Speaker A: Hello and welcome everyone to a very special bonus episode of Waiting to Be Signed with interview guest Ciphrd, the creator of fx hash. Everyone who's been involved in the platform probably knows that the beta just ended and we're looking forward to the full platform release sometime in April. So it seemed a very fitting time to have him on the show, joined as always by Trinity. Yeah, Ciphrd, how's it going?

Speaker B: It's doing good, thanks. Thanks for having me.

Speaker A: Well, thank you very much for coming on.

Speaker C: I know that it's a Busy time for you right now, we assume. And as you told us right before we just started recording, injuries abound.

Speaker B: Yeah, well, we'll make it work.

Speaker A: Yeah, you know, when we first started the show, it was an aspiration to have you on at some point. So it's kind of surreal, you know, here we are about 10 weeks later, 11 weeks later, to actually have you on. And it's so fitting, right, that The beta ended. Everyone's looking forward to the platform release. And just to be able to have this conversation with you is, it's really generous of you to give your time.

Speaker B: Oh, it's just okay. Like, it's also a break from, you know, coding. Gives my brain some rest.

Speaker A: Well, for people who maybe don't know too much about you or the origins of fxhash, maybe you can start off by introducing yourself a little bit and talking about your background in coding and generative art and how you came to Tezos and to fxhash, you know, the creation of it.

Speaker B: Yeah, sure. So I think I've been into coding since I was like quite young. I think I started coding at 11 or something like that. I was like, yeah, kind of lonely, you know, when I put my focus on coding stuff and developing stuff. So yeah, I fell in love with coding and it kind of became a passion. I studied like a little bit building software after like the regular school. And I started to like become a freelancer on the side to build websites for companies. And like, I quickly became independent and started building stuff on my own without like this academic background. And well, in the meantime, I became quite interested in generative art. So I would say that the passion came from developing video games at first, because there's like quite some similarities between video games and generative art, at least in the way of conceiving stuff. Yeah. So video games, it's like you're building systems, right? You're building lots of, lots of interconnected systems. And generative art is like an easier approach, I would say, to building systems on video games. And like, it has different purpose, but it's kind of the same design principles that you apply when you're engineering your thing. So I was doing a lot of video games and one day, like, I was like, okay, let's try to make something that is just not something that the user will interact with, but something that evolves on its own. And I kind of like it, but didn't give it much attention. And I did it again later down the line. And then I became interested in like plugging music to those systems. And like I was doing a lot of music visualization with algorithmic stuff. And along the way, I discovered that there was this field called generative art. And like it was already pretty established. And what I was doing was generative art. And like, it was sort of an enlightenment because then I was like, wow, everybody's doing that in such different flavors. It's like so amazing. And yeah, I became addicted to that more than anything else.

Speaker C: When was this, if you don't mind me asking?

Speaker B: So it was about 6 years ago, and I started building games like 10 years ago, about, about, yeah.

Speaker A: Is there any game that you worked on that you can say publicly that we might know?

Speaker B: No, basically I've been only building games like on my own computer. I never shared anything, only maybe one or two, but it's not very good and I don't even know if I can find those again because I wasn't like— I'm not very organized in general. I have to put a lot of focus on organizing myself, otherwise I'm just like a little bit chaotic in all my— how I'm working. So yeah, I never published anything, never saved anything. Like I burnt all my hard drives, so it's lost forever.

Speaker A: Wow.

Speaker C: There's probably some really good stuff that is just only lives in your brain. Please don't burn fxhash.

Speaker B: No.

Speaker C: Okay.

Speaker B: No, I put much care in like getting rid of all these bits of like not being careful.

Speaker A: So what was your journey to the blockchain and Tezos and then ultimately the creation of the platform like from discovering that you were interested in making generative art in the first place?

Speaker B: So as a web developer, like as soon as I heard about Ethereum and things like that, I like became interested in the background, but I already had so much things to focus on that I was like, okay, that's just something else that I need to check later on. 2 years came by and I didn't check it at all. I was following it from a long distance. I didn't really know what was happening. And I don't know, like someday I was like, wait, there is this technology that is like probably interesting and I haven't looked at it at all. And it was like, I think about 1 year ago that I first took a look at blockchains as a technology. And what was disappointing at the time being is proof of work. Conceptually, it's like a magnificent strategy to have people competing for resources. Like, it's really elegant, and the proof of work is like beautiful on its own. But it has this major downside that it's consuming our resources, not especially like consuming a lot of electricity, although it does, but it's more that it's consuming the graphics processors, and it costs a lot to build those processors. That's basically some matter that we will not find, that is being lost to like fighting for the computational power. So I learned about that and I was like, I'm not really interested in that aspect. And then I learned about NFTs and gave more attention to NFTs, like what they bring to the world, what they bring to creators, to artists. And I was like, okay, I've been stupid not looking at this. more carefully because this is like really game-changing for creators, for getting content. And then I started to dig into different blockchains and eventually discovered that Tezos was proof of stake. And I found the system like, it has its issues too, but it's more elegant because like it consumes less resources. And I like that Tezos is something that can run on cheap computers, like it makes the technology accessible for everyone. And yeah, I started to develop contracts, test things out, and I don't know, maybe 2 months later, fx hash came into life.

Speaker C: I think it's really interesting that, you know, a lot of the people that we've talked to come to Tezos specifically because this is where all of the quote unquote cool art was being done and people were really experimenting. But I really like your take that, you know, it's more about what does the platform itself have to offer, the blockchain itself have to offer. One of the things I was going to ask you is like, if you are code first or art first, and obviously there's like this huge blend between the two, but it sounds like the technology of Tezos is the thing that brought you here.

Speaker B: But by saying that, you would exclude that code itself can be art.

Speaker C: That's true.

Speaker B: And myself, I think that many well-designed systems are beautiful pieces of art. And yeah, I couldn't distinguish the two at all. I can see some art in things that aren't visual at all and that are just algorithms by nature.

Speaker C: And that really represents itself in like RGB, I think, for example, where it's a very like elegant system that produces so much.

Speaker A: And that's a topic that we've discussed actually, I think, a lot on recent episodes of the show too, which is from a public and collector standpoint, we have such a There's such a variety of backgrounds on fxhash. People who know nothing about anything like me, you know, people who are coders first and are coming here because they like the technology and the algorithms, or people who are art collectors first but don't always have appreciation of the code. And there's so much like learning going on and collaboration and like efforts to educate, which is what I think makes the fxhash platform and the community so special.

Speaker B: Yeah, I agree. Like, there is so much evolution. word that will represent it properly, but effervescence. I don't even know if that's English, but yeah, like there are some nice ideas popping up every day, some new ways to like exploit the platform and use it in, in novel fashions. Yeah, it's really interesting to see. And I think like that's where I want also to put some focus on the platform. You said that a lot of people don't know exactly what's happening behind the code itself. Like, they see an image and it's just an image. Like, they have no idea on how to articulate their appreciation of the code itself. And I think we need to, like, improve the learning and, like, put some focus on it so that everybody can educate through fxhash itself, because we have, like, a major input resource to use for education, and it will be like, we should use it.

Speaker C: Do you have any ideas? Like, I know that a lot of people, they learn a lot by like scrolling through like openprocessing.org, just an example, as an example where they're able to see an output and then really dive into how it's made. Is that kind of what you're thinking?

Speaker B: Not exactly, because you could actually be doing that with FX. Your source code is available, even though sometimes it's not properly readable. But what I have in mind is like some higher levels of abstraction in the learning process. So like more generally, what are the processes that drive the autonomous systems in generative art? And that's why I wanted to incorporate articles into the curated spaces, because I think it's going to be a way to provide a framework for everybody to write any type of content, including educational content. And I think there will be like some stuff to do with the integration of the pieces and the articles themselves.

Speaker A: That sounds like a good way to transition into some of the new features that are coming with the platform release, which right now we understand will be sometime in April, not necessarily April 1st, maybe a little bit later because there's so much complexity of transferring everything over and making sure that everything is, I'm sure, fully safe and audited and working. But Yeah, the writing and the kind of curatorial aspect, I know we're very interested in talking to you about that, but are there any features or yet unannounced stuff that you would feel comfortable talking about before we jump into what we know?

Speaker B: There will be a lot of new features. First of all, the new generation of contracts will have a modular design which will allow the iteration to provide more features in the future if needed. But overall, like, there are lots of features within the contract that won't be exposed to the frontend at first. And even they will be disabled in the contract itself so that they can't be used at all. Basically, the release is going to put a fresh start and a solid state on the platform. Because right now, like, there are a few systems that are working but not really well designed. Like, it was more or less some patchwork made during the The days of the beta because it was used by a lot of people and there were lots of issues. So I had liked to find some quick solutions to keep the platform in a usable state. And now we are going to like move all the infrastructure on new clusters. We are going to remove Pinata and use our own IPFS cluster. We are going to have some solid contracts working together with more consistency and things like that. And it's It's a lot to transfer. And usually— I'm sorry, you know, I wanted in the beginning to like put all the features that will be in the contract on the front end for the release. But then I realized that it wasn't very realistic to do all of that at once because for each new feature you expose yourself to new bugs. There is always a risk that an edge case you haven't thought of arises and then you You like have to patch a lot of things. And so there will be features, few of them like really important features that will be released with the platform. But moreover, there will be like new features coming maybe one every 2, every 3 days, which will be like major features, like things that are requested by a lot of people for a long time, but that weren't possible because of the previous contract state. Yeah, to talk about some of these features, because I think that's What are people interested in? So first of all, the collaboration aspect. We will have fully integrated collaboration factory in FXH. So a contract that can generate collaboration contracts. That's the elegant way to create collaborations. Like there are other platforms where you can't see the 2 artists that collaborated together. You have like the contract, the collaboration contract address, and you have like to do some digging. It's not like fully integrated. And this will be like fully integrated. You will have all the names of the people involved and they will be in the search engine, things like that, which is like not something that's easy to do but really important. There will be the new ways of distributing tokens for the artists. So basically ways to restrict their distribution to a whitelist, to people holding the FXH token so that we can like put some safety against the bots. There will be ways to split on the primary market as well as the secondary market for the royalties, some splits handled by the contracts themselves. And there will be also lots of new stuff. But oh yeah, the Dutch auction, I need to talk about this one because it will be a part of the release as well. So Dutch auction and more generally new pricing strategies. So I've built this modular system that can be extended add any type of pricing strategies that we can think of. And the most simple one is fixed pricing. So that's what we actually have. But it was a little bit extended so that artists can put an actual release time for their token. So they don't have to enable it later on manually. And it will open the way for the front end to like show the tokens that are coming in a procedural way. And the Dutch auction, of course. which is going to be implemented within the contract, which is like something that I haven't seen yet. But yeah, looking forward to see how it's going to behave.

Speaker A: I mean, I think the Dutch auction stuff is super exciting and all of the other ways as well, right? Like, I know there's so many variations on auction systems and pricing systems and having the flexibility to allow artists to experiment with that, I think is going to be key as well to combating bots, right, which are a big problem. And I think we can talk about that more a little bit later when we get more into the token. Collaborations, all that stuff, I think sounds amazing, right? I'm sure you're familiar with the Camille Roux bridge project, if you saw that one, that had about 20 different contributors and they had to manage it all manually to, in order, in order to make sure everyone got paid. All that stuff sounds amazing. And yeah, it's really exciting to hear it all confirmed, you know. Formally here. So do you wanna talk about curation then? 'Cause I have a question about the curation aspect, which is, right now the platform is very open. Unverified artists still have to wait their time in, we call it jail. They have to wait in jail for 3 hours before they are released, but we still see about 40 to 100 new releases per day.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: And I know that there's some uncertainty in the community about how the curation layers are going to be visible on the platform and whether that means that it's going to be harder for newer artists to break through or emerge because the prevalence of curation and tastemakers may create a lot of like winners and losers. So I'm curious how you feel the balance between this original spirit of fx hash where any new artist has a shot to break on the scene and be, you know, for their short amount of time at the top of the discovery page versus a future where there's going to be people who have economic incentives, right, to build lists and try to get you to look at what they like and mint or purchase on the secondary through their curatorial part of the site. So how do you imagine that balance working out?

Speaker B: Yeah, so it's going to be difficult to design this properly. But I want to keep something at the core. So I think that the explore page on its own is great to discovering new projects. It's great to drive traction to any artist. Like, you don't have to go through a curation layer to be exposed on this main discovery page. And I think we have to keep that. For me, this won't change. But what needs to change is the ability for newcomers or people that that have already browsed a little bit the explore page to browse the content in a more meaningful way. So improve the discoverability of old content mostly. And this is where the focus will be put on the curation layer, not on promoting new content, but rather promoting content that's already on the platform but has been lost because of the sea of projects that comes every day. A lot of collectors, when they came on FX, They were having issues like trying to find projects on either the secondary or primary market. Like, it was a little bit the chaos for them. And some people like this chaos. I personally like it. But others, they would prefer to like have discovery of the things they don't know about. And I think this is also where the curation aspect can play an important role, drive those collectors that for now are mostly using FX Tender. Yeah. But I think in the future it will be great if the platform itself could provide different FX tenders to those collectors so like they can identify to some tastes that they like and so they can like follow those curators that they think are doing a great job at curating. But we must keep new content for any artist discoverable and not hidden by the curation layer. I think that's really important and I will keep thinking about it when designing the system.

Speaker C: I think when it comes to curation, and maybe you've seen this, I don't know how much you are on the Discord, but usually when somebody has a project that they really like, it just kind of snowballs and gets bigger and bigger and bigger from an interest perspective. Curation is really great because it helps with that discovery, but it does also kind of promote a mentality where the winners keep on winning. And sometimes that's great because it means that more people think that a particular piece is really great or that a particular artist is really great, but it does prevent the natural discovery of some like other folks, especially people who may be new artists to the platform. Is there anything other than curation that you think can help drive discovery?

Speaker B: Yes, randomness. Like this is the most fair way to browse something when you don't want to be biased by the people that build the system. Currently randomness is used on the front page. I'm not sure that it's driving a lot of traction to projects, but at least it's there, but it's not very efficient. But what I want to implement is randomness on the curated spaces. So basically what I envision is that the front page, instead of having some metrics on the curation boards, so the best ones are displayed Given, like, I don't know how much traction they get, things like that. There will be random curated spaces displayed on the front end. So sometimes it will be amazing, sometimes it will be less good, but we don't care. And I think we kind of have to, like, not use the snowballing metrics to display this content because otherwise, like, you eventually will have people gaming this system to have their curated spaces put in front.

Speaker C: And by using randomness, you can discard all of that in And that's with the hope that people are curating different things or a wider variety of projects. Like even if there are a few hundred that are really special, you wanna make sure that there are some who are promoting something outside of like that standardized norm. It's also interesting because the way that you're thinking about this and approaching it, it's very different from how a lot of platforms in like, let's say more of a Web2 economy are looking to kind of drive adoption or drive markets. If I think about Amazon, it's about collecting information so that we can push things to you based off of what we think you like or what other people like. And so it's about like convergence to a norm. I really like the idea that you're trying to kind of break that mold and have a little bit more, maybe chaos is not really the right word, but—

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: I think it's the right word, and I think chaos is appropriate in many circumstances, including this one. Yeah, I agree with that. Like, I don't especially like that all of this data is being collected. And what I like about Web3 is that you have this public wallet and it's all your identity. And there are lots of Web 2.5 solutions where you, like, connect your wallet But in the background, they collect some data on how you use their services, things like that. And I think we kind of have to diverge from this way of designing systems and rather provide tools for the communities to organize themselves without having a centralized system putting some major rules to connect those people in the way that they think they should be connected.

Speaker A: You know, personally, I'm very excited to build my own curated lists or collaborate with Trinity and build like the official waiting to be signed curated layer. In the back of my mind, the one concern I have is that despite the intention being to really have a diversity of voices and make sure all different types of projects, big and small, are represented through curation, that there will be an economic incentive towards homogeneity because people are going to want to list RGB and Zancan, because there's the opportunity to capture a share in the revenue, right? The fee collected on sales made through lists, that's going to be part of the contract.

Speaker B: There won't be this on the secondary market, only the primary market for this particular reason.

Speaker A: Gotcha. So you have to be curating an unminted project in order to collect. That makes a big difference. That wasn't something that I understood.

Speaker B: But you can actually create already minted projects if you want to bring a perspective to this project. And I think this is still great, but you won't get the economic incentive by doing so. And I think that's a way like to give some old projects a new life more easily, I think.

Speaker C: I actually really like that. Yeah, I'm sure that there— people will find some way to try to game that system because we've seen how people operate. Anything for the slightest advantage, especially when economics are involved. But keeping it to the primary is really cool and I think really special. So speaking of curation, you know, I think that we've seen a lot, a big rise in curation, not just through Tender, but also through like tastemaking, like on platforms like OnCyber or DECA. Are you looking to bring some more of like that, like that gallery-based curation to the platform itself to kind of keep more of that on platform?

Speaker B: I don't know yet. Well, the curated spaces will have much of what Deca has done with the pieces, plus some editorial features. But there won't be this on Cyber3D view until a long time, I think. You will still have some space like Deca for your curated spaces, I think. I'm sure, actually.

Speaker C: Maybe this is related to curation a little bit, and it's kind of 2 different things. One is I think a lot of what we've heard from you in like previous interviews is that you created FXHash because you wanted a place for you as a creator. Now that the platform has seen such explosive growth where we're seeing 100+ new releases on a single day, and obviously a lot of people are coming at it from a market perspective, have you shifted the way that you think after seeing kind of this huge embracement from collectors as well as artists? Like, who is this for now?

Speaker B: Yeah, this is an interesting question because it's been in the back of my mind for a while. So at first I built this for artists. Like, I didn't even have collectors that much in mind. I just wanted to bring a good space for the artists and hoped that collectors will find a way either to share me what I needed to implement or just like the space as it was. But then I was like this really naive, but Yet important realization in the middle. I was— my question was, how can I best help artists get traction to their projects? And the simple answer to that was, I need to build a better space for the collectors themselves. So that's like some logical conclusion, I think. Like, if the collectors have better tools, a better space, they will come more on the platform and it will like help the artists in the end. So that That was like my shift in paradigm, I would say, that made me build a little bit more tools for the collectors rather than the artists. Because eventually I'm doing that for me when I was me 2 years ago. Like, I have decided in mind that I would like that myself when I was 2 years ago, if I were to discover this tool, I could benefit from it. And that's what I'm trying to put in the platform. I discovered that honestly the best way to do that is to help collectors and help the artists both on the same level. You have to provide a tool for both or it doesn't really work in the end.

Speaker A: Now that you've kind of shifted your approach to collectors or to some degree towards acknowledging collectors and helping them out, do you track a lot of metrics around collection on the site like volume or just number of new projects or anything like that that has informed some of your decisions? And did you ever have a point maybe in the last couple months, in the beginning of 2022, we definitely hit a lull in volume, a decline between the initial hype in November, December, and it seems now we're finally pulling back out of it. Did any of that kind of inform some of the decision-making going into the new platform, or have you kind of just been approaching this all along as like, this is beta? The whole, you know, I'm not even going to worry about that stuff until we launch and start making some marketing efforts and really try to grow it.

Speaker B: Yeah, so basically I hate marketing, doing it myself at least, and it's very hard for me to like gather some metrics and try to analyze those because I just actually don't care at all about this. There is some people in the moderation team that are more interested in, in that, and so they told me You kind of have to do that to make educated guess, and it makes sense. So we gathered like some public metrics on the blockchain to like try to understand stuff. But honestly, I didn't pay much attention. What I was more looking is the general feeling of the people on the platform to know how to make it evolve. I find it to be a more interesting metric than how good is the market performing, because there are too many like side effects to the well-being of a market that I don't think it's really interesting for me to put some time on analyzing this. I'm more interested in like gathering some feedback and try to, yeah, make educated like decisions based on the feedback rather than stats.

Speaker C: I love that. I definitely prefer qualitative analysis over quantitative analysis as well because I think that the human experience is like really important versus Obviously analytics matter, but I think it's the feeling, like the emotional side of how are people feeling on the platform. So I really love that. And I think that that's maybe like a really good segue into talking about the DAO system, because that is the way in a Web3 world to really kind of capture that feedback into a nutshell and also provide like ways forward.

Speaker A: Yeah. And I think it's also the least understood part of the post-launch by the community. And I'll say personally by myself, I know it's not intended to launch in April, right? The main DAO and the fxhash token will probably be pushed out some number of months.

Speaker B: We are actually not sure about that. And there is a particular reason for that. I may have made the mistake to advertise the fxhash token as something that would allow people to get some fees off the platform. By staking it, I really want to do that. But every lawyer that I've been talking to told me you shouldn't do that right now. I don't know what it is, but I will be classified as a security. The token will be classified as a security, and it will imply that we have to gather some personal information about the stakers, things like that. So that's a lot to figure out, and I didn't know that. I thought that again naively. It will be easy to like put some legal stuff together and like make the token alive, but apparently it's not. And yeah, I learned that like quite recently that it wouldn't be possible now. But my ultimate goal for our token is to have something that redistributes the shares of the platform into the stakers. And like, it's the only way that I have in mind to tie the ecosystem together so that It's Web3-based. You buy the token, you can stake it, you can take decisions. It's basic, I would say, economics, but tied with algorithmic rules. When we talk about DAO, we often give it this term, but like, that's this entity that manages a platform, but it's actually made of different components. Like, a DAO is a governance system, a token to distribute the rights, and another contract to like maybe stake this token to get some revenues. Like, it's a group of components that make a DAO viable. You don't have like just a contract that does the magic. Some parts of this like design will not be possible until a while, like until we can figure a way to back up this legally. And I was really sad about this. Like, I really wanted to have this for all the users, but— Yeah, that's actually the tweet we are going to publish soon.

Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, I have to say I'm personally relieved to hear that answer from you because this was something that we've brought up a lot on the show being in the US. And I know a lot of the securities law here has either excluded airdrops like what you were originally planning from being given to Americans in particular, or just creates a bunch of compliance issues like the KYC stuff that you probably aren't keen to figure out anytime soon, and the mandatory reporting to people who hold the token if it's classified as a security. So my concern always was that if the token was rushed out, it would become a vector for failure for the platform that was otherwise healthy, because we're introducing a lot of this complexity that really has nothing to do with the art or collecting, right?

Speaker B: Yeah, but again, like, the platform, it's Not only art and collecting, it's also its whole economic system in its own. And I wanted to like— I know that staking tokens to get some platform fees will be a way to tie everything together, and I still think that. It's just that, yeah, there are all these laws that are in place that make it really hard to put up a system like that in place. And also, as you mentioned, like, this cannot be rushed in any way. We will take time for the token to be like properly designed. But yeah, the question that still remains is, will we release the token with the platform as a governance token and as a utility token? Because the token in itself is a good way to measure the engagement of the people on the platform. Well, at least if airdropped correctly. And it's also a good way to filter out bots. There will be some features for the distribution, as mentioned before, for the artists on the contract themselves. And one of them is that you can say that a certain amount of editions can only be minted if the collector is staking some tokens on the fxhash contract. And if it's staking for— locked for a long time. So basically the conviction level of the staking. And I think this is the best way to fight bots. Like if you distribute tokens properly and filter out bots, then they just can't get the token at all. And then they just can't get access to this mint. So this is like the question that still remains. Should we release that all at once or should we wait a little until like everything is more sorted out? Like it's still remaining, but actually the system is implemented. We could release it, but it just doesn't make sense to release it if it's not fully functional.

Speaker C: I think that the conversation with, about bots and the releasing the token and finding a way that keeps bots out from achieving the token, I think that's really interesting, really special. And I think that's why it's good to be kind of looking at some of the, like the metrics and like the ecosystem with like the wallets and the wallet interactivity. Is there any risk do you see for mistaking bot activity for something that regular people might be doing, because I know that some people have like 4 or 5 wallets that they might distribute, or vaults, I guess, that they might be sending their work to. It obviously needs to be designed in a way that doesn't punish those folks as well.

Speaker B: Yeah, exactly. So I won't disclose the metrics that I'm computing to filter out bots because, yeah, you can understand why it doesn't make sense to disclose those. There are some specific behaviors that bots are doing that just cannot be done by regular humans. It's not humanly feasible. And that's the metrics that I've been computing on the wallets.

Speaker A: Gotcha. Well, I wanted to ask, you know, some— something else we've talked about in terms of using the tokens as a form to— as a barrier for bots is the inadvertent side effect of it becoming a barrier for people who are new to the platform or who can't keep up with the whales on the platform, that there could be a sense of like there's a large first mover advantage for invested collectors who are here since the beta or just people who have spent more. And then artists, you know, we love the artists, but I have to tell you that the artists are not really the most engaged with what is going on on the platform at all times. I mean, I think it was like even up to a month after you had announced that in April all open projects will be burned, that they were still learning about that, right? So artists really don't have their fingers on the pulse of what's going on, and they could be setting that number far too high or far too low in terms of a gate. And it could become a point of criticism that an artist is being elitist and only letting whales mint, or the artist doesn't understand that actually all bots do have some number of tokens and they're not actually doing enough. So I guess the question is, how do you make sure that everyone who like wants to collect fairly is not being held back by the system without enabling bots to still kind of have their way?

Speaker B: And that's actually a difficult problem to answer because the philosophy of FX is to bring a framework for artists first and also collectors. But collectors for now don't have much of this framework. It's like just a regular marketplace. And artists, like, it's already a good framework. But the idea is like artists are kind of responsible for the distribution, and basically you're selling your work, so you have to do some— I think the term is you have some due diligence to do. I'm not sure that's the term, but the platform needs to put some easy way for artists to understand, to have like some good idea on how to distribute the content. But eventually Each artist is responsible for like thinking about it and trying to understand a little bit how it works before selling the work. And I don't want to like push any ideas, but rather I prefer to build a framework and let the community organize itself.

Speaker C: There's an interesting analog between encouraging the artists to do their due diligence and like have a framework for understanding what the best thing to do is. In regards to whitelisting based off of the token. And I think that also speaks to some of the pricing changes that have been happening over the last few months, because I think we can all agree that, for example, like work was way too cheap last year, you know, where you can get something that is amazing and beautiful for like 1 Tez, 2 Tez, 8 Tez, whatever. There was, you put out an open call or an announcement saying that artists, you should price your work fairly and accordingly to like what you're seeing on the secondary. And then so artists started doing that a little bit more, and we saw a lot of fluctuation in the amount of people that were actually buying on the primary at higher prices. And it's always changing, it's always evolving. It's really hard for artists to keep up, you know, where you see some really well-known people who might not sell out. Not that that needs to be a thing that happens within 24 hours or like 5 minutes, Yeah. But I can see that it's hard for artists to kind of always understand what the best thing for them to do is. Is that just a matter of them needing to pay more attention? Because I can see that also taking away from the art.

Speaker A: They need to listen to our show. Yeah.

Speaker C: We can become consultants. Yes.

Speaker B: Yeah, but that's an interesting take. And there's a lot to say in that. First of all, I've been going through this myself and pricing your stuff is like really scary. First of all, like you have to put a value on what you're doing. And that's one of the most scary things that you can do as an artist, evaluate yourself in terms of an economic metric. And that's really hard to do. And also like it's a little bit less the case, but until a certain point I had this feeling that the Tezos ecosystem was a little bit, if you don't put cheap prices, like you won't get engagement from the community. And that's what I wanted to like, I wanted my open call to be about that first. Tell the artists that if you think that you should put higher prices, don't be afraid to do it because of the messages you may receive from the collectors on Tezos. And like that was my main focus on this open call. Yeah, I realized afterward that there were like some misunderstanding about it. Like, I wasn't really trying to make the prices go higher, but just when I realized that some, like, really good quality pieces, uh, were put with a really low price, and knowing that some artists did it because, like, they were a little bit afraid to put higher prices because of how the economy— the Tezos ecosystem was— like, I was trying to fight that a little bit. And yeah, there is a lot to say because The biggest issue is it's super hard to value your work. It takes time and practice to do it.

Speaker C: I think the side note here is like, congratulations on Ethereal Microcosm selling out at 100 tests.

Speaker B: Yeah, that's— I couldn't believe my eyes. Really, like, it was mind-blowing to see that happening.

Speaker A: Yeah, I very stupidly in Discord said that I thought you would sell exactly one at the 100 test tier and then it would it would go down to like the 60 or 40 before people bought anymore. I thought there would be one person who performatively bought one to prove a point that 100 was right. And this is not to say that I didn't like the work or anything, it was just that we had never seen anything like that before. And, uh, yeah, I issued my correction and apology on our show that week at how wrong I was after watching it sell out like that. It's crazy.

Speaker B: But I understand your take. I had the same take. Like, I told my wife, uh, I think most of them will go out at 60, if not 40. Like, that— it was my take. I genuinely didn't think that more than 10 would sell at 180. And like, community proved me wrong, and it was interesting to see, and also fucking mind-blowing.

Speaker A: Yeah, it's, it's like, uh, it's really, I think, an issue of identity as a collector grappling with prices and grappling also with the internal narrative of Am I here to collect the art or am I here ultimately to invest? I think a lot of people do a good job of trying to publicly represent themselves as art lovers first and investors second. But when you see an artist like up their price based on the secondary value of their other work, and then it doesn't get collected or people complain, I think it really betrays that a lot of people are actually here maybe more for the investment side than the art side. And you just kind of have to accept that, right? I think that's— I think we've done a better job of that in the last few months. We've seen some bigger works come through and actually get collected. And but there definitely was that moment of friction where I don't think people knew what to do.

Speaker B: Yeah, and it's understandable. Like, when money is involved, it becomes scary for all the parties involved. Even like if you're a pure collector, you also have this speculative aspect in mind. Like, something that just how the society works and how money works, like it's in our head and we must think about it. It's really hard to find this balance between all of these aspects, both as an artist and as a collector. But I think what's interesting is just see it organically evolve over time, because at first it's chaotic, like everybody doesn't know what to do. It's a new system, it's a new community, it's— you don't have some precedence to like try to understand what to do with your work or how to collect on this platform. As you mentioned, there are some moments where it goes this way, there are other moments where it goes another way, like, but eventually, like, things on certain aspects tend to reach some sort of median, or like there seems to be some norms that take place because of the precedents that are being taken. And I think that We have to stand by that and see how it will evolve organically.

Speaker C: Overall, it's a very, like, we're still very young and very early. You know, we don't have this figured out yet. Like, there are a couple of different, like, sides to look at. One is the blockchain cryptocurrency investing thing where if you're not getting 100% return on your liquidity pool over the next 6 months, it's a bad investment because you're not doubling your money. But also, there's the correlation between, with the art world where it's You're measuring your value over the course of years or decades, not can I make a quick flip in the next 8 hours? And so it's like this weird mix of the speed of Web3 with kind of that curatorial and collective aspect where you are looking to get a return on the art that you're buying because you like it, but not necessarily on the 48-hour time horizon.

Speaker B: Yeah, and I think we've seen a lot of this in December. Uh, like the platform— I think the term is it's on fire. And so it attracted a lot of, yeah, let's call these flippers who wanted to make some quick return on their investment really fast. And I think that's why the platform has had so much revenue in December. And that's also one of the reasons that I wanted to close it for a while. So that like we don't end up in this like cycle of people trying to bump everything and like stop thinking about the art and things like that. And I'm quite happy that we had some slowdown in January because then we realized that, okay, so we maybe have to stop thinking a little bit about the money because obviously you can't make the same return on investment as you did before. And maybe we can put more interest in the art and the artists themselves.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: And like try to understand what some collections bring into the play, what artists have to say about things like that. And eventually this made the platform start another cycle in its life. And I like that it did. I honestly, I was really scared in December because not gonna lie, I was happy to make good numbers, but I didn't want to make those big numbers so early. I wanted to understand how to build the community more than the revenues of the platform. And so I was happy to see that there was a slowdown, actually.

Speaker A: I actually really want to talk more about the future, your vision for the future of the platform and your goals. But before we move off of it, I do want to get some better understanding of, in whatever form the token takes, if it's just governance utility token in the beginning, the formation of the main, main DAO in a sense, the fxhash DAO. What is your view on governance here? Like what things will it just be Ciphrd or Ciphrd and the immediate fxhash team still kind of acting on unilaterally versus what things are you going to want a lot of public voting on? Because, you know, I think a lot of the reason that fxhash has done so well in its earliest days is because you've been able to act unilaterally and make decisions, right? You throw up a poll in Discord, but you didn't have to give us weeks and make sure that everyone who was properly staked and getting they're voting in and doing on-chain governance in the same way. So what is your vision for how that's going to play out?

Speaker B: Yeah, first of all, there are some really benefits in having like a governance system on-chain because it gives some proper way to vote for features and things like that. Because on Discord, like, there are lots of biases, like the color of the smiley, the color of the vote. Like, there are lots of things that can influence a vote. And having it blockchain-based is already a major way to remove some of these biases. But more generally, and I'm starting to think that the whole world should be built with DAOs everywhere, just because it's basically what we already have but with algorithmic rules. So it just makes sense to enforce those because then you have some proper way to quantify stuff and To like establish decisions and things like that. But regarding FXH itself, you put some interesting points saying that there is this implementation side that needs to still be in the hands of the team, and it like cannot be done in another way, at least for a long time. For instance, on Iketnunk, like it was easier to build a governance system because it's more decentralized than FX. In a way that the tokens are easier to generate. You have like the contract, an indexer, and the frontend. And basically anyone can build an indexer and anyone can build another frontend to the platform. It's easier. But FX, there is the signer module that needs to be run constantly. You have the preview generators, you have all these little modules that cannot— that just cannot be decentralized for now. And so like we have to keep this in the hands of the team because there is just no other way to do it for now. So at first the governance system will just be a way to gather votes. Basically we as the team put an engagement on enforcing the decisions taken by the community. And I would like it to be like community will have an implementation power on the system itself. But for now it's just not possible because too much centralization in different components of the system.

Speaker C: And I think that makes a lot of sense. When you look at some of the community polls that we've had so far, you know, sometimes you've gone against what the community says, like not like much, but you know, you're able to kind of get a sense of the vibe of what people want and then kind of use that as an input to your own or your, like the team's decision-making. And I think that you've done a really great job of that so far. You know, as somebody who is pretty much obsessed and living somewhere close to fx hash most of my waking hours, I feel confident in your ability to, you know, understand what is, what the community is saying, what the actual needs are that the community doesn't see, and just kind of making a really solid choice from there.

Speaker B: Yeah. And this is an interesting point again, because If you want to present all the options, like let's say you want to implement a new feature and you have different ways to bring it to the front end. But that's not only that, there is also all the implementation complexity that lies behind. Also, like there is the implementation within the contract that is not known to the people voting. And all of those components make it difficult for people that don't have a full view of the system to like give the ideal answer if there's any. But that's where I'm trying to like communicate a lot on how it's working behind the scenes so that we can take some group decisions as a group. And I'm really curious to see how we will like work with the governance contract because I actually don't really know how it will work precisely because there is always like this uncertainty part. But What I'm confident in is that I'm trusting the community to make good decisions based on the information we gave. I know that I shouldn't go by this, but if there is a decision that just cannot be implemented reasonably, there is always— we will keep the right to say, no, we just can't bring this to the platform, even if the whole community wants it. And these are the reasons why we can't bring it. But if this is reasonable, it will be implemented if the community wants it. And I want to try to first build a system in this area where a community like may not have the final word but will have an important impact on the final decision.

Speaker A: Yeah, I know I'm looking very much forward to being able to either write proposals or write an opinion on an on a proposal if there's multiple options. And I think the one that we've been talking about most in the last couple weeks is the cycles and the open for new generators versus closed. A feeling that I've come around to is that the more open the platform is, the better it will be post-beta because, you know, in the case where we grow from the 10,000-ish users to 100,000 users, we don't want people to come in and have to learn really complex rules. But, you know, just simply throwing that for a vote in Discord without context, people just kind of vote like, I like it random, or I like it this, and they don't really think about holistically what's best for the platform. So the idea to have a forum where people can actually write and propose things and present logic beyond just what someone's initial gut might be and try to actually influence and educate voters. That's, I mean, that's one of the reasons we have this show, right? We like to talk about the platform and get our opinions out there and get information out there. So it's something I'm very much looking forward to.

Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah, and me too, because I've been like, I've had difficulties in like making polls on Discord because it's hard to find the balance between giving enough information and also having people vote properly on the votes. Because like eventually you will need to present like a 10-page paper if you want everybody to know everything that's at stake with a decision, but it's not realizable, not on Discord at least. But if you have a governance system on the website where you have more time to like look at the proposal, see some comments and some thoughts that people are having regarding the proposal, it's much more meaningful than to make an educated guess. Also because like on Discord you just have to click on a button to make a vote and you basically can click everywhere. It's not a good metric. But if you have to send a vote on the blockchain, then it Kind of make it, uh, I don't know the word, but like, uh, it makes it less free, right?

Speaker A: It's a little more— it's one extra step, and so you have to actually be more deliberate.

Speaker B: Yeah, and there is like some, uh, conceptual value in sending votes to the blockchain rather than on Discord where you just click on a smiley to give an answer. Like, it makes it more professional. No, that's not the word I want to say.

Speaker C: I mean, I think the other thing that we've seen, and it's like been touched upon a little bit, is when artists, for example, ask questions about edition size or pricing on Twitter, you get like certain groups of individuals, primarily flippers, saying you should price this at 1 tez, you should price this at 2 tez. And obviously, you know, flippers are an important part of like the economics, or they're a large part of the economics of the platform, for better or for worse. And so you get people who are acting within like specific interests that are for their own interests, not necessarily for the interests of the platform as well. It would be interesting to see how like votes go, especially with the understanding that, you know, from a governance perspective, when it's based off of tokens, like people who heavily interact with like the market will presumably have more tokens and be able to influence those votes accordingly.

Speaker A: Or people who go through the efforts of accumulating more And if they're tradable, if they're cheap, and in a really cynical future, you could see like a small cabal of people who have overaccumulated and have outsized influence on votes.

Speaker B: Yeah, we'll see how it turns out. I hope it will not be the case, but it's really hard to control the token once it's released if it's tradable. Eventually, if someone wants to buy all the tokens for $10 million, I mean, people are going to say, okay, I want this money, and you know, you can't prevent that. But we'll see how it goes. And that's also why it will be interesting to have the governance system not purely make the decisions 100%, and like we still have the veto right in the end, because we can try out the system, see if it really works, and don't have it like destroy the platform just because Some people like got their hand on the tokens.

Speaker A: We'll see. I mean, that's the great experiment of Web3 in a way.

Speaker B: Yeah, I'm really looking forward to see it taking place. But also like, that's why I wanted to have the staking like redistribute some part of the fees, because by giving people like some shares of the revenues, it gives them an incentive in taking the right decision for the platform as a whole instead of just for themselves. Because if you don't have this incentive, like, you can just decide to take the best decision for yourself only and benefit from it in the short term. But if you are like, have an economic incentive in having the best decision taken as a group, then it ties the system a little bit stronger in the end.

Speaker A: You know, I'll say one of my concerns with having the one token that did governance and did profit sharing and acted as a gate to keep bots out of minting is that the more valuable that token is, the more the bots are going to want to collect it anyways, right? If it's revenue generating, it's not really going to price them out. They're just going to want to accumulate it anyways. It'll just pay for itself over time. So even if they're not given it initially, if it actually has an economic value that they can create a revenue stream from, it almost does become free over a long enough timeline for them to go ahead and jump in and get it. Versus having like one token that is maybe just governance and eventually revenue sharing, and then another that's distributed based on behavior only that could be used explicitly for creating allow listing and act as a barrier.

Speaker B: Yeah, okay, I see. Yeah, that's, that will be interesting to explore. But there's also something to consider that bots, they need tens of accounts to like mint on certain projects. And it's really difficult to buy lots of tokens on different accounts. And especially like if we give the moderation team the power to like decide that this is a bot account, we can't let it have those tokens anymore and things like that. But the problem is that if there is an economic incentive, we just cannot have the rights to like freeze the token of any account. Like it just cannot be possible. Yeah, like actually having this conversation makes me think that the token in itself needs some more thoughts. Yeah, I actually didn't think about having different tokens, but now that you mention it, it kind of makes sense even though it makes the system more complex. Yeah, I need to think about it because it could be interesting to explore. There's this balance to find between complexity of use and the actual benefits that it brings to the platform.

Speaker C: We're always happy to have more conversations about this.

Speaker A: Yeah, you can come on anytime. Well, I think we want to talk to you a little bit about the future of the platform too, and your kind of goals and where you think it all might go. But before we move off DAOs, so another aspect of this was subDAOs and the ability for people to come together. It doesn't have to even have the token necessarily, right? But to come together and form kind of clubs for buying and sharing ownership of art. In thinking about this, one of the Issues that I wasn't sure how it would be solved would be like multi-signature ownership of a wallet and making sure that everyone, you know, no one can rug pull the wallet, right? The main person at the top of the DAO. So is that something that's being worked in on the contract level at your end, or is that something that people are going to have to pursue individually?

Speaker B: This will be implemented in the contract. So this won't be released right now, the sub-DAOs. This will be later on. But yeah, basically the DAOs will be a multi-signature contract where you can make a proposal to execute an operation on the blockchain and you can vote for its execution or not. And there is this technical aspect, and then there is the when do we decide that a proposal can be executed. Basically, different groups of people will have different opinions on how the group should reach consensus. So what we will bring to those contracts are different ways to decide when a proposal can be executed. So when you create the group, you define that, for instance, everybody has the same amount of shares and we need to reach 100% of the votes to be able to execute an operation. And this will be the voting strategy of the contract. Like, people joining this contract will see the voting strategy and they will be like, okay, this is the only way to execute operations with the DAO.

Speaker A: Okay.

Speaker B: And if they want to change the strategy down the line, down the line they can. But to change it, they have to pass it through the first stage. So the previous needs to be fully accomplished before moving to the next step, the next way to count votes. So yeah, again, the idea is to provide frameworks to organize those sub DAOs and provide them with different ways to organize themselves. But we want to keep like some security on the contract themselves so that you can't just rob the content of a DAO if you hack it in a way. It needs to be like really safe on the contract level.

Speaker A: That's great to hear.

Speaker C: I guess from here, I know that we've been talking for over an hour, which is so much fun. And I think it's been flying by, at least from my perspective. From a future vision, hopes and dreams and goals, what are some of the things that you're looking forward to for the future of fxhash? And what are some of like your dreams that would be amazing if they came true?

Speaker B: Yeah. Wow. Well, being so much in the actual development, I haven't really thought about the next 10 years for the platform, for instance. But what I want is To be able to tie the educational content, the discoverability of the projects within the platform itself. For me, this is a goal that will be reached at the end of the year for sure. Like the curated spaces will come way before that, but there will be some tweakings to make for it to be properly done. But I would like the platform in itself to be sort of a go-to for generative art, not only if you want to collect, but also if you want to learn stuff. And if you just don't care about the collecting aspect or the economic aspect. And I think just by having the content on the platform itself gives like a really powerful way to introduce people to generative art and to have like some actual examples on how it's implemented in the real world. And there is another aspect that I'd like to develop, and it— I think it's like really tied to my personal history with releasing my own content in the real world. Before putting some content on the blockchains, I was trying to find ways to put my stuff out there. And it's really difficult. Like, this is the most difficult thing that I've ever did as an artist. Like, you have to reach out to different organisms. You first have to find those organisms to reach out to. Then you have to make some description of your work. You have to imagine how it can be implemented. Yeah. And basically you have the stuff you do on your screen and the stuff that you can put in the real world. There is like 100 times more work to put it in the real world. And having a platform that can help artists to go from what they're doing in their bedroom into the real world and get some money out of it, I want like to advertise that and help the people that were in the same situation as I was to like find ways to Earn their life just by doing the stuff that they like.

Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, the number of people who in the last 4 months have gone from not making a living on their art to now not just getting by but actually like flourishing, right? I mean, some people have gone from zero to hundreds of thousands of dollars, like real, you know, real fiat that they can use to pay their mortgage or their rent and feed their families. So it's just like That's insane.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker C: So congrats, you made it all possible.

Speaker A: And is there any other metrics though? Like, do you have a goal of like getting to 100,000 wallets or hit any other artists? Like, I know a while ago you mentioned getting Jeff Entrella on the platform was a really big get for you because he was a personal influence in the art world. Is there any other metrics that you're looking at? Anyone else or anything like that that you aspire to over that could be accomplished in the next year or 2?

Speaker B: Yeah, there are one or 2 people. I think I'll try to get them to post something myself because I really want to see their work on the platform. But yeah, no, other than that, I'm just happy to be doing this as a living now. Before that, I was like working for other people, and it's been a major shift in my life just doing stuff that I like and helping people more than I ever did before. It's just already amazing. And for now, I'm just enjoying that. Like, I don't have like some goals for the number of wallets or things like that. I'm just going to try to bring some fresh ideas and improve the platform day by day. And maybe the people will come more or maybe they won't, but I'll just do my best to provide the best space for everybody.

Speaker C: I like that philosophy. You know, it's so interesting just because there are all these different generative art platforms. You know, some are like, like broader towards all types of art, like whether like Taya or Versum, even just on Tezos. But when it comes to gen art, like I think that FXHash is considered, you know, one of the biggest contenders in the space. And it clearly has a very different product philosophy than like an Art Blocks, let's say. And I think it'd be really cool to see how like these 2 systems, like in particular, continue to grow and diverge and just to see how it brings even more awesome art into the space.

Speaker B: Yeah, that's the end goal, right? That we keep having some amazing content being posted by amazing people. And that's also why I think curation, when it's done at the platform level, puts too much constraints over the creativity of people. I'm curious to see how it will evolve actually, but I prefer to go with open system.

Speaker A: I mean, it's just been so fun to explore. Every day is kind of like a holiday, right? Where you never know what surprise drop might come if you just happen to have your attention on the browser window. It's completely replaced video gaming for me at this point. This is like an MMORPG in a sense, but real world, you know? I think there's one last obvious question we have for you because you've already given us so much of your time, which is really amazing. But is there anything before we ask it, is there anything that you wanted to touch on that we didn't get a chance to cover?

Speaker B: Maybe there was, but I don't see it now. I think I'm good.

Speaker A: You know, when fx hash launched the beta, it launched with several projects of your own. Is there anything that we can anticipate With the launch of the full platform that might be coming from you, will there be like a day one Ciphrd, or will there be another fxhash tagged drop?

Speaker B: No, there will be something. I just can't say that I won't be a part of it, but there will definitely be something for you to look forward to.

Speaker A: Wow, but it won't be a Ciphrd. Will it be under the, the fxhash name, or will it be just from another artist that you're just excited about?

Speaker B: I can just say that there will be lots of people involved.

Speaker A: Gotcha. Using the collaborative contracts, maybe?

Speaker B: Maybe, yes.

Speaker A: Oof.

Speaker C: So cagey. I love it.

Speaker A: Awesome. Thank you so much. It's been amazing to have you on. Like I said, it was really a goal of ours from the start of the show to be able to merit even being able to get you on and talk to you and just the coincidence of the beta ending and it's just all so perfect and It's lovely. So thank you so much.

Speaker B: Yeah, thanks for having me, for putting all of this content out there. And yeah, thank you.

Speaker A: Well, I think that does it. I hope everyone enjoyed, and maybe we can get you on again in a few months to review kind of the launch of the platform. And if there's any kind of big new phases coming, it'd be great to talk to you. But until then, thank you so much, Ciphrd. Thanks, Trinity. As always, and, uh, we'll talk to everyone soon. Bye.