Speaker A: All right, hello and welcome everyone to another episode of Waiting to Be Signed, a special interview episode. We're joined today for the 3rd time on the program, by Ciphrd, the founder of fx hash. It's great to have you back. We're super excited. How's it going, everyone?

Speaker B: Great. Thank you, Will, Trinity. Thanks for having me. It's always a pleasure.

Speaker C: It's always a pleasure for us as well. Every time you come on, we learn new things about the platform and everything that's coming up. So very excited to see what you have to share about today.

Speaker A: Extremely excited to have you on. It's been probably about 6 months Maybe more since we've last had you. There's been a lot of features, new features pushed on fx hash. And I know that you have some news to share with us as well. But before we jump into that, in case anyone hasn't listened to those other interviews, maybe you can just give everyone a brief reminder of the origin of fx hash and your vision behind it.

Speaker B: Yeah, sure. So fx is a generative art platform that's built on the Tezos blockchain and that is fully open. So anyone can publish a project, anyone can participate in the ecosystem. The idea in itself is like not unique. It was inspired by Art Blocks and by other platforms following similar principles. But I really wanted to have an open ecosystem which didn't really exist in the generative art landscape before. Because I thought, you know, I wanted to have a similar experience than platforms I had used before in a more Web2 context, such as Shadowtoy, for example. So I really wanted to create similar things for posting my work, and I did. It got a bit out of hand very quickly, but now, you know, I'm very happy to be building this super IDE.

Speaker A: We're still excited about it. Every week we are finding projects that we are excited to talk about, are happy to mint, and sharing with everyone on the show through fx to articles. You've created so many new tools in the last 18 months. What features that have come out recently have you personally been most excited about and are most looking forward to, like, their continued development?

Speaker B: I don't know if the last time I came on the show I talked about fx at all or not.

Speaker A: You did. You surprised us with it, actually. It wasn't in the kind of pre-interview notes.

Speaker B: Oh yeah, yeah, true, true. So yeah, you know, we released it. I was like not 100% happy with how it came out. In a way, that's a super complex feature that's, truth be told, like complex to implement and deploy at this scale. The thing is, the UI wasn't ideal for collectors. Some stuff were a bit too complex. The API accessible For artists was a bit too much constrained, giving them little control about what they could be doing with the tool. I still think it was great. You know, it opened up for new kind of projects to to be released. But you know, we've heard the community a lot and tried to iterate on params to make it more artist-friendly. Let's put it that way. I don't know if you've seen the Alejandro's project Pensado a la Mano, which was basically hacking params. So the idea is that you were drawing like some shape. on a canvas and then you would have to copy some data back to params on the minting interface and then you would mint your piece. So the thing is, it was a bit of a hack because the piece itself was the interface to mint. However, you had to input certain data, you had to do certain manipulations manually to finally mint what you had in mind. So when looking at the project, it got us thinking and Alejandro made an actual request to have that. Which is the ability for artists to control the params from within their code, at least how params are being defined and manipulated. So it's going to open up a new wave of projects that we tried to highlight with the hackathon that we just announced last week. The goal of the hackathon is to invite artists in leveraging what we describe as code-driven params. So basically the ability to build custom minting interfaces where they have full control over how params are being defined. And I think it's going to open up to a new range of generative art projects that we've not seen so far because we've only seen projects that have the ability to turn some data into a fixed output. But we didn't have so far the ability to have projects where you can truly build custom experiences with the collectors at mint time and also have it being translated into a token with particular data. So very excited to see how it's going to play out. So that's also why we wanted to put some light on this with the hackathon. And we should hopefully be seeing some projects coming in the upcoming weeks leveraging this new paradigm of designing projects. What else is there to talk about? We released Redeemables a few days ago as well, the project of Joanie Lemercier. And yeah, I'm very excited about this as well because we tried to build this as sort of a modular framework to be able to connect digital items with real-life events and objects. So we've so far seen this as few artists leveraging this new tool to build floatables and physicals, but maybe it's going to become something else that can power wider generative algorithm ecosystems.

Speaker C: Yeah, we were really excited to talk about redeemables last week. It's completely unique from what we've seen within the generative art space. Apologies for the baby in the background, but it was really exciting to see that come out and we're looking forward to see how artists leverage that into the future and just to see how that continues to grow.

Speaker A: We had heard whispers at one point that perhaps there might be an fx hash merch coming through redeemables. Is that something that you're free to talk about? Is there any progress on that?

Speaker B: Okay, so the initial idea was to release an fx hash token with redeemables, so it being the first redeemables project. But we've been so busy like building the feature itself and handling other stuff that we did not like focus on this. And when Joanie, as well as some other artists, reached out because they wanted to have this kind of system for their projects, we thought that, you know what, let's just use this as an opportunity to release the feature because basically it was on standby for a few months until we had the sort of merch gen art project ready. Maybe it will come down the line because everything is almost ready, truth be told. But, you know, I don't want to make any promise here in this regard.

Speaker C: We'll keep you to that promise next week, right? That's when it'll come out? Okay.

Speaker B: Yeah, just for you next week, for sure.

Speaker C: Oh, perfect. I love it. So I don't know if there are any other features that you would like to discuss, or perhaps we can talk about some of the future vision for the platform and how they compare with the original vision of being an open platform for artists. We saw a ton of tools come out for artists recently. There have been more tools coming out for collectors. Is that vision still in place or is there, is there a shift? Where are we going?

Speaker B: Yeah, so there's a few things planned, but I think so far we've released the basis of the tools we wanted to release and we tried to iterate on this. So Redeemable is the only addition, true addition we've made to the platform in the last 6 months after params. But in the meantime, we've tried to refine and improve what existed already. Also, We've been pretty busy hiring new people because the issue we had previously was that we are super great at pushing new features and finding what artists might leverage for creative purposes on their projects. But usually we've struggled a little bit in polishing these features after they're released to make sure they accommodate for every need, to make sure they are also even like at the release time released in a proper way. It's also because we were a bit understaffed, right? We had 3 developers, no one like managing the product. So it was always a bit difficult to both like ongoing platform development, fix the bugs, things like that. And also like shipping basic features which are required for keeping the platform alive. It was pretty busy. So usually we had to, we did our best to do it with our vision, but we had to accommodate for not having a proper product manager, not having some people dedicated to the UI/UX full time. I remember like last time I came, I discussed about this issue that we had and we wanted to focus on not shipping new features but improving the product that we currently have. It's still an ongoing process internally and I think in the next 6 months we'll keep working on this in the background as well. We've been thinking a lot about slightly improving the UI as well and a little bit the UX because the platform, I love the aesthetic personally. I find it very close to what I like in terms of UI, but I know there are some people that find it repelling at first sight. And I mean, it's fine, but we do want to smooth a little bit this UI while keeping the brand identity to also help onboarding users that are not familiar with our ecosystem. Because we've met a few people that had this first issue with our interface and how it worked. So we want to basically overall improve the quality of the whole platform without changing much the features. On that note, by the time this recording will be out, it will already be announced, but I guess you guys are maybe aware of it. But we also want to integrate and expand to other blockchains. Our next integration will be Ethereum. The idea is basically we want FX to be a chain agnostic tool where any blockchain that can bring advantages for some artists over other blockchains. Yeah. We want to have them in our ecosystem. So we had a lot of feedback from various artists that wanted to release on Ethereum, but there wasn't any platform that was either suiting their needs or having the quality of tooling that we have. So we heard this feedback and we wanted to also try to expand a little bit our offering by providing support for Ethereum. So it will come. You know, I don't want to put a date, but in six months or so. And we want to make sure we will have the same quality and same set of features that we have on Tezos, but also on ETH, and eventually down the line other blockchains if they answer the needs of our community. But yeah, that's what's on our medium-term roadmap. There's also a lot planned on the long term, but it would require maybe 30 minutes to go through that. And we are soon going to share a little bit more about this, but it's still in the specification stages.

Speaker A: Gotcha. I mean, that's huge news, obviously.

Speaker C: Bombshell.

Speaker A: Yeah. I wasn't sure if we were gonna get to that on the chat today, so I'm gonna put a pin in the ETH thing though, because a lot of what you've talked about here, expanding to other chains, hiring more people, continuing to polish and change the UI of the site, all of this costs money, right? And I don't think it's a secret to anyone that we've been in this bear market for all of 2023 and, you know, retroactively looking back, a good chunk of 2022 as well. Tezos is way down in value. Prices are just way down across the board. I have to assume that fees are not what they used to be either. So how are we affording all of this? And I know there's an announcement associated here as well, right? I guess I'm teeing it up.

Speaker B: Yeah, sure. Maybe to build on to that. So we had like some pretty limited costs in terms of people that were working on the project as well as infrastructure. Most of last year it was costing between $40,000 and $60,000. So usually the platform fees were either compensating for that or generating even more, which allowed us, you know, to have a bit of treasury to make sure in case of bad time we could afford, you know, still paying the team and the services. So on this side, we were fine. So the announcement that's going to come, well, maybe I can introduce it in such a way, but about 8 months ago, something like that.

Speaker C: Yeah.

Speaker B: It was a long time ago, about 8 months ago. We sat down and tried to think about, okay, we have this sustainable product with a small team and we like it in this way. But should we think about what we could be improving? What kind of other markets we could be reaching? What kind of new features? You know, sort of how big can we grow FX and do we want to grow it bigger? So we had a lot of discussions with the team. We also talked with the community. Lots of talk in price discussion, lots of talk in many channels, but we ended up like with the first statement that is generative art is the art movement of our era. And also we are only at the beginning of what generative art can unlock and what generative algorithms, to be more precise, can unlock for both human creativity and utility. And with this statement in mind, we tried to explore a little bit more what actually was going to be unlocked and We realized that there was a big opportunity to build more and more tooling to sort of create a bigger generative art protocol, generative protocol that could fit the needs that are going to come in the generative space in the years to come. So it's with this in mind that, you know, we were sort of at an inflection point because we could have continued to iterate on the product as we did before. But it was like not— it was always a little bit a knife under the throat, right? Yeah. Knowing that if the market would go down for six months, we would be quite in trouble just because you know we were relying so much on this. And we knew that Tezos also as well, while being super great for experimenting, we didn't become rich because of it. Like we had like no millions in the treasury to ensure three years of development or something. So that's when we thought carefully about deciding to raise some money, and we were not stressed really at the time being because we had like lots of treasury left and. We could like keep running the operations for a few months without getting any income. But it's in the spirit of wanting to grow the team because we wanted to iterate a lot with lots of ideas that we thought about, okay, maybe it's time to find people that can both help us financially but also help us grow the company because we are all super new to this. We are all pretty young and we don't really have experience in growing a team, growing a business, or You know, making sure we are not taking the wrong turns when there are important turns. So yeah, that's why we ended up deciding to raise some money.

Speaker C: That is absolutely huge news. And, you know, something that's been talked about on and off with the community for a long time, but to hear that confirmed is absolutely outstanding. And, you know, when you were talking about if crypto hits a 6-month down market, things could be in trouble. Obviously we're in more than a 6-month lull. I don't know if it's fully down, but again, that does feel like very risky. And I know that a lot of people have been moving away from crypto and into other endeavors. In such a challenging market, how has fxhash been able to stand out and, you know, actually go through and achieve the funding? I would love to hear more of that story.

Speaker B: Yeah, so we didn't like going in the funding in the middle of the bear market, knowing that, oh, we need some money to keep the business running. Let's pull a few things on the roadmap. And yeah, this is why we want. We actually came with a pretty solid plan that actually, you know, we refined along the way. But we came like without needing the money to survive because we could have survived without it. And we were really looking for meaningful partners. So it was not only a game of us trying to have people like our project, but also it was a game of trying to look for investors that really share the vision. And also can help us achieve what we want. And it was not easy to find people. What we discovered is that a lot of people that were sort of investing and interested into gen art did so in the next bull run and were sort of throwing money at this because it was like hyped and everything, but didn't really understand the long-term vision of what generative algorithms can become for society in maybe 10 years. And to us, it was always a way to sort of filter out relatively easy who have this understanding and share the vision that we have and who do we want to have on board on the project. Because eventually this is a long-term partnership that we are going to build. It's not just injecting money. The money is important to grow, but also we wanted to have the ability to unlock stuff that wasn't possible through networking, through advisory, through basically having experienced people sharing our long-term vision.

Speaker A: And can you speak at all to whom those partners are? And in particular, I'm asking because I think it was in our very first interview, we talked about the prospect of funding. And at the time, you were pretty adamant that you did not want to take funding and be kind of beholden to other people. You know, obviously, here we are almost 2 years later since that interview. A lot of things changed, the platform grows a lot, you know, you have a team that you want to build. So how did you go about finding like the right people that you feel are going to be supportive of the vision, not create roadblocks or pressure you into doing things you don't want to do with the platform? And like, who are they?

Speaker B: Yeah, sure. So before getting on to that, I want to quickly speak about being reluctant for funding like 2 years before and now being open to it. So as you mentioned, like a lot of things changed, but I think it also comes from the fact that during more than a year and a half, the whole team was overworked to keep maintaining the community, maintaining the tools, maintaining everything that we had and keep Shipping features for the artists of the platform, and no, we love this, so it's fine. But also, it got really, really tiring. And again, when we sat down to look at the future and realized that there was so much more left to build, and that we needed to increase the team, we needed to for what we have in mind, we need maybe five, six developers plus people that are going to support this team of developers in a more sustainable way. And I didn't want to have to build everything with the small team that we had and keep being on this. Like not sustainable lifestyle, but also, I mean, if we were to get sick, if we could not like ship the product. So with this in mind and maybe a year of experience sort of running a company, running a community, the vision changed a little bit. Not the vision, sorry, but the resistance that I had to funding changed because I realized that this is what it can unlock. And it was under the condition that we would meet meaningful partners. Like if I had felt at any point that The people that could have invested money or wanted to invest money were not interested in what we do, did not share the vision. I would have pulled the relationship at any time. Like, I wasn't interested into this. So we talked to a few of these, like, I will say not super interesting, but maybe people with whom we don't really have— could have a great relationship for what we have in mind. But eventually we find some very interesting funds and very interesting collaborators. So Our lead investor is 1kx, and as soon as we talked together, there was like a good energy coming. So first of all, we were looking at people that would understand that we don't want to start putting guidelines in what we do, but we want to keep building in the way that we did and freestyle a little bit in some aspects while maintaining a clear vision, of course. And 1kx was very open to this idea. They really shared this principles of letting the company grow by itself while giving some advice from time to time, still sharing like again a long-term vision that makes sense. And yeah, we met Peter from 1KX who's been very amazing. He has this deep vision about generative manufacturing and what it can unlock long-term for humans basically. There's very few investors from the space that have this interest for generative algorithms applied to basically anything. It's still very niche. So lots of investors understand generative art but don't really look further. That's why we clicked a lot with Peter and with the other folks at 1KX because they have this vision of generative art is only a step and it's going to become more and more exciting through various reasons. We also met like Fabric that follows a little bit the same ideology than 1KX. So that's why we wanted to have them on board. There will be a lot to name. I'm sure there will be an opportunity for us to do so, but to give also an idea of who we brought on board in the round, we looked at people at, let's call these creative technologists, technologists that are interested in what the tech can unlock, but in creative ways. So we looked at this kind of profile to build an advisory group that could help us build the tool that we have in mind in the future.

Speaker C: Wow. So not just funding from one group of people, but lots of interested parties. That's amazing.

Speaker B: I don't know if there is a way to get funding or anything. It seemed like the right way for us. So it was like not really a question. This is how we wanted to do it. I think it's something that's done quite often. I'm not sure that we are the first to do this. Actually, I know we are not, but it felt like the right way to do it for us.

Speaker C: And so you've already talked about how you want to get these funds in order to grow the team, move faster, quicker, be more agile, be more responsive. Are there any milestones or goals that you have with the new investment, or are there any goals or milestones that your new partners are putting on you to achieve?

Speaker B: That's like something we were very careful about, not getting partners that would require us to put milestones, but also understood that we are an early stage company. We have some ideas, we have a product that artists and people use, but we don't exactly have a strict direction in where we want to take it. And so that's why we picked 1KX as lead, because they understood this and they also understood that there was an opening, but it would be trial and error to get there. But we had to find like people that are like-minded to help us achieve what we have in mind. And yeah, we have set internally, you know, a few milestones. I think the first one for me is to finally get a team where I'm not going to be overworked doing some dev stuff because We need to hire like smart contract engineers that can take the load on implementing for various blockchains but keep implementing on Tezos as well as other engineers. So, you know, this will be the first milestone, finally having a team that's more distributed and has the ability to handle a little bit more what we have in mind. And then the next milestones will be what I briefly talked about. But first of all, getting the product in a state where it's more easy to interact with. Also integrating Ethereum. And long term, we plan on building a fully featured generative protocol that I'll keep a little bit some secret on this for a while. But, you know, in 6 to 10 months, we'll start talking about it, gather feedback from the community about what we have in mind. But this is why I'm super excited. Like, for me, once we have this long-term vision achieved, this very open and modular protocol, we can unlock so many use cases that It's hard to think about all of them. And also a good indicator that we have potentially a good idea that can help the generative ecosystem that are going to build on top of us to have freedom.

Speaker A: The generative ecosystem has certainly grown a lot this year, despite the bear market, in particular on Ethereum, as I'm sure you're aware. And I guess as we're now headed towards SFX Hash as well, assuming you're kind of familiar with all of these platforms that have launched, you know, 256, Alba, Cypher— not Cypherd— Eclipse, And soon another one called Prohibition, which looks like it's also gonna be like using the Art Blocks contracts and stuff and has some big Ethereum players behind it. So how do you kind of view like integrating into this ecosystem and kind of, you know, for lack of a better word, like having to compete, right? Like on Tezos, there really is just fx hash. Like we've had a few other platforms launch, but they've been mostly more like trying to compete with Object, you know, not doing like long-form generative in the same way. that fxhash has enabled. So what is that plan to insert the platform into this broader ecosystem and make a statement and continue to be a leader in long form?

Speaker B: I think we'll keep following what we did. We want to keep shipping features that can unlock creativity for artists. Sometimes some of these features will not be liked because like params, they change a little bit what long form generative art is. It's not the same with params, for instance, but it's just about giving more options and unlocking creativity with it. And I was very excited through Vitalik to see these platforms emerging because first of all, it's a good way for us to start to understand a little bit more. For instance, if we release on Ethereum, what kind of tools the Ethereum community is expecting, you know. So we knew that already, but having actual like fx hash-like platforms launching on ETH helps us as well to start to understand a little bit what we will have to provide on this blockchain. However, I must say I was a bit disappointed to see the same pattern that is basically the Art Blocks formula being replicated on every generative art platform. There's only very few people that are experimenting outside the box of just basically having this on-chain seed that's being randomized and it's an input to a token. But, you know, we've seen this pattern replicated on Pretty much all the platforms that have launched. And it's actually like on Tezos, we've seen more creativity on that end with the platform from P-Fragile.

Speaker A: Edit.art.

Speaker B: Edit.art, yes. Apologies, I forgot the name. But, you know, having a similar concept as params, more sort of simplified, but, you know, it's new. And of course, emergent properties, trying to leverage AI, which I find very interesting, but, you know, trying to explore different ideas. And it's what we tried with params. It's what we tried with redeemables. It's what we are going to try with other ideas, but always trying to add these modules as an optional module for artists. You know, I think if we keep improving and making sure we follow what the artists' feedback about the tools they need and include those tools in an elegant way, so making sure it's always optional and modular and can be leveraged with as less constraint as possible, I think if we release on ETH in its current state, we should be fine. And again, like, I mean, we don't have like a plan to completely destroy competition or anything. I think it's just a matter for us to answer to some of our artists' requests that was, yeah, we'd like to have the ability to release on fxhash on ETH. So it's just, yeah, basically us answering a few months with delay.

Speaker C: And also obviously launching on ETH, you know, you'll be able to capture higher platform fees, at least in terms of real dollars. Or how do you feel about the future of this large group of open generative art platforms? Do you think that there will be a consolidation of them in the future? Do you think that fx hash will just stand out by being the most innovative? Do you think that some of them will just close rapidly? Do you have any thoughts around the future of the space?

Speaker B: I can't speak for the other platforms. Truth be told, I don't really know. I know that we have a few things planned outside of generative art per se. You know, I've been talking a bit about generative algorithms applied to other fields. I think these are some interesting use cases, mainly in fashion, but also in other industries. We've seen it with the collaboration between, was it Tribute Labs? The Chromie Squiggle sweatshirt. I'm always forgetting the names, but you know, this project with generative sweatshirts from Chromie Squiggle. It's an innovative, interesting use case of generativity applied to other fields than art. And I think it's super interesting. And, you know, the way we want to build the protocol is for it to be fully open and fully accessible and easy to build on top of for other, I don't know, companies, builders that would like to build custom experiences leveraging generativity in a novel way. We want to help them achieve their ideas, basically. So yeah, I don't really know exactly how the competitive landscape is going to evolve, truth be told. I'm not super interested into this. I'm more interested into the novel use cases that we'll see.

Speaker A: I think on that same theme, but from a different angle, something that we've been covering a lot on the show recently is these different platforms and where they're succeeding, where they're not succeeding, and trying to hypothesize why. One of the things that we've kind of arrived at is it just seems like on ETH, the expectation maybe is a lot higher for the artwork. You know, for example, with Alba, like right now, everything that they're releasing that's minting out, like it's not open right now, right? This is like a curated set of drops that they've arranged for the launch of their platform. The art's really good. You know, a lot of them are fx hash artists, unsurprisingly, but it doesn't feel like that it's been demonstrated at least that there actually is an appetite on the Ethereum side for just like an open playground. Because even though, like you said, they're restricted, they don't have all the same features as fx hash. There are people out there who probably have been like waiting and waiting for something like that. Or you would imagine had been waiting for something like that to release on ETH rather than having to go through like the Art Blocks application process or some other similar curated platform. And it just doesn't seem like it's happening. It just doesn't seem like without the marketing, without the buildup, you know, without it being a hyped artist that they're getting the traction that I think they expected to. It's kind of like an open question for you to consider or like give your opinion on, because I think we see it too on fxhash, but on fxhash, it's like anyone can release. It's basically free because Tezos is so cheap to transact on.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: And if you release a project and it doesn't work out, it doesn't, it doesn't really matter. You're not really punished for it financially. And then the ones who do hit, they hit, right? And they find their success and they build their organic following. But even artists who have a bit of a following who are trying to go over to ETH are not finding that same success. So like, I'm just curious, like, as you've observed it and having run your own platform now for so long, like, how do you think about that difference between the 2 chains? Like, is there a difference? And what do you think is going on?

Speaker B: I guess. First of all, we've never seen an open gen art platform on ETH so far. So, you know, it's hard to see how the chain itself is going to react to that just because it's never existed before. So I'm curious to see when Alba will open, how it's going to play out, you know. But there is an important point that you mentioned. The price of access of Ethereum is very, very high, up to a point where it's unhealthy. High. It's very hard to participate as an artist because you have to pay a lot. However, it also unlocks possibilities because you can also access a more established collector base. You access more marketplace tooling just because the ecosystem is more mature. And I'm making the comparison to Tezos. So they both serve different purposes, right? I think it's important for an open protocol to give as much potential to artists as possible. So right now we've seen like lots of amazing artists publishing projects on FX and getting pretty big, you know. But eventually at some point they wanted to, as a logical step to their career, maybe earn more money for a job or maybe reach out to a wider audience that maybe Ethereum can enable. So we've seen lots of success of some artists that had published on FX and went to ETH releasing through curated collections. And I'm pretty sure There's also like artists that have less succeeded but have accumulated quite some name for themselves without getting crazy money on FX on the platforms that could also benefit from reaching to a new collector base on Ethereum. So I think it's also hard to speak in this kind of like bear market that we are because it's sort of maybe it's not yet the bottom, but if it's not the bottom, we are pretty damn close to it, you know, because it's We are seeing like less volume than ever before and it's pretty slow. But my guess is that it's going to slowly pick up. We are sort of going to, I don't know, people call it the enlightenment slop, but basically just people finding the actual pace that is like more sustainable for the future, rewarding projects that are more meaningful and that are here to leave a mark behind themselves. And as we are going to get into that, I think, you know, having the ability to launch on a blockchain that's more established is going to unlock options for artists, but it's not going to be for everyone because as you mentioned, it's a lot of risk. Like if you don't have an existing collector base, releasing on it is like pretty difficult. If it's a miss, you may have spent, I don't know, $2,000 just to release the project. $2,000 and nothing happens, you know, it's substantial. So I think that's why both are important, having the ability to build a name for yourself. But I think we can also be the playground for more experienced artists that want to reach to a wider collector base, but within the same ecosystem where they grew.

Speaker C: So there are a couple of other things that come to mind when it comes about pushing towards what both artists and collectors like. I think Ethereum, as you said, is one of the biggest things that you can do. But there's also been this continued conversation around the value of on-chain versus off-chain art. Is that something that you're looking to explore in the future?

Speaker B: Yes, very much. So it's already implemented. in the Tezos smart contract. It's just not been implemented on the UI so far, but we'll push it in the upcoming months. It will be pushed before we release to ETH on Tezos, and when we release the ETH integration, it will be an option on ETH as well. But yeah, I mean, this is like one of the other examples where you want to have a bigger team. It's because we have like open editions, we have on-chain code, we have a new marketplace contract with more features that have been developed on the smart contract side, but we are lacking resources actually ship it on the API, on the frontend, and where it's required. So on-chain code is definitely on the roadmap and is half implemented, let's put it like that.

Speaker A: I can't remember if we talked about it way back in our first episode with you, but, you know, obviously when you released fxhash, you made the decision to not do on-chain and to use IPFS as a way to host. And interestingly, every one of these Ethereum platforms that launched is very much leaning into like on-chain. And for whatever reason, that ecosystem feels very like maximalist in that way, even if maybe their developer base on ETH doesn't want people to be using the chain in that way and storing such large amounts of data. And there could be some potential vulnerabilities there that I'm starting to hear about. I think it's interesting to move Tezos to on-chain. I'm assuming when we expand to ETH, on-chain will be an option. But what do you feel about it personally? And why bring it to Tezos? I guess like, what do you think artists will gain? Or what do you think— that move signifies?

Speaker B: Yeah, so first of all, we have to understand that although on-chain in a maximalistic view makes the code lasting and forever being there, it doesn't ensure the fact that we will be capable of running the same code in 10,000 years, right? Because we'll still have to have same CPUs, we'll have the ability to run this code, we'll have to have interpreters that work on the CPUs and GPUs we'll have, or at least the computing environments that will be available in the future. So even though the code is on-chain, it's not sure that it will be executable in 100 years. So yeah, let's put that aside. But I just want to try bringing a little bit of the different levels to this maximalism, right? And other point is being on-chain comes with lots of constraints. So that's why I did not want to release on-chain code at first, because I know that lots of artists are writing with, you know, they have like 10,000 lines of code. Like if we look at Zancan's project, Garden Monoliths. I don't know how many lines there are, but there's like 10 files with 1,000 lines per file at least. And getting all of this on chain is, it's a lot. And it's a lot for the chain to maintain as well. So if we have an open ecosystem where there's like 27,000 projects published and all of them are on chain, it can be quite some data to keep there. And it's not very practical for artists. So this is like talking only about code, but also all the projects that want to leverage images, videos, and iterate over this with code. They cannot do this on-chain because it's like just not— I mean, they can, but it will cost thousands and thousands on ETH and maybe thousands of Tezos as well to store megabytes of data. It's putting like constraints at the cost, of course, of unlocking the ability for the code to be on-chain. And I think while it was opinionated by myself in the beginning, The platform and the open ecosystem we stand for shouldn't be opinionated, at least remain opinionated in what it provides to artists. But on the contrary, give them the option to decide whether they want it to be on-chain. And if it fits their vision, then it should be an option. Or if they don't care and want full creativity and will go with IPFS, it's also up to them. So my view on this hasn't really changed since the beginning. I just think that it's in good time that we finally release the on-chain code. But also you have to understand that having support for both on-chain code and IPFS at the infra level adds a lot of development because you have to support both. It's slightly different. There are edge cases, you know, so it's some extra work to make everything working. And it's also why we've been pushing this in the future.

Speaker C: All this talk around modularity and on-chain versus IPFS. The ability to pick if you wanna do redeemables or wanted to do a params project and so on and so forth, especially as new features come out. You know, I know that having this all available in a clean UI is paramount, but it does add a lot of complexity from an artist angle. Are there any things that you would like to try to do or have in mind for ways to simplify the process for artists, guiding them to make the correct choice or the best choice for them? Moving forward, we're a long way away from November 2021, where it was implement fxRand and you're good to go.

Speaker B: Yeah, listen, I'm 100% with you there. I'm myself getting lost in the UI sometimes, not to mention the extensive codebase that we have to support the various modules. I have a few ideas in mind and the team also has a few ideas that we'd like to implement to, you know, there's people that will not care about having all the features and just want the fxRand basic approach. There should be a way for them to go through 4 steps. In the project setup and don't go to the 11 steps that we have right now to cover all the cases. It's in the spirit of refining the UI/UX of the platform that I introduced just before that we also want to provide this modularity in the UI for having more simple experiences for newcomers. Because we don't want newcomers to come and see, oh, fx, redeemables, iteration numbers, code-driven parameters. It's a mess, right? So we want them to feel like it's easy to get into this ecosystem, but also have the ability to unlock way more creative potential. But it's tricky. It requires a lot of, again, resources. That's why we've been pushing that back and that we have this complex UI for now, because it's the only thing we could have implemented in the time that we allocated to it. But I'm 100% with you. It's super complex. to have all of these features coexisting next to each other. It will be our work in the upcoming months and years to smooth these out.

Speaker A: Can you imagine fxhash ever publishing, you know, basic guidelines for artists too around how to like put their work out and optimize for success? I know that one of the core things about fxhash is that there's really no curation, right? There's no forcing anyone to do anything a certain way. Certainly, there's got to be enough learnings over these last 18 months. Like, I can think of a lot of things that when artists reach out to us, you know, for advice on the side that we tell them, right, to help them structure their drops. Is there a future where fx hash kind of publishes broadly a list of like best practices that of course no one is bound to adhering to, but like for someone who's coming over and releasing for the first time who maybe doesn't know the community, there's a lot of pitfalls that they fall into, like, you know, Dutch auctions that are— that use a lot of reserves and then you know, you get to the lowest price and it doesn't mint out, or like doing a params project where you can accidentally make a duplicate or that has 50 different levers to it. And then people just go, I don't want to spend the time on this. Like, is that the type of thing that we could potentially see in the future?

Speaker B: Yeah, so there's like 2 levers, 2 directions there. And it's sort of the 2 colliding aspects of the platform that we have since the beginning, like the artistic aspect and the financial one. So what we want to do is sort of Put guidelines on the technical side. Make sure you know if there is a technical issue that may arise with people leveraging features in an improper way, then we should have guided them in a better way, and we should be putting measures in place to make sure it doesn't happen again. But when it comes to artists being new to the market and making some mistakes that we made all in the beginning, it's a bit hard for us to put guidelines there because. It's sort of like tapping into artistic freedom. And as an open platform, we shouldn't be the ones that put guidelines on how artists should be expressing themselves. I think the only place on the website where we have this kind of advice is for the reserve, where we give a tip on not putting a big— trying to keep some slots open so that the ecosystem doesn't completely come closed with only reserve list, things like that. So it's been in place since the release of the feature. And there's also a pricing guide because at some point we've seen like gas wars. So, well, it was a while ago, but I think you can remember, you know, when projects were priced at, I don't know, 5 Tezos and people would gas 50 Tezos to get a spot. And it's when we put this in place to make sure even newcomers can have this understanding of, oh, be careful, this is what can happen on the market. You may not want your collectors to face a problem where they cannot get a piece on primary because it wasn't like properly priced. And again, it's very the pricing is very tricky. So we tried to remain to only give a few advices for people to ask questions to themselves. But it's usually the the kind of path we try to follow. Don't go too much into giving advices that may restrain artistic creativity. And there is a fine line, right? Maybe at some point we'll figure out that it's best if We help a little bit more on some aspects for the overall well-being of the community. But you can very easily enter pitfalls if you do that, because then this advice is that you are telling people about how they should be releasing their work is going to become the norm. Was it the right way to do? Maybe it actually wasn't. And maybe you shaped the ecosystem in a way that it shouldn't have been shaped, right? So again, it's a fine line we have to navigate all the time. But we try to remain as unopinionated as possible if we can.

Speaker C: And that's always made a lot more difficult by the fact that the ecosystem is always changing. What is correct, air quotes, in one month or one week might be completely different from what would be recommended the next week or the next month. So it's really hard to nail down the number one best fit thing to do. So I also understand some reluctance there in order to provide some of that guidance. fx hash has really been the cornerstone of the market activity on Tezos as a blockchain overall. Are there any thoughts or concerns about how if things move over to Ethereum and much more traffic is on Ethereum, how that might impact Tezos from a financial perspective?

Speaker B: Yeah, so we thought a lot about this, right? And the thing is, if anything, like having the pieces on Tezos and on Ethereum side by side. We'll highlight the pros and the cons of every blockchain. And we've been in touch with, I don't know, like, I can't give you an exact number because there isn't one. I can't remember. But with so many Ethereum collectors that do not want to collect on Tezos, but have like vaguely recognized the quality of the work and don't really understand the technology or the features that Tezos provides. And we think that also, you know, getting more collectors on board because we now support Ethereum will get them to see the Tezos pieces next to the Ethereum pieces they are used to collect. And maybe at some point they will say, oh wait, actually it's faster on Tezos, it's easier. For one piece on Ethereum, I can collect 20 on Tezos. So maybe I'll just try a little bit. So our goal also is to raise the tide for the whole community because For ourselves, like the quality of the work that we see on the platform is either the same if not better than what we see on Ethereum, just because we have more creativity possible. And we do think that at some point there should be a reflection about not only the price but you know the esteem and the prestige that the artists that have succeeded on Tezos can receive widely. So yeah, we are not really scared about this. On the contrary, excited. I'm very much looking forward to seeing. What will be the effects of integrating Ethereum to the future of the existing Tezos species? Because I'm very confident in it being very positive for the Tezos species. But, you know, I can understand also the opposite argument. It's just I don't believe it. But in any case, I think first of all, we'll see. But I have a good feeling about this.

Speaker A: One thing I had kind of forgotten all of this is that we already have Ethereum payments as an option. on fx hash along with credit card, right? So I guess that actually does make it quite simple to put Tezos work next to Ethereum work and kind of mix and match the currencies and payment methods as long as the potential collector goes through the step of making a Tezos wallet and connecting it.

Speaker B: Yeah, exactly. And, you know, we received good feedback from the Ethereum payment integration. We already had in mind then that we would integrate Ethereum, but it was also a way for us to test the waters see what people thought before like going into more discussions about it. But yeah, ideally, you know, what we have in mind is you, if you're an ETH collector or if you're a Tezos collector, you can buy on any chain in the same way. I don't see why getting more Ethereum collectors on board and giving them the ability to collect on Tezos just next to what they collect on ETH is going to damage the Tezos pieces. I think it will be the contrary.

Speaker C: Everybody buy your RGBs and contras now. Is that the tip right there?

Speaker A: Yeah, while you still can.

Speaker B: I mean, yeah, maybe on the homepage we only feature Tezos species. Who knows?

Speaker C: Sure, let's do it. Well, thank you for answering that question so well. It definitely can go either way when it comes to how this might impact Tezos. But, you know, I think it's a wait and see and maintaining that open mind and an active roadmap. Is there anything else, Will, that you would like to get into or should we start moving towards wrapping this up?

Speaker A: Definitely need to move towards wrapping it up, but a couple of things. So you mentioned earlier, Ciphrd, the market contract that is kind of ready to go, but it's just not implemented yet and it needs, you know, needs this additional push of developers to like get it out. Are we going to finally see things like rebates on auctions and Dutch auctions and a lot of the new, a lot of the features that we've seen on other platforms, right? that are out there, like, are those going to finally come to fx hash?

Speaker B: Yes.

Speaker A: Hell yeah. Okay, that's so exciting. I feel like we've seen in the bear market especially the value of those methods of selling art like really work to help actually bring prices up in some cases or to encourage minting out, which has been an issue for a lot of artists in the last 6 months.

Speaker B: Yeah, totally agree. Like, the Dutch auction format that we have right now is really not optimized, especially in a bear market, because Yeah, it doesn't work.

Speaker A: Related to the bear market, the downturn we've had, the funding, the future. This is kind of an awkward question, but I think an important one to talk about. You know, obviously you're getting this influx of funding, we're going to bring more people on, we're going to grow, we're going to move into Ethereum. There's a plan, probably an 18-month or longer plan that we're going to learn about slowly over the remainder of the year. But what is the vision for the next bear market? We're getting through this one, we're getting the funding, we're hoping things are gonna turn up, fees will be back, build a treasury. But it seems inevitably in crypto, things turn down again. We've never had this kind of permanent up moment, right, in the history of it. So how do we build the platform out and prevent like a similar situation from happening? Like, do you think it's about marketing and getting more people interested in generative art in general? Do you think it's just about strategizing? and saving money to get through the inevitable bad times? Or is it going to mean in 3 years, 4 years or so, looking at another round of funding?

Speaker B: I would say it comes from first and foremost unlocking new use cases for people as well as getting new people on board. But I think they go end to end. That's why I've been talking a lot about generative algorithms applied to other fields, because I think this is how we can get other people interested into this. The way I see the future is maybe, you know, you have a platform that's built on top of us where people can move a few sliders and it's going to change the way their items are going to be designed or their furnitures are going to be designed. And maybe also how their clothes are going to be designed. And on the website, they have this ability to, you know, by co-creating with an artist and with engineers that have designed the algorithm, design the product of their dream and get it shipped to their house in a few weeks. This is the vision that we are trying to build long term. This is one of the use cases that we have in mind, maybe one of the biggest. But, you know, this is like providing value that's outside of, you know, digital art and speculation, where of course when the blockchain is tanking, it's hard to maintain value because then everyone is scared. Investors are a bit worried. Collectors have more issues to invest. But if there are like side businesses that are built on top of us leveraging our toolings, to unlock use cases in the real world. When the new bear market comes on crypto or in the real world, if we have the ability to generate revenues from utility streams, then it can help supporting the artistic streams, what we consider our core of the platform and what we want to keep shipping and building. But, you know, we are trying to make sure that we diversify a little bit in the right way to keep iterating on our tools for artists, but also making sure that we will be capable of supporting them more sustainably and creating also better experiences with them. Because we've not tackled this, but one of the reasons that we wanted to raise as well is we've been putting live shows a lot, and every time, you know, we had to partner with people because we didn't have money, or we have to take lots of cuts to make sure we could just make it, and it was cutting on the quality of the presentations. for the artist. And this is not what we want. We want to build state-of-the-art digital experiences where code is being leveraged in novel ways through the usage of our tools and not necessarily our tools, but this is what we do now. And this requires money as well. So the goal long term is to have various revenue streams to support the artistic community in the best possible way.

Speaker A: All right. I love it. I'm excited for that. Trinity, what do you think? Is there any quick questions that come to mind that we can use to wrap the episode or start wrapping it up?

Speaker C: Well, I think that you've already given us a wealth of information and knowledge and just so many things to kind of unpack as we move into the next 6 to 10 months, as you said. Is there anything left to be said, to be honest? Is there anything that you might want to say to anybody who's lost some engagement during the bear market? Ways that they might become more interested? What are some opportunities for them to get re-engaged and be excited about moving forward that you haven't already put onto the table?

Speaker B: Actually, like I already talked about this, it's the code-driven params. The hackathon that we made around this ability for artists to have custom minting interface. I'm so, so excited about it because we've never seen such kind of project anywhere, at least in the blockchain space. So I'm still looking for one of these projects to pop in in the feed. But I'm pretty sure that a few of them, you know, will have left a mark saying, oh, okay, this was like really a new way of creating. We can get, you know, collectors or members of the community just interested in exploring this new wave of projects. Imagine like it's unlocking like 25% of what can be done with generative art that wasn't accessible. It's a big chunk and it's— I'm so excited about it, not gonna lie. I wish I had time to build a project for this.

Speaker A: Well, maybe you'll have time once you get some of these new developers on board.

Speaker B: Yeah, man, I'll have time in a few years.

Speaker A: I know everyone would love a new Cyphered release. It feels like it's been a very long time now. It's got to be almost a year, right?

Speaker B: More. It's been a year and 4 months, I think.

Speaker C: Wow.

Speaker B: I think I've created like for 3 days in this year and a half. It's exhausting sometimes.

Speaker A: Well, I mean, that feels like a good place to And the episode, if you feel good, Ciphrd, on a nice note of optimism and things to look forward to. And just, it's going to be really exciting covering this hackathon around params the next few weeks as well.

Speaker B: Yeah, let's see. Hopefully amazing projects will come.

Speaker A: Really looking forward to everything that you've outlined for us today. Me in particular, some of the market stuff. I'd love to see some more of those features coming out, but obviously the ETH move and the on-chain stuff. I mean, there's so much to look forward to, and I think we need that excitement. Right now, for sure. Really looking forward to getting this episode out to everybody.

Speaker B: Thanks a lot for inviting, and it was a tough episode. Like, we talked about lots of stuff.

Speaker A: But it's good. I mean, also this transparency, I think, is really appreciated by the community, right? To know what's going on and to get it from you. And I know your time is valuable, so we really appreciate it.

Speaker B: Thank you guys for the support and for doing what you guys are doing. I know it's been hard for us to support you more than, you know, giving some time once in a while. But it's also to help supporting our ecosystems that, you know, we want to have more financial power. We'll get on that very shortly, but thanks for all the efforts that you've been doing. It's been super great to have you supporting us as well.

Speaker A: We still love fx hash. All right, well, that is it for this one. I think that was Ciphrd, the first 3-time interview guest, and I'm sure a future 4th interview guest, maybe by the end of the year, who knows. Always a pleasure to have you on, talk more about FXHash, where we are, where we're going, and to get your candid thoughts on the ecosystem in general. Hope y'all enjoyed this episode. We'll be back again soon with another one. Later, everyone.

Speaker B: Bye. Always blessed. We're waiting. It'd be nice. The rail of the week. We're waiting, always. We're waiting to be tried.