Due to the ever-growing immutable history of blockchains, the longer they exist, the more possible it becomes to interact (and transact) with the future and the past. It brings about strange, emergent outcomes that include: hyperstructures (free, yet valuable infrastructure), abundant retroactive funding (Ether’s Phoenix), and re-animating the dead. After just over a decade of existence, time-as-platform is slowly emerging and could redefine all manner of new social structures, art, and philosophical questions.

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.

New technology can change our relationships. When this happens, it both enables new ones to flourish while at the same time reframing or destroying old relationships. The former can be joyous, wonderful, and the latter can hurt and be depressing. A blockchain, a database in the commons, does both. New connections, new relationships have been forged while at the same time, with NFTs particularly, it’s ripping through old, established relationships. Besides the general critique against blockchain technology: environmental concerns alongside naked greed & speculation, I believe this effect - technology rewiring relationships - is a part of the unexamined nature of the unease. Why and how is blockchain technology (particularly NFTs) rewiring relationships?

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.

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.

The boundary of the firm remains a perennial and interesting question: where should firms begin, and where should they end? When should a firm be split apart, and when should it absorb another firm?

The Celestial Roche Limit is the distance at which a celestial object would be ripped apart by its own tidal forces as it approaches a larger object. This article derives an Economic Roche Limit to determine and explore a new boundary of the firm.

The first draft chapter of my upcoming novel: Hope Runners of Gridlock.