Speaker A: All right, hello and welcome everyone to another episode of Waiting to Be Signed, a special interview episode. We're back for round 2 with Erik Calderon, who you might better know as Snowfro, founder of Art Blocks, creator of the Squiggle, and probably the fastest returning guest to the podcast ever.

Speaker B: Sweet. I'll take that title.

Speaker A: Uh, Trinity's here as well. You know, we wrapped it up with you last time. We only got to maybe 2/3 of our list and you were so game to come back again and we threw time on the calendar and here we are. So how's it going? I can see you recovered from the fallout of our episode. You know, there were so many hot takes and—

Speaker B: So many hot takes, you know, but I got a lot of really positive feedback from that episode. I got a lot of DMs from people all over the place being like, thank you, and excited to hear it. And, you know, I don't necessarily agree with what you have to say, but I appreciate that you put it out there. So it was good. I feel really good about it. And that's why I'm super excited to just be chatting with you guys. This seems like a very real conversation to be had, and it seems like a very real group of people are willing to listen to what y'all have to say. And so it's quite— it's really an honor for me to be able to be on here and chat with you guys. I didn't realize it was not a video podcast, which is fine, except for now I'm really disappointed because people won't be able to see how Trinity's blending in with the background.

Speaker C: Oh yeah.

Speaker B: On that shot.

Speaker A: Yeah, your hoodie is the same color as your room right now, Trinity.

Speaker B: Pretty awesome.

Speaker C: All green.

Speaker B: Green screen. Yeah.

Speaker C: I am my own green screen. Yeah. I'm glad to hear the, the good response. Yeah. And thanks for coming back. It was a really just, I don't know, it wasn't a wild conversation that we had last time, but I think we covered a lot of ground. And I know that there's infinite ground to cover just within the space that we have. I think one of the big things last time we chatted, you were like traveling Multiple days every week for like six weeks. Things are not slowing down. You are not resting. Follow up there. Same pace, or are you accelerating? It's worse.

Speaker B: Yeah, it's basically every week now between now. But you know what's nice? So next week I'm taking three days off for myself. I'm really excited about that. And then I'll be at consensus the week after that. So you know back in the saddle. But then. after that, I'm taking some time off with my family. We're going to Spain. We're gonna go see family in northern Spain. That's where like half my family is from. And I will also be flying with young children, although 5 and 8, they do finally actually want to play on the computer or on the iPad or, you know, whatever the device is. We'll bring the Switch. So unlike when my kid was 2 and I would not let him grab my phone, but then on the plane I was like, here, take the phone, take the phone. And he's like, no, I don't want it. Now that you're giving it to me, like, I don't. Want it. Now they'll want it. And so I'm actually pretty comfortable with the 9 or 10 hour flight each way with the kids. We'll see.

Speaker A: You're referencing that I'm about to go to Japan next week and we're taking a 2-year-old. That's going to be wild. And I'll definitely report back on it, probably for episode 115 or whatever it ends up being when I return. But I did actually want to follow up with you. You know, you kind of implied on the last episode that a lot of the traveling that you were doing was related to Studio and generative goods and kind of getting bigger brands perhaps, or people that maybe, maybe names that we don't necessarily think of when it comes to like generative and NFTs, like on board and kind of embracing this technology. You know, I'm sure you can't get into specifics if nothing's been announced or signed, but if that is the case, like, can you speak at all to kind of the tenor of those conversations and like what got people or what's getting people excited and what are some of like the barriers? Or hangups that you're encountering as you're trying to get people on board?

Speaker C: Are people excited?

Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, you know, what's interesting is so much has changed since I last talked to you. I mean, this is the floor is lava ecosystem and it feels like that, you know, I've come back kind of feeling that if a brand has a Web3 person on staff, they automatically have certain expectations that need to be met by being a participant in Web3. Oftentimes they are financial and in the current state of the ecosystem, that is maybe not a good sign, like to be working on potentially doing something quickly in this space. And I think exempt from that are, you know, the artistic kind of gallery-level brands or kind of people that use the platform. I don't ever have the luxury of traveling specifically for generative goods or specifically for the studio, but I do just travel for whatever reason that I'm getting called to speak or, you know, to be a part of a conference or an experience. And You know, it's whatever is most top of mind that consumes the majority of that conversation. So, you know, I can't remember when we chatted, but Paris was very much bouncing ideas off of artists and just trying to get a vibe check. Venice, also a vibe check and just kind of getting a feel for where artists are at. A lot of the comments I got from artists and collectors in the space was the idea they were grateful that I called out the supply and demand issues that we talked about. I think it's a hard pill to swallow, but I think it's just a pill that's going to have to be swallowed. And I think just even since being interviewed, I think it's become just even more clear and apparent, like what, you know, the kind of the lack of symmetry between, you know, supply and demand for what's going on in this ecosystem. And it's terrifying because, you know, we're building these tools, the studio, for people to go sell, put themselves out there and make more work. And I think that the studio could be judged on whether artists' work are successful there or not. And I think a lot of what's so important to me is to make it clear that this is artists that are taking a moment to kind of reflect and release work based on understanding their audience and based on understanding the collector and no longer getting to just kind of assume that the ether is going to sprinkle a bunch of cash in the way that it did in the past. And the precedent that was set I think it's a reality check. I think it's going to hit people kind of hard, but I also think it doesn't mean that the studio and/or a project is a failure if it doesn't sell on the studio. Artists don't just like make work and then they have to sell everything all the time. Yes, in our ecosystem, that's kind of what it feels like, but I think there's a pretty nice opportunity to kind of have a longer-term approach. Right now is the best possible time to have that kind of real sober conversation. If you're here for the long term, let's, let's think about what is a homogenized ecosystem look and feel like, and why do people feel that way as collectors? Why do they feel that way? What does homeostasis in the artwork look like? Like, homeostasis in the art world is millions of people with watercolors, of which like 10% of them feel like they are good enough to like put their stuff out there, of which maybe 1% of them getting to put their stuff out there and be represented by a gallery, which is kind of the normal medium of selling in the traditional art world. We have a really great opportunity here in which anybody can be seen. Anybody can be recognized in this ecosystem. But right now you have to put something out there that is truly unique and truly like stands out and exemplary. I just feel like there's this opportunity, forget the studio, just this. And I didn't get wonderful reception from artists on this comment. You know, this, this is something that is not well received by everybody, but I think that 2024 is a year for reflection. Both artists and collectors, you know, as collectors, we've been guilty sometimes. I mean, I'll put myself in this puddle of like buying everything that's generative art because I love generative art. It's so cool. And so I'm not sending the right signal as a collector when I'm just buying everything, right? And then as artists, I think it's also like a period of reflection. It's like, you know, who are your collectors? And like, who has one of everything you've ever sold? And who's it they're like liking your tweets and like giving you feedback. And when you post something exceptional, sending you a DM being like, holy crap, this is like really great work. I think 2024 is a year for reflection, and it could be that things pick up here in a little bit. But I think that any artist and any collector that really just kind of dig into like being a little bit more introspective and being a little bit more reflective of the past, embracing the past, understanding what happened in the past, and think about how this evolves in the future, if and when there is another kind of influx of demand, the artists that have shown to be the most thoughtful and the most, like, careful and the most deliberate are going to be the artists that are going to have the most success in the next round. And I think that's hard. Artists want to produce stuff. Artists want, you know, they need to make a living. A lot of artists quit their jobs to pursue this full-time. It's freaking awesome. I love that. But that may not be making ends meet, and that's really tough. But the solution isn't just selling more art. It's really taking a step back and thinking about the ecosystem and what every one of our roles is within this ecosystem and what's going to make us differentiate ourselves.

Speaker A: Yeah, I think a lot of us, when we hear 2024 is a year of reflection, it might be a little disappointing. It's because I think in retrospect, we all consider 2023 was the year of reflection and we don't want another year of reflection. We want We've reflected and now we want to proceed back into a bull run and have that same kind of, not even just sales, but that sense of community and buzz and conversation. And I mean, this was a topic, you know, just today we released an interview with Iskra and this came up, like this idea of like recapturing the magic of 2021 and like, how do we do it? Can we do it?

Speaker C: Spoiler alert.

Speaker A: Yeah, spoiler alert. We can't, or it'll be difficult.

Speaker B: I strongly disagree. The magic is going to be between an artist and their collector base, their diehard collector base. Like, that magic can absolutely be created. The magic of just like random people stumbling into your work and getting really excited about it— look, a year ago, people were really in it for the art. Like, people that were really sticking around after like the rough patch of 2022, I'd say of those people, Maybe 10% of those are still here, right? So like, you know, we just have to really understand what is your metric of success for participating in this. I love it when people tweet this every now and then, like someone will kind of put this out there, like, why are you here? What is your metric of success? What gets you out of bed in the morning? You know, if you're really honest with yourself about that, like you can actually help a lot. And if your metric of success is being able to like instantly make a profit on your art, like that is where I think it's gonna be really hard. Sorry, as a collector, like that you instantly can like sell something for more than you paid for it. I think that's actually going to be pretty hard. Like, I think that magic may be gone or temporarily paused. Right now, the vibe is often, and this doesn't apply to just generative art, and that obviously doesn't apply across the board, is I am at an art fair in the traditional art world, and I somehow convinced a gallerist to sell me a piece and take it straight off the wall. And I walk outside of the doors of that art fair and I hold it up above my head and say, if no one is willing to pay me more for this than I just paid for it, this fair is a scam. This artist is trash and this gallery is just no good.

Speaker A: 100%.

Speaker B: Like, that's exactly the sentiment that we're feeling across the board as artists, sometimes as collectors, sometimes as platforms. That is magic. Like, that is actually like, you know, magic in the sense of like Magic is not real. Like, magic happened, and that's not— money doesn't just grow on trees, and things happen, and people get smart, and people get like more deliberate. And I, I think artists taking a moment, and maybe it doesn't have to be all of 2024, but we're going to see phenomenal works released by phenomenal artists that are going to have phenomenal success. Some artists have gained a certain level of notoriety where it's going to be easier for them to either sell it or easier for them to charge a higher price for it. Some artists have not released anything in so long that I'm going to be just so excited when that artist comes back to release, even if it's an edition of 500. Like, it's going to be so exciting to get their work again. But we have a lot of artists that are very prolific, and that's great. We love this fact about our medium that is so prolific. But if you're prolific and relentless on, you know, releasing stuff, And you don't care if it sells or not, I love you. Like, that's fine. Like, just keep putting your shit out there. That's awesome. If you're relentless and prolific and angry that your stuff is not selling, or frustrated that your stuff is not selling because the collectors are not here, because the platform isn't doing it for you, because Web3 is dead, that's where I, like, I feel like a certain level of anxiety of just like, that's not something I can solve for you. That's not something I can answer for you. And that's not something I can tell you it's all going to be okay. Because that goes back to the supply and demand stuff that we talked about last episode, right? Like, there's just, there's way more artists than collectors today. At least it feels like that. And there's only going to be more artists. And we're still seeing a dwindling of collectorship. There's a lot, there's a million people on Blast, right? Like, if you go on the Blast website, it looks like they have a million people that have signed up on Blast. So like, there's a million people out there, but they're not collecting digital art. Now, how can we get them excited and how can we get them to collect digital art? That's where I'm excited about generative goods. That's where I'm excited about like the studio and, you know, being able to kind of leave little breadcrumbs for new people to fall into the rabbit hole, not based on hype, but based on like a curiosity for the medium and based on curiosity for the technology. I mean, the people are there. They're just not collecting art because the majority of the people that are there are oftentimes here for purely speculative reasons. And we can't live without them, that they're very much part of this ecosystem. And I used to kind of like push back. And now I realize we all play important roles in this ecosystem. Everybody has their role. But currently, they're not speculating on art, they're speculating on meme coins.

Speaker C: They'll rotate in, maybe.

Speaker B: I think so.

Speaker C: Just as a nice mirror to, you know, the conversations from 2021 and 2020, GameStop is back in the news.

Speaker B: Hey!

Speaker C: So maybe we're coming back, who knows? Q3, Q4 2024. That's where it's at.

Speaker A: Uh, let's hope. But, you know, I think interestingly, the closest we've come to kind of recapturing some of that buzz and that feeling of like, we're back, or that even, not even necessarily that we're back, but that feeling of excitement has been around some generative releases recently that have been like open editions and free. And like most specifically in our, in our minds, I think Highlight did a release. It was like Highlight with Bright Moments plus someone else. Like it was like a 5-way release that Zancan with the Aux Arbes that did like over 70,000 mints. And then even more recently, Punevyr on fx hash did 275,000 mints on a free project that used a Farcaster frame and all of that. And just thinking a little bit to like our conversation last time with Studio and giving artists more tools than were traditionally available than just like, you know, long form on Ethel 1. It's really interesting, the power of free and that ability to like, yeah, like There were almost 50,000 unique wallets that minted that Punevyr. Like, that's probably a lot of those people who are on Blast who aren't collecting art. Yeah. Got interested because they saw this thing and it hit critical mass and broke out. How reproducible is it? Or like, how well can you engineer it? I don't know. It kind of feels like everyone will get one shot at doing their own thing like that. But did you kind of track any of that through all of your travel recently?

Speaker B: I've heard. Yeah, I've heard about it. There's, there's a lot of really fun stuff out there that's kind of free. There's a lot of stuff happening on Base in general. There is like a sustainability aspect of minting tremendous editions for free. Obviously, it depends on the model for a platform. Look, 250,000 mints today. When I released the Chromie Squiggle, I did not expect to get 10,000 mints, right? So now there are at least 25 times more people here than there were back then. And so My intention with the Squiggle and the reason there was a price of $20 was just so it wouldn't get botted. So like, you know, because people can just kind of abuse systems if they want to, was just to get it into as many people's hands. And that's a lot of, you know, my guidance, I guess, when— because I want to make sure that I'm not just another collector giving— telling artists what to do, right? Because I do worry about that, even if, you know, I have the best intentions on like giving people suggestions. Like, I worry. But if somebody asks me my opinion, you know, My dream, my excitement here is getting work into people's hands. And then seeing that potentially materialize into physical things that they then walk around and help spread the word of what I do. It's like, oh, cool hat. What's that rainbow thing on your hat? Oh, it's a squiggle. What's a squiggle? It doesn't even have to be an expensive thing. We have Heart and Craft and we have more fun stuff happening with Generative Goods. So I think that we need to embrace anything that's gonna help get art into people's into hands. people's hands so that they have a conversation in the arts, especially if it's their first time. And I think that, yeah, seeing those things happen like that, I'm just ecstatic about them. I'm really happy. I'm really happy for the artists. I'm really happy for the platforms. I think that, you know, Floor is an example of someone that's kind of built everything into just one app. And so, you know, I get a notification from Floor. It's like, hey, you get this new— and I don't have any problems with Solana, but like, I just, I think I accidentally collected my first Solana NFT the other day because, you know, Floor sends me this notification saying, hey, the next drop or whatever. And it's like, just claim here for free. You press a button and you have an NFT in your wallet. That feels really good. And you know what else feels really good is like, I just cannot stop thinking about Luca Netz right now and what he's doing. I don't know if y'all have seen his most recent video on like, he went to Target, you bought a $7 pudgy penguin, you scan a QR code, he's built an app. It just drops these like little NFTs into your wallet and you add them to your little penguin. And you now, and I know that's not art necessarily, although there's like, you know, there's like a nice vibe to it.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: But like, I've watched the video now like 50 times, and I'm just sitting here thinking like, we have everybody so upset because prices are down and collectorship is down. And I feel like I'm killing myself to go get more people to come into this ecosystem. But man, sometimes I feel like I'm just doing it wrong because Luca is doing it and he's doing it right, and he's making this accessible, painless. And that's what we need. We need 10 Lucases in this world. And some of them, instead of being like, you know, toy penguins, maybe like being maybe art related, or, you know, like the— what was it— Flux kind of, you know, back in the day, you know, like, or comic cards related, but like artistically, you know, you've got Dom Hoffman doing stuff with like generative comic book covers that aren't even made into NFTs, which, in my opinion, just even for purely documentation purposes, if gas is so cheap on L2, like everything should just be an NFT. But that's a hot take that not everybody agrees with, but that's fine. But yeah, like, I just You watch Twitter so upset and so frustrated and like so forlorn for the future, and at the same time you're watching these people that are just— there's no guarantee for success. I don't think he could like really make his money back selling $7 penguins at Target. I just don't know. I don't know what the maths are there. It just does not seem like something. But you've got people that are just out there killing themselves to get this into people's hands, and You've got various different on-ramps to get people excited about what we're doing. And he's got the route that says if he gets 10 million, 100 million people, what percentage of it does it take for them to be excited about what's happening in the generative medium to provide a little bump in what we're doing? It's not a huge percentage of the people that might be buying a Pudgy Penguin that we need to somehow get excited about what we're doing. And so, you know, the 250,000 mints and the Pudgy Penguin stuff and like, you know, on a much slower and deliberate scale, but like what I'm trying to do with generative goods and thinking through Even something as simple as, you know, what does it look like for when, you know, you're an artist in the studio and you can walk around with your phone and you can just like, you know, someone's like, hey, what do you do for a living? Oh, I'm an artist. Oh cool, let me see your art. You pull up your art. Oh sweet, how much do you sell them for? I sell them for like $200. Oh cool, how do I buy one? Actually, I can swipe your credit card and I can just send you this mint right now. Or you can do that at like an art fair, or you can do that at like a local art market or a pop-up shop or whatever. Um, I just, you Yeah, the phone is going to be our tool to get ourselves out there. We need to empower our creators and our artists to be able to sell their work detached from the computer screen, detached from the seed phrase. I know that that's like anti-decentralization, but damn it, we just, we're going to progressively decentralize here. If you are concerned about losing a $50 piece of art because your seed phrase is compromised, there's a lot of things that you could lose that are much more valuable that we put our trust into like a single 6-character password for. So, you know, we can progressively decentralize into like these valuable things. And I don't remember how this question started. So sorry, that was another ramble as usual. But yeah.

Speaker C: Rambling is great. We're here for it. But I think there's been something that we've noticed in like the shift since the last time we talked to now. And you're talking about like, how do we onboard however many people, the next million people, 10 million people, whatever, into the NFT space, which theoretically involves transacting, whether it's through a traditional wallet with a passcode, whether it's like through your Google account, whatever. But we've also seen this giant proliferation in just sharing, I would say, primarily through like Farcaster, which I used for a very brief period of time and then kind of rolled out of it because it's just too much work. But we were able to see artists getting compensated, not necessarily because they were selling work, but through the social side of things via $degen and tipping. And technically you could do it through Warps or any of the other types of tipping coins that have come out of that space. And I think it's also widening the funnel through social minting, which is how we really ultimately got to that 275,000 Glyph mints. Do you think that's like another arena of just kind of expanding that aperture? Like if Twitter incorporated like minting frames à la Farcaster, you know, that's another really great way of expanding things as well as like doing it on your phone, albeit probably at a lower cost than $200.

Speaker B: 100%. Yeah, I mean, you know, we just have to be careful with like, when you start getting into a ton of mints, the infrastructure starts actually having like real costs and real kind of like, you know, especially for platforms that aren't necessarily killing it right now. You know, I don't think any platform right now is just like profitable, or very few of them are even just profitable. So those implications can be real. There's, there's a lot of things to unpack there. First of all, I want to start with, we talked about onboarding the next million people to Web3. That might actually be what I've been you know, let's say, saying for a little while. And as I hear you say that, I realize, especially just over the course of the last few weeks, especially with my infatuation of these like Pudgy Penguin like onboarding process, especially with some of the conversations I had in Venice and some of the conversations that we're thinking about for the future, I'm done trying to onboard 100 million people into Web3. I want to onboard 100 million people into being collectors of digital art. I mean, I know that sounds nuanced or maybe, but when I hear you say that, it's like, this goes down to this This like app-based process, this idea that you go to Bright Moments and you mint a thing, and obviously you have to have a wallet and do some stuff on the backend to do it, but like that could be abstracted. And the technology was a catalyst for people going down the rabbit hole for collecting digital art in the Art Blocks Discord 3 and a half years ago when it first launched. You could say that it onboarded people into Web3, but I think the true collectors, the true patrons, the ones that kind of stuck around are actually people that were just onboarded into collecting digital art where they might have completely avoided art in the first place. So nuance there, but gosh, like, I feel like just from this conversation, I will reframe my conversations to not onboarding people into Web3 anymore. Like, look, I've been spending so much time internally with my team, externally on a few different points. One of them that is just so salient to me, and you know, this kind of has a little bit to do with the Farcaster stuff, but we are all logging in.

Speaker C: Yeah.

Speaker B: to the same computer, and your ETH address is like your home folder on the computer. And when I buy a piece of art from you, you are transferring it from your home folder to my home folder on one computer. And that's how I know that it doesn't exist on multiple computers or that it hasn't been sent to like 25 other people. And what that means to me, like, we are almost like referring to computers as silicon chips or whatever, diodes or whatever the hell runs computers at the chip level, at the micro level. By talking about onboarding people into blockchain, when people are literally just understanding this idea that they're just all on the same computer and everybody has access to it, and this is how we keep track of stuff and how we know that things are real and not real and whatever. I think it, again, it's like we, the blockchain is literally just, it's not even the recording format anymore. Guys, like the blockchain becomes the thing that is used in case there is a dispute. Yeah. At some point, the only time you will ever need to go under your skin is when your accountant's trying to figure out your taxes, maybe. And even that, one day, I think countries will wake up to regulation to realize that we're like, we should not be taxed for capital gains for spending a currency to buy a thing. It should just be a currency, but that's fine. So the blockchain will be the last line of defense for dispute resolution, because we're all just going to assume that everything is on the table and on the surface and that we're transacting in a way that is honest. And we're going to assume that until someone does something wrong. And then we're going to be able to be like, nope, this is fake. It's kind of what happens when you go on OpenSea and you're like, oh my gosh, why is that so cheap? And then you realize, like, you know, people airdrop you fake collections in your wallet, like, what the floor is this? And you could potentially go buy it. But you can verify by looking at the smart contract and know that this is a fake collection. And that's generally been resolved by OpenSea. But some of these things are really old in my wallet. I really think that we're going to get to this point where the blockchain is— the word blockchain, the concept of blockchain, the talk of blockchain is going to be simply for dispute resolution. And we're just going to otherwise assume that we're all on the same computer and we're all going to be using the same thing together. I mean, that's something that when you then think about Farcaster, you have this native app running on this computer that knows your address because it's in your home folder. And so you can do things in the app by liking something. The people that made the app know exactly who you are and are able to then send you things on this like shared computer. It's like, I feel like just in the last year in the down market and You know, yeah, we can we can sulk about art sales—not just generative, just art sales in general—kind of being low and slow. But the bears are when people build. The bears are when we can take a step back and think about the future and think about like because if you have money flowing in and everything's happening really fast, you just don't even have the bandwidth or the thought to like think about those things. And what Farcaster is doing, yes, I think Twitter would be great if they came out with some kind of way of doing. There is a way. I mean, I minted a young weekend mint directly from Twitter, but you know. Millions of warnings, and obviously I wasn't able to see the end result, you know. And also the Twitter API is really hard to deal with and very expensive— $5,000 a month if you even want to be able to do something fun. So Farcaster has definitely got an edge on that. But when you log into Twitter from your phone, you're logging into a network with yet a different computer. When you log into Farcaster from your account, I'm sharing art and buying art on the same computer. I'm logging into Farcaster Essentially on the same computer as everybody else is. When we all understand that the end thing here is that we're producing, we're creating, the Ethereum gods and like all the other smart contract chains have created just one computer and that maybe one day in the future we will all be operating on this single computer. And the unlocks that that happens, especially with L2s, and like that's why it's really nice to have L2s within the EVM ecosystem because all of those things settle onto that same computer. There's something really powerful and exciting there. And it almost kind of took needing to have a 250,000-piece that you could demonstrate that people would mint through like this other social app to really kind of scale back and open our minds up to like this opportunity with the world computer. It's always been referred to as the world computer. But oftentimes, we don't let that sink in, that we're all logging into like a computer that everybody in the world can log into. So yeah, I think there's, there's some really incredible opportunity.

Speaker A: Well, I mean, I think as amazing as it would be to onboard another million people to generative art or just art in general, even if it happens to be on NFTs, like, I think as 2 podcasters in the space, we'd love to see that happen because that's more potential listeners for us. But studio aside and generative goods aside, looking at the other half of Art Blocks, the curated side, and looking at what some of the other platforms have been doing, narrowing the scope.

Speaker C: Yeah.

Speaker A: Fewer releases, right? Addressing the current market. To what degree do you feel like serving the people here will potentially lead to expansion again? Because there's a lot of lapsed people that could come back. If we just got back to where we were 2 and a half years ago, things would feel really, really good.

Speaker C: Right.

Speaker A: And it seems like a lot of the intentional moves that are being made with Curated are kind of designed around, right? Because it's not just going to fewer. Releases, but it's more support for releases, which is partially why there's— I think this has been publicly talked about at this point, but that's partially why the fee is going up, right, for curated as well, because there's going to be additional services, right? So maybe you can talk a little bit about like what it's going to mean. And this is also not unique to Art Blocks, right? Like we have platforms like Verse who are really like doing shows and like putting a lot of effort behind each solo release is kind of like their version of curated. So like. Can you speak a little bit to those changes and also where are we in seeing other curated releases? It's been a few months since we spoke, so I don't know if we're any closer.

Speaker B: Yeah, it has been a few months and yeah, I mean, we have stuff lined up for curated. We have not announced when or what is going to be going on there, but we have some stuff and we're already in talks with some artists about it. What we're trying to make sure is that what we bring forth on curated is something that is going to be— like, Farcaster is meeting audiences where they are. You know, this is something that the product team at Art Blocks is, you know, very obsessed with, and I love that we think about it that way. And then, you know, also meeting collectors where they all are psychologically and emotionally in like a process of collecting and wanting to collect and getting excited about collecting new work. And I think that we have an opportunity to— the idea that in the current ecosystem, the most gorgeous piece of generative art in the world that can be done on-chain, let's just say, like the thing we haven't even seen before, like the grail, the shiny thing. That is something that, in my opinion, I mean, we'll still see some beautiful things like that through curated, probably through some group shows. But, you know, this goes to the proliferation of generative artists, the fact that a lot of them, I think we talked about it a little bit last time, that a lot of them learn together with the same tools and kind of produce similar stuff until 200 out of the 10,000 rise to be some of like the most mind-bending generative artists of our time, but we need to give them time. And also thinking about the fact that a lot of the generative works that were released in 2021 and 2022 had probably been worked on for 5 or 6 years, maybe even longer in some cases, shorter in other cases. And those got generally consumed in 2021 and 2022, and that things that have come out since then are great exceptional works, but a lot of them didn't really have that kind of long artistic kind of dance and relationship with them. So I think that what I feel like is, you know, this goes to generative goods on the cheapest side, which is like, I want more physical things. I feel that I need more physical time with my work. And then also at the highest level of like an Art Blocks curated piece, I think there has to be some kind of performative element, some kind of physical/performative/community/ thinking outside the box, not just like, how can I make the most beautiful pixels on the screen, which is awesome, of course. I mean, look at my collection. I'm a huge fan of these things. But how can I also just raise the bar? And so when Art Blocks Curated said for years, like, we are looking to raise the bar, and there's a lot of critique as to like whether Art Blocks Curated should have released some of the stuff as curated or not. But if you look back, it's, it's one of the best sets of curated generative artwork that exists within our ecosystem, right? And I think We have some platforms that come close to it, but also with a highly curated model, like, as in, like, you know, individual outputs are able to be curated and they're much smaller releases. And so, you know, it gets infinitely more difficult when everything is purely on-demand generative art. And so, you know, obviously you can kind of tweak those parameters all day long to come out with the most curated curation of generative art, but I'm proud of everything that we've done at Curated, but I do believe that for us to continue to say that we are raising the bar I have yet to see in a really long time a purely digital work that is raising the bar. Like, I mean, just like taking it to that next level. Like, it's all incredible work. All of these artists are phenomenal artists and they're all making incredible work. I'll give you an example of something that I felt like raised the bar was Operators Project last year, right? Like, that raised the bar. And it's not just because the visuals are stunning. Like, it raised the bar from the way they presented it, from the way that they like created a presentation around it. And like, literally, I was sitting there like just buzzing thinking, oh my God, this is going to be on Art Blocks. Like, as a joy of a founder of a generative artist, as a creator in this ecosystem, like just being like proud that like this was going to be on Art Blocks. So, you know, it raised the bar. And it was not just screen-based work. There was a choreography component. There was a human element. There was a follow-up And I think you can have phenomenal and tremendous generative art that is always going to be appreciated as like purely digitally on a screen, and it's going to be incredible. And we're going to release a lot of that probably through Curated as well. But like, if we really want to say we're raising the bar, we should be raising the bar. And so that's what we're looking for in that next kind of solo curated release is something that truly feels different. And our goal is to have our next release have a major part in Marfa. And even if people couldn't buy a piece or afford a piece, like being able to use out-of-bounds mints so that everybody can participate in Marfa, or have it be actively part of the dialogue so people come together and have an experience that is unparalleled. And what that means is we're taking advantage of obviously the distribution mechanism of algorithmic art and being able to make something unique and everybody— the automated element of making everything unique. And then also the distribution mechanism, like what it means for a bunch of people to own something that's unique to them as part of a bigger family. So all that to say, like with Art Blocks, like we feel a tremendous amount of pressure to blow people away and it's increasingly more difficult to do that. And some artists are well enough established in their career where they can do whatever they want and it's gonna do really well and that's phenomenal. very excited about that. And like, I think very proud of those artists, you know, hopefully Art Blocks played a role, even if it's a small role in that. But after 3 and a half years of releasing, or 3 years of releasing generative art, all of which I think is stunning and incredible, with a dwindling collectorship that has a lot of options and may even start spending their money on things like AI, may even spend their money on things like playing video games on blast, like whatever, like the shiny thing is that is going to be, you know, like Generative art was that for them at one point too, let's be real. We are just trying to make sure that what we release next is going to just captivate those people, the ones that are still here, and make them feel almost like feel honored to still be here or feel rewarded for having stuck around and been like, okay, yeah, this is kind of what I've been waiting for for a long time. So without being able to announce what we're doing and without being able to say what we're doing, it's really hard to kind of put it into words other than that. Yeah. Any of the best digital artworks that were ever released on Art Blocks in the past as curated could very well fit the next version of curated. Most likely, again, there's maybe that like shiny thing that we haven't seen yet, like that that new thing that like makes me want to eat the screen or just whatever. Like the next thing that we haven't seen in in the digital world is that's gonna happen too. I know that's gonna happen. We're just gonna look at something on a screen and our eyes are gonna cross. be like, oh my God. But at the caliber of anything that's been released in the past on Art Blocks, which is, in my opinion, some of the best generative art in the world, for it likely to get like a solo curated slot moving forward, it probably needs to be that plus some physical performative, fully thought through element to feel like it's transcending just the screen and turning into something that is—

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: reigniting a more meaningful cultural connection between the people that are here to buy it. And for everything else, there's a million platforms. There's the studio, there's Engine, there's the idea of doing some, you know, really cool group shows. There's room for all of that. But if there's only 500 people buying art these days, we want to make sure that the things that we do release are going to be the things that are going to blow their minds.

Speaker C: And I think that Art Blocks curated in the past has really done a really good balance of that. You know, I'm just thinking about from a viability perspective, you've had some of the more experimental pieces, like the Operator piece, great example, what Sasha Stiles and Nathaniel Stern were doing. Another really great example, one that didn't mint out, or at least last time I checked it hadn't, which is a shame because it's a really, really cool piece.

Speaker B: It's a shame. It's such a good project.

Speaker C: Yeah. But, you know, I think that's something that From a viability perspective, especially within this slightly, well, dramatically smaller market, as we've said, it's trying to figure out what does success look like? Is success releasing something that is bonkers, hella cool, that just raises the bar? But is it a success if nobody wants to buy it? If it hasn't found its audience?

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker C: Should people be expecting to pay more there to be smaller editions? And what are some of the goals with the curated pieces other than to raise the bar?

Speaker B: To draw more people in, right? Like to get people excited about it again, to either get the people that were excited in '21 that kind of like went away and they're like, oh shit, look what Art Blocks is doing now, to get them back, or to get completely new people into this ecosystem to understand so that maybe there is a world where we can go back to releasing a piece every month or every 2 months. That doesn't have to be some crazy performative thing, but because there's like so much demand here, that's just the problem. It's like Art Blocks going from 250 to 150 to less than 100 to 10 releases in one year. I mean, from a company perspective is suicide. I mean, it doesn't feel good to like not be selling. Like we built all this technology to like sell cool art and to like be part of this. But if we're doing that and cognizant of the situation that's out there, like We are not responding to that in any way other than we hear and feel the collectorship. If you have the best work in the world and it goes on Art Blocks curated and it doesn't sell out, that doesn't help anybody. And if we feel that the market is in such a place where that exceptional digital work could be released on Art Blocks and not sell out, what does that mean? Does that mean you're a bad artist? No, I hope people don't think that means that Art Blocks is not a good platform. Like, it's just the reality of like being in a canoe with really tiny paddles going down, you know, rapids very quickly and having very little control over the entire ecosystem and not having enough Lukas in the world to like get a bigger swath of people to kind of come back in and fall into that rabbit hole. And some of the people that did go through the rabbit hole might have also, even, even the ones that were most passionately about collecting art might also have gotten worn out and, uh, or lost money or seen that there's— it's harder to make money. So they've kind of slowed down and kind of started falling off of our timelines too. And Web3 is— it's so much about just paying attention and like listening and like just putting, you know, putting your ear to the ground and just kind of understanding what the vibe is. And it is awful to have built this thing at Art Blocks that is capable of minting tens of thousands of mints every day and make the deliberate decision to slow it down. It is awful that we don't give as many opportunities for artists to release through the curated platform, which is what it was originally meant to be for. But if it's not going to sell your work, it doesn't do you good, it doesn't do us any good. So let's hear things out. I really want artists to spend time in the studio to understand the relationship they have with their collectors. An artist is more likely to have a highly lucrative and successful curated drop on Art Blocks in the future if they nurture their collectors for the next, like, however long it takes to just release maybe some smaller editions. One of the things that I'm most excited about with the studio, for example, and this kind of goes towards— we— this isn't the end of generative art, y'all. This is just the end of whatever we just experienced in the last few years. I am desperate to see artists, instead of tweeting dailies of just like an image output that they got from an algorithm and saved it on their hard drive, I'm desperate, especially once we get integrated into L2 and Arbitrum and like different, you know, or Base and Arbitrum, different L2s, that if it costs you less than $5 to upload a whole algorithm and mint one piece and close the algorithm as like your daily and tweet that, I want you to tweet your daily as a documented on-chain generative artwork because L2s now allow you to do that for very little money. I want the studio to be full of artists that are taking their dailies and documenting them on-chain. If you rewind back to why I started Art Blocks in the first place, because I would see people post about things on Instagram and then think, okay, this is beautiful, but tomorrow it'll be the next one. It'll be the next one.

Speaker C: So wait, just, it's one of ones. Their daily, a one of one on an algorithm that they upload through Studio, potentially collaboration with Farcaster to get that as a social mint, one and done.

Speaker B: Not even for sale. I'm saying not even for sale.

Speaker C: Oh, not even for sale, just to exist.

Speaker B: We spent 10 years in the generative space sharing artwork with zero thought that anybody would ever buy it in the first place. I mean, very few of us. Had any kind of exposure to a gallery or, you know, plotter drawings obviously sold. And like, you know, a few of us had kind of little stores to sell our work, but very few of the generative artists were actually like making art because they thought they could sell it. They were just making art because they love it. And so I'm, I'm kind of saying, look, you can have— I see some artists, for example, where they do dailies and every day it looks like it's kind of from the same algorithm, right? So what does it look like to upload and then every day you mint a new one from that algorithm and it's for the week? And so it's 5, and then you close the algorithm down. You keep those 5, you don't list them for sale. But guess what? People like me that feel a little bit fatigued from like just constantly being told to buy stuff— every now and then I see something on Twitter and I'm like, man, I would love to own that. And so someone like me might go and place an offer on that piece. And maybe if you don't accept the offers for a year, you actually have a pretty good idea of what to price your next work at, because you have this idea of what people are willing to kind of offer you for your work. And you could probably price even higher because generally bids are lower than the actual true worth of the thing. We have this opportunity to just kind of spend the year utilizing the tools that have been given to us, utilizing the 24/7 permissionless beautiful marketplace that exists within like Web3 as a whole, but using that as a tool in the tool chest, not as like the means to the end. End of making the art. So artists doing dailies, tweeting about dailies that are actually like minted on-chain works that are not listed for sale, I think they'd be pleasantly surprised, especially if it's like really great work, to see that by not making it available for me to buy, it might make me want it even more and to maybe go in there and like place a bid or 2 on the works. I don't know, I could be really wrong there. I have a bunch of work that I've been wanting to put out there into the world But I can't release it on Art Blocks because Art Blocks in the previous model, cuz it was like this release mechanism, which is for selling it. You know, I don't have time to create my own engine contract, although now the studio does it all kind of outta the box, which is great. Uh, you know, an engine partner, they're great, but like, they don't want me to just like document work through them. Like they want, you know, that's what they're here to do is to sell work. Right. So now with the studio, I'm gonna have my own studio contract. It's gonna be a flex contract and I'm gonna be able to like just fuck around with code.

Speaker C: Yeah.

Speaker B: And like, document it in the way that a lot of artists have documentation of their careers prior to, you know, like if they were doing sketches for a sculpture. Ensemble has done a tremendous job of kind of like helping artists document their work. Love what Mac is doing over there. And like, this is just another way of kind of saying, hey, look, like we also document our generative processes. Some people did that a little bit on Prohibition, on fx hash, people document their work, but oftentimes it's like then followed by here's a link to mint. And I'm kind of throwing it out there and saying, hey, like, we can potentially use this to document our work now that L2s make it so cost-effective. We could document our work. And that leads towards this other deep thought of trying to make art as passive as possible for collectors. You know, if I walk into a shopping mall and all the stores, there's like someone standing at the front of the store and they're like, come in here, come buy something, come buy something. Like, I'm not going back to that shopping mall. Right? But like, obviously everything's for sale. What does it look like to be like a normal shopping mall where you just kind of walk around and you like window shop and you experience like what's going on around us? And that's what Twitter is like. Twitter is right now maybe the biggest art gallery in the entire world. Maybe Farcaster is, you know, like if we look at Twitter as a medium to demonstrate our work, not necessarily as a place to sell it, but like as an exhibition space and like a way to document what we're doing. I just see this like, vibe change. I could be wrong, I have— this has to be proven, but I see this opportunity for a vibe change when like the thousands of prolific generative artists that are out there are actually just like going back to the roots of kind of being a generative creator, posting work that they've created, but like this time documenting it using blockchain technology, putting it all on chain so it kind of has all the merits and all the exciting parts about on-chain art, and then spending some time going through the relationship, like hearing what art collectors have to say. Instead of posting a video of an animated artwork, it's actually just like the live view of the animated artwork. Maybe WarpCaster and Twitter start upgrading to where you can start, you know, gosh, my dream is that you could pull up a Chromie Squiggle in WarpCaster and like click the frame and it would just like animate the squiggle, right? Like, that feels very low-hanging fruit, I think, from a perspective of a development perspective. And we have a lot of apps. I mean, we have a lot of like artworks on Art Blocks that would benefit from animation being live in the browser and in the feed. You know, really kind of leaning into this idea that this is all potentially, you know, we can kind of get the vibes back by getting, turning into like exhibition center, art gallery. Just like when I walk from one room to another, I don't look at every artwork in my house every single time that I look at it and just like soak it up. It's like, oh my God, I love this artwork. But I love my artwork. Like it's just there. It's passive. You know, the reason Spotify can be so proliferated is because you can drive and listen to music. It's really hard to like drive and look at art. So art will maybe never be as passive as Spotify is, right? But art is passive in my house. Art is actually pretty passive on Twitter. Like we're just scrolling through. Sometimes I like the art, sometimes I don't. Not because I like— I press that like button, not because I like it or don't like it. Sometimes I'm just scrolling faster than others. But I love that my timeline is like 3/4 people sharing and posting artwork, and half the time it's not even for sale. Half the time it's just artists posting like their dailies. And I think that we can embrace and harness this technology to like empower our dailies to A, help us document our work long-term, take the longevity of the blockchain. B, help us potentially understand what strangers are willing to kind of pay for our work when we're not trying to sell it, just kind of putting it out there. And C, potentially monetize the work in the far future where you have enough demand for it that you just go in and you accept a bunch of offers for a bunch of works because you're excited that people want to own it. It's turning it upside down, the process of minting and the process of being a participant in Web3. But I do think there's like something there, and I think it can definitely elevate the vibes a little bit.

Speaker A: A lot of what you just said, I think, speaks to like the long-term preservation of things, almost like archiving. And it's something that really doesn't get talked about that much in the space beyond, oh, is it on-chain or is it off-chain? with IPFS or similar service. And we've seen a lot of great discussion about the merits of both. And Art Blocks has been, from the beginning, almost entirely on-chain. Every now and then someone says like, oh, this tiny little, maybe this little one piece you could say is not on-chain, but let's, for the sake of discussion, let's just say that Art Blocks is on-chain. The fact that a piece is on-chain doesn't de facto protect it for 50 or 100 years. Right. We've been busy this week. We interviewed someone else yesterday who tried to go back just into their Hotmail account from 15 years ago, and it had been migrated and they couldn't access. So the idea that digital preservation in general is better than physical preservation is perhaps a very flawed view.

Speaker B: It's very flawed. Paper is actually what has survived the test of time more than anything else.

Speaker A: Yeah, like there's 2,000-year-old paper still. Yeah. Do you consider at all, like, the role of the platform in not just stewarding these artists to put their work on-chain, but then to help them like future-proof it, like develop best practices. Like, what's the plan if ETH goes down? What's the plan if browsers stop supporting JavaScript and people can't actually view this stuff? Like, do you think about, like, I assume you do think about it. Yeah. So what, where are you at with it? Like, what can we do? What should we be doing?

Speaker B: Well, I mean, we're aware of what the potential things, I mean, obviously the thing that will happen, be the thing we didn't even know, we weren't even thinking about. So like, that's just the way life goes. But, you know, I have a couple things. Number one, I believe that things that people find value in, whether it's cultural or financially, humans will find ways to persist. And I use, you know, The Legend of Zelda as an example. Like, I've been able to emulate The Legend of Zelda on every single computer I've ever owned since it was created.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: Now we have it on the Nintendo Switch, like the original Zeldas. And if people find enough cultural or financial value, we will preserve. And what's beautiful to me is that the more art that is released in this mechanism, the more someone finding value in a single piece of art preserves everything else that's out there. In other words, if JavaScript gets deprecated and we have to like have some kind of emulator for JavaScript-based digital art, All it takes is one person to be extremely passionate about one artwork and what they do for that one artwork will allow you to emulate just about any other artwork that exists in our ecosystem. So I do believe, number one, that we will preserve the things that we have that we find the most value in. ETH going down is an interesting concept in that there's two sides to that. One of them is like ETH, you can no longer have a transaction. That's complicated. What you lose there is ownership data. But you would still be able to read the blockchain. Like you wouldn't have to zap everybody's hard drives not to be able to reproduce the JavaScript code that lives on chain. So you have the side of like, you know, chain stops, art persists. It's just, we don't have ownership data anymore. And then there's like the second black swan event, which is solar flare knocks every magnetic device out on the planet. And we have much bigger fish to fry at that point anyways. So I don't just see like the entire Ethereum or any other blockchain just being zapped overnight. Yeah. I can see it stopping, stalling, forking, whatever, but in 90% of those scenarios that are all potentially possible and also potentially detrimental, the art persists. What doesn't persist is the ownership, and then we just have to figure out a way how to preserve that ownership, how to demonstrate who owned that last, which you can do, and then figure out a caveman method of, you know, giving people ownership of the art again if they find enough value for it. So yeah, I think we can emulate, and I think that we can also just like consider that we— for many, many years, paper was the de facto medium, but like paper was the only medium that was necessary. Computers didn't exist, like pixels didn't exist, things weren't animated yet. This is just a whole new generation of like data. Like the majority of our data— forget about the art for a second— like the majority of our data in society is also on the line here. And granted, we have these like caves in Sweden, I think, that like, or Finland, that like people are storing, I think, paper copies of the internet. Or if I'm— I think GitHub has some kind of like crazy deep cold storage that like is storing paper copies or other ways of storing copies of the internet. You know, gosh, it would be nuts if we all had to wait in line to like have our turn to be able to access that data again. It would just be unfeasible. But I do think that the way that we preserved that we find ourselves needing to preserve data today is going to be as vehemently as the way that we've wanted to preserve old paper form in the past, just because back then our life could operate fully on paper. And today our life does not operate on paper. My hand hurts when I have to write like 5 words. Like, I just don't even use pens anymore. And what's going to happen with like the next generation? And, you know, when we don't go to college anymore because everything's in VR and like there's not even textbooks anymore. Like, I just When paper is no longer like the way that we even count on learning, it might be another generation or 2 in the future. I just, we'll have to just think about how the digital world is preserved. And I do think that there's a lot of really cool things. Like I loved when Alba.art came out with like, you know, the ScriptyPy library to keep everything to like be more on-chain. I always thought, well, that's cool. Art Blocks has always kind of wanted to do something like that. But then you think about like, well, right now, Is p5.js going to go away today? In the next year? 5 years? 10 years? Maybe 10 years. I don't know. Like, I mean, it would mean that something much greater and bigger came out.

Speaker C: And will it go away suddenly?

Speaker A: Well, no, they just announced 2.0 actually, right? They just announced a big update to it. So at the very least, we have a new version coming.

Speaker B: Yeah. And then ultimately Art Blocks did put p5 on-chain, right? Even though I think it was precocious to do it. Like, I didn't think it was going away anytime soon. We are working on a really cool fully on-chain rendering infrastructure where you're going to be able to call a token URI and it's going to serve you the HTML template, which is the part that's not on-chain. That's rudimentary because anybody can search on how to make like an HTML template. But, you know, we'll serve you the HTML template, we'll serve you the algorithm and we'll serve you the library and we'll serve you the token hash and it'll all be like one big sandwich of on-chain goodness. And then we're just reliant on JavaScript. Obviously, as a protocol for rendering stuff in the browser. And if that changes, then we will very likely be able to emulate that stuff or translate that stuff. Or I think it's really hard to believe that it would just one day just completely be gone and inaccessible. And in the end, the most valuable artworks in the world are hanging in people's homes on paper. They don't necessarily have to be transacted in a 24/7 permissionless ledger, although I do see that as the future, where everybody's on-chain all the time anyways, entirely on-chain. So yeah, I think that's a really good thing to be thinking about. I think we can think harder about it as well. You know, when I'm asked to donate a Squiggle, or if I donate a Squiggle to like an institution, you know, I get this like very long piece of paperwork that says, if the Ethereum blockchain goes down, will you accept putting it on another blockchain? Or would you accept us printing it? Or, you know, what is like How do you prefer this to live? And who has the ability to fix this if something goes wrong? And the institutions are thinking way far in advance because they've had to deal with this for years. So I feel like if the institutions continue to come and show interest in what we're doing, not just the collectors that have a vested interest from a financial or an emotional perspective, but the institutions have an invested interest to start preserving our stuff. And we have a lot of institutions that have now collected digital Art, generative art. And so now the institution gets to take on some of that role, hopefully, in the preservation process. And that just expands the likeliness that our work will survive.

Speaker C: Is that something that you see as happening differently across some of the core curated pieces, which I assume will primarily be ETH L1 versus other pieces such as the ones that an artist might just mint as part of their daily that could exist on an L2? Or another chain we've already mentioned, Solana, we can just throw that out there as well. Do you think that the onus of preservation is different for those different types of work?

Speaker B: Well, I mean, L2s are super early. So yes, I mean, I think, but I mean, again, what happens, the worst thing that can happen with those chains is they stop. I mean, you know, it's like someone's got to store it on their hard drive, I guess, like the whole chain. But L2s are really young. So there is an inherent risk. But this is the dilemma. You know, I was on a call on Twitter Spaces with Matt Hall, And John Watkinson the other day for the CryptoPunks book that's being released. And, you know, John stated very clearly, it's like you have that triangle, you know, it's either fast, cheap, or in, in the case of our ecosystem, decentralized, and you can only have 2. So based on the beginning of this conversation talking about getting this into people's hands and getting people excited and getting consumers excited about it, like, we have to make a sacrifice. And in this case, Any L2, you are making a sacrifice on security. How big of a sacrifice is actually very different across the board. I mean, a lot of them settle on the L1. Some of them even allow you to recover assets from calling L1 transactions on, you know, like on L1. Like, I think Arbitrum has some really interesting kind of emergency protocols for being able to like call state from L1. If I was releasing an artwork that was for the sake of art itself, like to sell, that people expect to be able to maintain a value for, I would probably do it on L1. And if I want to have fun with something, make like a creative good, like a designed product, a super accessible mint like Heart and Craft, or a free mint, That doesn't mean I care any less about the artwork and like what I'm putting out there, but I'm making a sacrifice in order to make sure that it gets into the right people's hands. Or, you know, look, you have some artists in this ecosystem that have had enough success that they could mint their dailies on L1. And I would love to see that. Like, I think that'd be pretty awesome that, you know, these artists, they just like, they've got enough investment in their studio and their career that, you know, they could spend $15, $20 a day minting and not even counting the cost to upload the algorithm. And by the way, you know, huge shout out to some of the people on the Art Blocks team, specifically Riley, who has continued to just make the compression algorithm for how you upload stuff on Art Blocks just ever more robust to where every single time he touches the smart contract, it just reduces the upload cost of putting stuff on chain, like fully on chain. I love nerding out about all that stuff. And that just kind of doesn't get celebrated really as often. But like, if our goal is to make this as accessible to people as possible. But yeah, I mean, I think that L2s will be good for documentation. You know, if the artist documents something on L2 and doesn't sell it, they can also burn it on L2 if they then get excited about it and they want to put it on L1, and then they can document it on L1. I mean, there's just different ways that we can approach this. It's just all so new that it's really hard to kind of tell what the right way or what the best direction is. But ultimately, the L2, similar to the L1, The black swan event is that you lose the ability to transact. It's really difficult to assume that we're just going to lose the data that's stored, and therefore our art will persist, and it'll persist with the last person that owned it on that chain. And then obviously there's forks, and that gets things complicated. I don't know if you all remember when like Ethereum kind of forked and everyone was worried about the DAO fork. There's the DAO fork, but then like, you know, when we went to proof of stake, you know, there was people that were going to keep proof of work like moving forward, and, you know, obviously there was speculation that And it's like, yeah, it's very expensive to mine those blocks. But does that mean that there's like 20,000 Squiggles now because you have 2 different people? Thankfully, that just kind of died away because that was like a real fear. So that's always an issue. But that's where consensus is so critical. And it's like the V1 Punk, V2 Punk debate. Ultimately, consensus is that the V2 Punks, or what people call the V2 Punks, are the punks, and those are the ones that carry the value. But there's a whole group of people that have rallied around the V1 Punks, and they actually have value. Like, oh my gosh, the floor price is nuts, in my opinion, for something that wasn't even intended to be the real artwork. And I don't know, that the V1, V2 punk debate is very much going to be looked back upon as we explore the issues, the potential issues that you're bringing up right now, Trinity. Like, that is going to have set the precedent for what it looks like for when an L2 forks and which one is the real chain, or if an L2 dies And we have to somehow resuscitate it or decide who owns the artwork or whose state is final. Those things I think are just going to be based on precedence from the past and we're going to have to get through those things. But risk-reward is pretty straightforward. Like, I can upload an algorithm for $5 on Base and I can mint 5 pieces for another dollar and post one every day on Twitter. If I posted all the time on Twitter, I kind of wish I did. I just don't. Shout out to Brian Brinkmann as someone that really understands what what it's like to be a good, like, successful participant in Web3 and be able to, like, market themselves and, like, be able to put their stuff out there in a way that doesn't feel overwhelming and overbearing as a collector. There's many like him, but I mean, he really stands out. But yeah, I mean, I can't wait to start figuring that out.

Speaker A: I got a studio pitch for you, Eric. All right. Imagine you can construct an aspect of the contract such that an artist could mint their daily on Base, put a price on it. But then once a collector goes to claim it, it automatically through the contract burns it and remints it onto the L1. So that way, it's just like a single-click experience. And then probably 10 clicks with your MetaMask to like authorize this and that and that fee. But then the artist, it's just whatever, their $2. And then if a collector wants to come along and pay everything to put it on the L1, they can do it.

Speaker B: Will, I have a counter to this. Okay, go for it. Go for it.

Speaker A: What is— Put it on Tezos.

Speaker C: Exactly. Put it on Tezos. Already on L1, forkless upgrades, low cost to mint, superior security based because it's not Solidity. There you go. Wild idea.

Speaker B: Wait, was that really your— did Will really get—

Speaker C: Yeah.

Speaker B: Oh, that was— oh gosh. Yeah. But then we, but then we have to build smart contracts and like indexing for non-EVM chains. And that's, that's like—

Speaker A: Well, they actually have a new L2 that's going to be EVM compatible. We have a whole episode about that.

Speaker B: But wait, so Tezos is going to settle to the Ethereum?

Speaker A: It's called Etherlink. It's an EVM compatible L2, but it—

Speaker B: Oh, that settles onto Tezos?

Speaker A: It settles onto Tezos. So it inherits the security from Tezos. So their big push right now is DeFi for that. But who knows where that'll go?

Speaker B: Look, what you suggested, Will, is kind of like the lazy minting model that OpenSea actually had tremendous success on early on, where like the artist didn't actually have to pay anything to mint. And then like the collector came and paid the mint fee. And I think that's a really interesting way to kind of look at it. One thing that we've thought about a long time ago at Art Blocks is the idea that you would mint on L2, but the algorithm lives on L1. And then you would be able to do— because the mint is just a hash string, right? And so migrating a hash string mint from Art Blocks from L2 to L1 is the same as migrating an IPFS mint across 2 L1s, because it's just a hash string that points something, right? Well, I mean, in IPFS, the hash string points to an IPFS. In Art Blocks, the hash string is what is used to create the randomization. And so we always thought that the bridge between L2 and L1 was going to be algorithm on L1, minting on L2, so that the cost of minting was low for the collector, but the immutability of the algorithm remains on L1. And then you would be able to migrate that token to L1. And that's definitely still something that's in the cards. But Something that I think is really important about just my shift in perception over the last couple of, especially the last year about L2, is that we still kind of treat L2 like a second-class citizen a little bit. And we don't mean to often. And there are conversations about L3s. And I've even heard L4s be talked about, right?

Speaker C: Mm-hmm.

Speaker B: So when we're deep in like L4s, the L2 is going to be offering those security promises that we currently maybe want out of L1. And so You know, until we get to like L75 and then like L2 and L5 are gonna be, you know, I don't, I don't even know what that world looks like, but that's coming when we're all using the same world computer. When a billion people on the planet are all logged into the same computer, we're probably gonna be on L75 at that point. And you're gonna have different scales of security along the way, and you're going to pay more money for a higher quality standard of security. And it's all gonna become a little bit more homogenized. In the meantime, right now with the studio, what I'm really excited about is that you go into the artist profile. Yeah. In the studio, and you're going to see the stuff that they're minting for documentation. You're going to see the stuff that they're minting for sale. If you zoom out a bit, you're going to see the stuff they released on Bright Moments, the stuff they released on Art Blocks, the stuff that they released on some, you know, like a different engine partner. And you know, this is the expansion of option. Like you know, I tweeted at the very beginning of the year. This is a year for optionality and experimentation. That's what that means today. Art Blocks is experimenting on the curated side. It's painful. Y'all, like having to make drastic decisions and drastic moves, and hear a lot of like you know frustration from the community, even from the artists. Like we're not fully on board with the way we were calling stuff, etc. It's painful, but we're experimenting because the status quo is not fun either. And then in terms of you know experimentation, we're going to do the same in the studio, and hopefully engine partners are going to start getting excited and start experimenting as well. We have a lot of different ways that we can explore this in. We kind of want to transfer that a little bit to the artists and the creatives in the space and say, how can I apply my creative genius not just to the visual representation of an artwork on a screen, but to what I can do when I do cool shit with this technology that's being put in front of me, that's being facilitated on a world-class platform?

Speaker A: Well, Erik, we're running close to our hard stop here. Trinity and I both have baby duty in 10 minutes. But I gotta ask you on the way out— oh, sorry, Trinity, do you have one more? You have one more thing?

Speaker C: Well, I think we both had potentially similar wrapping up questions. I wanted to know if there's anything else that creators or collectors should know about Studio coming out. You've already kind of teased a bunch of really cool stuff and kind of posited a bunch of other cool stuff, but you've announced Melissa Wiederrecht's work coming out. Is there anything else that people should be looking to, both from a release perspective As well as any new capabilities or functionalities that are just different from what's on offer with Curated or what's been available through Art Blocks Engine.

Speaker B: So clarifying, every artist gets their own contract. They can choose regular or flex. As on-chain maxi as I am, I'm probably gonna ask for a flex contract because that gives me the opportunity to, if I want to do it, like one of the coolest people in our ecosystem, he goes by Raven did this really wonderful project in Marfa where he took photography and then he added some generative elements to photography. And I love that. It's something that I, you know, like, yeah, a lot, long time thinking about those kinds of things. And so I don't want to close myself off to that. So we have flex contracts, we have regular contracts, you own your own contract right now. Initially, Art Blocks is going to be very controlling of the initial projects on the studio because we want to make sure we get it right. Like, there's a lot of moving parts, right? We've gone from Yeah, engine partners kind of do what they want, but we still know everything about what they're doing when they're doing it because they, you know, we try to support them and, you know, it's rare for someone to just like drop something on our blocks without our knowledge. So for the first few months of the studio, we want to know what's going on, but we know that at some point that's going to get out of our control because the studio is you do what you want with your contract when you want it. We want to make sure that we can figure out a structure for to at least give a place for artists to be able to have courtesy for other artists' releases, right? Like right now we don't have a really good robust infrastructure for like a calendar. Just, you know, 2 artists that would love to give each other space may be releasing at the exact same time. So we're being very deliberate at the beginning. We're trying to feel how fast are these things going to mint out? How much server infrastructure do we need to like give these things? They'll probably mint pretty slowly. Also, by the way, Melissa and then Aaron Penne is also releasing next week too. So we have 2 of them releasing in the same week, which is really exciting. We're also experimenting with new stuff. I've got Really excited to get to work with Marcelo a few weeks from now. So this episode will probably air after that on a commissioned work, you know, similar to the 24 hours piece that was released by Alexi Andrei through a patron. That's something that doesn't really fit on Art Blocks anymore, Art Blocks curated anymore. And so, you know, I want artists like I love the idea that I would be able to pay an artist X amount of money and buy without knowing what they are 100 mints. And me as a nerd, excited person of this ecosystem, get to like walk up to A random person at a bar, it'd be like talking about generative art, be like, hey, do you want one of these? Like, this is really cool shit, and be able to mint them something. So, uh, working on like patron stuff, working on documentation, one-of-one-of-ones— the studio is going to be perfect for that. Some higher edition stuff on L2, you know, modular pieces where like you're, you, you know, you collect something here and then the next drop you collect something here and then maybe you do something with it there. And ultimately, really, it all comes down to hoping that artists do a little bit of reflection, understand who they are, who their collectors are, understand that the most exceptional work in the world right now is maybe going to be very hard to get people to buy a ton of just in general, even if it's under the Curated brand. And so, you know, as we kind of like rethink about Curated and think about, you know, like group shows and solo shows and how we kind of like put stuff out there to make it more enjoyable and intriguing for both the artist and the collector and the ecosystem as a whole. My dream is to see curated quality projects released on the studio over the course of the next year. And it's a risk, but I think the studio is creating— it is like a little collective of some of the best artists that have ever graced our presence with generative art. You know, it's semi-curated. I don't know if we talked about this last time.

Speaker C: Yeah.

Speaker B: We're granting studio contracts to anybody that's released on Art Blocks before, and then after that, we're going to start releasing them to people that are released on Bright Moments. And then the Art Blocks artist application process will now just be to get a studio contract if you don't already have a studio contract. And we're going to be pretty selective there because we want artists' work to live next to great work. And then for everything else, there's like a million other places to release. So it's okay.

Speaker C: It's kind of like the best of both worlds. Love to hear it.

Speaker B: Yeah, I hope so. I don't know.

Speaker A: We'll see. Only time will tell. Well, when we do round 3, we'll check in with you. But before we close out, I got— so here's a fun one for you in the last few minutes here. So suppose you were a podcaster who could maybe optimistically sell 500 units of a generative good. What kind of good would you make? What would— like, would it be a shirt? Would it be a hat? What's possible? Like, if you were a generative art podcast that wanted to make a generative piece that their fans could collect, like, How would you go about doing it? And then also tell us how to do it.

Speaker B: Oh my gosh. Okay. Okay.

Speaker A: How much would it cost us?

Speaker B: This could be a lot of fun. You know, you've got, I mean, obviously, like you can set up like generative minting infrastructure and do some stuff on Art Blocks for the actual minting part. But I think as a podcaster, you'd probably want to maybe not try to be fully on-chain and do some fun stuff with IPFS with soundbites. And like, what I think would be really fucking cool, considering you have some of the coolest collectors in this ecosystem, is that you take your favorite episode or you take the introduction to every episode you've ever done. So when you first say, hey, or maybe when you announce the name of the speaker or the person that's on your podcast and you put those soundbites on IPFS and you work with an algorithmic artist or someone, maybe you guys can do it internally, that glitches that sound. So brings it into p5.js and then adds some weird glitch to it and turns it into a really interesting, weird-ass soundscape. And so then you release those and you maybe make 2 for each artist and one for you mint for the artist and one you sell to kind of raise some money for the podcast, which I think would be great. And then when you send people Christmas cards, you get one of those cards that are like $10 and you can record something on the card and then send it to people. And so you would just like record that onto a card, or you make that a physical thing where it's like a one-of-one. And so you record the NFT, it comes with an IYK card, you can transfer that NFT into your wallet. You don't even have to have a wallet because soon Privy is going to help us onboard the masses without even having to like get a seed phrase. And so you get like this beautiful little Christmas card with a little tiny recorder in it and you record that weird glitch-ass thing. That's really funny. And so now you have this artwork that when people walk by, they press the little button and they hear, you know, Snowfro or whatever glitch thing happened. And I think that would be really fun. And that's just giving me 1.5 seconds to think about it. But I think we could have some more What about shirts?

Speaker A: Is there a way to make generative shirts? Or is that too complicated because of the cost, like the setup cost of screens?

Speaker B: No. So it's, it just depends. So you can do UV, direct to print UV. Generative Artworks has done some awesome stuff with shirts. And then also, what we're trying to prove with Generative Goods is 1 of 1 of X embroidery. And what we're doing at Consensus, 2 weeks from now, we've actually created a generative version of the Generative Goods logo. We're calling it logo with brackets, and you're going to mint one, and then immediately the embroidery machine is going to start embroidering your unique version of that logo, and you're going to walk around with a Generative Goods hat that's unique to you. So yes, you can do that. You can just create a logo. In fact, that's something that I think we're going to see a lot of. I think brands, to differentiate themselves, one way that they'll do that is instead of their logo being the same as everybody else's, they'll have a way to differentiate themselves by having their logo be unique to them. them. And if I, if I'm lucky enough to just show you really fast, um, so I mean, this is just a few examples, but oh man, it's stupid to look on the phone. But, um, you know, this is just like general goods, randomized words, alphabet soup, just kind of like, you know, one G on top of the other G, whatever. Uh, we have, I think, 2.5 trillion possible combinations of what the logo can look like. And, um, that's how we're going to get our brand out there is with stuff that's unique, they'll get an NFT, they'll get the physical hat, and it'll start the conversation for individuality.

Speaker A: Well, maybe we can follow up over email because it's a dream of ours to make something physical. The closest we've gotten is talking to plotter artists, but obviously that's like a lot of work for them to babysit the plots and get them all shipped out.

Speaker B: And you can't even wear them. You can get something that you can send generically. Well, that's the thing. The idea with generative goods is that if you get the DST file for the embroidery, you You should technically be able to take it to an embroidery company down the street as long as they have 15 needles, which gets a little bit complex. Yeah. And they would just be able to embroider it for you.

Speaker A: We're gonna follow up on email cuz like it's about time we made something for the show, like physical. And this seems like the way, like, I know Trinity, you would love to rock a hat or a t-shirt.

Speaker C: Oh, I need more hats. Definitely. Yeah. I wear a hat every day pretty much. I just don't know where mine is right now, or I would be wearing it.

Speaker B: I would rock a WTBS.

Speaker C: Exactly. Who wouldn't?

Speaker A: All right. All the more reason for us to get them made then. Cool. All right, Eric. Well, thank you so much. I think that does it for round 2. We got to most of our list. A couple things, of course, we missed, but that's always going to be the case. It would be awesome to check in with you again. Let's give it a little more time, see how things, things go. But maybe towards the end of the year we can check in again. It'll be here before we know it, I'm sure. So.

Speaker B: Cool. Okay. Thanks, guys.

Speaker A: All right. That's it for this one, everyone. Hope you all enjoyed. That was Erik, round 2. We'll be back again with another episode. Bye-bye.

Speaker C: Bye.

Speaker B: Always. We're waiting to be signed.