time to compress and display - animated GIFs are a signature compression method but they’re generally large files at art quality dimensions and hard to store and create en masse. Glitch Forge On Demand solves at least one of those problems wherein the artist can pre-render tons of gifs or videos and submit their collection as a zip file (rather than the painful tedium of one-at-a-time methods) that then gets randomly dispensed at mint.

I’ve admired a long list of artists that have moved into the NFT space making this kind of art (especially on tezos). My friend aitso from Convergence will get a future post dedicated to their work, but right now you can see his work as it gets minted:

I would mention Blue Safari, elbi, somfay, Max Capacity, Kate the Cursed, jotta, Sky Goodman - I could keep going but at some point it’d have to be an exhaustive list of tons of artists in a genre that I love and not an article. One of those artists I’ve had the good fortune to be on lots of twitter spaces and discords with though, is Ina Vare. I encountered her art through the Convergence community, and if you want to know a little more about her process there’s a great interview with Polyforms. She discusses her gear and technique a bit in that interview - and one of the really fascinating things about her work is how she goes back and forth from sentimental (in her words, “romantic”) and personal content and the total abstraction, “trash” art, the rational and mercenary. I don’t want to project this onto her, but consider sometimes she does self-portraits that are warm and personal and other times she does ones that are much more of a character and costume. It’s like she has two different personas competing to dictate what art she’ll make in the moment, and some of the best bits are actually a blend of both.

Compare with a less personal (and more edgy) portrait:

It’s a matter of preference which mode you end up wanting to see more of - but having both aspects in one artist makes the work more varied and versatile in my opinion. I don’t collect a lot of the “trash” personally, and while I appreciate personal portraits and interesting and pop subjects like this banana:

What I usually get excited about is the totally abstract work - and Ina had been saving a really cool project to drop on Glitch Forge just when we opened up our video and gif submissions. Her collection will eventually display correctly as animated - but just take in some of these (now sold out) renders of Magificent Heaps :

We’re really proud that she could essentially put this whole collection on sale at once and participate in the fun of blind mint mechanics - and to serve art that you think is important and good with a tool you built feels amazing. I’m sure she’ll keep making neat projects across the NFT space, but I was glad she spent some time on our little platform. Maybe she’ll drop something else with us, who knows. ;)

3. Joaquin Linquiman

Linquiman is one of those artists I’ve followed and interacted with way for a long time who I’ve personally seen come a very long ways. That’s not to denigrate Linquiman’s early work - it’s to say that I’ve witnessed his development and proliferation of styles and refinement of techniques and really really enjoyed where it’s come compared to where it began. I won’t digress about things I don’t know very much about, like Linquiman’s Argentinian background or how he thinks about his own art or anything - these are just some strictly formal observations. Take, for example this collage work from late June 2021:

This is early work that isn’t bad but has lots of competition in the world of mirrored effects, glitched channels blurring, not bad but a little generic maybe. Compare that to the style you can start to see develop in January 2022 - the early attempts at simple mirror and clashed together compositions collapses for a while into pandemonium and then on again to the patterns starting to arise out of the chaos; he develops a relationship with artificial structure and the figures in his collages at the same time and you can really see it start to come together over 2022.

Once again - since it’s my picks and I usually like the strictly abstract, let me showcase just how amazing JL’s work he submitted to Glitch Forge is. Complex arrangements, interesting texture, vibrant colors, the theme of repetition and chaos lending itself to glitch aesthetics in visceral and wild collage/abstract works. Linquiman’s Regalito series is where I would pin my personal deep appreciation of his developing style - and the fact that when asked he agreed to drop two collections of work adjacent to that style thrilled me more than anything. Artnome wrote an amazing article about artist success wherein he mentions the David Bayles and Ted Orland story that suggests artists who create more art eventually make better art by virtue of perfecting their technique and style with experience rather than artists who simply try to make their magnum opus in one great effort. This apparent truth is yet another reason I prefer artists who can create compelling series over artists who create one shot works of genius (even though both require a kind of brilliance).

The stylistic refinement into a signature abstract maximalism that Linquiman has accomplished thus far has been a real treat to watch. Tracing his collections on OBJKT lets you see his work get more and more refined and explore new methods that I can confidently say has resulted in better work. I hope other people pick up on the livewire he has running through his work and come visit what he has for sale in his Glitch Forge collections Panico Y locura and GRIAL.

I’ll be the first to admit that I spent a lot more time studying art history than contemporary artists before I got into NFTs. I found Sosogutter on the Glitch Artists Collective Facebook page (gross, facebook) was one of the few artists that I was both aware of and really looked forward to seeing new work from. He says he’s only using MSPaint - and for all I know it’s true. What caught my eye and kept it is that it’s pixellated work, usually in bright primary colors, but it doesn’t feel superficially bouncy.

A lot of his work has kind of a faux-graffiti look to it that really feels at home in the world of glitched cyberpunk imaginary graffiti. Like tags for fictional artists that soso makes up just long enough to make a tossed-off glitch minimalist design and then they disappear.

I’ve also always been jealous - sosogutter knows when to stop working. It’s a weakness of mine that when I feel like I can’t get something to feel quite right I just keep adding stuff. Sosogutter has the kind of effortless “I made it, it’s good, I’m done” attitude that characterizes someone with confidence and a pretty amazing ability to take a simple design and make thousands of versions of it that all feel fresh. That’s another thing that amazes me - I can still see a new sosogutter circle or wavy lasagna noodle-looking thing and know it’s one of his stock designs but the squares and pixels and waves of color contrasting with black will this time strike me slightly differently and I’m back - I’m off again imagining this piece on my wall in cryptovoxels or niftyisland or just the interior mental space of my desktop computer.

I even connected with soso a while ago to make a couple designs together which I supplied materials for and he finished masterfully. It was really satisfying. If I had to describe sosogutter, I would say they come across as surly and impatient with the tedium of marketing and social media mechanisms, but that artistically soso knows he’s found a thread of something alive and unique and cooler than cool and so he keeps at it. Once in a while I still collect a sosogutter piece, and once in a while soso jumps back into tezos or eth markets and mints a ton of work at once (again: no patience for pacing or trickling). It’s simple work in a signature style that feels pegged to early computer art aesthetics without feeling tired or antiquarian. If you browse the sosogutter objkt page and can’t find something that makes you say “wow” at the same time it refuses to overwhelm you with more and more noise and color, I just don’t know what to say to you.

2. Ciput (https://twitter.com/chiquitaputri)

I had the good fortune of stumbling on Ciput when she was just starting out in NFTs. She was making aggressively simple abstract works, I think she mentioned it was with a mobile app or something. I had been exploring the idea of just riffing on some mid-century book covers I had, and one of the things I’ve always found hard to wrap my head around was when shapes are rounded, shapes are overlapping in really simple ways, shapes are irregular - that is, it’s one thing to work with stacking and arranging geometric primitives, it’s another to have a wavy free-flowing ability to move in and out of the rules of geometry to make something neat and (like sosogutter) be done when you’re done.

Sometimes you look for an artist that’s a virtuoso and doing something no one else can do, and sometimes what you find is that the art you actually want to be looking at is not the most sophisticated but is created by someone with a powerful aesthetic sensibility. She just kept coming up with new incredibly simple little takes, and they were perfection in the most pure and easy sense:

Collecting from new artists is usually cheaper, too - and if you’re counting on your income from art to be what sustains you I don’t personally feel you have a strong obligation to dump it back into other artists. It can be nice to do so when you feel you can, but the gaggle of voices suggesting artists are obliged to collect other artists are - in my mind - suggesting we create a closed loop economy that can’t possibly benefit people who need to pay for real world expenses, family bills, etc. I collected Ciput early on because she wasn’t charging much and the work was sublime. Collecting masterful artists at expense can be fun too, but discovering new artists and helping them grow into their rightful place of contemporary practice can be very rewarding.

Ciput has been very open from the start that she’s a mother of a couple boys, living in Indonesia. For someone like myself bouncing around USA - I imagine our lifestyles are pretty different - but that authenticity of just clear thoughts, sentiments, and honesty connects across cultures. The clarity of these little thoughts is what is striking - and you can see that clarity carry across into her work that poured out over the next year or so since then. I’ll sample just a few different styles she experimented with to demonstrate the consistency of that quality I believe she had from the beginning: sensibility.

Above here are some 8x8 bidou designs. If you missed that trend, there was a market that cropped up on Tezos that leveraged simple 8x8 pixel designs as its gimmick and did really well for a while. They’ve just recently been listed by OBJKT.com so we’re seeing sort of a renaissance of that moment. Ciput also has two generative series that turned out great (one in collaboration with 0xPhiiil) that tinker with geometry and lines in smooth sweeping shapes. With an artist like Ciput, it’s worth following to see what she’ll try next and trace when that spark of inspiration she possesses innately will flourish into something beautiful and refined and then carry on bouncing along creating new things in a hopefully never-ending stream.

3. TheBreadArts (https://twitter.com/TheBreadArts) formerly TheGlitchedArts

TheBreadArts (from here on TBA) is one of those artists I discovered early on when I was just beginning to take myself semi-seriously as an artist. When I say semi-seriously I just mean that it’s when I lost interest in most all other hobbies and compulsively searched and saved and explored artists doing things like what I was doing - learning how they navigated their world and what they made of it. There was a sort of too-cool-for-school glitch art called The Glitched Arts account I followed for a while that I eventually sent a message or two to just to see what they were like. They invited me to a Telegram (what’s Telegram?) channel with a guy running a few glitch art aggregator accounts who took it upon himself to teach us all about how Instagram algorithms worked. I don’t know if I ever got the hang of it - but I did get to rub shoulders with TBA and see a constant stream of incredible glowing pixelsorts, blocky shifting arrangements, jumbled pillars of color and light that he put out at an incredible rate.

TBA and I would go on to share a few different hangouts on Discord or various marketplaces. Essentially, TBA shares some of the same virtues that Ciput and sosogutter possess: a sensibility for what to make. There’s a restless need for experimentation that TBA shares with me, and you can see the bubbling up of thing after thing in slightly new styles and colors - united by a sensibility of when something feels “right” that TBA has more than any particular set of rules you could try to apply.

I may be cherrypicking here, but I’m personally still a fan of when TBA does simpler works (which still have a lot of detail, admittedly):

TheBreadArts occupies a kind of new space that I think the art world is still catching up to : glitch artists who use technology and effects as they are instead of creating them. Someone who takes the tools that exist and asks every single day, “but what can we make with them?” We need artists doing this, otherwise what we find is that we just become perpetual tool-makers who never expand the horizons of what our tools can do - who never create the bodies of work our tools are meant for. The requirement for being a good tool-user, as I’ve said over and over, I believe is sensibility. TBA has this in droves, and you should absolutely follow their instagram account and beg them to mint more work so that the collecting world can offer their support and enthusiasm for what TheBreadArts loves to do apparently simply for the sake of doing it most of the time.

Consider also the palettes that Max Drekker chooses: these are usually mixed palletes (not warm or cold) often in tertiary hues. In my own Lazlo project - I generally assigned pieces fictional dates closer to the turn of the century if they used lots of primary colors, and if they used more tertiary palettes like the one below they felt more like mid-century designs. This isn’t based on any kind of quantitative study, but more of an intuition based on looking at book cover after book cover and noticing trends: Max Drekker’s work often looks like it belongs to mid-century designs using late 60’s-80’s Op Art techniques. Sometimes Max goes back to more primary tones - but always the important part is that the colors seem carefully chosen each time, not just slapped in with the hope they’ll combine well.

Bear in mind here that you’re looking at an artist working in a strictly digital format creating pieces that don’t just feel like homage to a bygone era, but like Bilnd - these are as good or better than the authentic pieces of the design trend.

I would suggest you compare Max to a designer like Germano Facetti or Walter Ballmer. In a word, this is what sets Max Drekker apart from the thousands of geometric abstraction artists he is contemporary with: his work makes sense in a design context with historical awareness, with an intuition of the sensibilities now being praised by antiquarian appreciators of graphic design. Max also departs from being limited by flat shapes and adds all kinds of wild volume to some of his designs that feel more like polished objects in design studio imagination. I think his work will age exceptionally well and still feel like classic designs several decades from now.

2. Víctor Arce (https://twitter.com/lxtxcx)

Arce has a list of accomplishments and exhibits and clients - much more of a career artist evidently than most of the people I enthuse about. It shows, though - the sheer output and quality of his work should impress. I didn’t find anywhere a statement, so I’ll be doing reverse-engineering of what it seems to be about. Dominant colors throughout his work are pink, blue, yellow. One of the major themes is late 90’s early 00’s interfaces, which makes the use of the cardinal CMYK-suggestive (read: print) palettes ironic and playful. See, for example, his generative series called Ultrazone:

As we moved past web 1.0 (websites you navigated to directly) and into web 2.0 (social media as the dominant conduit) - looking back at the way it worked before can be kind of romantic. Websites used animated gifs just because they could - the tables and forms and structure of HTML felt so serious by contrast, so you had this odd combination of a new medium of communication trying to be taken seriously combined with the absolute ridiculousness of what people chose to do with it. It also had a certain magical quality: even though technically it works the same today, the way we use the internet has become so centralized that an empty address bar and the idea that you could just guess a hyperlink and then find circles and networks of linked pages the way old angelfire or geocities or whatever were connected is strange. Tumblr still works a little that way, but on the whole, the internet felt a bit more Alice in Wonderland back then. Like HAM radio lunatics sharing frequencies.

Just like Drekker and Bilnd, one of the most fascinating trends I find in art these days is looking back with hyper-idealized vision at those times - making something larger than life out of the relatively ordinary follies and flourishes of the actual digital artifacts.

You can see that effect going on in lxtxcx’s work - even his website is a smattering of goofy antique icons that you can move around and some actually do things. His HTML_Dream series (and others like it) are something like a candy-coated vaporwave still life in 30 frames. Tableaus of expressive user non-interfaces painted over in whimsical gradients. It’s a feeling of a GUI without the fact of it, the goofy little details taking center stage instead of the functionality.

What really drives lxtxcx designs is - as usual - composition. These aren’t the “anything simpler would be missing something” style of Polyforms, though, Arce goes back and forth in different works between maximalism and simplicity. Maximalism being as much as you can add before it just turns into noise, and the simplistic designs feeling like undeveloped software demos just to prove the thing exists in a misty low-poly proof-of-concept. What does it all mean? I think maybe it’s claiming the freedom to be playful and funny and not mean anything in particular - but point to the magic realism of web 1.0 interfaces and labyrinths and recall how it felt rather than how it was. In reality, it was a lot of mostly empty web pages with an image stolen from some other page, a few rambling blog posts that trailed off into months of silence, networks of bored people trying desperately to use this new medium to substitute for human interactions that take effort. It wasn’t actually a magical time, even though there were sparks of inspiration here and there - but with Victor Arce we can imagine it was rich and iconic and a renaissance of the virtual new-wave forum.

3. Pretty Bad aka Dylan Murphy (https://twitter.com/prettybadcrypto)

Obviously you can’t use the same criteria to evaluate an artist like Pretty Bad that you would use for Drekker - but that’s fine. I’d pick two different styles that Pretty Bad does to be my favorites: “portals” semi-abstract and his more general skeleton-themed tattoo looking art.

There was a distinct moment in the late 00’s where it seemed like skulls were in every design for everything. I have a personal theory that popular art and design trends since the 1960s have vacillated between sincere go-for-the-gusto you-like-what-you-like moments and then postured ironic stances towards that same material. Eventually people get tired of feeling distanced and savvy and just pick something to like, in turn that eventually gets played out and seen everywhere to the point that it’s boring. It’s a cycle that seems unavoidable. People picked skulls circa 2008 because skulls are badass. The inevitable backlash means that people picked skulls circa 2018 because skulls are passe, and liking things with earnestness is out of vogue.

Dylan Murphy’s art, to me, is the semi-ironic kind: it’s not hyperdetailed mean-as-hell skulls that would work for a Metallica bootleg, it’s simplistic skulls, funny self-deprecating names, bright colors.

This is what makes Pretty Bad in fact pretty good - it’s the darkness and edginess flipped inside out to be fun. The hand-drawn-looking style works well to create a sort of faux amateurish charm throughout his work. We can ask the same question we ask every time though - of the crowd of people doing similar things, why Pretty Bad? My answer is partially that Pretty Bad likes to experiment with tons of different styles and tools, and so when he comes at something with this classic style he usually creates something fresh and good. That is, because he’s not churning out thing after thing in the same vibe, we get new eyes on the style from the artist himself when he comes back to it. Another reason I might pick Pretty Bad over others is that his style appears so simple, and yet he can render totally different things in the same style and have it feel consistent. He hasn’t just created a subject matter or a few good renditions of them - he put together a pretty simple style that feels expansive because he can do new things with it when he feels like it and it doesn’t feel like a tangent. Consider: no skulls in sight - but this candle in the hand clearly feels from the same world.

So once you can sort of take in the style and start to feel at home - notice there’s a whole different collection that uses a different aesthetic but the same stylistic tendencies (for some of them). Pretty Bad also has a series called Portals that is less a strict style or content type collection than it is a general theme for making art. Portals from this place to that, literal portals that are follies or archways or doors, figurative portals that are mostly just shapes, sometimes in a new style of glitches or hard edge or vector, sometimes classic tattoo-style renderings. Once again - a part of the fun is variation on a theme. This also makes it fun for the collector - you can pick a series of portals that pair well together and create your own little triptych or series:

Pretty Bad even brings it back around sometimes - and this is one of my personal favorites out of all his work, this crossover between the whimsical tattoo skeleton stuff and a portal. That’s what makes this powerful: the style can encompass everything, and when he flourishes true to form it’s genuine bubblegum semi-ironic art that feels great. A world with themes that isn’t restricted to them, a style that’s expansive without feeling diluted, and simple compositions in several flavors that feel just enough like real cheap tattoos that they have the simple roughness that makes them so damn cool.

1. Miguel aka Mig (@nftbromi)

   https://objkt.com/profile/migmig/created

   Miguel is mostly on Tezos, but I have a piece by them on dartroom.xyz as well that I love. We both do a lot of art that is mostly shapes and occasionally squiggles. You would think that restricting yourself to mostly shapes would mean that all the art starts to look the same from one artist to the next, but Miguel has a few signature moves that make his art feel fresh and unique even within those restrictions.

His use of repeated shapes creates something more like blocks of form than strict objects, so that a square isn’t just a square but a squarish movement in one part of his composition. By using gradients constantly, each shape is also not just a flat element stacked on others, but suggests depth that’s contradicted immediately by the flat stacking technique. That is, if you look - it feels both 3D and aggressively flat at the same time, and the final effect is a kind of airy indifference to questions like “what would this look like as a sculpture.”

One of the interesting things about the squiggle and its apparent birth in memphis style design is that it takes the rigid structural certainty of geometric primitives and throws a completely expressive element into it. Add to this Mig’s color selections and you start to see a body of work that walks the line between playful and serious. You can see his designs continue to develop too - usually portrait dimensions, and with each new design something new and something familiar: can’t frame it with a simple rectangle each time, the stroke goes in the middle because it feels right - but this time it’s stacked, this time it curves around a sphere, this time it ducks behind a shape. I have no idea what Mig has in mind as his “rules” as he’s creating, but seeing the rules get observed and then transgressed in turn has led to an exciting collection that I love to own but could also use as desktops or could imagine printing out.

2. Bilnd (@BilndArt)

I don’t own very much Bilnd art, but I have bought a couple pieces on Eth. I’ve found that one thing I really enjoy is watching fellow strict abstract artists that struggle with the rigor of geometric abstraction and hard edge aesthetics but also want to explore more radical abstract expressionism that dispenses with all that. Usually I find people who want to do both have better compositions.

See, for example, how these two radically different compositions and styles have a similar feeling that’s hard to articulate:

The limited and deliberate palettes make the art come together in both of these - the clear direction of composition having a focus and a negative space help you to settle on what the art is saying. Personally, I struggle with trying to have authentic looking brush strokes using digital tools. One thing you may notice the longer you stare at digital art is that you can eventually recognize (mostly) who is using tools like ProCreate: the brush strokes look the same. You can tell who is using brushes in photoshop: the strokes don’t differentiate well and you can see brush pattern stacking. Does it take you out of the illusion? If it does, I submit that’s a good reason to not enjoy someone’s work. If the illusion is maintained or somehow enhanced by the digital technique that’s a victory in my view.

I think Bilnd does an incredible job of using deliberate palettes that are reminiscent of Swiss Modern design of the 1950s/1960s and geometric styles that look as at home in his collections as they would in a design museum - triumphs of simplicity and restraint.

Consider the below example of a piece that is utterly simple - 5 colors. The shapes look iconic without feeling like he’s just pulling from a WingDings font. The texture over the whole piece suggests it is aged - this is a design artifact from a world where the simplicity of that era was never actually as consistently good as Bilnd’s art is.

3 . Polyforms (@polyforms_)

If you’ve noticed a theme - it’s that these artists are doing similar things to what I like to do. Polyforms is no exception, and his work treads that difficult space of combining complex eye-candy textures with simplicity and form-based compositions. Polyforms’ designs make you ask this question: could he add anything more and make it better? His best work always leaves you thinking that he reached the exact point where more shapes would just be cluttering up the screen where you want to instead take in the detail.

If you’re feeling in the mood for something even simpler, just like Bilnd you can see Polyforms going back and forth between the stark simple shapes and more complex arrangements. Maybe this is just a signature of artists I tend to like - but I don’t see how an artist can completely explore radical abstraction without dipping into the different poles. This, unfortunately, does mean that some platforms will question an artist’s commitment to style. It’s a Catch-22: a sincere artist, in my estimation, will feel compelled to try different things in the balance between total expression and using universal things like geometric primitives - but that very exploration makes their collection varied and not as marketable as a consistent body of work.

I also happen to own a few of Polyforms NFTs from early Polygon days. I don’t buy lots of animations, but you can see how the combination of simplicity and glitched details makes these pieces stand out:

I should also note that Polyforms is worthwhile to explore because he keeps a nice website: https://polyforms.io/ where he interviews other artists about their methods. Solid questions that help you understand the process of everyone he speaks with. That curiosity by itself is an indicator that Polyforms isn’t just making decorative art with the most immediate tools at hand - but is deeply interested in the way other people are making things and what they think when they make them.

///

If people are into it I’ll do future installments of my art picks. I hope walking through these three artists has helped you find something exciting.

This is a story about what it was like to be an outsider and insider all at once - what it was like to get based before I knew what that meant and stay based while witnessing the project go off the rails and yet still be the center and gateway for me into all things crypto-currency and decentralized finance. I’m going to explain my own dive into the deep end and try to use my experience to help crypto culture make sense to outsiders and to help insiders articulate their own world. More and more people seem to be entering NFTs without really grasping what crypto currency in general is about. At times it may seem plodding if you’re a crypto veteran, but this is meant to illustrate what it’s like to get into crypto from the outside, and to realize what places there are where you are still an outsider.

There is a section of Nicholas Talib’s book Black Swan that tells an interesting story about the author Umberto Eco. Eco apparently has a giant library, and when guests visit they will often ask “have you really read all these?” Eco would tell them that he definitely hasn’t read all of them, but the huge collection of books serves to remind him of all the things he doesn’t know - an anti-library. Cryptocurrency and crypto culture is a giant spiraling library of knowledge that would surprise me if any person knew every detail of. There is so much to know, and once known so much to do, and once done so many things done that haven’t been recorded or collected - the best that someone like me can even begin to do is see the broad silhouetted outlines of what I do not know. I interact with cryptocurrency regularly now - sometimes in relatively complicated ways compared to my very first experiences - but all of the time I am very aware of the huge body of things going on that I’m not privy to, the complex interactions I don’t understand, and I came to have some kind of relationship with all the things I needed to know I didn’t know by becoming BASED.

The Ride Never Ends

I never meant to get into crypto currency at all. I had a few friends who dabbled in it, and one friend who mentioned something about doing artwork there (how?) but I had considered it a pretty arcane technical niche of people who were trading code and probably some illicit substances somewhere. I was more or less minding my own business and exploring being a digital artist as the pandemic really set in. I had just moved to a new state and had a new job, and when I had free time there was no one to spend it with - so I just kept making art and building a body of work on Instagram. I had gotten connected with The Psychedelic Porn Crumpets through there that summer, so I was feeling pretty puffed up at the time about the quality of my own work and fielding a few DM’s a week about this project or that - and I had one slide in that stuck out by being both more sketchy and less elaborate than most.

The person DM’ing me was just Mr. Bones - a reference to a popular meme. For those who don’t remember the game or the meme, in Rollercoaster Tycoon you could design a ride and decorate it elaborately and then delete the exit, effectively making the ride last forever. Someone made an image thread about that with their custom car ride “Mr. Bones Wild Ride” that never ended - and understandably some of the riders eventually lost their enthusiasm and in their little thought dialogue box it would say things like “I want off Mr. Bones’ Wild Ride.” Now - if you’re an internet person you’re going to recognize this reference, but at the same time someone who goes by this name is very difficult to google. The noise-to-signal ratio is going to be insane: you will get so many results related to the meme it will be difficult to find anything authentically tied to whoever this person is. Essentially, a name like “Mr. Bones” helps establish someone in a particular space and instance with an identity, but also leaves their identity difficult to trace across sites and platforms. So I saw the name and the offer to get into NFTs (whatever those were) and thought to myself “red flag.”

Mr. Bones said he was helping build an art collective associated with Based Protocol. Against my better judgment and partially because I was poor (more on that later) I accepted their offer to float me a little bit of Ether and post my art on Rarible.com for sale. Bear in mind, I did not know what Ethereum was before this, I had no Metamask or any other wallet, I barely understood what Bitcoin was, and what exactly I was doing with my art when I posted it there was beyond me. Even just a thing like figuring out what my wallet address was and where I could link it to Mr. Bones - say that out loud - “I need to send my wallet address to a stranger” - it was intimidating even for someone who was relatively computer competent. This is one of the first things that is confusing but amazing about getting into cryptocurrency. If your previous experience was reading articles about Silk Road or dark cabals of cryptids discussing anarchy on Tor - your idea of what cryptocurrency is remains very dark. These are secret places for shadowy people who know how to do things that you and I do not - a technocrat class that most people will only interact with if they’ve had their credit card stolen or used the same password on too many recipe websites and banking apps.

The first thing I had to get used to was the idea that my wallet - my bank account - could have a public account number and that knowing that number didn’t mean you could just do what you want with it. What it did mean, though, was that any stranger, even a meme skeleton, can send you money in different forms without having to write a check, without having anyone call a bank, without any meaningful delay. Money from a total stranger could enter my account without me doing anything but sharing with them where to put it. So I had some Ether now, and without grasping why it had to be this way yet, I had to spend some of it to post my art. Again, bear in mind I’m poor at this point and I have a family that runs on a very tight budget. I didn’t want to try to explain why I’m using any money that I have to put some art on a website when we had handwritten accounts of all the money going in and out of our household at the time. This is another thing people getting into crypto are going to find difficult: expenses that they don’t understand that are significant when your income doesn’t have much surplus.

I minted some art that Mr. Bones and I agreed was worthwhile, and I minted a number of editions of it (think multiple prints of the same piece of art) and within seconds it had sold. Wait, it sold? Blue Kirby, something of a notorious trader and collector and influencer type, had bought all the editions of my artwork almost instantly. That previous June I had spent almost a thousand dollars I really didn’t have printing large high quality prints of my artwork to put in a gallery showing that I had been on a waiting list for over a year to present. It was a pandemic and people weren’t really going to galleries much that June, but all the same - not one of those works sold in the gallery. Now my experience with these NFTs was that I made hundreds of dollars worth of Ether after spending only $30 or so. All because I got in touch with some person who was involved with Based Protocol. What is that?

I spent several nights feverishly reading articles on my phone when I should have been sleeping. What is a Non-Fungible Token, what is an ERC-721 or 1155, how is that different from an ERC-20, what is Ethereum and how is it different from Bitcoin? Here is another place that the outside world has to make a giant leap to catch up. When Bitcoin first started being talked about - I read a little bit and understood that it was basically a store of value: by analogy it was like digital gold. Something you could keep and was worth something, and if you could find some place (like a shady “WE BUY GOLD” store) that took it, you could exchange it for real money. Okay, fair enough. What I had missed while I went back to my day job for years and spent time getting an education about other things and having a family and so forth - I had missed Ethereum. In short: I had missed the fact that cryptocurrency now had programming built into it - that the various tokens that Ethereum made possible could actually do things - and the thing being done was to make a mirror of the traditional world of finance, only using anonymous actors and hard-coded mechanisms in place of the real world systems that use laws, known entities, signatures and government bodies to function. What I had missed was that you could use a computer system that was simply hosted across people’s computers and decentralized instead of in one place (unless you’re CZ) that functioned as a world ledger and computer to both process and track all these financial interactions.

Feels Good Man

What people are doing with this new capability is what we call decentralized finance, or defi. Now I was learning that not only had I missed the birth of this during 2020’s so-called “DeFi Summer,” but that people were already mocking their own systems and their own structures and actually playing games with all this money flying around. So after my initial experience with NFTs, I kept researching this group I had been dropped into. I found the group chat for the art collective unreadable - I didn’t know any of the vocabulary or what it was in reference to. The based.money website itself was insane - vaporwave aesthetics, a smoking skull icon cribbed from Warren Zevon, a system of currency using elastic supply mechanisms and a comical “rebase” button that set the value of the currency to $1 USD. I didn’t know the terms yet, but it was an algorithmic stablecoin that actually required a button-press to implement the algorithm, and could trade at any value people sold for while it was de-pegged. There was an article about Ampleforth (who?) and some explanation that this is a financial “game of chicken” meant to shake out the “weak hands.” I read the page over and over and just mumbled “what?” to myself - I didn’t have any money to play chicken with, and I was pretty sure I didn’t understand the game well enough to play even if I wanted to. What was even more shocking was that there were people who had money and just didn’t take their money all that seriously - that they were willing to play with it. All of it was a part of the culture, though. The anonymous developers, the “scene” aesthetics of supposedly god-like coders who had hacked together a crazy irreverent system for playing fast and loose with money - this is all a part of the cultural moment mid-transition from something shady like Silk Road and software piracy teams to a respectable financial world. The counter-culture both does and does not want to be associated with the world of finance.

Another thing about the new and growing space: there are no official chronicles of a lot of what is going on. I didn’t know at the time that I had already pretty well missed the major events: the first and second pools, the rebases. This is still culture happening with immediacy, often in semi-private or at least obscure channels. If you are an outsider - you don’t really see a lot of the discussion and you may not even know where to find it. There is a reason almost every website involved with DeFi or NFT things has a link at the very bottom to Telegram or Discord: these are the places people are having conversations about what we’re up to. I’m sure there’s still onion servers or imageboards or whatever that are also doing this in more encrypted and private ways, but these semi-public channels are a significant chunk of where the culture is growing and where we are connecting and tracking and asking questions. To an outsider that only bothers with newsfeeds or the odd reddit thread or god forbid - tiktok, none of it is going to make any sense or start making any sense.

So I started asking around in the Telegram channels and Discords to find out what I had gotten myself into. I met personalities that were larger than life - some who disappeared and some I still see around today. Familiar avatars that would tell me stories: $Based had built a game where people could trade currency at increasingly inflated prices and then pay a transaction fee to press a button (within the one hour window it was possible each day) and rebase the value - making some degenerate gamblers (basically where the slang DeFi “degen” comes from) very rich and some others suddenly very poor. The Telegram channel was flooded with memes of dancing skeletons, vaporwave/retrowave/chillwave tropes, pink and blue B - and when there was a rebase imminent the channel would be spammed with so many messages and memes the pace was too fast for anyone to keep up with. It sounded electric. This is where some of the foundational myths of BASED began: such as Dustin Rall. Dustin dropped into the Telegram channel asking questions after having spent a whopping 50 ETH only to acquire something like 2 $BASED (which, you’ll recall, is designed to be reset to $1 per $BASED). He apparently used the wrong link or something and spent most of that on gas. Dustin became a savior figure for BASED - someone who had sacrificed himself donating that much Ethereum and whose vision for the project became a thing of legend. We need to make this thing worth it for his considerable investment. Why were we all hanging around this Telegram channel? For Dustin. If you weren’t there for him - please leave.

The point where I had joined was after this initial frenzy. The story as I’ve reconstructed it is that following the release of $BASED the developers - the Ghouls - intended to build a token swap platform (for myself new to crypto: a currency exchange) and to fund the project they listed some NFTs for outrageous amounts, something like $50,000. The idea was that the investors who believed in BasedSwap were building the treasury anonymously so that the team could work. Yet another thing I didn’t understand when I was being initiated was just how fast everything moves in crypto. Between the time of the sale of those NFTs and any reasonable development time being completed, all the tech that had been started for BasedSwap was redundant. Taking someone else’s completed project and copying it, and modifying it (“forking” for the non-coder) is simply not exciting, and often not profitable or useful either. The Ghouls dropped that idea and instead decided to build something called Moonbased.

A part of the thrill and wildness of $BASED was that the developers had built a protocol and then publicly burned the admin keys that let them change how it functioned. On the one hand this is just a fun publicity stunt because it means it is a finished product that’s been set loose into the world. On the other, it’s part of what it means to explore these new spaces where anonymity means that trust is in short supply. If no one can change the code of a project, that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s secure but it means if you can read it as well as anyone else (just like wallets, the code for these tokens exists in a public way that anyone can view it) we’re all playing the same game, a fair game in a sense. Unfortunately, a token that cannot be developed any further and that functions crazily as the supply goes in and out of people’s wallets is hard to build upon. There even had to be some jumping from one token to another as things broke - and so was created Based Classic, the dustins.vision euphoric trippy meme potpourri. Even the dead and forked tokens became a way to come up with arbitrary inner circles and holding for the sake of a zany cultural moment.

Even as more and more tools make plugging one project into another possible - something strange and unique may be exciting, but isn’t meant to be compatible with everything. After gradually understanding I had missed the rush of $BASED, I wanted to know what the Moonbase was and how it worked before it launched, so I figured I should go find the persons to ask.

So I wanted to know just who the developers, the GHOULS were - not their real identities - but who the anonymous developers of all things BASED were. I knew there was a team, and I thought I knew how many there were, but I had only really seen the ghouls I knew as BasedMoneyGod and Run The Ghouls or rarely G H O U L . b a s e d around any of the places people hung out. Another thing outsiders may not understand right away: there are good non-nefarious reasons to be anonymous in crypto (or online in general). The $BASED.money game was public, how it worked was viewable by all, the keys to the currency code were demonstrably burned - but how all these transactions and games and interactions between platforms and anonymous people are considered legally has not been ironed out in a lot of places. Even now they are talking about passing laws that make it a legal requirement to know who every person is that you transact money with in sums over $10,000. Now imagine a thing like based.money with hundreds of anonymous (at least, to the developers) wallets interacting with sums that change value wildly in days or hours and doing that for weeks. That means a public record of hundreds and hundreds of transactions for amounts that may one day be considered illegal but are now untraceable. Not only that, but building a project like $BASED for fun may not be something you want to show up on your LinkedIn page. Code projects where people role-play as hacker pioneers of the digital finance wild west are not places you want your Tax ID or professional resume to be items of interest - even if you are playing the game in earnest.

There’s two other important things to remember here: so much of the old way of doing security online meant that you had to give lots of personal information to a platform which they could then regurgitate to you if you locked yourself out of your own account. That’s kind of a clunky way of securing things, but it kind of works for a while. What we’re seeing is that the internet has a long memory, and websites and services are sometimes short-lived, and the average person has a 10-20 year history on the internet now of giving that information to god-knows-how-many businesses. How many of those businesses kept all their databases perfectly secure? Moreover, how much of yourself do you willingly share online? Outsiders in many places will say things like “I’ve got nothing to hide” - and that can be totally true - but if your identity is only verifiable by an aggregate of all the facts of your life, and more and more of those facts get catalogued for the purposes of social media or for your library card or for the place you bought socks once - eventually your entire online identity including bank accounts becomes a very shaky enterprise. It didn’t necessarily seem like that big of a problem at first because the internet wasn’t that old, there were not decades of information about you to be sifted through by social engineers bent on getting your data. Having an anonymous identity isn’t just a signal (remember the red flag?) that you don’t want to be searched - it’s also a way of separating the sorts of personal details and misty future legal liabilities from your ability to act in the present. All of these new crypto websites are operating in something we now call “web3” - which is difficult to define, but one of the basic concepts is that your identity isn’t handled by the sites you visit who are responsible for taking notes on your life story, but instead handled by a secure wallet that you have the keys to. Essentially, you interact with these sites as a peer rather than instantly becoming a customer and liability with an account they create and manage for you. I find it more than a little frustrating that even now in 2022 outsiders will complain about having to use web3 versions of things as an unnecessary analog for web2 things, but then you find yourself sitting through commercials, your content being leveraged for Google Ad Words, your work only being profitable if it sells 400 t-shirts, the best videos and artwork being screened behind Patreon paywalls.

So I picked at random one of the GHOULS that I knew of - Run The Ghouls - and I used a mnemonic strategy that had worked well for me as a designer: I created an image and visual identity to match what they had posted as their avatars. I like Run The Jewels too, so I hacked together their signature font and a Skeletor illustration from an action figure and copied in some quotes I found around Twitter or Discord from Run The Ghouls (here on: RTG) and hacked together some VHS elements and motion graphics and made what was essentially an animated GIF of a VHS advertisement for the person of Run the Ghouls as a fictional movie that was somehow promoting based.money the currency. Bear in mind, this was all because I was trying to understand what based money was, so copying the text from their website seemed obvious. Putting in quotes and jokes from RTG that helped illuminate what it was all about helped me understand it. Wrapping the whole thing in a retrowave VHS advertisement was just a fun design exercise. I don’t know what possessed me to do it, but I decided to make the VHS tape an NFT. I didn’t really understand the nature of collectibles vs. art in the crypto space yet, but I had some idea that I was making something that was a bit of a goof and a bit of a collectible and in general was just the first step of me trying to piece together what I was doing.

I made 10 of the VHS tape, and pretty quickly all 10 of them sold once the people floating around $BASED caught wind. This was the rush of the first art sale again - I’d had a few sales since then, but nothing that had taken off like this.

RTG seemed into it, and that was fun for me. It’s a little bit like an older brother telling you whatever you’re into is cool - these were the secretive coder types I knew were doing things far over my head. I kept going after that initial experience, trying to understand what everyone’s role was. It’s still not clear to me - but broadly you can categorize things like community relations, design, operational security, front end and back end programming and blockchain and contract interactions. I should mention that “contracts” are the language we use for how tokens and programs interact with the blockchain - the decentralized ledger/computer. Contracts better communicate the same principle of web3 - that what we are establishing when we use tokens are relationships between code, objects, and people, not a thing that works somewhere else without us that is only connected to us by dealers or salesmen or brokers.

I gathered that BasedMoneyGod did something with the contracts, and hung out and “shitposted” with us. What does that mean? This is yet another reason that anonymity is valuable without being criminal: the way we have tried to use either legal measures or social pressure to police what people say has worked in some ways and not others. In some ways - it has helped create office cultures where hopefully no one is forced to hear awful things or be treated in malicious ways, where we have a certain way that we behave professionally with the understanding that it is obligatory to be there if we want to keep getting paid, and being subjected things we find offensive is unfair if we can’t choose to leave. I think as a culture we’ve extended that concept in some ways to our social media channels, and want to use social pressure the same way we used to use harassment complaints to create behavioral norms that everyone is comfortable with. Again, as an intent that isn’t so bad. What it has meant though, is that people are often anxious to loosen their tie, they don’t want to visit happy hour after work with people, they don’t really want to be themselves at work or in the office very much on the off chance that they - even accidentally - might cross the norms of the lowest common denominator of social acceptance. In a lot of places in crypto culture, people are relishing the freedom from that kind of office environment, that kind of stilted behavior that ensures it stays squeaky clean. Lots of developers and even now public figures are a bit more freewheeling online than you might be used to in the corporate world of 1978-2016. We may not want to hurt other people’s feelings, but given how much of our life is spent at least somewhat “at work” - it’s an awful lot of life to take seriously. “Shitposting” is just what we call the kind of goofing and posting and sharing dumb stuff that people do when they’re "off” - when they’re off the clock or not turning on their publicly palatable persona. I think this is yet another problem that is only revealing itself as the internet gets older: an archive of every thought and joke and offhand comment you’ve made for the last two decades - is there any of it that someone could pick apart if they were looking for a fight? If they were looking for a reason to try to hurt your reputation? That doesn’t mean you’re cruel or awful or gross or evil, but having your guard up at all times is exhausting.

I stumbled my way through learning about ghoul.SOL - who seemed by all accounts to be one of the galaxybrains of the operation - and kept going with xghoul0x (aka Ras al Ghoul) and started on one for G H O U L . b a s e d. I stopped when I got to Sir Pepe Ghoul. This is as good of a place as any to discuss another aspect of crypto culture that is confusing and intimidating from the outside. Pepe the frog is one of those memes that means very different things to different people. For that matter, “BASED” itself, as lingo, came from an old 4chan meme. You can read the knowyourmemes page yourself, but basically it came from a stray joke from rapper Lil B - “based god.” To call something “based” then became something like calling it “cool.” From there though, there’s been a sizable chunk of internet history that helped give birth to the alt-right, and Pepe and BASED were both associated with it, but not owned by it. One thing people can tend to forget when it comes to memetics, symbols and language is that context is crucial. Sometimes context can’t be removed: Charlie Chaplin was hilarious, but you still can’t wear that little mustache and a red armband and do a Charlie Chaplin impression because you can’t get rid of that other context for those things. Calling something “based” though, it doesn’t necessarily mean that you agree with rightwing pundits or have been “basedpilled” into that world. Pepe, likewise, is used by tons of crypto and digital natives to symbolize an entire culture that feels itself distinct from “normie” culture. It doesn’t mean that you’re a part of radical or fringe or frankly xenophobic subcultures, it means you identify with people who feel that mainstream culture has become a place for unreflective, shallowly well-adjusted, just plain shallow, or dull people. There is always a certain stream of resentful and bitter and cruel types who really do mean “normie” in the most sneering way. There’s also a lot of people who live portions of their life online and in books and find the news misleading or boring and conventional life goals like a nuclear family and a 5 bedroom house stupid and consumerist and the critique is much more like this: “the unexamined life is not worth living” (I don’t know what crypto weirdo came up with that but it seems like wisdom).

So there is a whole subculture of people who see the frog as a symbol of the examined life, but who also recognize that maybe they really are just maladjusted, and maybe the outside world is right and they’re dumb or weird. Who knows. It’s more about establishing the contrast than resolving it - in fact, people not getting it and insulting the pepe or asking “based on what” kind of vindicates the feeling that we are not the same. I wouldn’t say that’s healthy, necessarily, but feeling at once superior and inferior to other people is a strange complex, and having other people to share the complex with makes it less strange. There’s a lot of people shitposting now: the Pepe identifiers are playing with money online because it feels good man.

Anyways, Sir Pepe Ghoul was one of the dev team. A famously reclusive member who managed internal comms (rumor had it) and used an aristocrat Pepe as his avatar. Now, the Pepe meme was also, coincidentally, one of the founding memes that built NFT technology. There was a running joke on imageboards that you could post whatever goofy edit of Pepe you had made into a collectible card and say it was a “rare” Pepe and insist no one copy it. Ask robness about it if you really want to know more. The Rare Pepe card was, of course, just an image file though - and anyone can copy and save a file they can see one way or another. It begged the question, though, of how could someone make an image file that couldn’t just be copied? The answer was to use blockchain ledgers to have an official ownership token (like a house deed or notarized collectible baseball card or something). The ownership token couldn’t be stolen by viewing the image associated with it, and so finally the rare Pepe enthusiasts had something that couldn’t be heisted. This is kind of something that outsiders to all NFTs still haven’t grasped: the image isn’t the token and we’re okay with that. You can view and save the image (of course) without owning the token.

I knew about this little portion of the subculture by the time I arrived at making this VHS tape, and so I decided to go all-out: if this was going to be the Rare Pepe of Based VHS, the tape should be all gold. The advertisement should have gold sparkles cascading on a glimmering field - the box should be lined with gold foil, the Sir Pepe image should be a finely crafted portrait: and I listed a mere 3 NFTs (not 10) for 1 ETH each. In the description I think I said something like “this is ridiculous - if you buy one of these I’ll send you some art” because I still didn’t understand fully the willful silliness of collectibles and the dubious and potential and illiquid value of art. All three sold in minutes - and again I was shocked - and this time I tried to take up the collectors on my offer, and one proud Texan was at least kind enough to accept some real art in the form of a Makersplace token to soothe my guilty conscience for having profited off of a joke. Mr. Bones was even surprised - if I recall correctly, “3 ETH, just like that.” Bear in mind, though, 3 ETH was a fraction of what it is today back then.

If You Know You Know

I did not coincide my NFT offerings with the Moonbase launch - because whenever I asked when that was exactly the answer was “few days” and eventually I twigged that no one knew until it was all but done. By the time the Moonbase actually launched, I was spread over a few art platforms experimenting with NFTs. I found one called Block Chain Art Exchange where the developer hung out a lot in his telegram, and even seemed to be taking feature requests. So I asked if I could sell things for $BASED. Why not? I had only started to make a little money here and there, and the idea of messing around with any of it still seemed insane to me. Sascha from BAE was pretty helpful, and pretty soon I made some artwork that was themed in BASED memetic colors and listed for $BASED. It was bought by a couple members of the community (my gratitude) and at this point I had to figure out what to do with the stuff. The moonbased.money website was insane - a long prologue of dialogue about the project between avatars - a forthcoming NFT card game - all resolving to a spaceship console hurtling towards the stars that told me I could “stake” my $BASED for $Moonbased and showed me the token balances of several projects I knew practically nothing about on a screen that was about where the radio display would be on an old car.

I stared at the thing forever. I asked someone “is that all I do?” and when I got the affirmative I clicked the button that told me I had staked my $BASED. Reading the definition provided:

What is staking? Staking is the process of actively participating in transaction validation (similar to mining) on a proof-of-stake (PoS) blockchain. On these blockchains, anyone with a minimum-required balance of a specific cryptocurrency can validate transactions and earn Staking rewards.

This verb is used everywhere - “stake” - and what it does in each case will seem to the end user at least a little different. The end experience: you are investing your money by lending it in exchange for some sort of reward or ability to do something. Once the verb “staking” doesn’t frighten you, the world of DeFi begins to open up. I found out that Sushiswap, the second most popular currency exchange in Ethereum at the time, was doing a liquidity pool for $Moonbased/$Sushi. I didn’t know what that meant. Again, I turned to the usual places and asked people I had some relationship with how it worked - and a community leader that went by BasedRod walked me through the process of creating an LP token and staking it. I watched several youtube videos about what I had just done, I looked at viral video explanations of what I had just done, I read blog articles about what I had just done. It barely made sense. A big part of the reason it barely makes sense is this: I had been poor. I had been poor and frankly not even interested in understanding the mechanisms of higher finance that did things like market-making, liquidity in real world markets - and that was just a part of the larger economic world I know that I don’t understand.

I have some vague grasp of how loans work, but how exactly interest rates are determined by people and who benefits from things like tranches, how futures or options work on a large scale, how to use leverage and margins - how any of it worked was the most irrelevant information for someone like me who was a realist about my skillset and the salary it commanded and had accepted one kind of life in the face of the alternatives. I was gradually exposed to more and more things being done that mirrored traditional finance: one BASED personality was involved with $HEGIC options trading, another was carefully following derivatives and leverage dapps (decentralized applications for web3 people), another is involved with Reflexer and knew worlds of information about “stablecoins” (crypto tied to less volatile mechanisms) and their “pegging” mechanisms (setting of value according to algorithms or independent things like US Dollar value). I had one friend in BASED who translated a lengthy whitepaper (read: technical explanation & documentation of a project) into Spanish and was singing the praises of confusing tokens that worked with collateral and stablecoin swapping that ended up multiplying little piles of money into great stacks over a couple months.

If all of this feels a little overwhelming, I think it should: there is a staggering amount of information and moving parts that govern how the real world of finance and higher finance works, and mirroring all of that world with programs and mechanisms and anonymous wallets that don’t require human interaction is a colossal undertaking. Any person who is just dipping their toe into crypto ought to be overwhelmed by the sudden access anyone with a wallet and a few bucks has to all these mechanisms that have traditionally been handled by investment teams, accountants, advisors, brokers. Day trader hobbyists maybe found it a little less intimidating after having grown accustomed to managing their own finances directly, but widespread adoption is going to be daunting to anyone aware of their own limitations. Knowing that there are people playing this game on much higher levels shouldn’t be novel: unless you were in a pretty small minority, you were probably also aware that there were people in the regular traditional financial world playing complex “games” with their money that were over your head and required teams of accountants and tax attorneys.

A very important meme to understanding crypto for outsiders: the midwit meme. People who have had this realization that there is so much that they do not understand going on - they may identify as the “smolbrain” or low IQ person while people on the other side of the bell curve are the “galaxybrain” 200+ IQ types - people who are actually building these things and know how they work and what they’re meant to do. Because the smolbrain can’t understand, they decide to just give up and enjoy the memes. Because the galaxybrain is really here for fun at the same time they’re here for profit: they decide to just enjoy the memes. Only the midwits - the people who are frustrated that they haven’t mastered the thing and see that it’s madness to invest your money based on a good meme, those are the only people not having fun. By that same measure, though, this is what makes a good meme so valuable: it makes something popular and fun that is very difficult to understand thoroughly on the most technical level in every way all up and down the development chain and across dependencies and shared libraries. Memes are the bridge between the people who have no idea how it works and the people who know, but couldn’t explain even if they wanted to. A part of realizing this is on some level how it works is maybe the first step away from being a “normie” - the first step is the humility of recognizing the world is complicated, and you probably aren’t on the far side of the bell curve (yet).

So thanks to the community and the memes I eventually came to have some understanding of what the Moonbase was. In my own words (and probably slightly inaccurately) it was a way to crowdsource funding for crypto projects by buying their tokens with “rovers” - puppet accounts that would own those tokens on behalf of the holders of Moonbased. There were (again) buttons that could be pressed - only this time you called a function called “rugpull” (more on that later) that would sell the tokens accumulated thus far in the project and distribute the equivalent value in $Moonbased to those of us holed up in the cockpit with our $BASED staked there. The idea was that the whole gang would help build the projects that we sent rovers to - that the incentive to help their project succeed would mean we helped promote them and build their identities and generally make friends.

I was beginning to get a handle on this system in the abstract when I started making posters for the various projects that the Moonbase was partnering with. I made a poster for WAR - some kind of game-ified staking contest series that based people were playing around with. I started to make another one for $ROPE - an NFT staking game and 4chan adjacent community - when everything went nuts. This is one of those places where there’s a lot of differing accounts of what happened, and who you believe or what facts you consider important is going to change your outlook on what happened.

In sum, as far as I can gather, xGhoul0x had privately brokered a deal with the developers of $ROPE to work on their NFTs that could be staked. Meaning you could take their card tokens and “invest” them to earn rewards - you could stake your $ROPE cards to earn $HOPE and spend that $HOPE on other things (and eventually exchange $HOPE for other tokens). I explored their site a little and a BASED compatriot sent me some of their cards to see how it worked, and all things considered it was a fun and playful system they came up with for using NFTs for something and building the ubiquitous “staking” mechanics into something more tangible like a card that I could insert into a slot. It was obvious the potential that had for building a game out of the Moonbase dialogue characters and mythos.

What instead happened was that the exact details of the deal were not revealed to the rest of the GHOULS until very late in the game, and some of the meetings were unexpectedly recorded to ensure that deals being made were honored. By that same token, however, the very principle of the value of anonymity in the space - both to crypto anarchist ideals and in general just to sensible dealings with experimental projects - that principle had been violated. How else do you ensure an anonymous entity fulfills obligations you can prove they made, though? Here we are at an impasse. We have not built enough tools to ensure semi-anonymous reputations can be trusted yet. The teams did not agree that the deal worked out was mutually beneficial, and there was a lot of pettiness and bitterness and insults hurled back and forth. The communities, from my vantage point, were both put out a bit. Lots of members liked to dabble in both worlds and without having any details suddenly understood that the deal had gone sour. What could have been a really high visibility collaboration with multiple card games (there was a Moonbase Card Game in the works), stake-able NFTs, and general crypto solidarity had fallen apart - and to put it nicely, xGhoul0x had burned some bridges with the team after disagreeing about how and what kind of license any member could take with making deals on behalf of the team.

At this point, I recognized the tokens on my Moonbased console display, and I could gradually watch the $ROPE rover value deplete as the project failed. The Moonbase, I think, is still a good idea in theory. It was early in a few ways: there was no specific individual incentive system to encourage particular people to promote particular projects (there are things like bounty systems that attempt to solve this problem now). It also suffered from the reality that lots of crypto projects move fast and burn out equally fast. A team collects around an idea, builds the thing, it turns out we didn’t think of something or didn’t code something quite right or maybe they just have dayjobs or whatever and the team moves on. Something like that happened with $WAR, but now the Moonbased crew had spent a lot of effort and enthusiasm supporting a project that didn’t add significant value to the Moonbase. It’s hard being a decentralized venture capitalist substitute. The good thing about the broadness of the financial world being mirrored, though, means that there is an endless pool of applications to be built: and the GHOULS were already moving onto their next project: Based Loans.

It was around this time that there was an increasing amount of personalities floating around BASED that were all affiliated with Ray. “Who the hell is Ray?” you might ask? Honestly, I didn’t think Ray was real for a long time. It’s just this guy. Ray was from rural Szechuan. The legend goes that Ray worked at a hydroelectric plant and funneled sweet clean energy into Bitcoin reserves and now day-trades crypto from his quiet office at the dam. There was even an interview where RTG asked him questions like why Ray was compelled to start a telegram meticulously collecting all the $BASED memes he saw. Why Ray took the time to publish the Szechuan Few-Daysly newspaper about BASED events. I thought it was all hilarious - and either Ray or someone pretending to be Ray (usernames like “imfromruralszechuan” had bought the Pepe tapes) in the Telegram 24/7 it seemed. I started making tapes for the various community members as I got to know them, usually after a personal interaction or two. Cameron Lee had helped me get my footing in Rarible after the initial sales and we had made a t-shirt design together. Blazed Bison explained all sorts of inner workings of the Moonbase to me (probably several times - I can be dense). Mr. Bones and his rebase.radio are still a fixture in the BASED community. Elegy and Amplice and NoFluffles all deserved tapes as a way of commemorating our anonymous identities (sorry Elegy and other frens - I owe you one) - in short, there was a cast of people I knew that all thought a Ray tape was a great idea. So I made it, and it sold much more quickly than I thought it would, which felt a little bad since I wanted everyone who wanted one to get one. We were joking about making some counterfeit tapes, and Cameron said something about making bootleg “Roy” tapes - and it took off into a new bootleg Betamax tape at the same time that Elegy and the crew started manufacturing Ray “forks” at an astonishing rate. Versions of Ray were everywhere, and it became impossible to tell who was whom from the early days of BASED because everyone it seemed had passed through the crucible of being one Ray or another at some point.

This became something of a pastime for the community while Based Loans was being built: we had no idea how long it would take, and the team’s own confession was that it was way more complicated than they realized it would be, and so we just sat around making Rays and being Rays and generally having fun staying in rural Szechuan in our imaginations. Some of us made pretty significant gains flipping NFTs, some of us started building our own projects. I was working on my NFT art career which BASED love-able lunatic cryptostacey helped jumpstart and trying out some generative programs I had worked on years ago. I designed some business cards as a running gag about American Psycho and the joke 90’s respectability of the Based Loans aesthetic.

Those GIFs sat in my “to be minted” folder for months - the early insane rate of things that happened when I first joined had slowed a bit. I still made VHS Tape NFTs for community members here and there when the mood struck me - one of my only regrets is not making more of those. I didn’t want to seem greedy at the time, but I think the fun would have outweighed the expense. Overall, it was a time where we spent a ridiculous amount of time coming up with Based vaporware and memes - projects we had no intention of actually making or even pitching to the team, ideas and random thoughts that we would photoshop into reality and let dissolve again as soon as we had come up with them.

There was some kind of understanding that it was taking an awfully long time to get based.loans figured out, but Amplice was running BasedTV and there was rebase.radio that had some wild updates to it, and whenever we would see a familiar Ghoul drop into chat the sentiment was usually the same: yeah, this is taking way longer than we thought it would and we’re frustrated too. I kind of followed the Moonbase, but it didn’t seem to me that it was raking in crazy returns. While we were goofing around, one of those memes we made up was about buying a house together. You know - like how communes and cults do it - we would buy some strange real estate listing and all move in and live eccentric and very based lives. We even shared funny listings sometimes just to see the weird choices people made (“why is there a toilet in the kitchen?”). At some point in this interim, BasedMoneyGod (from here on BMG) announced that BasedHouse was live and in testing. There was an actual virtual chat space screened by requiring that you hold some $BASED token that was built where everyone who entered was assigned a random Ray fork with chat instances separated by BASED mythos places. An extensive and surreal guide to the place was provided by a strung-out parody of Clippy.

When I say I can’t really portray to you how strange it was without pictures or actually being there - even the pictures fail to establish the weirdness. There were some audio issues, and we all came and went for a little bit - but fundamentally this was not the sort of thing you built if you were engineering something to make maximum money for least effort that you would dump. BasedHouse, as far as I know, never really got polished - and as of writing this article it’s still live.

Rugged Again

My father has more or less always been a believer in the random walk hypothesis. I never read the book myself, but he convinced me at a young age that the stock market is efficient: meaning that stock prices are pretty well immediately set at the price that all knowledge of the company or commodity or whatever should indicate. This means that you (no matter who you are) do not know better than the rest of the market. This means that investing in the stock market is more or less more like gambling - because any attempt to take on significant risk would put you on the same level as everyone else also guessing what stocks would pay off. I actually had a distant relative I met once who apparently worked with a large team of people who did very fine-tuned work spreading market information in spaces where it required that whole team just to make sure they amount of info they were sharing was legal: in other words, walking the line of what qualified as insider trading. In my estimation, the “real” world isn’t interested in playing by the rules so much as they are interested in not being sued over doing their best to play by their own rules.

As we finally got closer to Based Loans going live - Ghouls shared with a few frequent telegram personalities the beta link to test based.loans - which ended up being a hilarious Encarta-themed late 90’s computers for squares kind of experience. This is $BASED re-imagined as something other than scene hackers, something more like a parody of 1996-2000 seriousness that has since seen some similar implementations (it brings to mind heaven.computer and the new poolsuite.net). It looked legit to me: somehow and for some reason you could loan out assets: especially “shitcoins” - meaning Ethereum based tokens that were decidedly not Bitcoin and probably wrapped up in memes or dubious mechanisms. The Ghouls explained somewhere that it’d be a good system for shorting coins - which makes sense if you spend a lot of time developing tokens and get annoyed that some definitely seem over-valued and driven by speculation. That said though, for the millionth time, I had been poor before this. I have never shorted anything in my life - and even though I had The Big Short on my watch list and had some idea of what was going on with GME stock (more on that in a second) - shorting something as a financial strategy was not even on my radar. What I did know, though, was that this thing was finally launching. This thing we had all waited for what seemed like the better part of a year to see built. I had never felt before like I was really on the inside of anything like this - I had sort of passively watched the Moonbase launch, and I had missed $BASED when it was new. Here we were launching this other thing, and BMG himself was in the Discord voicechat discussing with us how to sort out rewards and token distribution for staking our Moonbased. We were as a group writing an outrageous PDF eBook (what could be more square?) to go with it and explain the platform. People in crypto seem to be generally laughing at the efficient market hypothesis - our world seems like it’s utterly reactionary, driven by knowledge asymmetry and speculation.

We had new avatars created by Quincredible including Bobby Fleshner - the $BASED world version of Robert Leshner - someone I realized was kind of a big deal over at Compound.Finance which is what I found out Based Loans was a fork of (maybe everyone else knew already, but again - I know where I sit on the bell curve). I tried to remember my dad’s belief in the random walk, and at the same time I could see all the excitement in front of me and felt like “this is it, right? I know something that maybe other people don’t?”

This is one of the places where cryptocurrencies are still finding their footing. The SEC supposedly prevents insider trading in real world markets - but it has got to be difficult to prevent insider trading among vast numbers of anonymous investors in projects where the developers are also anonymous - they don’t publish quarterly budgets, they don’t register as securities (as financial assets, that is). This is a part of why we are still on the frontier: regulators don’t know how to regulate it, whether they should or can regulate it, and what that would even mean for the immense amount of wealth flowing in and out of all these various projects. One nod of warning, like the SEC singling out $XRP can tank a token’s price without it being immediately clear why they would pick that one over any number of other tokens that are probably also liable to be warned in the same way. At the same time - who can know what crypto assets anyone involved in the SEC has - or even anyone who maybe makes a phone call to the SEC at a convenient time - and if they wield that kind of power, isn’t that market manipulation?

This is just a peek into the dark side of crypto that is much more complicated than the ordinary pirate-style stealing of an asset here or hacking a wallet there or even using monies for illicit goods. Those are more sensational stories, and so people are going to talk about those events more. More and more of these thefts and embezzlements and hacks have shaken my confidence a little, but I’m still arguing that the real dark side of crypto is projects being built in the space that are fraudulent, projects that represent nothing more than market manipulation by the super rich (“whales”), projects that funnel money in quiet ways to other accounts, projects that are basically ponzi schemes, or projects with fundamentals that simply can’t hold up in the face of a bank run. People are concerned about whether their wallet is secure or they might get scammed by a bad connection and they really might - but the in-joke you’ll hear over and over again in crypto is that someone got “rug-pulled” - meaning either the project failed and now their money is worthless, someone emptied the project treasury into their own wallets, somehow they ruined the price-point of their token through botched code or mechanisms that it turns out don’t work (see: Titan / Iron Finance, and since I first wrote this article the $LUNA catastrophe). Hence the Moonbase joke: “rugpull” - we sell that project’s tokens out from under them (kind of). Rugpull is a blanket term for basically anytime your investment gets tanked either through corruption or failure or accident or just because it turned out to be a bad idea. The corruption can be rampant too - I myself, with tiny amounts, experimented with someone who was supposedly building a new standard for creating NFTs with copyright checks. The team disappeared one night and deleted all their discord and telegram channels and their token suddenly couldn’t be traded anymore (there were no matching assets to swap it - no liquidity). Another team that asked me to make some artwork for them seemed sketchy from the start: the admin had to manually “aidrop” (send to all the wallets involved automatically) their reward tokens for being invested in the project. Anything and everything that has to be done manually and relies on trusting someone to do it is a recipe for disaster in this place.

They decided to run a “flash farm” - meaning that unlike the usual staking maneuver I had learned by letting my little combination of $moonbase and $sushi generate a little more $sushi over the course of a couple months - my $moonbased would generate a bunch of $BLO all at once and then be done. The flash farm for based.loans was wild - I had almost never at this point seen money sort of materialize out of almost thin air like that. Sure, it was all $BLO - Based Loans Ownership, but it wouldn’t be the first crypto asset I’d had for a minute that I could theoretically trade into cash but didn’t really want to. The platform was initially built, as far as I could tell, to facilitate people shorting $SHIB while that token was on a rise. Just a couple of weeks before Based Loans launched, Vitalik Buterin rugpulled all the $SHIB holders. This means not only that tons of people had panic sold, but also that the value of $SHIB was really hard to predict - and most of the people buying it had no idea what it did or why they were buying it.

This is where we get to another dark side of crypto - or, at least a nonsensical side of it. There are tokens that do nothing, some that do nothing on purpose. They are built for speculation markets, “memecoins.” Some of these are a joke - it’s not meant to do anything (see DOGE and why Elon Musk is kind of insufferable). Some of these are a little more deceptive - @mgnr_io on Twitter explained that they were building a memecoin as a sort of social experiment. If I had arrived here with the opinion that investing in tokens that did things was difficult because real world markets are efficient, how and why do you invest in tokens that you know don’t do anything and only have worth because people arbitrarily decide to buy them or don’t understand what they’re buying? You see even now people hearing that cryptocurrencies are taking off, looking for something that sounds interesting and just dropping money in. This is bound to build some resentment from the developers who are making these complex DeFi mechanisms work, and wanting to short these ridiculous assets seems like just the sort of thing I would want to build if I harbored that kind of resentment.

The other dark side is how predatory some of these projects really are: they are literally waiting for you to buy their token so that they can slowly sell their own tokens back to the crowds of newcomers. People who jump in and think “oh, well maybe it’s not all about buying drugs anymore” and get a Coinbase account don’t understand that this coin they know nothing about has been waiting for just such a person like them to jump in and allow the initial investors to dump those heavy bags on them. A lot of people getting in now, like myself, weren’t there for the 2017 crash, weren’t there for the Initial Coin Offerings. “Up Only” may be a fun joke and meme for us people watching the crypto charts: how can you not be excited about an asset like Ethereum that is up (as of right now) over 690% in the last year? That means money must just flow into the pockets of anyone who gets involved, right?

The knowledge that this is the real dark side of crypto as it currently stands - that the sort of schemes and predatory postures that are illegal in real world finance just haven’t been (or maybe can’t be) regulated into crypto yet - that knowledge creates a certain kind of paranoia among the people participating who know. A reputation is a valuable thing, and tracking what a person does and doesn’t do with wallets that are known to be in their control is how the insiders have cultivated a culture of honor. I don’t do that. I don’t have the time or wherewithal to pay attention to the doings of various wallets (even though you can do so relatively easily on etherscan.io) - and so in a sense I understand that I’m operating in the dark. The paranoia that seeps in, though, is more complicated than that. It suggests teams explaining what they’re doing is not motivated by the reasons they give, it suggests that if they drop something in a new and novel way or get busy for a while - maybe this was a mechanism to build “exit liquidity” - a financial escape route for them - or maybe they aren’t really busy or sick or whatever but they’ve abandoned the project and quietly sold or transferred their controlling interests. Knowing that you have your semi-public channels but that there are also probably much more heavily invested wallets discussing and planning in more private and encrypted channels means you can always imagine that the whales are the ones doing big moves, making the actual decisions, puppeteering the project from the shadows. It’s difficult to tell.

In the aftermath of $SHIB becoming a wild series of spikes and dips and the value of it being really hard to determine - people like me wanted nothing to do with it (I felt like a midwit here: memecoins seem like a recipe for disaster). People who had no idea what they were doing certainly wouldn’t know enough to use a loan platform to lend out their newly minted $SHIB, people who knew enough about how it worked may not want to own $SHIB at all, and the people who did know how it worked and did want to short their shitcoins had all gotten bored and moved on to the next project that felt fast and crazy and could possibly make them rich. This is my take on what became of based.loans - it was in the wrong place at the wrong time and the GHOULS had a series of real-world things come up that kept them away from their fun hobbyist project that had spiraled into a complex web of contractors, dependencies, and crazy market conditions. Getting new markets built into based loans was not apparently as easy as it should have been, and behind the scenes the developers disagreed over who-knows-what. Ghoul.sol’s statement, at some point, was that working on $BASED projects is the most fun they’ve ever had, but no amount of money would get them to try to untangle Based Loans. In my mind - if you were trying to milk or scam someone - you would ask for the money up front and then disappear instead of refusing to even take money to fix something you were fed up with.

There were some awkward movements with hiring a growth hacker ghoul that joined up and was tonedeaf to the memes and community sentiment generally irked a lot of us. Trying to really pivot the brand to be based.loans facing was the right move for it to succeed - but the tech just wasn’t following suit and growing along with our focus on it. As one of the anon devs put it - “Based Loans was like the Beatles all going their separate ways while trying to write one last album together.” We tried to build some other projects and leverage what was left of $BLO to make them happen, but just couldn’t quite get either the code finished or enough votes to shift $BLO to projects only tangentially related. What we instead saw was that $BLO just sort of fizzled into nothing as the community saw a diaspora. This has itself been interesting for me. To name just a few examples: for a while when the Ethereum chain was getting too expensive to play with art on, lots of artists were jumping ship to play on another chain called Tezos. A minimalist platform there called Hic Et Nunc (latin for “here and now”) took off, and the top collector from the first few months of the platform’s growth in popularity collected some of my work there. We talked for a bit and they revealed they were in $BASED from pool 0 - from the very beginning. An article came out about Sushiswap where Joseph Delong of Sushi fame and general platinum-tier shitposter mentioned that he came from the BASED community and I was his favorite artist (!). In short: I often meet people who were involved with BASED in one capacity or another - the network of enthusiasts extends to almost every corner of the crypto world and goes from the floor of idiots and smolbrains and newbies like myself all the way to the shadowy super coders and galaxybrains and lead developers for major platforms.

In an effort to make one last pivot, Mr. Bones got in touch with a lot of us to help build and release Mojimonsters collectible NFTs as a Based Collective effort. In my experience, it had sort of come full circle. We had a wild DeFi experiment that transitioned into artists collaborating to make fun things together. Some of the remaining regulars put together a shared wallet (a gnosis multisig called theskeletonkey.eth) that we have slowly filled with some of the proceeds from projects like Mojimon or from ENS drops or leftover $BASED tokens - Mr. Bones and The Spaniard and BasedRod have donated a lot. You can almost tell who put the tokens in there just from what kind they are. What are we going to do with that treasury? I don’t think any of us knows exactly - but whatever we try to make of it we want it to be $BASED - which means fun. Losing sight of that is I think one of the things that really left some people put out by the whole experience. When a team builds something that by their own account is for fun - if no one gets rich we shouldn’t be surprised. I think they really were building for that reason but I could be wrong, I’m still something of an outsider to what I imagine are quieter velvet-lined and encrypted channels where the movers and shakers of this new world meet and plan.

We’re All Gonna Make It

So I’m hopeful. If I got nothing else out of it - BASED has an extensive library of community-created meme content that is more fun than anything else I’ve seen in crypto. So many projects are trying to emulate their success in this department by sponsoring meme contests or making fun identities - but the reality of it is that people can generally see through memes that are meant to hype a project with no substance. Smart people can tell when your meme isn’t a bridge from low IQ to high IQ but just a glitzy con - whether it works or not.

The reality is that BASED still exists as a loose community spread across this space. BMG and Ray brought me up to speed on the value of alternative networks compatible with Ethereum like Polygon. Some of my current BASED friends showed me what Fantom (another Ethereum compatible - “EVM-Compatible” network) is about (or was before Andre ghosted) and bought my first attempts at putting art on that chain. The creator of smolbrains NFTs has some of my art on his wall. Some Ghouls were involved with testing Sushi’s MISO with Jay Pegs Auto Mart, which was another hilarious Telegram channel and NFT collection. We look out for eachother and offer tips and our condolences when our stupid projects crash, we send BASED gifs when someone finally picks a good product and it heads to the moon over a few weeks. One of the cool things about how tokens work is that their utility can be decided upon or changed or created independent of the original creators.

That is - if one day someone decides to build a totally unrelated project, they can still offer rewards or uses for $BASED tokens if they want - your tokens may be impossible to swap for money for a while, but it’s not like when a Chuck-E-Cheese’s closes down and they smelt all the tokens or whatever. This is where we eventually went when theskeletonkey.eth and Quincredible built Based Ghouls. You’ll recall Quincredible built some avatars right around when Based Loans was launching - started developing a style and skillset as a pixel artist.

The initial whitelists for Based Ghouls were built from holders of $BASED currencies - from all the people who had purchased art or crypto associated with Based that eventually tanked and kept holding it for the culture - $BASED, $MBBASED, $BLO, $MOJI, etc. etc. This was our attempt to give something back - even if it was a roadmap-less PFP. This is a part of what is still developing with regards to how NFTs and tokens in general work: decentralized ownership means anyone can do things with a token even if the project is dead - or in our case, especially if the project is dead. What Quincredible and the ghouls did over the past 6 months was take all these crazy Based memes, all the streams of memetic energy (Sci-Fi Moonbase, Encarta 95, occult stuff, vaporwave, synthwave) and we mixed them all into one potent cocktail of a PFP.

We built the thing and launched it for the whitelisted extended based family. We tested it an awful lot - but it turns out we screwed up one detail. We ran out of Eth for gas during the initial deploying, and apparently that meant that the proxy (read: our tool for not in fact burning the keys and being able to upgrade and expand the whitelist or change settings) wasn’t included. We had to fork the project (which you should have expected by now) from v1 to v2. The old v1 ghouls are dead tokens where we swapped the metadata to link to a game over meme, made it so that holders of those tokens got 3 ghouls for the one they bought before if they minted to the new contract. On 6/9/22 we removed all the whitelist requirements and just released the horde - let any old person mint them for free. Some people didn’t look very carefully and bought one of the old v1 tokens and tried (now, too late) to mint 3 because they were holding one. All in all, the collection is rife with references to based history, based memetics, ghoulish things of all sorts. I think it’s fun as hell - which is the earmark of any truly Based product.

What makes us think Based Ghouls is worthwhile for the average person? The fact that it’s inextricable from the birth of defi, the culture of the community building some of the most notorious and powerful defi platforms - the fact that it’s the memetic home of some of the smartest people in crypto when they want to act dumb. Learning based history, doing “based memetic archaeology” actually teaches you some of the basics and concepts of cryptocurrency, acquaints you with the genesis of defi parallel with NFTs. In a word: we vibe - rebase.radio is as listenable as ever, Based Ghouls has a soul - and whether or not it makes money for anyone the ghouls will still be here.

Epilogue of Rambling on Crypto - Are We All Gonna Make It?

Once we understand the real pitfalls of the new crypto world, we can also understand a bit of why cryptocurrency is picking up steam. Ponzi schemes work because people buy into them and the early adopters get paid by the later ones - there’s no business being done. Those absolutely exist in crypto. The current generation is also being told over and over again in the “real world” that Social Security will probably run out by 2035 or so. This means that our real world money has been taxed into a system that pays out to the early investors but will have nothing left for us by the time we need it. In the news we’re seeing lots of people discuss things like the GME short squeeze where the fundamental complaint is that the elite are not playing by the same rules that we are - that maybe they can make platforms like Robinhood shut down trading (unfairly) to preserve the interests of the institutions. In a sense: we have seen the shaking of institutions the last decade, and one of the institutions that has shaken and dropped a lot of rotten fruit is our financial institution. There’s a sentiment that they are on very fundamental levels unfair, that they radically favor the wealthy and privileged in allowing them to do things with their money that the rest of us simply can’t. The most conspicuous example of this was the crypto community’s response to the head of the SEC, Gary Gensler doing this little monologue for college students who he says should be saving that cup of coffee worth of money every week. If you’re not paying attention (like I really wasn’t before I got into crypto) you might not notice that even a high savings account interest is .25% to .5% Now keep that news in mind while seeing that the SEC is also trying to prevent platforms like Coinbase (decidedly not decentralized, but still) from offering a mere 4% to investors. This all contributes to the feeling that the powers that be aren’t just acting in the interests of the upper class, but are actively trying to deceive and take advantage of the rest of us. Not just in the US, either, this includes the global economy that has multitudes of people who are disenfranchised - people in third world countries who don’t get fair wages and certainly have no banking equivalent available to them.

The world of cryptocurrency as it currently stands, in my estimation, is a combination of both the worst and most predatory practices that can only be gotten away with in an unregulated space and the best and most ideal motivations that can only be built free from the regulatory practices of a corrupt and inequitable institution. One of the craziest things about getting BASED was having people buy my art when I was brand new to the entire world, and they said something like “we’re moving into a post-scarcity mindset here.” These are the kinds of things you say in a bull market. I could afford car repairs, holiday gifts, new clothes - all those things I genuinely needed for a few months because there is a general spirit in the space that we are not just playing with money but creating wealth: that we are all gonna make it. This is the last thing that may or may not be true but has profound implications. I’m not an economist at all, but if I’m reading it right when Adam Smith talked about the wealth of nations - he was not talking about spreading wealth around so much as creating it through market efficiencies and trade. That is - if we can handle our money ourselves, eliminate middlemen and only produce or do with money what makes sense where we are - perhaps there really is more to go around. It sounds idealistic and first-year-econ-student, but if we can truly do new things with crypto technology that eliminate overwhelming overhead created by their real world financial counterparts and extend these capabilities to anyone who can create a wallet - could we actually be moving into less scarcity for some kinds of money? Are we capable of scaling the walls of old finance institutions and making money work for poor people the same way it works for the wealthy? That’s the dream, but that’s also a good line to drop someone if you want them to buy your token. I don’t really know which one is true, but at least now I know that I don’t know.

I wanted to clarify first what I consider a few different kinds of things that we lump all together under NFTs and Cryptoart. In my opinion, there are generally three different kinds of things being traded

• Collectibles with arbitrary aesthetic value

• Collectibles with semi-relevant aesthetic value

• Art

One of my favorite little essays on the subject is still Collins Dyer's Medium article that uses the baseball card analogy. The difference between the authentic collectible and a copy may be materially negligible, but it matters which one is real. If you photocopy a baseball card, you have not made two authentic baseball cards. One of the keys here, in terms of the "why" of collecting is that baseball cards aren't really expected to be "pretty" - their value is generally tied to this outside thing (baseball) and the overall collectors market for baseball cards. You don't look at a baseball card and say "well that's not very impressive to look at" because that's utterly besides the point. These are things I would call "collectibles with arbitrary aesthetic value."

This kind of concept makes a lot of sense when you think about NFTs that maybe make reference to the subculture, or have more of a reputation for being collectible than for being impressive (visually speaking). I tend to think that some of Beeple's huge collection has started to work this way: people are indifferent to the actual art, but the collectibility - "blue chip art" is the reputation they chase. This goes for Cryptopunks too, I think. The visuals matter - people like monkeys and aliens I guess - but ultimately it's not about the pixel art. You could find a thousand pixel artists doing much more detailed and impressive work, but that's besides the point. Even weirder to consider: why are action figures with flaws often more expensive? Prototypes and short runs of mistakes are objectively worse than their "correct" counterparts, but worth more? There are actually some Curio Card NFTs that had contract issues that sparked just that debate. Currently, it seems like the consensus is that faulty programming or just plain mistakes don’t really increase the value.

Secondly, consider another kind of collectible that is similar, but not quite the same: comic books. Now, a very expensive collectible comic book isn't necessarily expensive because it's work of art, but it's likely that a very expensive one will both look good and have some sort of cultural significance or narrative significance for a pop culture phenomenon. Are early Superman comics worth a lot because they have the best art? Not really, but Superman became a big deal eventually, and they at least looked good enough and had exciting enough plots to help launch the character. It helps that as time goes on there's less and less of them in mint condition and well-archived. To me, this makes sense of something like **Hashmasks **or the more recent Clonex - where there are tons of them, but a few are rare, and the rare ones aren't just valuable because they're rare, but because people like certain designs that were algorithmically possible, or maybe the names were interesting or something. That is - there's a combination of collectibility for its own sake and aesthetic value.

Lastly, there's art. Is art collectible? Yes, but I don't think it's the same as a collectible. One of the differences is whether artwork - even a series - is meant to be a part of a collection someone can possess all of or whether individual pieces and series are meant to be statements in their own right. Think, for example, about whether it would make any sense to release a baseball card series of one or two cards. You couldn't hold up the card and say "well, but this is an amazing card" - because maybe it is, but that's really not how collectibles work - I think there has to be some sort of threshold of amount and variation on a theme that makes a collectible something other than a statement by itself. Artists that get lured into expecting collectors to snap up all their work, I think, have unrealistic expectations - or at least they've sort of changed the nature of the work they're doing into something else. Real artwork, I think, has its value most anchored in its intrinsic aesthetic value - it is something that for whatever reason, either visually, thematically, conceptually - it brings meaning and pleasure to the possessor of it. This is a part of what has been thrown off balance with the influx of celebrity pseudo-art - the artwork is generally not particularly good (there are of course exceptions) and instead the art is being treated as collectibles, and the collection is as vast as there are A through D-List celebrities who decide to make something on a whim, so naturally the value of any particular piece is going to be very hard to predict and partly depends on the ongoing building of the collection of celebrity NFTs - and usually you can't have the safety net of a thing that is simply beautiful or fun to rely on.

Now the question of what the difference is between the real thing and the file. If the file attached to the token is not fundamentally different than the JPG that could just as easily be hosted on imgur or something, why buy the token? I can offer a conceptual reason, and a pragmatic reason.

The conceptual reason to buy a token is fundamentally this: tokenization is what makes digital art authentically connected to the artist. In his essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" Walter Benjamin points out that mechanically reproducing art can destroy what he terms the "aura" - the sense that this material object connects you to the artist. This addresses a fundamental confusing thing - if you can reproduce a piece of art using machines, and do so in such a way that it's indistinguishable from the original - what is the difference between the authentic piece and the copy? What’s the difference between a Walmart print of a Warhol piece and one created in his studio? Benjamin claims it's an "aura" - an intangible feeling that we are connected because these are the same atoms, same pieces of canvas or pigments or whatever that were moved by the artist. In the world of digital art, I believe it has always been confusing where the aura existed - since those bits and bytes were never really touching the artist in one copy of the file more than another, if you have the 2000th copy of a file, you own the same data that the original artist owned when they shared the file.

When you tokenize art, what you are really minting to the chain isn't the art itself (which is technically usually stored via an IPFS hash or on a server somewhere or both) - but you are selling the connection, the traceable and prove-able moment where the artist said "this is finished, and this is mine" and put this data up for trade - a permanent public transaction that connects the buyer to the artist. Couldn't the artist just make more? They could, theoretically, but it's generally frowned upon in the same way that a famous photographer taking their negatives and developing new prints after selling some as "definitive" would cast aspersion on their collection. Essentially, the moment of creating the token that is attached to the art is the final form - the metadata attached to the token of the visuals, the title, the description, where and when it was "minted," the artwork itself after that is essentially the raw material.

So buyers have a reason when they find something they love to truly "own" a digital file in a way that was impossible before. Now the practical reasons are multiple too: if we genuinely value art and digital artwork being produced, we've finally taken away the experience principle of copies as having the final word in "why not pay" for something. Formerly artists used giant hideous watermarks or just relegated themselves to essentially working for free or having complex security systems in place for Patreon patrons or something to make payment meaningful. In other words - we've created a much simpler payment-for-value method, artists getting some compensation for time they spend ostensibly enriching people's lives. Fundamentally, though, it’s important to remember that the end experience - seeing the art - is not what you are paying for when you buy the token.

The other pragmatic reason that NFT art is useful is that it both establishes a global marketplace and a global re-sale marketplace. As someone who's lived in the rural midwest for a stint, the kind of art I make may have a market on the internet - especially amongst the cyberpunk larpers and newmedia junkies - but nowhere within a couple hours could I print my art and find people en masse that understood or wanted it. Suddenly having your work in front of eyes across the world and across cultural borders means that wherever it finds a demographic that is interested, you can reach them. Not only that - but in the real world, re-selling artwork isn't something the average person has any experience with. The average person may have some experience re-selling collectibles, like comic books or baseball cards or even rare coins - but art? For an ordinary person, an investment in art is generally just lost money. How many people would know how to get in touch with galleries for art they didn't make themselves, or find auction houses, or try to list on Facebook marketplace or something similarly absurd? The re-sale market seems restricted to the elite - fame being the main criterion for whether or not the artwork you own (which probably has to be worth something in the hundreds or thousands) can be considered for auction, how many people have access to that? Consider this Twitter ad:

Given how many people enjoy art and would like to participate in the market for it one way or another, NFT technology is in a sense a radical chance for ordinary people to collect and re-sell without intermediary. The immediacy and universality of the art collection and re-sale market is a novelty, so long as people conceptually still believe in the connection to the artist or value things as collectibles. Which aspect grants value to the NFT isn't really as significant as is the group belief that the value isn't totally based on speculation.

I sell both art and collectibles with semi-relevant aesthetic value.

I make a lot of art, and I work very hard on my art and the conceptual meaning behind it and the technique I use to create it. I also make some collectibles: MTG-like cards of my own mythos, VHS tapes and business cards for personalities and memes related to the $BASED money subculture. Different rules apply to different kinds of NFTs, but so long as we agree that value can be found in the tokenization expression - there's no reason this market has to exist completely on the winds of speculation like so many things in crypto.