NFT creative universes are undergoing an exciting phase of wild experimentation: emphasising free IP, new economics, and remixing. As these universes develop, there’s three key components that can help foster success: permissive licensing, low fidelity + metadata, and on-chain bundling.

“The Signature” is a conceptual art project that explores the importance of the provenance of an artwork in relation to it being used as an NFT.

On Oct 24, 2021, Botto, a “decentralized autonomous artist” sold its first work for ~$325,000 (79.421 ETH). Slowly, but surely, all the requisite components have matured for crypto-based autonomous artists to take center stage. We now have broader adoption in crypto, NFTs, DeFi, DAOs, GPT-3, Generative Art, & GANs. There are a handful of projects exploring this intersection, and they surely won’t be the last. Let’s delve into what they are, and what could likely happen. I’ll cover early explorations (Plantoid, AI ArtDAOs, Artonomous, Clovers) to current projects like Neolastics, Abraham, NounsDAO, & Botto.

NFTs, as unique items on the blockchain, has a URI that points to data containing the metadata & the corresponding visuals. This URI can be an HTTP link, pointing to a video or image hosted on a normal server, or other services like IPFS (hash-based addresses), or Arweave (incentivized hosting of hash-based content). There is another way, however, a format that's become increasingly popular: the usage of a data URI. These URIs contain all the information within it. There is thus no server at the other end. Using data URIs has allowed NFT creators to experiment with putting all the content related to an NFT 'on-chain'. It adds a vector of permanence to the art. If Ethereum continues, it does not need ancillary infrastructure to support it. A common format currently is to store the NFT visuals as SVG, since most browsers are able to natively parse it. I do a deep dive in how different projects have been using SVG on-chain.

A good story makes you feel something. Having ownership over the story makes those emotions stronger. Telling fiction with NFTs can be a powerful way to tell stories: both old and new. Projects have been exploring this intersection the past few months. There is a tendency, however, for projects to take a more top-down approach while NFTs can & should explore bottom-up storytelling as a new medium. Top-down fiction is what’s being told to us. It’s when you go watch Star Wars in the cinema or play a new role-playing game from Bethesda. Bottom-Up fiction is what we invent stories about the fictional world on our own. It’s when you’ve bought the lightsaber and you are running around in your yard making fuzzy whoosh noises, force throwing tennis balls at your dog. It’s when you roleplay in World of Warcraft at the local tavern outside Stormwind. In this article, I want to share what this looks like in practice with NFTs and where I see this going into the future.

With NFTs blowing up, there's been quite broad experimentation regarding pricing, sales, auction formats, and collection sizes. What an NFT is supposed to represent (from art to virtual real estate) can be quite broad, but regardless of that there still exists interesting tensions between the creators, collectors, and the size of collections. These tensions aren’t new. I can bet that the trad art world, trading card game designers, sneaker designers, and many in-between have given these questions some considerable consideration before. What’s new with NFTs is that 1) the asset lives on the same substrate as where the auction/sale occurs, and 2) we have native, beautiful, open source data to dissect. While I have written before about collection sizes (and designed a new implementation using bonding curves), I want to delve a bit further into these tensions: the creator vs the collector, and collection sizes.

Neolastics is a new digital art project that I created that allows collectors to mint (and burn) new randomly generated pieces of neoplasticism inspired digital art. It’s liquid, meaning that at any point, a collector may choose to burn their piece to receive a reward from a communal reserve (a bonding curve). This project is a continuation of experiments and ideation from 2016 around the creation of autonomous artists.

Virtual reality is a prime space to experiment with property rights because space is infinite. What is finite, however, is distance to experience. If land can be infinite, then locating close to meaningful virtual experiences is what becomes valuable. This provides ample opportunity to experiment with new property rights, all perhaps, even in the same virtual space.

A few weeks ago, I had a chat with the Cryptovoxels community on ideas on how to increase or decrease land in this decentralized virtual space. I want to share two such ideas: a COST (Harberger Tax) zone, and a Bonding Curve zone. Both rely on land being minted and destroyed as desired. Both generate value back into the community.

On 21 March 2019, I released the first NFT collectible that was always-on-sale using “Harberger Tax”. In order to keep the collectible, you pay a tax based on a price that you have to specify. This price must always be set. It is called: “This Artwork Is Always On Sale”. As artist, I’ve received ~18.4 ETH since then as patronage. It turned over 3 times, before being held by the same patron since then. It is valued at 240 ETH (currently). In it, I asked a few question as it relates to this being conceptual art experiment. I try to answer them and share the release of v2 artwork.

Recently, the topic of personal tokens started gaining traction again in the blockchain community. This is particularly driven by new tooling and platforms (such as Uniswap), enabling easy trading of personal tokens. This is a far cry from 2014, when I first proposed ideas around personal tokens. Back then, the only way to experiment with this was to launch your own blockchain. Glad times have changed.

New examples of personal tokens take various forms. I'll explain some of them, and then propose a new variant for liquid, social reputation tokens.