My dear partner, M, and I want to explore the edges of NFTs, beyond photo for profile (PFP) tokens and the other static, corporatized offerings. I’m a writer, and M is a technologist, and together we are artists. Through Evertunes Studio, we are now building our second offering, called Westward Ho. (Our first, Coingame1, is now dormant — we learned a lot but didn’t quite succeed.)

Westward Ho is an exploration of the Westward Expansion, which begin in earnest in the late 18th century with Daniel Boone’s exploration of the Wilderness Trail through the Cumberland Mountains, and ended in the late 19th century with the conquest of America and the decimation of Native American culture. Generally, mainstream history books have glorified this conquest, with little regard for the stories of genocide, slaughter of species, and environmental and cultural destruction that resulted from the European push westward.

We are telling this story with 99 NFTs, divided into 9 distinct categories. We begin the process with one video, and one song (to be revealed later). M. has created algorithms that generate changes to each of these mediums that accompany the very brief stories I am writing for each token. The NFTs have a number of qualities that vary according to how they are generated. The resulting scarcity markers will be interesting to those who like to play games.

The visual, aural and written storytelling upends traditional narratives, giving the viewers of these NFTs the opportunity to experience the Westward Expansion in a deeply personal way as they gauge their reactions to the degenerative and world-building qualities of generative art.

We’ll be sharing these with all of you in the next few weeks. We hope you’ll join in.

Creativity is a wonderful attribute. Yet, ideas alone, without fruition, are often just sad. As with Porsches, sooner or later, every asshole gets a good one. But to what end? Other than with the books and articles I’ve written, I’ve always had trouble getting from the idea stage to the product.

I am proud to say that Coingame has moved from idea to product. The coins have been distributed.

Still, there’s another step: properly bringing the product to market. In this, we could be said to have not succeeded. I don’t think we’ve failed, because this was an experiment and a learning process. But we only found a few people willing to give us their wallet addresses. And of those who did receive coins, I suspect that few will play.

Why?

When we first started distributing 20 coins each to players, two days ago, on Sunday morning, the gas price was about $60. While we debated whether to wait for the fee to lower, it rose to $90. Our strategy imploded! Well, it wasn’t quite that dramatic. We just said, ok, we’ll try again tonight. We finally dropped them into people’s wallets with a $45 gas fee for each batch of coins.

These high, and constantly fluctuating Ethereum gas prices are a huge problem for the network. No one seems to know if the much hyped shift to proof of stake (a person holds coins in escrow — their stake — as a way proving their reliability as “miners” on the network, rather than doing proof of work, which relies on energy sucking computational power that has led to breathless criticism of cryptocurrency) will lead to lower gas fees when it goes into effect this year.

Something has to change. Anyone who played our game yesterday or today would have been hit with dozens of dollars in costs just to send these coins around to get the action started. It doesn’t seem that that happened.

We considered using xDai or Solana, both of which use less energy and have startlingly lower transaction fees, but neither one has the users that Ethereum has. We’re not sure the general public is ready yet to jump from chain to chain.

For us (my silent creative tech partner prefers to remain unnamed, for now), we feel proud that we had an idea to launch a cryptocurrency game designed to challenge people’s ideas about money and desire, and got that idea into the world. And we’re also happy to put its creation behind us.

Coingame is launched. It is time to move on to Evertunes. These generative music NFTs live on-chain and evolve musically into infinity with each trade. I’m sure you’ll want to listen.

On the one hand, the response to Coingame has been overwhelming. Everyone we’ve spoken to has been intrigued by the concept and eager to play. On the other hand, we at Evertune Studios have encountered several obstacles to distributing free cryptographic coins with no current value to strangers’ wallets.

It’s said that blockchain offers a trustless way to exchange digital assets, meaning the technology is immutable so you don’t need to worry about verification. However, trustless can also mean that you don’t trust anyone! With good reason.

Unfortunately, thieves, scammers, bottom feeders and cryptosatanic connivers abound, and the world of blockchain is filled with scams and phishes foisted upon phools. That makes giving away coins that have no value, for a game that no one has ever heard of, a marketing challenge. And we at Evertunes aren’t the kind of salespeople who can sell wheat to Kansas farmers or pigeons to jaded Manhattanites. Let alone cryptocurrencies to strangers, even if there’s no charge.

That’s what we’ve learned in the last couple of weeks.

We’ve reached out to people on Twitter, in a million and one Discord channels, and via email and text. A few people we know have offered up their public ethereum wallet addresses (basically, a low-risk proposition), but we’re looking for more.

To that end, I’m reaching out here to encourage you to play Coingame. Details in preceding posts, or at Evertunes.io.

Tomorrow, Sunday, January 9, we distribute the coins and the game begins. Do not be late to the game! Well, it’s ok if you are because this game goes on into infinity (though you can get out of it at any time). I’ll be updating you on what happens.

Monday, we turn our attention again to our signature experiment, the generative music NFTs known as Evertunes. We have some great surprises in store.