Speaker A: All right. Hello and welcome everyone to a very special interview episode of Waiting to Be Signed, the rare 2-guest appearance. We've got Kosi and Cypher from the fxhash team. Cypher, of course, you all know. He's the founder and CEO. And Cosimo from Discord, you probably know, head of strategy, recent immigrant to France. Congratulations on making it over there. Trinity's here as well. Hi, Trinity.

Speaker B: Hello.

Speaker A: And we're super excited, excited enough that we recorded a new episode last week. So much has been going on. So let's just kick it off by asking both of you what's been up the past 5 or 6 months with the FXHash team. You know, you've got the AI agent, there's been a ton of talk about the new platform and the token launch and art tokens. So as best either of you can, like, catch us up on how everything's been the last few months.

Speaker C: Yeah, sure. So first of all, it feels so good to be back here. It's been a while and, you know, it's always a pleasure for me to be there. Yeah, I mean, if we had to say just one word for what we have been doing for the last 6 months, I will say it's we've been cooking. So as you may be aware, last December we announced launching the token with some initial proposals for a protocol. But we weren't completely satisfied with the protocol we proposed. And as we've been talking with artists in the meantime, with collectors, we saw a big opportunity for refining the protocol into something that can bring a substantial change in the economics and the dynamics of generative art and more generally NFTs. And as we saw this opportunity shaping up, as we were discussing more refining the protocol, We thought that we had to take the due time to properly, first of all, design it and then implement it in a way that will be better than what we used to implement with our complex systems in the past. It's been, as you may be aware, kind of a signature move to release a cool system in a way too complicated way. So this time we still have a complex system, that's for sure. But we really put a lot of focus into making it super simple on the product side of things for users. So that they can really experience it with the vision that we have in the background. We've also ventured a little bit in some other areas, including NFT XBT. I feel there's like a lot to talk about the token and OpenForm in itself, so I won't like develop too much about it. But yeah, if you have any questions in the end, feel free, we can develop a bit on that.

Speaker B: So just to kind of backtrack, back when you originally announced the fxhash token, not the one that was announced back in 2022, The one that you came to us over the winter, it was really the 2 types of tokens. There was the fx hash token and then the artist token, and that was really the main interplay. Let's go into like the main mechanics of what's been happening with the release of OpenForm Art. You already talked about some of the interest factors in terms of needing to shift to like a, perhaps a more engaging and fun model. What were some of the other things that came to light? What was some of the original feedback that you heard from the community and from artists? Let's maybe just do a quick run-through of where things are now.

Speaker D: I can speak to a quick point, Ciphrd. One of our biggest motivators, if you'd like to call it that, is we were noticing a lot of the same sort of repetition of outcomes for generative art drops. Like, as we were kind of, as a space, delving deeper and deeper into what was at first like, is this just a market slowdown? And I was like, no, this is a full-on bear market. And with a slowdown in artworks that were being released, with the slowdown in collectors that were coming into the space and participating, it became more and more evident that when artists would do a drop, you know, open a collection, there was like a really limited window for it to succeed. And this was kind of always the case, but it became more evident when there was kind of less participation overall. And so less artists were able to succeed in this like really condensed span of time, which is essentially like right when the collection opens, right? So it kind of made us start thinking that collections, in a way, in the current setup, they end at the drop. The mint happens and it's kind of over. And, you know, on socials it's fun for a little bit, everybody gets a post in iteration, but it quickly just kind of peters out, even for really successful collections, and then they're almost just like forgotten. So that really got us thinking about the lifespan of artworks. Some collections have enjoyed like really long lifespans. Like, think about the classics, right? The ones everyone knows— Ringers and Fidenzas— but then also on fx hash, the Dragons and the Gardens and so on. And so those collections are spanning time, but other really high-quality collections that were successful are not. So with OpenForm, we really wanted to think through, like, how can we kind of, like, invert that so that when a collection opens, when the mint happens, that's the start of the collection, not the end of the collection. And so the mechanics that we've introduced that are enabled by art coins allow a really deep level of engagement and interaction with artwork that will span time because there isn't a cap on what that interaction might look like or how that engagement— like what the time period is for that engagement per se, right? And for us, we're like collectors and artists ourselves. We really wanted to find a system that's different than what there is that introduces fun. But like, we also understand there's no going back to 2021, right? Like, we can't just keep pining for the old days. We need to look ahead and bring innovation. And we think that's what we've done with OpenForm.

Speaker C: That's very well said. To that, I would add to, you know, there was this contrast between collections sort of end on day 1. And algorithms can produce an infinite amount of outputs with an infinite amount of inputs as well. And so we thought about this contrast and realized that it's such a shame not to leverage algorithms as they can be. So ever generating outputs based on social inputs, essentially. And we need to build in that direction. So that's sort of where the premise is of thinking about OpenForm. And as a quick reminder, OpenForm is about—

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker C: You mint, you can reroll, and you can evolve your iterations. So as you evolve, you keep the traits of the NFT you have, but you get some new traits that are either mutated from the parent or that are some new ones introduced based on how deep you are in the lineage. It's really going to be up to artists to leverage this whole new paradigm. But yeah, super excited to see the social dynamics that will emerge from it because it's really never been done yet in this way.

Speaker A: Yeah, I think it's such an interesting idea to tackle that problem. You know, I think during that whole bear market that we've been in, and are still in to some degree, we've seen these spurts of like interest amongst the community of like posting a piece of art a day for, you know, a month type challenge that we did in Tender, right? Like ways to go back, appreciate your collection, share it, get it out there and try to remind everyone there's like all this great stuff and some of it might be really affordable now or Or even if it's not, it's just worth appreciating going back and taking a look at. Because like often we would have a release come out, it mints out in one day, and the only way it then kind of exists beyond that is in the sales feed. But when there's no secondary market action, you're just not seeing it as much. To have now a way to release a project that's really just, there's a start date, but no end date to it. And there's never that pressure of, I missed it. There's always gonna be the option to go in, get some of the art token associated with that. And mint, you know, the price might be higher or lower depending on when you do it, but there's always gonna be the opportunity to interact, which is really interesting. I really like that idea. So who came up with the term OpenForm, by the way?

Speaker D: It was Ola, wasn't it? I'm pretty sure it was Ola, our head of program. I can't say for sure, but my memory seems to say that's who coined it when we were— and not coin it in like the content coin sense.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker D: But like, well, I think we were just, we were in a team meeting. We were trying, it was like we were really trying to find a name for it. And we were thinking about open editions and long form, and she just kind of dropped it, and we were like, that's got to be it.

Speaker B: Nice.

Speaker A: We've been seeing a lot of chat in the last week or so in fxhash Discord about this. You know, you guys are in France, you've made sure you're all buttoned up on the fxhash side to launch a token like this and conform with equities laws there. But a lot of people who use fxhash are international. So like, one, can you talk a little bit about, for anyone who maybe missed the space and stuff that you did earlier this week. When it comes to claiming and tax concerns and stuff, like what you've done to make sure that the tax burden for people claiming is low to nonexistent. And then also like for an artist in the US or an artist in Australia or somewhere else that's not France, have you done any kind of research into the laws or regulations that they might run up against releasing an art token like this?

Speaker C: So we haven't looked into all countries, of course, there's too many, but the main ones. And we also aligned on the best market practices on that front. So there's going to be 2 timestamps, essentially. The first one is that we are going to open the claim for everyone, but the token won't be tradable on the open market. And then a second timestamp, roughly 2 weeks after, where we open the token on the open market and also release OpenForm and the Art Coins Launchpad. We do this because if you claim a token that isn't tradable on the open market, it doesn't have a price. There isn't a tax event associated with it in most countries. So we followed this practice because it allows people to claim without there being any kind of tax burden.

Speaker D: Specifically, I heard a lot of concern, you know, like, hey, I've received airdrops to my wallet that I didn't actually want, and I'm afraid of the tax implications of simply receiving an airdrop. And that's a pretty big motivator for us to go the claim drop route. So that, you know, you have to consciously choose to claim the token if you want it, but it's not just going to get served up to you and you're going to end up with a token that you didn't ask for and that you think might have negative tax implications for you.

Speaker A: And what about people looking to launch art tokens, right? Like even us, right, as 2 Americans, like if we did a WTBS token—

Speaker B: When we do a WTBS token.

Speaker A: Yeah, when we do a WTBS token to mark our 4th anniversary or whenever, like Is there anything, you know, Ciphrd, you said you guys did look into some of the laws for major countries. I'm assuming the US falls into that category. So obviously, we've seen meme coins go unpunished right now. But what we're doing here is a little bit different. I'm not asking you to give legal advice necessarily. But like, is there any kind of anything that you can say to people who are worried, right? Because I think for the longest time in the US, we've been told you can't do anything like this. And there might be some fear for people who want to participate in the platform, but don't want to like get themselves caught up in a bunch of laws they don't understand.

Speaker C: That's a very good question. And there is a key element to understand is that as someone that's going to release an art coin on the platform, you're not going to sell the coin yourself. It's going to go through a bonding curve mechanism. So it's going to be going through a deterministic price. But essentially, you're not selling the coin yourself. So you're not the one liable for selling it. That's the key element that makes it like a really friendly environment for releasing a coin yourself.

Speaker B: A part of the coin release process is that artists get the chance to reserve allocation of that for themselves, presumably as like an untaxed event, free price type of thing. Is that another part of the consideration for creating that overall user flow?

Speaker C: It's not going to be completely free, your coin initially. You have to buy it at the best possible price that's ever going to be, which is right at the beginning of the bonding curve. So this is a way to ensure that yourself first of all buying the coin and you're not going to be selling it yourself. And it ensures that it's a fair market for everyone that's going to participate. So it's been known for a long time that there's like all of these scams happening on crypto where you would like reserve 50% of your supply for free and then you sell it and suddenly you start dropping everything. Here it's not really possible except if you buy yourself a lot of the supply initially. So it's sort of a little security that makes it more fair and more secure for all of the participants in the market. But it's gonna be very advantageous for you to buy it as you launch it, because it's not gonna cost a lot, and it's the best time to do it. So we actually recommend to do so.

Speaker A: I think both of us probably have a lot of questions. We've never, you know, we were joking in the episode we recorded that we have to learn about DeFi now. We've avoided it for all these years as an art podcast. I want to come back to that, but before we do, my understanding is that FXH and the art tokens are going to be done on Base, the Ethereum L2. Given obviously the platform's history with Tezos, and even now Tezos has like Etherlink as their EVM-compatible L2, was there ever any consideration in using Etherlink or trying to incorporate some of the history of Tezos into this project in any way? Or is Tezos just kind of done at this point? Like, people are still free to use it, obviously the contracts exist, but— What is your kind of sentiment, both of you, about that chain now?

Speaker D: Sentiment-wise, I don't feel personally one way or the other about Tezos itself. I feel grateful about the entire culture that sprang up there because it's been game-changing. I mean, yeah, of course there's deep, deep Ethereum on-chain digital art culture, generative art culture, all of it, but there is nothing anywhere like what sprang up on Tezos, you know. So I feel like We've been lucky to add our name to that bit of history there, and not in a small way, which is pretty special for us as a platform. And also, you know, just us as collectors, right? Like, we've all been clued into Tezos for a long time and how great the art is there. So there are a lot of opinions out there about how the foundation is using their resources and the direction of the chain overall. I don't have much to say there other than that, you know, I'm just happy about what has happened on the chain itself over the past few years because it's gotten us to where we are today. And I mean, this podcast itself wouldn't be happening without it. So I think that's pretty sick. In terms of why we chose Base, it's, you know, rather simple, right? Like, we really kind of just were looking at our options for chains, and given the heavy reliance on various DeFi components, we really needed to seek out an ideal balance of security and ecosystem access with lower transaction fees. And, you know, Ethereum just offers that, and Base gives us the lower transaction costs for a really high-scale system, which is what fxhash protocol and OpenForm require, right? It depends on a lot of transacting. And so when looking at an EVM environment, I mean, we are able to have the security that we need for artists, collectors, everybody's going to be using the, um, the tooling. And the really approachable mint fees and transaction costs.

Speaker B: I think I saw it mentioned somewhere that Base will be marketing the fxhash token as well. Did you have a lot of collaboration with them in the creation of the new system? And what's it been like to work with them versus interacting or perhaps not interacting with the Tezos Foundation in building new product?

Speaker C: That's an interesting question. So when it comes to working together specifically for developing the token launchpad, And the FX hash protocol, we actually didn't collaborate together at least on a technical standpoint. That's also for a good reason. Like we don't really need help on that front because it's TVM. So it's like there's lots of developers, there's lots of tooling, and it's it's rather straightforward. It's interesting to discuss also about the different dynamics working with the foundation that is sort of much more wouldn't say like an old-fashioned way of dealing with us, but. You know, we have to go through like more protocols. We have to make an actual presentation of what we have in mind. And, you know, when you're in a space that moves really, really fast, we've had to some extent like an easier way of working with BASE, which is we just basically quickly introduce the idea and they don't have, you know, to go through the foundation process, etc. And we can iterate much more quickly, let it be on the marketing standpoint or, you know, on bouncing off ideas and see how they can support on which level. I wouldn't say that Base is perfect by no means. I just would say, you know, that when you're thinking about what environment provides the best prospects for the artist, first on the medium term, but also on the long term, Base was definitely like a really good candidate because as you may be aware, it's growing fast. It has a great potential of targeting like end users in the future through Coinbase. So it was like definitely a key argument for us in providing the best solution for artists. Not ideal, but the best that was accessible.

Speaker D: Something that I wanted to bring up that has come up in our conversations as a team sometimes is like, you know, we've heard like there's no generative art ecosystem really on Base, you know, Tezos already has that going for it. So stay on Tezos. But prior to the entire sort of like NFT art revolution that's happened on Tezos, I mean, Around the time of the Tezos ICO, which I remember, nobody would have ever called it out as like, hey, this is where there's going to be truly sick crypto art culture happening. You know, it was kind of like a Fed chain at the time because it raised tons and tons of money. So I don't think people were necessarily looking at that being like, oh, that chain, that's going to be the Berlin art scene on the blockchain. Like, not at all. Quite the opposite. And, you know, you kind of hear the same types of things being said about Base these days. the connection to Coinbase and FedChain and stuff like this. And it's like, okay, yeah, but also the seeds are there. There are users, there's liquidity, there are NFTs happening, and nobody has really quite cracked the code yet on like how to make the NFT scene feel more organic, let's say, and like have like actual just sort of like natural traction, right? And I would bet on us for that, you know? And I think in the same way that some platformists came onto Tezos and were like, hey, yeah, this looks like a banker chain, but like we're going to turn it into something else. I think the same thing is totally possible with Base. And if I was going to bet on someone to do that, I would definitely bet on us.

Speaker A: So right on. Well, let's talk about some art because, Ciphrd, you're going to have the first release. We're recording this on the 16th. Claiming is going to start next week, May 20-something. And then a few weeks after that, so early June, we'll have the first art token. Is it going to be $Ciphrd. So I guess that's the first question. Is it like going to be an art token or an artist token for you? And can you talk a bit about designing this release, right? Because one of the really cool things about these open form projects is the ability to lock a piece in and then it becomes not only the NFT itself, but a seed for generations after that, that the original collector or any other collector can latch onto and spawn new generations off of. So I imagine you're designing something in the code of the project, right, that takes advantage of that and can really showcase that. So what's your token going to look like? And then speak a little bit about, from a code standpoint, from an art standpoint, like what you've done to really show off what OpenForm is here.

Speaker C: Yeah, so let me start by saying that I've been through many, many rabbit holes with this project, through a custom Bytecode implementation to Petrinet to various rendering shenanigans, but it's been a good journey. Let me get back a little on art coins and the different kinds of art coins we expect to have on the platform. So first of all, there's a single project per coin. So the coin is dedicated to one single project. And then there's the case where a coin can host multiple projects. For my practice, I think the latter is going to be more interesting because I do lots of works around some big thematics. And so while I haven't yet found a name for the coin, I know that it's going to be about evolutionary genetics. So interestingly, this piece evolved along OpenForm, and the evolving aspect of OpenForm came from a need on my project because I was thinking— so initially there wasn't evolving, there was only rerolling as a principle. I was starting to design my project. The idea is that there's some cells that are connected to together by strings, by lines, and they can exchange data together through this line. And they can process data sort of arbitrarily. And they process data by using some kind of, you can think of little brain that is defined by their DNA. And so I was thinking, hey, it's nice, we can have random DNA every time so we can have completely random outputs. And then I was thinking, but that's quite a shame because I would like this project to be explored like life explores evolution, right? I would like people to basically pick what they like. And if they like it, you know, they can tweak only some of the parameters, maybe randomly, and it gives them some offspring. And then from this, you know, they can select the best offspring just like evolution is doing, but it's doing this by natural selection process. So as this idea came, I was thinking, okay, then wait, we can actually have evolving as a key mechanism for all the artists because while it's useful for this particular project, it can also be extended to any gen art algorithm, not exclusively a bio algorithm. That's sort of how it started to shape together. And when it comes to some of the specifics about the code itself, you can look into Thomas Frey's Tierra.

Speaker B: Okay.

Speaker C: as an inspiration for a lot of the ideas that I had. Terra is a computer simulation where there is some DNA that is manifested as some bytecode, so some computer instructions. And you have little cells, little organisms that are put on the CPU. And these instructions, they define how the organism interacts with its surroundings. And so it has different capabilities like reading on the left side, reading on the right. Or creating children, for instance. And what's super interesting is that the simulation randomizes the bytes on the CPU and organisms start to form and then natural selection kicks in. The best organisms are those that remain and they compete for the CPU resources. And so I was inspired by this idea of having some bytecode that defines how the organism interacts with its surrounding. And the principle of mutating the bytecode as you would mutate DNA, as nature is mutating DNA when we give birth. And I started to build around this concept. So I was thinking, okay, what can the bytecode allow? Maybe it allows the cells to get the value of one chemical in the environment. Maybe it gives the ability to contract muscles, etc. And so I designed like all the project around these small commands that can be activated by this small brains. And when you mint an iteration initially, it's kind of randomized. So you may have something that's a little bit dysfunctional. And then you may reroll until you get like some property that starts to work a little bit. And when you find something that works, you know, then you can evolve this one until randomness, just like in nature, starts producing some coherent behavior on the organism. That's speaking about one of the aspects of the project. We could also speak about the growth of these organisms, the rendering, etc. But I think this is like the aspect that's the most compelling when it comes to the evolutionary characteristics of OpenForm.

Speaker B: So clearly you're structuring your project to really lean into and to take advantage of all of the evolution mechanics that are going to be inherent in FX. H, or I guess the open form system. Really excited to see that and also to kind of see the different levels of variation between the different generations of evolution and just kind of seeing like once you get 10 generations out, like what does it start to look like? I am super excited for that. But you know, this also does introduce like an interesting new way for artists to kind of build their art that is very outside of the standard p5.js, let's just slap some parameters and some rarities into this from a couple of different ways. One is constructing their project to take advantage of the system. And the other one is really leaning into the false rarity system, I would say, where it's really similar to what we had in params, like the collector base kind of figuring out what is rare or not. Interested to have your thoughts on that, or just any information around You know, what do artists need to do in order to really take advantage of this? Or can they just release their p5 sketch similar as they would on the traditional platform?

Speaker C: First of all, I think any algorithm can leverage OpenForm in some way. It's not like you need to go in a specific direction with specific algorithms to leverage OpenForm. You can use anything that currently exists. So initially with LongForm, you get a random number and you leverage this number in your algorithm. So now in this case, it's going to be you get a series of random numbers. How do you adapt the algorithm to leverage this series of numbers? I've identified yet 2 categories of practices, I will say, with OpenForm. The first one is by mutation. So what I'm doing with my project. So essentially you generate some parameters initially, and with each new generation, you mutate some of these parameters. And mutations can be practically anything. And the other is like more of a deterministic approach in a way where the depth, so like how many generations there are in the lineage, is a parameter of the algorithm in itself. So for instance, you can think of generation 1, there is 1 square, then generation 2, it gets divided in 2, et cetera. So by generation 16, you have like a—

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker C: Well, if you divide by 2, it's like 2^16. But say you have many squares, right? So that's one way of doing it.

Speaker A: I've seen some of the WIPs you've been sharing, Ciphrd, and it reminds me visually, from how you describe it, I think the product's very different, but visually reminds me of some of like the earlier stuff that Jeff Ventrella put on fxhash, actually, like the visual style of it. And I know that that's an artist that you were really excited about when he was releasing way back in the earliest days of fxhash. Very excited to collect that for sure. Let's talk about then the market side. You know, you've said that you think you're going to do a token that will be linked to this project, obviously, but then multiple projects in the future. For those of us who have never done DeFi stuff, we've used this term already a couple times, but what is a bonding curve? How does it work? A lot of the fxhash team are in and out of Discord trying to answer some of this stuff too.

Speaker B: Like, what is graduation?

Speaker A: Yeah. What happens when it doesn't graduate out of the bonding curve? Like, how hard is it going to be for a project to graduate out of a bonding curve? You know, I think when you look at like probably the one that you guys have most closely modeled this off of is Virtuals, right? Is it half a million dollars or a million dollars to get out of the bonding curve there? I don't even know, but that seems like a lot. That would be like a lot of money, a lot of liquidity to get a single art project up and running, right? Like where for a smaller artist, like getting something like $10,000 or $20,000 out of a project would be extraordinary. So can you kind of describe to us like what that is going to look like for someone who's never participated before? And then let's talk about strategy and stuff after that.

Speaker C: I'm gonna intro the answer by saying that we designed the product in a way where if you're not interested into this price token dynamics, You don't really have to be exposed to it. So you can wait until the project is available for minting, for just clicking on the mint button, and it automatically buys the coin in the background. You don't have to think at all about, you know, how to best leverage the coin market, etc. Similarly, as an artist, we are designing the token launchpad so that you're only focusing on it from an artistic standpoint. I don't have to price it specifically, to think about the allocation, etc. We basically provide the best defaults for everyone. And we have like some artist fields such as the number of ideal editions that you may want for this. And then we basically compute the coin characteristics based on this artist's preferences. That's on one end. You know, we want people to know that you don't have to get interested into these dynamics. If you're not interested in those, you can only focus on the artistic side of things. Though there is an opportunity for anyone that wants to leverage the system in the best possible way to actually dig into these coin dynamics. About these coin dynamics. So when an artist releases the project, it goes through a bonding curve. So very quickly, the price is mathematically defined. So as more people are buying the coin, The price increases at a predefined rate, and people can sell at a specific price at any time. And the purpose of the bonding curve is to ensure that when the coin first entered the market, it's not completely volatile, and people can buy at some specific prices and don't immediately have a loss because everything crashes. And so once the coin reaches a certain threshold, which we define. Generally as the graduation, then it enters the free market with on one side some amount of coin that hasn't been sold and the other the money that people put in to buy it through the bonding curve. And it creates an initial pairing that provides some initial backing. So we thought extensively about the amounts here. We are not actually 100% defined on the precise value, but we are thinking in between the $10,000 to $20,000 range in terms of price point. So we don't want the bonding curve to be too hard to get through because the purpose is really not to be a barrier for the artist, just secure the market participants in a way initially. So it's gonna be like an amount that's relatively reachable for the majority of artists. Now, if as an artist you're not interested in going through the whole bonding curve or the bonding curve at all, you always have the option at any point in time to let the token enter the free market with the current liquidity that's being put in the curve. So you don't have to wait till the graduation.

Speaker B: I guess I have 2 follow-ups. One is the relationship between the artist token and the minting of the art. Is that something where over time, the number of coins required to mint is changing? If you have 10 artist coins, and you bought those early, Let's say it's 5 years from now, those coins are worth a lot right now. Can you still get the same amount of art as you would if you were early on in the game? What are like the pricing dynamics like that? Is it just reflected in real-world dollars or in the artist coin perspective?

Speaker C: So it's always in terms of artist coins. If you initially bought 10 artist coins and the price was defined by the artist as you need 1 coin to buy 1 iteration of the artwork. Then you will always be able to do so in perpetuity. Now what's interesting is as more iterations are being minted, getting a single individual coin where basically what's enough for minting is going to be harder and harder because the supply is going to decrease. So the system I think is pretty interesting in terms of the relation between the coin and the generative art project because they go in hand together as the supply of One increases, the supply of the other increases, and the supply of the coin sort of defines the price of the artwork based on the demand, right? So the system was designed to provide some price discovery and equilibrium over time based on the demand. That's gonna free artists thinking about pricing their project or finding the best market price because it will auto-adjust essentially.

Speaker B: Okay, so this is the ultimate ecosystem in which one art coin equals one art coin, as long as it's the same art coin. All right. Excellent to know.

Speaker D: Finally, finally, one coin equals one coin. About time.

Speaker B: So that was the question around the pricing of art and just the overall accessibility of people. I think what we're hearing is that it pays to be early, just as it pays to be early everywhere. The other side is getting back to Will's question around DeFi and the existence of liquidity pools that people can participate in. I don't think I've seen much official documentation out there on the liquidity pools. Like just looking through Discord, I'm seeing things around 2-year locks, that sort of thing. I guess, what is the process for people to engage in these liquidity pools? What are they pooling with? Like, is it fx hash token? Is it with ETH? Is it with USDC? What is the purpose for the locking and what are some of the benefits for people to engage with these liquidity pools? And what are some of the downsides? I'm thinking about things like impermanent loss. Which back in my very tragic DeFi days, it was always a concern.

Speaker C: Well, funnily enough, in this case, there's never quite gonna be like a permanent loss because you can always get an art NFT in the end, right? So even if the price tanks to zero, you still have the same number of NFTs that were initially promised. So it's not always gonna be a permanent loss. You know, it's not quite there. When it comes to the liquidity pools, We'll share more of these details into the docs. I will only cover the basics here, but there is a first liquidity pool between ETH and FX hash, the main token, and FXH token is used to buy art coins. Each art coin will have an initial liquidity pool between the art coin and the FXH token. There is a fee on every transaction made on this pool that is given to the artists, that the artist perceives. This is a way to basically turn the speculative aspect of the coin and all of the speculation that can happen there to become a revenue stream for the artists, which is going to be kind of a new model. It's hard to predict how good it's going to be for artists, but based on the research we made, PumpFun, but also like Zora with their new coins, it's an interesting prospect, that's for sure. If Zancan, for instance, had released a coin attached to Garden Monoliths and to a few of his other projects, I think we can say with confidence that it would have become an interesting revenue stream for him had it been able to capture some of the trading fees happening on the coin. So, you know, it's going to be interesting to monitor that and how well it plays for artists, but we are very confident into it being a better way of generating revenues than royalties on the secondary market.

Speaker A: Essentially, it kind of reminds me of right around the time that royalties were getting annihilated on ETH 2 or so years ago, some of those platforms that popped up. There was some discussion amongst artists around reserving more of your mints from a limited set of release, right? Like, so if you're going to do 500, hold 50 for yourself. That sounds like similar, right? Like, and that's your future liquidity in the project. But I think a lot of artists were a little uncomfortable with this idea of like, holding their art back, you know, right? Because then the second they sell it, it's kind of indicating to the collectors that maybe they feel the work is overvalued, or it could create like difficult optics for an artist to like hold a certain number back and then start dumping them later, like, and cash in that liquidity, so to say, right? But here with the tokenomics of it, it seems to soften that, at least to me. There's a lot of reasons an artist might want to like bring the price of the token down, right? If the token is really getting really overvalued, or not necessarily even overvalued, but just getting expensive, it's kind of like doing a stock split, right? Like, I've reserved 15% for myself, I'm going to put 5% back into the liquidity pool because I'm about to release another project that's going to utilize this token. And I would like to see, you know, more collectors be able to get in. I mean, there's other ways they could do it too, right? They could just price in smaller fractions, but I think it's going to be like a more elegant solution, like you were saying here, for artists to hold bets on themselves without having to like retain the work and go through the maybe difficulty of having to sell like a discrete NFT versus just being able to engage in the liquidity pool from time to time.

Speaker D: You raise a really important point here, especially— I mean, I remember this, like, it was really trending there for a second where the recommendation was certainly like hold back a pretty significant amount of the art supply itself. And it's a little bit awkward as a strategy, and I can imagine it also being sort of like a bit of a dilemma creatively for artists because you want your art to distribute, right? Like, you want it to be diversified amongst as many collectors as possible, and like, you want it to reach people. So it's kind of strange to then kind of be backed into a corner where you feel like in order to be compensated properly, you actually need to hold the art back itself and put it under the couch or something for a rainy day. And that's like one of the key places where we feel like Bringing finance and art together in a more explicit way through the usage of coins was a really elegant solution, and it does kind of like create the sort of alignment between artists and collectors that I think NFTs originally promised to do. The difference here is that we now have a financial asset that is explicitly used for getting paid, for making payments, for use, right? That is separated from the art itself. So like one is the financial instrument, the other is the art, and you know, of the reasons why we've been saying recently, like, you can get as deep into the finance side of it as you want as an artist, but at the same time, you can completely abstract it away and just really focus on the art itself because the finance side has its whole own— it's like very sharply defined from the art itself if you want it to be. Everything else is interlinked on the platform. You don't have to worry about it if you don't want.

Speaker B: I think it's so interesting, this play between art and finance. And I think that a lot of the hopes for like this new system is kind of opening up the audience for fx hash to people who are more on like the crypto side of things rather than just the diehard art side of things that would be Will and I. Have you thought about, or have you done any projections around like that interplay between people who are there for the coin sector? Yeah. Speculation side, and how it might have impacts on the people who are trying to mint or evolve into great works of art from an artist. I'm really curious to see how that kind of gamification and/or game theory really plays out once things are out there in the wild.

Speaker C: We have run some estimations, right, on what if there is a lot of speculation on the coin, which was one of the motivations to introduce the artist fee, by the way, so that, you know, even if there is too much speculation, they get some compensation for it. But it's hard to model these things because there's so many complex components interacting together at the same time. So I think the best way will be to see how people interact with the coin, let it be on the trading side of things for pure speculation, or people that just want to get through the art and adjust the system based on the feedback. One of the key elements that we need to monitor, you know, do the collectors have access to the art they want at a price that they think is reasonable? Something that I want to note is that we kind of noticed that big prices for NFTs aren't really working anymore. It's just not working. And artists need to more think in terms of high reach, low prices. Which is a much more, like I would say, fertile ground for NFTs. And based on this, we designed the numbers so that all the artists will release their coin under roughly the same initial values. So very low prices for getting an iteration. And then the first minutes, hours will define like roughly like the price the market thinks the project Should be priced too. So there's always gonna be an opportunity for collectors to get an iteration at relatively small price initially. That's one of our goals for this system, is to make it so that it's very low cost to get one edition and to reroll it and to evolve it. We don't want these individual actions, at least in the beginning of the project, to be expensive, the very contrary actually. The purpose is to make it very accessible for everyone. And then as time goes, then, you know, the market can adjust, but we target and we want to sort of constrain artists into thinking under this new paradigm. And you have to release a project that's going to generate thousands and that can generate maybe because you can reroll like tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands. And you need to expand your parametric space. It's not a big deal if some iterations aren't great. It's part of the idea of evolving, getting something that's not good and rewording it. But instead, you need to think in terms of making it fun for collectors, accepting the idea that some are good, some are bad, some are outstanding, etc.

Speaker A: It's interesting, right? Like the idea you were kind of saying that there's going to be these default, there's going to be a recommendation, right? So If I'm an artist that's concerned about supply for whatever reason, and I really only want there to be 64 editions of this, and for whatever reason I'm deciding to do a token, you could plug in that number of ideal editions. And then I guess what would happen is via the total token supply, the system would spit back to you a way so that like that incremental 65th potential iteration would be like potentially prohibitively expensive, right? Like in order for the market to support 65, 66, 67, The idea is that there'd be so much pressure on the supply of the token that maybe the artist would be like, okay, it went to 70 editions, but I made way, way, way more money because of the way the tokenomics of it worked. Is that about right?

Speaker C: That is about right, actually. That's one— no, no, that's a good way to frame it, I think.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: And this ties into— because I think this is another thing that people have been talking is like, what is the relationship between primary price? Because we're going to be setting our primary price in both some like amount of ETH and then also some amount of art token. If I understand correctly, the recommendation from the team right now is to do a very low ETH price per mint and have a lot of that price discovery, the price action live in the art token that is being spawned with the project. So can you go a little bit more in depth about that recommendation? And like, if I'm an artist, like how should I think about the ETH portion of that, like as the absolute floor? Because if my token goes to zero through some factor outside of my control. Yeah, can you just kind of speak on that recommendation and how you kind of envision it playing out?

Speaker C: So this Ethereum fee is going to be the same for everyone. There is an option for artists to change it that we are not going to immediately expose on the UI. We are going to see how it plays out initially. The system can support having a different fee at this level. We just want it to be the same for everyone at first because it's just removing One thing to think about for artists. The idea is to have roughly like one to two dollars Ethereum fee and one to two dollars Artcoin fee, so that the total price is between two and four dollars. That's the range we are targeting initially. We'll see like based on how the system is being used if there is any value into tweaking this Ethereum portion side of things, or if this is sort of like the one that works best. There's gonna be a bit of experimentation to do. We have already talked to some artists that are interested in having like specific characteristics for how much this fee grows as you go deeper in the lineage. We've had artists that wanted it to increase a lot so that it's harder and harder to get the children of children. So I can assume that this eventually becomes an option because for specific projects it has some value for the artist. But the goal is to initially have the same settings for everyone and see like how it plays out. This is quite in contrast with how we did previously, right, with giving artists everything they may want to. But this comes with the byproduct of having artists that literally don't care about 90% of these settings to have to go through these settings and understand what they mean. When honestly, like in most cases, we could have opted for a default and it would have been probably more than enough. We're also thinking in terms of You know, maybe there is an advanced option that lets artists that may want to go deeper to configure this kind of settings. But initially, we'll be trying out without control over these particular settings.

Speaker B: Is there anything else you want to cover on this particular topic, Will? Because I do have a question around the profit structures here from a slightly different angle.

Speaker A: I think I'm starting to have a good grasp on it. So hopefully everyone listening is getting a pretty good grasp on it. And I know that there's going to be more detailed documents Coming to, and pretty soon we're going to get to live it. And I hope that once we experience it, it's going to be like a lot simpler than it feels now as this like abstract thing. But yeah, Trinity, go ahead. Where do you want to take us?

Speaker B: I mean, I think one of the things that has been really a hot question in Discord has been more on, again, on the legal complications. I see iRyanBell in particular, very worried about securities and everything. I think some of that concern might be stemming from the artist token side of things. And I think that you've kind of explained that in a really clear way that makes me feel pretty confident in it. One of the other items that is a way for people to profit is through when people evolve a work that you have, essentially you get a portion of the fees because you are owning that, that base token. Are there any concerns there from a legal standpoint about being able to profit from an NFT that you That's a good question.

Speaker C: So this is something we'll also like encourage people to look in with their local tax authorities because we can't have an answer for every jurisdiction. We checked with our lawyers for the main cases and there's a way to justify it in case of artistic exploration. It's artistic research. It's a collaboration between you and the artist. And as such, you know, this object has some artistic merit to it. But I will encourage like everyone once, you know, they get some profits through this vehicle to, you know, look with their authorities to see what it entails. I don't exactly know the amounts we are going to be talking about there. It's hard to quantify like how big lineages can become eventually. Like, I don't know if we'll be talking about hundreds, tens of thousands with the most important lineages.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker C: So it's gonna be very interesting. I feel like, you know, based on the usage, we'll also provide more information for everyone to handle this more properly. But yeah, it's been greenlighted by our lawyers with these settings. Then for everyone, of course, there's gonna be like the due diligence for reporting this appropriately.

Speaker B: Yeah, and I think based off of the fee structures that you've mentioned, if somebody evolves from one of my mints, I'd be getting paid in ETH, because that's the, the platform fee, or at least the currency in that. And I assume it would be fairly fractionalized and probably under a dollar, uh, probably closer to the 50 cents, just based off of, you know, what I would expect the split to be. So it does seem fairly minuscule, but I know that it's something that people might be concerned about.

Speaker C: Yeah, I know that's a fair question. It was also one of our concerns, but yeah, modeling it, it's not gonna amount to crazy numbers eventually. Like With the most optimistic modeling for the biggest lineage, we are talking under $100 as well, which is like rather substantial in itself, of course, but it's for like the best case scenario.

Speaker A: You know, obviously, all the questions come from a place of excitement. And just like, I mean, at least for myself, right? Like, I think this is far, far better than, you know, when we had Paul on back in December, you know, the original like vision sounded a lot Closer to just artist meme coins, basically. And maybe that was underexplained at the time. So where it's gone is really great. Very, very excited. But what would be really exciting is to hear about any other artists. You know, it sounds like you've socialized this idea a lot. We know, Cypher, you're going to release something. Is there anyone else that you can kind of talk about that might be in the mix to release shortly after you? You know, we've seen the fxhash accounts retweeting some Tyvek stuff recently. Is there like a soft confirmation there? And like, just have you talked to like large collector DAOs and stuff? Because I kind of feel like there might be some appetite for them to get involved on the token side here too, right? Like suppose like a Zancan or a Mapan or someone comes and does a token, like there's got to be a case for them to diversify their holdings and artists beyond just NFTs that have these liquidity problems, right? Like it's not always so easy just to sell an NFT at the price you want at the point you want, but a token solves a lot of that. So what can we get excited about in the future? What are you guys hearing out there from artists and collectors?

Speaker D: Okay, I'm gonna go backwards actually from the end of what you said back to the beginning. There is a lot of great overlap in it for, yes, DAOs, but also speculators, you know, people who go beyond just like your typical art collector, because you do have people who are really great at identifying momentum as traders, as speculators. Like, they can see when something is bubbling on socials or when there could be a good directional play to be made, and they can apply that same kind of thinking to artist trajectories, except for there has never really been a way for them to place a directional bet on an artist outside of buying some of their art, right? But, you know, people who want to make some kind of speculation on art may not necessarily have an opinion or a taste that's like well developed enough or opinionated enough to go in. Like, let's say for example, early on in XCOPY's career, if there had been an XCOPY coin and you could have made a directional bet on XCOPY because you saw the momentum, but you didn't know which piece to necessarily buy of his, right, to place that. So there's a big difference between those 2 things. And one of the reasons why I think art coins for artists could be a huge shift in tapping audiences that up to now have not really been able to get involved in NFTs for those reasons. Okay, but who? We've spoken to well over 100 artists, like artists who have released on FX, artists who haven't released on FX, artists who have released really big collections, artists who are really well known and have never released an NFT collection of any kind. And we have a lot of interest. I can't really get into the names, you know, so there's like a lot of words for like a lot of people have really great feedback and will be releasing, but, you know, we can't say necessarily who other than that you can look forward to some pretty incredible artists releasing projects.

Speaker C: I think since the launch of the platform, essentially, we've never seen such a big artistic enthusiasm in the community. Not only I, but the whole team has been talking to many artists, trying to let them know about this or getting their inputs. And I can't think of any artist that had been like, I don't see any potential in OpenForm as an artistic concept. And it's a good indicator. I've heard many ideas from some artists, so I already know a little bit that we'll be seeing crazy things. I also know that there's many crazy things that are gonna happen in the upcoming months as well, because it's such a new paradigm of thinking about social interactivity at the algorithm layer that it's an open ground for big creativity, and we'll probably see potentially new genres appearing Gen art with this.

Speaker A: Trinity, I know you have to go soon, so you wanna ask one or, one or two more?

Speaker B: I think that it's gonna be incredibly exciting to see what kind of comes out. I guess at this point in the coming weeks, love to say weeks and not months. Um, I lost the question. One moment buffering.

Speaker A: Checks notes.

Speaker B: Checks notes. How does this interplay or interact with what fxhash has been marketing and working with so far, like the core offering? Will people who are afraid of the coins or just not quite sure what to do, will they be able to just do a regular drop on Tezos? Or do you really see this to be the foundational core of fxhash moving forward? And will you be kind of sunsetting the traditional mint process?

Speaker D: We won't be sunsetting classic fxhash by any stretch. You know, classic FX is landmark, right? It's not going to go anywhere. And if you want to mint classically, if you want to create classically with no coins whatsoever, you'll be able to continue doing that. That's like still very much at the core of what fxhash is. With art coins, with OpenForm, we see this as a continuation of like what we consider to be our spirit, which is being an open platform that maximizes the creative possibilities for artists and creates a lot of opportunity for people who love art to engage and find the piece that speaks to them, right? The piece of art that speaks to them. And I don't know if we've ever really talked about it this way, but it's occurring to me now that it's almost like this is our version of trying to answer to the original vision of NFTs. You know, I think NFTs were always like really about community participation, right? I mean, the promise of an NFT at first was almost like the decentralization of art in a sense. And in a lot of ways, we've seen kind of, especially through kind of scarcity thinking during the bear market, people flying back to what felt more familiar, like very traditional forms of gallery-presented artworks, closed platforms, and curator-forward types of art consumption. And that's fine. That's, you know, it's entirely a part of the system and there's no problems with it. But at the same time, Maybe we kind of started to lose, like, as a collective, the— I don't know if you want to call it the original idea of NFTs because there wasn't just one, but some of that promise about, like, the decentralized aspect of crypto art, the community participation side of, you know, there being creative economies. And we think art coins are enabling that. This is at least, like, a big step forward towards reclaiming some of that open and decentralized spirit that's always been key to crypto and blockchain art. So to summarize, I mean, for us, this is not meant to be a replacement of like long form necessarily, or a replacement of classic fx hash, but an extension of a lot of our key and core principles.

Speaker A: Any question before you have to jump, Trinity? I've got a couple more things, so I think we'll stay on just to wrap up with them, but I know you got to go soon.

Speaker B: Now let's go with some of the— there's one very great real talk question you have here.

Speaker A: Yeah, okay. So this is a 2-part question then. So obviously, we've seen a lot of platforms close down during the bear market. Unfortunately, a lot of people got started just as things took a turn for the worse. But you guys, Art Blocks, and Verse are kind of the only ones really out there, if not thriving, at least surviving. So one part of the question, like, how much is the success of this token protocol really going to dictate the longevity of fx hash? Like, how big of a swing is this for the platform as a whole? And 2, assuming it's successful, how easily co-opted and diluted could this feature be? I mean, are you concerned about fast follows or new platforms popping up and trying to do the same thing that could, you know, just like we saw with— I can't remember the name of the platform anymore, but the one that Wrecked Royalty is on now.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: ETH, you know, stealing volume from OpenSea and stuff. Like, what are your big concerns and how crucial is this to survival?

Speaker C: That's a very good question. So I think we've been lucky when at the time we raised because it was like right at the beginning of the bear market. So there was still momentum going and it allowed us to have the time to shape our ideas. So we've been very lucky to find a Really great investors to support us in this time, like not only like financially support us, but 1KX has been a really good fund to bounce off ideas and to help us, you know, see if this direction was viable. Like basically bounce off ideas, and it's mostly what you need when you're in a space that's evolving so fast. In transparency, it's a swing. We've invested lots of resources into this, but it's a risk and it's also a necessity. There is no way to continue to operate on the scale we aim to operate with the current model of NFTs, because if it's not sustainable for artists, it's not sustainable for us, right? And that's why we've seen so many platforms closing, because it's impossible to sustain in the way it's currently shaped. You know, it's sort of a good paradigm we are working with because our success is directly tied to the success of artists. So we are strictly bounded by this relationship. And so our key to survival is finding a path for artists to survive, right? So it's in this spirit that we kept thinking about ideas, etc. Finally landed on this new protocol ID. We of course ran some estimates like worst case to best case scenario. And even in the worst case scenario, you know, we would have some possibilities for keep surviving a long time with our token, with the liquidity pool that we'll be setting up with the token, with generally what the protocol is gonna generate. Because even in worst case scenario, there's gonna be some traction even just on the coin side of things. But also on the artistic side of things. So we are not gonna disappear for a while. It's we are still gonna be there. You know, we may rethink a little bit like the scale at which we operate, but I really don't want us to go down that direction. And to be fair, like even in worst case scenarios, this is we have some options to continue operating for some time at this scale. Now what's interesting is the prospects that art coins. If it becomes a success, right? Because if it works for open-form generative art, it certainly can work on some other scale for other forms of art, and it can become an entire new ecosystem that can power the art world if shaped properly. But as you said, if there is some early success, there's gonna be some very fast early follow-ups. So we've already been thinking about what next steps. Will be if it's a success. And we'll have to move very fast on that front because the space specifically on the coin and token side of things moves really fast. But we know that there's a lot of potential for this to become much bigger in many different ways on the whole art space. So, you know, for me it's about if not an immediate banger success initially, I'm really not scared about it becoming a big banger down the line because it's actually like fairly easy to envision how you can expand art coins to not only generative art but any forms of art. And when you start thinking about all the opportunities, you start to realize that there is a pretty big market that's available. I mean, looking at just the meme coin market, which is essentially crypto traders that look for opportunities to speculate, make money because they know there is opportunity. But let's face it, like meme coins are fun and everything, but it's pretty terrible from an investment standpoint. Like you don't— you have like one chance out of 10 for the coin not to instantly go down. So I think this, what we are proposing here has a lot of value on the investing side of things because It still has the same mechanisms as coins from an investment standpoint, but there is a real ecosystem backing up with actual artists that have an actual value in keeping their coin going. We have an ecosystem that has an actual value into fostering, you know, the investment side of things. So a lot of the efforts that we'll have to do also is like try to let traders know that this exists and is a potential opportunity for them because I have no doubt that they can very quickly make the addition in their head. Like, it's like meme coins, but with some very much more serious backup behind it. But I still have the same simplicity investing in it. I can still monitor it the same way as coins. So we'll be sharing these ideas in the future to investors in general. But I have no doubt that we have a shot at becoming much bigger in the crypto space by providing this kind of value for investors that, in all honesty, doesn't exist very much nowadays. I mean, virtuals is a good example to support what I'm saying, because it's like meme coins with some future value that might be generated by AI agents that sort of have some actual use cases that you can think of, you know. So investors like completely went all in into that because it was meme coin with some actual utility, the simplicity of investing with some kind of security. However, you know, agents, it's a little bit harder to see long-term value, etc. Whereas with artists, it's much easier, I have a feeling. You know, it's AI agents, you're like, okay, where exactly is it gonna go? So you have all of these weird things popping Like you can very easily see that most of them won't go anywhere, right? However, like art is somehow more straightforward. It's been there forever. It's a store of value. It's well recognized. You can very easily see the recognition of an artist, the care they put into their work. So it's gonna be much easier for investors to evaluate the potential over time about all of these artist coins, I have a feeling. So I'm fairly confident, and we'll have to move rather fast. And good question.

Speaker A: I sense just from some of the chatter in Discord that what you're kind of talking about there, the trader aspect of it, is something that I think strikes a bit of fear into artists too. Trinity left to take a work call, so she jumped off. But when episode 121 that we just released, we were talking about back in 2021, It seemed like such a problem to the community that there were flippers and like people botting. It was like, ah, like there needs to be a way. And then we invented, you know, you added these systems like reserves and things like that to counteract the people who are here for pure speculation. And through this coin platform, it's kind of like we're inviting that back in. But I think now in retrospect, it was like, well, we'd much rather have that than not have the platform at all, right? And If it means that there are going to be people here who are going to be flipping the tokens and, you know what, FXHash is collecting fees along the way and the artists are collecting fees along the way. And at least now we don't have the issue of, well, there's finite art out of the algorithm from inception, right? The flippers can flip and then when they get tired of playing with the liquidity pools and the price comes back to a normal level, now someone like me can come back in and I can swap into some art token and go mint the Zancan or go mint the Rudxane or go mint the Ciphrd, right? Like, I'm never going to be boxed out of minting a project that I want to mint because of flipper activity, right? Just like you would have— we had that 2-week rule, right? The infamous, like, wait 2 weeks and then go to the secondary.

Speaker D: Wasn't that Galaxy's rule?

Speaker C: Yeah.

Speaker D: Of course. Yeah, I remember that. Yeah, that was formative, you know, and and we didn't know it at the time that that was a sign of I would categorize a sign of health, right? Like the ecosystem was thriving, the market was thriving, and at the time a lot of us saw it problematically. And like you said, in retrospect we look at it and we're like, God, bring the bots back, bring the flippers back, you know. It is this kind of funny thing where like and and we've you know spoken. About this plenty of times where as a culture on Tezos, but also in NFTs, I think at large, had a tendency earlier on to almost shame the financial side, even though stuff was mooning and Fidenzas and CryptoPunks were worth like dozens of ETH at a time or more, you know, over 100 ETH sales and stuff. And, and yet at the same time, like, people could be bullish on that and hold. On the other hand, a sort of disdain for sellers, right? And for like those financial aspects of the NFT art world. And so yeah, now we look back on that and we're like, man, we were kind of crazy to be down on making money, right? Like, it's okay for artists to make money, it's okay for platforms to make money, it's okay for collectors to make money. And inviting the traders back in with a more, let's say, like a more defined role Because at that time, there was kind of like, you were either in it for the art or you were a flipper, and flipper was like super derogatory. But like all those people were is just traders. They're just speculators, you know, and they're an integral part of the ecosystem too. So yeah, now that we have a more holistic view of like all market participants and the symbiotic role that they all play, you know, within the movement of art, I mean, yeah, we're happy to introduce something that is more defined for them as a role. Like, we want traders back here just as much as we want collectors to be back in. Whether you're in it for the art or you're in it for the flip, it doesn't matter as long as you're here and you're participating in the ecosystem. We're happy to have you, you know. And yeah, if we do get those, um, I can't remember what it was called. There were like these like little cartels. Do you guys remember?

Speaker C: Yeah. FNRS something.

Speaker A: Fencers, fencers.

Speaker C: Yeah, fencers. Yes, yes.

Speaker D: Yeah, again, it's like when times got so desperate that you were like, what I would give to see that handle, to see that clan back in the Discord.

Speaker C: Will, uh, you made a very good point in your question as well, mentioning that if we get those like speculators back and traders back in to the ecosystem, in contrast with what we had before, we won't have the same gating that collectors were complaining about in the inability to participate at all because they were left out from the initial mint, right? Because as you said, like, now there's gonna be like this whole like market for the coin that's gonna fluctuate over time and eventually potentially allow you to get a whole iteration at some point. But there's also always the possibility, you know, that you not necessarily want to have 10 NFTs in the end, but you also want to speculate as a collector on the success of a project because you realize it has a lot of value. So you can still like buy some small amount of coin knowing that there's gonna be a lot of activity coming onto that. So there's gonna be many ways to participate if you really want to, not only through the artistic side of things. But I also want to mention that this idea of trying to make large-scale body of works with like smaller prices on the primary is also another component that gonna play into everyone's ability to participate. No, I don't know exactly if artists will go against this wave because they will still have the option, you know, as you said before, to make it like 60 editions. And so then you need much more coins to buy a single iteration. I'm not sure, like maybe we'll see that this is actually the best model for this kind releases. I'm not quite sure, to be fair. We are gonna bet initially on this large scale, small prices. But who knows, like maybe we'll discover some very new dynamics with this new kind of pairings.

Speaker A: As a last question here, because I'm sure you guys actually have a lot of work to get to as well, even though it's afternoon or evening over there. With the last couple years, we've seen so many of the artists who grew on FX Hash— well, I don't know if it's the right word, but to say they graduated up into the curated platforms of Art Blocks and Verse. And Art Blocks moved away from the 1,000 edition projects that they did and got a lot smaller. And Verse, for the code-based algorithmic stuff that they've been releasing, generally have gone smaller and smaller as well. Looking at, say, Mapan's last 2 releases, there are 60 editions available to the public, right? Like extremely small offerings with the idea of, well, these artists who are in that echelon of blue-chip investible, they can't and should not blow out 10,000 edition works into the market. So what do you feel— the way that you're describing it, it's kind of like, well, let's wait and see if there is something for them here, or do you feel like that is a bit of flawed thinking to a degree of like being maybe overly protective of supply? Like, does the coin, does the token solve the supply issue in a way because it gives like an external store of value outside of just the artwork itself? Because to me, I mean, I haven't enjoyed that. I have not enjoyed the way those works were released and I've been, at least on this platform, kind of critical of it. I feel like an algorithm that can support 500, you should find a way to do 500, right? That is the best way to see it and enjoy it and like have it live and not like artificially keep it down for the sake of price. So I don't know if either of you can kind of speak on like where you think that dynamic could go and like Also how to like bring those artists back to fxhash, or is that even a goal of this token, right? Someone who is getting, you know, up to $10,000 a mint on a project, like, is there a way to bring them back to fxhash through this protocol?

Speaker C: I have a thesis, not sure if it's right, but I have a feeling what we've seen with these smaller edition sizes, sometimes higher entry price points for artists, is the result of the shrink of the market, specifically the secondary market. So there's been, first of all, like less primary market participants than we used to have. And as this shrunk, like the number of, say, collectors that can pay more than $100 for a piece has drastically shrunk up to a point, you know, where releasing 500 editions to a $20 price point, which might be the breakeven for artists based on the time they spend become somehow unreasonable on the market. And releasing, as you said, like 10,000 editions was gonna completely kill the secondary market because then there's gonna be too much supply. Coins, we hope, and as you said, will provide a solution to this. As you know, it can become like this store of value that becomes another solution for artists and for traders. But I think also the new minting dynamics of ever-evolving projects Or also something that's gonna play a huge role into making it interesting for artists to target much bigger edition sizes as what they used to. Because it's not gonna be about having 500 outstanding editions or like 64, like really unique, great outputs that all have great value. It's gonna be about creating a fun process for everyone to enjoy as a group.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker C: So it's very different compared to before. You're not— the goal with this new raising paradigm is going to be about making it interesting over time versus making it great once. And it changes everything and allows for new dynamics, bigger edition sizes, lower prices, fostering activity that's going to go into the token itself, the coin itself. Sorry.

Speaker A: Hmm?

Speaker C: I always end up in the end of questions like, I had like 2 more points and I'm pretty sure I had at some point and they always disappear.

Speaker D: But you had good ones. You know, some of what you were talking about just now kind of jogged my brain a bit and something that I've thought a lot about over the past, especially past year and a half, where that tendency towards smaller and smaller collection sizes has really shown itself is like, you know, you often see that with artists who have already run the gauntlet and they're quite successful, like they're quite established, and then they can start to command that kind of price and their artwork becomes more premium. So in some ways, like, it's logical, right? Like, their artwork starts to become more scarce and obviously the buy-in just gets higher. At the same time, you know, I feel like, uh, for artists who maybe have not achieved that level of recognition and perhaps aren't being seen by the closed platforms and the curated platforms, Open Forum does propose a really interesting way to make yourself heard or make yourself seen, right? One example that kind of stands out to me is like Punevyr's Glyph mint. For anybody who's unfamiliar, Punevyr did this really incredible project called Glyph that was minted on our Farcaster integration. It was like released Via Frame and minted, I think it was well over 250,000 editions, which at the time was a record. Since then has been superseded by Phojeebus' count, which is also on FXHash. But anyways, Punevyr had always been like a real community legend, right, at FX. And post-Glyph, there was a lot of attention going his way and there was a lot of outside attention from people who'd never heard of him before. And just the pure reach of that piece gained Punevyr an audience that, you know, he's never been able to access outside of fx hash. People who had never even heard of fx hash were minting in droves on the frame, you know, on Farcaster. So I feel like with a system like OpenForm, which does nudge artists towards big systems, like big gestures, right? This is a sort of like ideal creative ground, like a really nice medium for them to find that type of success and that type of audience that a lot of artists in the earlier waves of generative art have been able to find for themselves and rise up, you know, kind of to become these like well-established names.

Speaker A: Sounds cool. I'm so excited, guys. We said it in the last episode too, it's like the first time we felt not just hopeful for the platform but hopeful for the ecosystem to get back to the way it was when you could have artists putting out cool projects and people really Like caring, right? It feels funny to say that a token might bring back actual like attention in the form of care, but I think it has that potential here. So super excited for it. Love that you landed on this as the protocol. It seems super thoughtful and very art forward. You know, I know that there's—I'm sure there's a lot of artists who have a lot of fears around this just being like a meme coin by a different name, but it does all redound back to the art. And I think that is a wise way to go. So I don't know, any final thoughts, anything before we close out from either of you?

Speaker C: You know, the excitement is shared. As I mentioned, you know, it's the first time also on our side that we are seeing an actual like vitality, but like revitalization potential, you know. And to be fair, like when we first thought about tokens and coins, I was the first to be skeptical because I've always been not really interested or very skeptical about meme coins. But as we started to see a vision that was going, as you said, very much around the art itself, and as we started to shape dynamics that were very much art-centric, it very quickly became a realization that the only aspect of coins that we were skeptical about were related to their usage, like in hateful communities with just like useless memes, not always useless, but you know, weird memes, some stuff that we could not relate to. But it was the same as some NFTs initially. For instance, I've never quite felt an attachment to Bored Ape or to some other collections that I was feeling. Or there was this question, you know, that we all had, like, why this in particular? And I feel like this is the same sentiment that artists may have been feeling, you know, but suddenly NFTs, it became obvious, like, hey, it's actually not about degenerate gambling. There is actual care from people from the whole ecosystem. And yeah, I feel like coins are gonna be that. And I hope, as you said, you know, it's gonna be something that gets people to care again about art and about artists. Sometimes it just takes One ignition, you know, one little thing that was missing. And in crypto, it's often related to money, right? And so when you bring this back into the mix, you know, it's maybe just what was missing for the ignition to start again. And we are beginning to see, you know, some excitement that led us to think that we are at the premises of something that's gonna work.

Speaker D: Seconding all of that. Really, really well said, I think. It's funny, coins have broadly gotten such a bad reputation, especially amongst the art crowd, because, well, we're not really generally paying attention so much to crypto finance stuff, right? And I think in the NFT art and art realm of on-chain activity, people are really like, I don't mess with DeFi, I don't mess with trading. All I hear about coins is rugs and scams, you know, and a lot of that stuff exists, but there's also real genuine innovation there. And ultimately the difference between a good technology and a bad technology is really just how people choose to use it. So I think that in the hands of the community here, we can take a lot of those technologies that have bad reputations or seem like they could be sketchy and show the world how they can be used in ways that are really positive and make people care about things that are great, like art. So that's my hope, and ultimately that we're having fun because it feels like it's been forever since there's been real deal fun in the space, and I would love to feel that feeling, that rush again when I hit the mint button. So let's feel that, you know, let's feel something. Yeah.

Speaker A: All right, let's feel something. That's a great way to end. Cosy Cypher, thanks so much for coming on again. Super excited for what this protocol is going to bring. Everyone who's made it this far into the episode, don't forget to claim your FXH token. You can go to the website, connect your wallet. You can check to see if you have an allocation and make sure you claim it because if you miss, you miss, right? So I'm looking forward. I've got a nice—I'm a top 100 wallet, it turns out. So let's go forward.

Speaker C: Yeah. Well, unsurprising.

Speaker D: FXH.

Speaker A: Yeah, we'll see. We'll see. I was checking and I was like, oh, what's this wallet above me that only has 2 transactions but it's getting more? And it's the random wallet that bought RGB1. And yeah, I was like, this person, they're getting more tokens than me, but okay, they can have it.

Speaker C: Yeah, just very quickly, thank you a lot. The questions were really thoughtful. Thank you, Will, and thank you for all the care you have.

Speaker D: So many Yeah, of course. Yeah. Thanks, Will. I mean, it's been great, great to actually see you for, I think, the first time and, and have this discussion with you. I, I'm stoked. And, um, this is my first time on WTBS. I mean, this is a milestone for me, so thanks.

Speaker A: I think the only one left now from the team is, is Ola to have her on. Well, we'll complete it eventually. We'll come around.

Speaker D: Make it happen. All right. Cool, guys.

Speaker A: Well, let's, let's end it here. We'll probably have another episode to record somewhere post all this fx hash launch. So super excited again. Thanks for coming on. Hope everyone enjoyed and we'll be back again, maybe kind of soon with another episode. All right. Bye everyone.

Speaker B: Bye.