Erick Calderon: I remember distinctly being on the trading floor at the CBOE, and it was 2018, so I was already kind of already in this space, but crypto was down. And I remember overhearing a couple of guys on the floor, and they had just come back from lunch, ETH was around $80, and they were talking about how they thought this whole crypto thing was dead. They no longer needed to worry or think about it.

Fast forward, obviously, ETH has come back stronger than ever. I don't think it's dead. I don't think generative art is dead. But I think that people who are just looking for a quick, fast trade, or people looking for the next quick and fast trend, will always be building on top of a house of cards.

What we've watched over these last couple of cycles is that anytime somebody comes into the space with intents on flipping fast, they never last that long, and it always ends up not so good for them. Or worst case, they end up staying around, but they're miserable the entire time because they're just chasing the current trend, and generally that just means you're losing money the whole way through, and it's not a good way to be.

What we try to preach, and it's not just us — Trillitech and lots of platforms that have been around for a while say the same thing — is buy what you love, invest in things that you care about, and hold on for the long term. I don't necessarily know if generative art specifically will be the next big narrative that pushes prices up. I don't know if AI is going to be that narrative. But I do know that if you find genuine pieces of artwork you love from artists that you want to support, more likely than not you'll be really happy with that decision over the long term, even if the market doesn't necessarily reflect it in the short term.

We're seeing that highlighted right now. There's a ton of great generative art projects that are underpriced for what they're worth, in my opinion, and I have to just accept that and know that in due time the market will realize the same. It's not to say I'm not trying to help that along — I'm doing everything I can with Art Blocks to try to expand the market, bring in new collectors, and create new demand so that the incredible pieces of artwork being created can find good homes and be valued accordingly. But it is a slow and steady process, and you can't just flip a switch. I think we're going to see that over the next 6 to 12 months, generative art specifically start to shine again, and I'm excited for it.

Will: When you say bring new collectors into the space, am I right in assuming that's not necessarily new people into crypto as a whole, but more so new people from crypto as a whole into generative art and NFTs?

Erick Calderon: It's actually both. I think we need both. If we constantly just trade the same NBA basketball cards amongst 6 people, the price is never going to go up. We need new people coming into the NBA basketball card market. So we need more people coming into crypto in general, but we also need to source from the crypto world and say, "Hey, have you checked out generative art? Have you checked out digital art as a whole?" Because there's a lot of interesting things happening not only in the space that we're most familiar with, but in the Bitcoin ecosystem as well. There's a lot of really interesting stuff happening over there, and I think it's just being slept on because prices are so cheap. But I don't think it will remain that way forever, and I'm glad to see things start to pick up.

Trinity: Was any of that in your mind when you started thinking about, or in the past 6 months to a year, in terms of expanding to Sansa? I know we'll talk about that in a bit, but was some of that thinking about how to create new pipelines to get new collectors into the space, in your mind as you started to develop that idea?

Erick Calderon: 100%. Whenever we do these calls and interviews, I try to speak candidly and give you my thoughts as they are, not necessarily thinking too hard about whether we've talked about this before on the Sansa side of things. But it's a great segue, honestly, because that's a huge part of why we're doing what we're doing with Sansa. It's not the only reason, but it's a very big one — bringing in new collectors, in whichever form that looks like, whether that's from the broader crypto space or completely new users into the space as a whole.

Trinity: Should we jump right into that, Will? I feel like that's what everyone's been waiting to hear about anyways, so we might as well transition into it now.

Will: Yeah, let's do it. Obviously the news yesterday, for anyone who hasn't heard, was that Art Blocks acquired Sansa. Sansa, for those that have been under a rock, is basically the up-and-coming secondary marketplace of choice among the generative art community and beyond, kind of stealing OpenSea's thunder in a really significant way over the past 6 to 12 months. It's no surprise to us — I think it's a great acquisition. But we would love to hear about it from you. What excites you about it? What's the story of how it came to be? Just give us the info that we're all hungry for.

Erick Calderon: I'll try to give you the short version, because obviously there's a long version to this story, but I'll try to hit the most important points. Being an OG in the generative art space and coming from Bright Moments as well, I've known JMac for a while, and I've always deeply respected what he's tried to do with his various projects, dating back to Verse and to now Sansa. I've always thought he had a keen eye for good product and had the right intentions with what he was trying to build. He was very adamant, especially with Verse and now with Sansa, on building for the generative art community specifically, trying to find those right tools that really spoke to what we as a community wanted, versus just building a generic marketplace that tries to do everything for everyone.

That's kind of what OpenSea has always been to me — a jack of all trades, master of none. Whereas JMac, His Royal Highness, has always tried to say, "Well, what does the generative art community actually want? What tools would actually be helpful?" I saw that ethos from the very beginning, and I've always respected it. So our relationship over the last couple of years has been building.

Then, obviously, this last year Sansa started to pick up steam. I don't remember exactly when it caught my attention, but when the Gazers drop happened on Sansa, I took a hard look and was really impressed by what I was seeing — his execution, the numbers he was pulling, and just the general community sentiment toward the platform. That kind of put it on my radar as, wow, this is really quickly becoming an amazing product for the generative art community.

From there, obviously, conversations were had, and here we are today with the announcement.

Will: A lot of that tracks with what we understood and knew about Sansa and JMac as well. I think just observing it from the sidelines like most other people, we were pleasantly surprised, but the more you sit with it, the more it makes sense. I don't think there could have been a much better fit as far as what Sansa's focus has been and what your ethos has been as well.

I'm curious — this is going to require a little bit of a longer answer, and there's a lot to it, so feel free to take your time. But I'd love to hear about the actual assets, right? Because I think from an outsider's perspective, we understand what Sansa brought to market in the sense of its focus, its UI, its community trust. But when it comes to actual intellectual property and the tools that were built, can you speak to what you're most excited about in terms of what Art Blocks actually gets from this acquisition, in terms of tangible assets or IP?

Erick Calderon: Yeah, there's a lot of tangible IP and tech that comes with the acquisition, but for me, the biggest thing is the community and JMac himself. I know that's probably not the answer you were looking for, because you specifically asked about IP, but that's such a huge component of it for me. I have so much trust in him as a leader and as a builder, and I think that a-players attract a-players. So just having him as part of the team is going to open doors to individuals we might not have had access to before, or that we would have had a much harder time recruiting without his help.

As far as tangible assets go, there's things like the LP tool, which I think is one of the more special aspects of what LP has created. It's this concept of taking a generative art collection and instantly being able to create a marketplace for it, whether that's on Art Blocks or completely unrelated to Art Blocks. I think that's going to become a bigger focus for us moving forward — not only being a place to create these amazing, curated, long-form projects, but also giving people the tools to create their own bespoke marketplaces around whatever they want to collect or whatever community they want to build.

We have a lot of interesting ideas about how we can utilize that tool for our engine partners as well, giping them the ability to open up their own dedicated Sansa marketplace specifically for the type of artwork or brand that they're building around. So that's very exciting on the product side.

We are going to inherit some of the Sansa team as well, and I'm very excited about that, because I think between the two teams, we're going to become an even bigger powerhouse than we already are, in terms of the amount of talent and horsepower we have to build incredible things for this community.

Trinity: You mentioned a bit about the LP tool and the ability to create your own marketplace. Do you think that's going to extend not just to engine partners, but also to curated artists or playground artists? Substantively, will there be a difference in what's offered to each of those groups, or is this going to be more universal?

Erick Calderon: It'll probably start out more universal and then, over time, we'll figure out where the nuances make sense for the different types of collections you can create on Art Blocks. But at first, I don't see any reason why it wouldn't be available to everybody. If you're a curated artist and you want to instantly have your own dedicated marketplace for just your curated collection, there's no reason why you shouldn't be able to do that. Or if you're a playground artist and you want that same tool, there's no reason you shouldn't have access to it as well.

I don't see a lot of differences right away, but we'll see how the community starts to use it, and there might be some nuances that come up that we have to figure out how to differentiate, if any at all.

Trinity: Understood. I think it's exciting to hear, especially just thinking about a lot of the artists we've spoken to who have expressed frustration with, "I wish I could build my own storefront," or, "I wish I had more control over the actual sales mechanisms of my own work, even though I appreciate being on Art Blocks." I think that gives a lot of individual artists more control, which is really exciting to hear.

Will: Yeah, I know a lot of that has already existed to some degree in things like fx(hash) and OBJKT, where artists do have their own kind of pseudo storefronks. So it's cool to hear that Art Blocks is centering some of that same energy, if you will.

Trinity: I want to ask, this is going to be a 2-parter, I suppose. So bringing in JMac, obviously a very big and important piece for the future of Art Blocks and Sansa. But could you speak to how Sansa's team, or JMac himself, might shape the future decision-making of Art Blocks? And then the second part of my question is, are there any other team updates, whether that's structurally at Art Blocks or new members, that we should expect in the near future that you can share with us today?

Erick Calderon: For sure. So JMac is going to head up all of our marketplace stuff, which includes primary and secondary sales, whereas beforehand, I was more focused on that. Now I got to hand that baton to somebody that's just as passionate, if not more passionate, than I am about it, and he's going to help lead all of Art Blocks and Sansa into a combined marketplace experience for users. He's going to have a very large impact on the direction that we go together.

As for other things that are happening, we're taking somebody who's been at Art Blocks for a while, Jeres — I don't want to necessarily give her title yet because we're still trying to figure out logistically how that's all going to work — but she's going to help id develop and push forward our brand engine partnerships. That's something we've dabbled in a little bit, but haven't gone full bore into, and I think that's going to be a very interesting component for Art Blocks in the future: bringing in brands to work with artists, hopefully in the generative art community, to help push things forward and hopefully bring in new users.

Because I think brands have a big place in that. They have a large market share of individuals that have never touched anything Web3, blockchain, or crypto related, and if we can find a good vessel to bring in people who've maybe collected sneakers their whole life, or maybe collected other iconic pieces from a specific brand that means a lot to them, and introduce them to blockchain technology in a way that makes sense to them and is additive rather than confusing, then I think that's a big market to tap into. So that's something we've already started, but we're going to push a lot harder into moving forward.

Then obviously there's more general hires as well that are happening. Off the top of my head, I don't have too much to disclose right now, but there's a lot of exciting stuff happening on that end as well.

Will: You mentioned brands, and this is something we've talked about with a couple of other guests as well — I know Art Blocks has already worked with a few, like Pacsun and a few others in the past. Charmin, actually, was a big one. Are you able to speak to what you're excited about from your side in terms of how this might affect the space? Or from what you've seen, what excites you about bringing brands into the space more, other than just onboarding? Or is onboarding the biggest piece for you?

Erick Calderon: Onboarding is a big piece, but I don't want to make it seem like that's the only piece, because I think that oftentimes discredits what these brands are trying to do and their intentions with entering the space.

A lot of these brands really do want to embrace blockchain technology, generative art, and everything that goes with it — the ability to create truly unique, bespoke items for people, whether those are physical or digital. I think in the future you're going to see this hybridization of physical and digital collectibles that make a lot of sense, especially when you bring in the auto-generative component. So it's not just about a special edition Air Jordan that's a special color that they've never released before. Now you can create shoes that have never existed before and never will exist again in that exact form, because they're all going to be slightly different based on whatever inputs the algorithm decides to create.

Digitally, you can create the artwork or the certificate of authenticity to match. There's a lot of interesting concepts there that not only benefit the consumer, in the sense that they're getting something bespoke to them and their identity, but also benefit the actual creators of the products, whether that's the algorithmic artist that's helping create the certificate of authenticity, or the physical creation of the object itself in a slightly different form than everybody else's.

I'm very excited about that intersection. I don't think we're the only people that see this. I think a lot of brands see this as well, and it's going to be exciting to see not only what we do in this space over the next couple of years, but what other people are doing in the space and how they're utilizing this technology in ways that we hadn't necessarily thought of.

Will: For sure. I think the tokenization of real-world assets is going to be a huge theme in crypto over the next 5, 10 years. I think generative art—NFTs as a whole, but generative art specifically—being one of the first tools to actually put that into practice in a very tangible way that consumers can understand and touch and feel, both digitally and physically, is a great thing to see. It's cool that Art Blocks is on the forefront of it, and I'm sure it'll trickle down into other industries outside of just sneakers and paper products as well.

Trinity: On that note of onboarding and bringing in new users, I want to switch the conversation a little bit to a broader theme of new collector experience, and maybe use Sansa as a jumping-off point for that conversation. I think a lot of the messaging yesterday, and I think a lot of the938 sentiment from the community, was really positive across the board, which I don't think we've seen before with an announcement like this. But a lot of that messaging was around the idea of creating a more seamless experience for onboarding and collecting generative art. I think a lot of that comes down to fees, complexity of user experience, and things along those lines.

I wanted to ask, in your mind, what does that new collector experience look like? What excites you about what it could become? And maybe to root that a bit, could you paint a picture of what a new collector experience might have looked like a few years ago, so we can juxtapose that with what it could be in the future?

Erick Calderon: This is going to take a lot of unpacking, and I could probably talk for another 3 hours about this subject alone, so I'll try to give you the concise version.

The first few years of Art Blocks, we didn't have competition. We were the only ones doing what we were doing. And so it was really hard to force our hand into creating a great experience, because there wasn't necessarily competition forcing us to think about it. As things have played out, we started to get competition, and it wasn't till recently that Sansa was actually giving us a legitimate run for our money in terms of just easy, simple experiences for people. It really lit a fire under our — under my — ass, quite honestly, in terms of us needing to do something about it, because we were losing market share not because our art was worse. If anything, I still think we have the best curation in the space. But experience matters so much, and I think we were slacking in that department for sure.

So over the last 6 months, we've hired a great new design team, we've hired some great new engineers, and we're focusing a lot on revamping the entire Art Blocks experience, all the way from discovery to the actual purchase and minting experience, to the secondary experience as well. It's going to be a series of rollouts throughout the entire year that hopefully create a way better experience for either brand new users coming into the space or seasoned veterans that have been around for a while.

I don't want to give away too much, because I think it's better served when we can just show people, rather than try to explain it. But we're taking a very hard look at what we've done really well and continuing to double down on those features, as well as taking a hard look at what we haven't done so well and really trying to hone in on those experiences and get them to a place where they need to be for a world-class product. Because I think in the beginning, when you don't have competition, it's really easy to get complacent. And I don't think we ever really got complacent, but we definitely got comfortable in our little niche that we created, and now it's time to expand past that and make sure it's approachable for a much bigger, wider audience than what we're seeing today.

Trinity: I think that's such an important point, and I don't think it's necessarily going to be shocking to hear, especially for people that have been early or considered OGs of the space, that a lot of the early adoption and community building was because it was such a — I don't want to say "insulated" community, because I think that discredits a lot of the work that's been done to promote and build that community — but it was in some ways a very insular community that a lot of us got into because of our proximity to it, whether that's because of Twitter or knowing someone in the space beforehand.

So as you think about that expansion and appealing to a wider audience, and even conversations we've had on this podcast around, "Is generative art too nerdy?" or "Is it too into the weeds for people to understand code as art?" — I'm sure that's still going to be true to a certain respect. But how do you think about balancing that expansion into a wider audience while still keeping true to what made the space special in the first place, without necessarily diluting it for people that have been from the beginning?

Erick Calderon: There's going to be a lot of trial and error, quite honestly. It's going to be really hard to appease everybody. I mean, we already see this, where you try to walk such a fine line to make sure the OGs don't feel disenfranchised in any way, but you're also trying to appeal to a broader market. Any change that you make, somebody's going to be upset about, and somebody's going to applaud you for it. I don't think there's necessarily a magic answer to that.

But I will say, high level, I think you need to embrace the fact that as you get bigger, it's not necessarily a bad thing. I know a lot of people in the space, especially the OGs, get very nervous when they hear the word "mainstream." I don't necessarily know why that has such a negative connotation, especially when it's something that you genuinely love. I would love if more people in the world listened to the same music that I listened to, growing up with somewhat mainstream but also alternative bands. When my favorite bands started to get bigger, I was ecstatic, not annoyed. Yet for some reason, when we start talking about, "Oh, we want more people to love the same things we love," everybody gets very defensive and thinks that dilutes the actual quality or reason why they fell in love with it in the first place.

I understand that logic to a certain degree, because sometimes when things get more popular, they do get diluted in some way, shape, or form. But that doesn't necessarily have to be true. I think you can grow and still keep the same amazing qualities that made you fall in love with the space in the first place, and it doesn't have to be diluted. I think you just have to be very conscious and aware of what those key components were that made you fall in love with it, and make sure you don't lose those.

So that's a lot of what we think about internally, and it's not to say we're going to get it right 100% of the time, because we're not — we're going to make mistakes. But it doesn't mean we shouldn't try. We should be bold and daring and continue to want more people to love the same things we love, and know that it doesn't necessarily mean it's going to dilute the actual quality of what we're creating.

Will: Do you think part of that comes down to just better storytelling as things expand? Because I know for us, one thing we talk about on this podcast a lot is that generative art has such a fascinating history and thread that connects a lot of what's happening today to work that was being done in the 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s, but the storytelling side of things hasn't necessarily caught up to make it as approachable from an outside perspective, even though the tools to create and collect have made it easier than ever. Do you think that's a piece of the puzzle, or do you think it's really more so around simplifying the experience, the friction of actually using crypto, blockchains, and things like that?

Erick Calderon: I think it's a little bit of both. I don't think it's only one silver bullet that's going to fix everything. I think easier onboarding, easier experience is a small component of it, but that's not to say that's the only reason people aren't necessarily interested.

I do think storytelling is important. I don't know if it's necessarily about explaining the deep history of generative art, dating back to the people that were the pioneers of the space. I think that's really important for people that are already ingrained in the space and want to know more and dive deeper. But for me, a lot of the storytelling that needs to happen is switching the narrative from being very tech-forward to being more art-forward.

I still see a lot of articles, a lot of press, and a lot of general conversation about how generative art is created, the tech and the code behind it, more so than actually talking about the true art and content of what's being created. Obviously that's a huge component of it, and I'm not saying we shouldn't be talking about that, but I do think that's part of the issue of why it hasn't gone more mainstream. It's very intimidating for people to think they have to understand code to appreciate generative art, when in reality that's not true at all. You can appreciate the aesthetic qualities and the actual artwork itself without knowing anything about code. I think a lot of storytelling around generative art has been too tech-forward instead of being more art-forward, and I'd love to see that shift in the greater community, not only from us, but from other press and other platforms as well.

Trinity: I know we're already going a little long, but I want to make sure I ask a couple more questions before we let you go, because I know your time is precious. I wanted to ask about the actual rollout of Sansa. Do you have any details you can speak to on what that might look like? For example, will there be any noticeable changes for either platform in the short term, or is this going to be more of a longer rollout that we'll see over the coming months?

Erick Calderon: It's going to be a longer rollout. I don't have an exact timeline of when things are going to happen, because we're still trying to figure that out ourselves. But I will say, in the short term, don't expect anything to really change. Sansa is going to operate as Sansa. Art Blocks is going to operate as Art Blocks. We're going to start planning and thinking about how we slowly start to merge these two platforms together, or if we do at all. There's a chance we keep them separate for quite a while, or a chance that we merge them fairly soon. I don't have those answers yet, quite honestly, because we're still figuring that out ourselves.

But in the short term, don't expect any drastic changes. I know a big question on a lot of people's minds is what happens with the primary sales that are already lined up on the Sansa platform — are those going to switch over to Art Blocks? No, in the short term they're not going to switch over. We're going to help support and push those forward on Sansa exactly like they've been doing. We just want to make sure that we don't disrupt anything for any artists that already had planned drops, so we don't want to shake that up at all. And the Sansa team is going to continue to operate as they were, and then slowly but surely we'll figure out how the teams merge together, how the platforms merge together, if at all.

Trinity: Understood. And I think this is going to be probably one of the biggest questions on a lot of people's minds, so I'd love to hear you speak to it if you're willing and able. But in terms of who is allowed to actually release on Sansa moving forward, is that going to be a curated experience? Is that going to be open to everyone? What is the actual selection process, if that's already been established?

Erick Calderon: That's obviously the million-dollar question, and I wish I had a great answer for you, but the truth is, we're still trying to figure that out ourselves. I know that's probably not the answer everybody wants to hear, but we want to take our time to make sure we make the right decision, rather than a rash decision that we might regret later on.

There's a lot of great things about how Sansa has operated. To your point, it has been a little bit more curated, not with an official curation board like Art Blocks Curated has, but JMac has done a very good job trying to find the right artists to introduce to that platform. And I think there's a lot of benefits to that. I also think there's a lot of benefits to a very open, permissionless platform as well.

So we're going to have a lot of conversations, not only internally, but with the community as well, to try to figure out what the right answer is. It might be that we create some hybrid version between the two, where we try to find the best of both worlds. But I don't have a solidified answer yet. It's going to take us some time to figure that out, and hopefully, when we do, we can announce it to the community and share our thoughts on why we're doing what we're doing, and get some good feedback from everybody on what they think as well.

Will: That was smart to preface that as the million-dollar question, because that was going to be my exact phrase to start this next question. There's obviously a very fine balance, and I think Art Blocks has done a great job on the curated side of things, threading the needle of quality control with your own curation board, while still trying to give people the artistic freedom that a truly permissionless platform might allow.

I know Sansa always felt like a bit of a middle ground, or another interesting node in the flower that's coming out from the center, where it wasn't fully permissionless, but it wasn't as buttoned-up as something like Art Blocks Curated. I'm curious, when you think about balancing that permissionless nature that I think a lot of people want or expect from blockchain technology as a whole, but also providing a great experience and quality control for collectors and users — because I think that's ultimately why brands work with you, why collectors trust you, why artists want to work with you — how do you think about balancing that permissionless nature with quality control? Is that something you've thought about as you think about the future of Sansa?

Erick Calderon: Yeah, and it's something we've thought about since the early conception of Art Blocks. Curated was born out of the need for quality control, because Playground did exist at the beginning, but the problem was there was no real efficient way to discover good artwork on Playground. As things speed up, as more people create more content, it just becomes more noisy, and it's harder to find the true gems in the mix of things.

So Curated was somewhat of an answer to that, where we said, we're going to hand-pick very specific artists that we think represent the best, and use that as at least one avenue for discovery, if not the main avenue for discovery in those early days. And it worked out very well.

But it's not to say that's the only answer, and it's not to say it's the perfect answer either, because I think a lot of people will agree, even on the Curated side of things, we don't hit a home run every single time. Sometimes we shoot ourselves in the foot with certain drops that we thought would go over really well and they didn't, and other times we're pleasantly surprised with drops that we didn't think would receive as much attention or fanfare, and it ends up being one of the best drops we've had in a while.

So I don't think anybody has this perfect science down. I don't even think Art Blocks, with all of our experience, comes anywhere close to a perfect science in terms of curation and discovery. I think it's going to be a mix of different qualities: how do we build a great enough discovery tool that could potentially be aided with something like AI in the future, to help find and root out some of the best pieces of artwork, even in a permissionless environment? Or is it always going to take a human component to help discover and curate the type of work that we think resonates with a specific community?

I don't have a perfect answer, but those are the things that we think about on a daily basis: how do we make sure that we're pushing the needle forward, not only for our own platforms, but for the community as a whole? Because I think discovery is still one of the largest issues in the entire NFT space, not just generative art. It's very hard to find the true gems in a very noisy environment, and I don't think anybody has completely solved that issue. I think there's little bits of genius happening across many different platforms, but I don't think there's a silver bullet that fixes it all.

Trinity: Kind of going along with that in terms of curation, I wanted to ask more specifically about Curated. I know a lot of the community sentiment recently, and rightfully so, has been focused on Sansa. But I did want to circle back to more Art Blocks-specific news and ask, first of all, when we might expect to see a new Curated release. And then, in relation to that, are there any updates to that actual curation process that you can speak to, given that I know it's gone through a few iterations over the last few years?

Erick Calderon: Yeah, so hopefully soon. I don't want to give an exact time on when the next Curated drop's is going to happen, because we've been bitten by that before, where we say a timeline and then things happen, understandably so, because art takes time, and sometimes things get delayed for good reason: the artist doesn}'t feel ready, we're still going through and helping to get the algorithm to a place we're happy with. So I don't want to necessarily give an exact time, but sooner rather than later, I'll say that.

In terms of the curation board itself, we're still trying to find our footing there too. I don't think we've announced this or spoken about it too much, but the curation board itself is still being decided. I don't have solid answers on exactly how that's going to look in the future, but we're taking our time to make sure we make the right decision instead of a hasty decision.

I know it's a little frustrating, probably, for people listening to this, because it feels like I don't have a lot of answers today, but the truth is, there's a lot of amazing stuff happening behind the scenes, and we want to take the time to make sure we're moving in the right direction rather than just moving fast and having to backpedal later on, and disappoint the community in doing so.

Will: No, that's the answer, and I think anyone who's been paying close attention understands that Art Blocks has never been a company to shy away from testing things, being experimental, and adjusting along the way. I think that's honestly a really healthy way to run a business or a platform like this, especially in such a fast-changing landscape like crypto in general, let alone the tiny corner of generative art. So it's reassuring to hear that you're taking the time to think about these things rather than just being reactionary.

Trinity: Yeah, and shifting gears a little bit, and this kind of goes with the future of Art Blocks and Curated as well — do you envision new chains being added? I would assume, from conversations we've had with other people, that layer 2s might be a part of that discussion. Or are there any new sale mechanisms, or any other information that you can share with us today in terms of what the future roadmap looks like for Art Blocks?

Erick Calderon: There's going to be a lot of experimentation, and it's not necessarily 100% Art Blocks-driven either. I think it's going to be a good mix of Art Blocks trying to push the envelope in certain ways, but also us listening to the community and to artists about what they want to see and what direction they want to take their art in, and finding ways to help implement that.

As far as new chains, yeah, I definitely think you're going to see us expand into other chains. I don't have an exact time frame of when that's going to happen, but I don't think it's going to be exclusively about layer 2 solutions on Ethereum. I think you're going to see us adopt some layer 2 solutions, but also headed in different directions outside of the Ethereum ecosystem as well.

As far as sales mechanisms, yeah, I definitely think you're going to see us try new things there too. I don't have any exact details to share today, but just like we've dabbled with Dutch auctions in the past, and straight mint pricing, and even some raffle mechanics with certain drops, I think you're going to see us continue to experiment with different sales mechanisms, depending on what makes sense for that specific artist and that specific project. I don't think there's a one-size-fits-all approach there, and we're going to keep experimenting to find what works best for different scenarios.

Will: That's exciting to hear, especially the multi-chain piece. I know that's something a lot of people have wondered about for quite a while, given that Art Blocks has stayed pretty firmly rooted in the Ethereum ecosystem thus far. So it'll be interesting to see what that looks like in practice.

Trinity: I know we're keeping you way over time, but I wanted to give you space, since I know you mentioned you're headed to Marfa soon, if you wanted to give a little pitch for anyone that might be interested in attending, or any other events coming up that our listeners should know about.

Erick Calderon: Yeah, absolutely. So Bright Moments is throwing an event out in Marfa, Texas. I believe it is March 7th through 10th. Don't quote me exactly on those dates, but it's happening in March, and it should be an awesome time. I've been to Marfa a few times over the last couple of years, completely unrelated to the space, and it's a beautiful, artsy little town out in the middle of nowhere in Texas. It's going to be really cool to see that community descend upon the city and put on a great show. So if you're able to make it out, I definitely recommend it. It should be a great time.

Will: Amazing. Well, Erik, thank you so much for joining us today. This was everything we could have hoped for and more, especially with such fresh news. We're excited to see how the Sansa integration unfolds, and we're rooting for you and the team as you continue to build out this next phase for Art Blocks.

Erick Calderon: Thank you guys so much for having me. I really do appreciate it, and I love what you guys are doing for the community as well. So keep up the great work.

Trinity: Thank you. We'll do our best.

Erick Calderon: It's simple math, and it's very frustrating simple math. It's a reality check. How many people collected generative art before, say, 2020? Not too many — you had the Spalters plus maybe a few thousand people in the world. Then generative art met blockchain, and it triggered a bit of a renaissance. It introduced generative art to, being conservative, 10 times more people — more likely 40 times, maybe 100 times more people than were interested before. That was during a peak, during a boom. Then it settled back to something like 2,000 people. And 2,000 people is a lot, but consider: I'd been following generative art for over a decade, mostly on Reddit, where I'd say there were maybe 100 generative artists sharing work initially. We went from about 100 artists to something like 10,000.

That's before you even factor in the noisiness that comes with success in any art market. Obviously, if there's success to be found — whether that's financial recognition or just the joy of making art — it draws more people in. Same on the collecting side. Simple math shows generative art exploded in a way that attracted a lot of artists, but because of the cyclical nature of crypto, the collectorship didn't sustain through that cycle. And like you mentioned, I actually think generative art took less of a hit than just about everything else — we should be proud of that.

What I think Art Blocks can take some credit for is creating, maybe even inventing, a new type of art collector — people who might have skipped past art entirely in their lives and found joy not just in collecting, and potentially 10xing or 1,000xing, but in talking about art and their feelings about it and what it meant to them. I think that's why Art Blocks and generative art generally sustained a bit more. Early on I'd get crucified for saying "buy this because you like it." I know that's a hard ask when everyone's talking token prices, but I stuck to that narrative. I entered crypto purely from a speculative perspective in 2017, in the altcoin world. The moment I discovered art on the blockchain, that changed completely. Yes, you always want to buy something that's going to go up, but you also want to buy something that supports someone you care about, someone whose career you think deserves to thrive.

So it's just math, y'all. I've recently been criticized for focusing my efforts too much outside of Art Blocks art itself. I recognize that, and I empathize with it, because often — not always, but often — people criticizing are watching something they saw as an investment go down in value. I get that. But per this math: my job right now is to get as many more people to care about your bags as possible, which means satisfying the desire of more generative creators to keep creating without feeling demoralized or frustrated. If there's an increase in noise in a space without a corresponding increase in collectorship or demand, that's a problem — but it shouldn't affect an artist's morale, because it's pure mathematics. You're asking for an economic situation to exist that just doesn't.

So I focus a lot of my time on inclusivity and onboarding more people. Sometimes that looks cheesy or commercial, but it gives me the tools to sell this — not to someone who can pull $100,000 out of their account to buy a Fidenza (though I guess they're much higher now), but to someone who might fall down the generative art rabbit hole the way people did in the early Art Blocks Discord, when ETH was $400 and we were minting tokens for 0.1 ETH. People were buying $20 Squiggles, $40 for everything else. Fidenzas were $200. That was joy — being able to buy in at that price point. To sustain higher price points, you need a bigger crowd of people stumbling into that rabbit hole and getting fired up about it. Most people aren't going to make 100x buying apes low and selling at the top — that's where a lot of that activity came from, people flipping into a more desirable NFT. The rest of the world isn't going to get the "we are still early" experience; that's just not how markets work.

So the rest of the world probably needs something close to the experience we had in the Art Blocks Discord in 2020 — which is similar to what's happening on Prohibition today, similar to what's happening on fx(hash) today. Accessible, beautiful stuff, where instead of opening the newspaper in the morning, people open a website and see what's new. There's incredible work on Prohibition right now for 0.007 ETH that I think is phenomenal — minted 70 pieces. We need to get people excited about generative art the way the initial collectors got excited, and it's an uphill battle. We have the barrier of crypto itself, and the barrier of creating a wallet. Those are both tough, and if I don't have a project that helps people through those barriers, I can't do my job. A lot of these projects exist specifically to help people through that entry point.

I tweeted last year that it's too much for me to ask other artists to do that. Artists have enough to deal with. We're veterans of this — I didn't know what I was signing up for. To be clear, I didn't sign up for this, I didn't expect any of this, and I do often regret it. It's completely turned my life upside down, but the positives make up for that and keep me pushing forward. What I went through, and what the early Art Blocks team went through, isn't an experience every creator needs to go through. Creators should be able to just make art, have fun talking about it, and release it into the community — it's too much to impose my burden onto every other artist. That said, when I tweeted that, about ten different artists reached out and said, "No, Erick, you're wrong — it is our burden too." I probably assume a bigger burden than I should sometimes, but I've been here too long, and I see too beautiful a future to watch collectorship and enthusiasm dwindle.

So to new artists: provenance is beautiful, and we have provenance on the blockchain. Get your work out there. In 2021, there was an objective scarcity of generative art relative to the number of people trying to buy — treat that as your baseline. There was less generative art than appetite for it, with maybe 50,000 to 100,000 people in that wave. If we lower the barriers to entry and get an influx of a million people, only a small fraction could ever own the generative art collections that are popular today, and an even smaller fraction could own an autograph. That's a massive opportunity to have your work out there with provenance attached.

It can feel stale right now because the ecosystem has slowed down, and if you browse Twitter, the sentiment is so negative you want to jump out a window. But put your stamp on this — this is what the blockchain is for. You can use a blockchain for whatever you want, but when it comes to fine art, take advantage of what it's actually good for: putting your stamp on something permanently. When the next 10 million people come in, if it's good art, it'll get consumed, and you'll get communities forming around your collections because people will be excited to have discovered that gem. I don't know when the next million, 10 million, 100 million people are coming in, but I don't think it's an if, it's a when. I do think 100 million people will eventually own an NFT, and a significant majority of them will be curious about generative art. Across all platforms, we haven't minted more than 2 million generative art tokens, period. That sounds like a lot, but how many iPhones does Apple make a year — and those are $1,000 objects. Meanwhile there's incredible generative art available right now for $20 to $75.

Trinity: Yes.

Erick Calderon: So I'd say just stick with it.

One more point, maybe a hot take: I'm a huge fan of AI art. I love what I'm seeing, even when the AI isn't controlled by a human — more like Botto. Even when an AI creates a token, I find that fascinating. We're reaching an important moment in history where, over the last three years and the next three, the guarantee that an artwork or an artist is human is going to become increasingly fuzzy. Eventually you'll say to ChatGPT, "I want a generative project that builds generative buildings with full construction documents," and it'll just do it. Maybe that's 10 or 15 years out, I don't know, but it's happening. There's going to be a spongy period where you stop knowing if the creator is even real — we already have bots replying to Twitter comments, we've had AI create projects like the 0xBasic release.

There will be scarcity, at that point, for anyone who can prove they were human before this moment — even though I'm all about automation. Rolls-Royces are valuable because they're made by hand; I can't afford one, and honestly I'm not that interested in one. BMWs are made by machines and they're perfectly fine for me, and I love that. Society pays a premium for things provably made by a human, and there will always be a market for both the automated and the human-made. Getting your work timestamped on a blockchain right now is so critical. Don't be disappointed or discouraged by the market — get your work out there, because you're staking your place in history before the day I can go to ChatGPT and say, "Build me the entire Art Blocks platform, 75 projects of great variety, a couple cartoony, a couple flow fields," and it creates not just the platform, not just the artist, but the whole ecosystem from a prompt. It's inevitable. So get it out there.

Sorry, I rambled a bit, but I want people to feel motivated and encouraged. You can't be discouraged, no matter what the market says.

Will: I think the AI conversation is too big a can of worms for today's sheet — that could take up a whole episode on its own. But I do want to go back to what you were saying about bringing more people in. Last night we recorded our weekly episode and went through the announcement you all made a couple weeks ago that Art Blocks bought Sansa. Then last night came the clarification that Sansa is being turned into, or expanded with, an independent self-publishing studio offering a more casual, low-pressure minting experience. One thing we theorized was the inclusion of open editions or inclusive editions, like what you did with Prohibition and the Heart. Maybe you can speak to the role Sansa might play in onboarding new people, and also just: why buy Sansa? What did Sansa bring to the table to enable this toolset and this new platform? It almost sounds like something the Art Blocks team couldn't do with their existing contracts and infrastructure.

Erick Calderon: There's a lot there. Why buy Sansa? First, two amazing humans who were fully aligned with my vision of the future without us ever once having a meeting about it. They built Sansa around Art Blocks specifically — it started as the Art Blocks marketplace, a more aesthetic way to browse and discover art. Now Sansa has rankings, and a bit more of that pro-Web3, data-driven approach to acquiring art — we can get deeper into that over time.

Art Blocks.io, on one hand, wants to serve Web3 enthusiasts and be cognizant of how people like to operate — people go on OpenSea and check the rankings, and Art Blocks had a lot of early success partly because all the pieces were mashed into one, contributing to the numbers and keeping us at the top of the rankings. We recognize people want that, but we've been careful to stick to our desire to be art-forward. And being art-forward isn't going to artblocks.io and seeing your collection is down 50% over the last week, or that so-and-so's collection is doing ten times better than yours, or that yours hasn't made the top ten in a month. That's a separate experience — one facilitated by the 24/7 permissionless ledger we all love, but separate from collecting art and trying to understand the story and message an artist is putting forward.

So it made a lot of sense: this is already built on Sansa, and it can be developed further there. Building in Web3 is so hard. We grew really fast — Art Blocks grew to a team of 40-something people quickly, with all sorts of expertise and backgrounds. In 2021 and 2022 there was plenty of money coming in, and it felt like we could just keep doing our thing forever. In my mind, that was never sustainable. So when things started slowing down and people started asking "am I still going to have a job? What does the future look like?" — it changes the internal dynamic completely. Suddenly every decision becomes a democratic process with a lot of different stakeholders. I love our investors because they don't micromanage at all, but my duty is also to consider what they think, what my team thinks. It's really hard. It changes the dynamic so quickly.

I used to make a decision, get into the code, and change it that night. I'd write a ten-page wall of text on Discord — people would roll their eyes, others would screenshot it and post it on Twitter like, "this is how we build in this space." That can't happen when you have 42 voices in a company, all of whom are awesome individuals who took leaps of faith from established careers to come work here.

Last year was tough internally at Art Blocks. There were reorgs. I'm committed to not laying anybody off, and we're in a good financial place, especially compared to most other Web3 endeavors, because we've been conservative and had a strong first couple of years. So we had some optionality, and we wanted to rethink everything — finding the resources and bandwidth while also hardening our backend infrastructure, understanding regulatory requirements. There's so much engineering work that goes into staying regulatory compliant. Royalties, for instance — two people full-time building dashboards and infrastructure just to figure out how to pay royalties. We went six months without paying a royalty last year, because the way it works, we get all the money and have to facilitate it to the artist — not to mention the tax implications of that money passing through us. It's a mess. Those things aren't what the public sees. The public just sees the drops, the price going up, the price going down. We're trying to operate as a mature organization in an incredibly fast-moving space, where chasing shiny objects often creates massive revenue in a short time but also, as we've seen, tends to backfire.

So while we were figuring stuff out internally and getting into our groove, the opportunity to work with Sansa came up. And when I looked at it, I realized this was something I'd been pitching internally for a long time without getting traction — it's just one of many ideas for how Art Blocks should evolve. When I saw what they'd built, I thought: this is exactly what I want to happen. These two guys in the UK basically did it on their own, with love, care, integrity, and thoughtfulness for the future. The build-versus-buy decision was straightforward. Working with Jack and Matt, and rallying our entire Art Blocks team to do due diligence — that was my first time ever being involved in any kind of M&A, despite twenty years in business. It was an incredible experience, and it sets us up for things I've wanted to happen for a long time.

Internally, there's this idea that this is the next thing for Art Blocks, or the second thing for Art Blocks, or —

Trinity: Yeah.

Erick Calderon: — actually the original intention for Art Blocks. I'm all about the art at Art Blocks, but our original tagline was "generative content on the Ethereum blockchain" — not "generative art." I never in my wildest dreams thought we'd land the opportunity to work with these incredible artists. It became this delicate thing we had to protect, because in fairness to the people putting work on the platform, we had to slowly elevate the bar for what it took to release on Art Blocks. But the original intent was to let people be innovative and creative with generative content.

That's what this is about. As of yesterday's announcement, we preserve the history of what's now called Art Blocks Curated — we're coming up on project 500 — and continue to be even more selective there. But I've struggled with the idea that I created a platform that isn't inclusive to new buyers. Even something at 0.1 ETH is still $500. That's not what got me into this — I claimed free CryptoPunks, people bought $20 Squiggles. Inclusivity is critical for me. I watched this thing I built become increasingly exclusive, increasingly luxury, and I fought that really hard. Now we have a place to continue nurturing badass art from badass artists in an ecosystem with integrity. We pretty much created this concept and we're still here — who else is still here from 2020? Very few people haven't quit, sold, or rugged. We're still here, just as excited about what we do.

This acquisition gets us that much closer to my dream: a broad home for generative art, innovation, and content on the blockchain, using the provenance mechanism of NFT technology to guarantee and support visual outputs. I couldn't be happier with the way things are going. For the first time in a long time, especially after that announcement, I feel real relief that things have fallen into place, and I'm genuinely excited about the direction Art Blocks is going.

Trinity: There's so much to unpack there — like four different rabbit holes I want to go down, and I can only pick one. Part of it is about the corporatization, or rather the de-corporatization, of Web3 — going from startup mentality to something more sustaining and viable across any market conditions, since Web3 is so much more subject to volatility than "normal" organizations. You're talking about expanding the strategy, but also there's a sadness in how Art Blocks used to be something that could be for everybody. Even listening to your past interviews, it's clear you weren't expecting it to need to become so curated so fast — it was just a thing you were doing.

And it's not just inclusivity from a collector's perspective, but maybe also from an artist's perspective. We've seen so many excellent artists emerge and thrive through the open platforms, just because they were able to release work, practice, and understand what they needed to do to be more successful. Jeres, with Torrent, is one of my top Art Blocks Curated projects of all time —

Erick Calderon: Such good work.

Trinity: — and he got his start with, let's just say, slightly not-safe-for-work lines and shapes.

Will: You can say phallic, Trinity. You can say phallic.

Trinity: It wasn't top of mind, surprisingly! But it's amazing seeing how quickly people can grow, and how much the space and the skill of artists have changed over the last seven years. It sounds like Sansa, or this new platform — correct me if I'm wrong — will be an expansion of what Sansa does today, enabling both creators and collectors to really get into the mix. Is there anything else you can share about what Sansa will do from a platform perspective? What does it specifically enable?

Erick Calderon: To be clear, I don't have the courage to be a fully open platform in Web3. Back in 2020, I didn't think anybody would ever release on Art Blocks. So when I talk about trying to be inclusive, it's a little funny in hindsight — I was practically begging people to put stuff on the platform. Things have changed since then. There's too much potential for copy-minting now, which isn't the end of the world, but we've established a certain level of quality control and attention to detail that matters enormously to me, both from my past business background and just in general. Part of that is making sure someone doesn't go and mint a bunch of swastikas — Web3 is a dark place, y'all. There are plenty of other places that focus on being fully inclusive, and I celebrate them — fx(hash), Prohibition, I think Highlight is open too. There's a place for that. As I mentioned in yesterday's announcement, generative minting is possibly the second most commoditized technology in Web3 now, after normal IPFS-based minting, so there's plenty of opportunity for people to experiment and get their work out there.

We're going to fill a nice middle ground: our application process will always stay open — we're never going to close ourselves off, that's against how I see the future — but we'll still be selective, because there's pride for an artist in releasing work into a space where they know the rest of the art meets a certain bar. Honestly, when something doesn't qualify, it usually just means the person is getting started. We've rarely rejected someone who's been at this a long time; you can tell when it's one of nine thousand people who just started coding. And there's nothing more invigorating than knowing all it's going to take is a year or two. New coders want to snap their fingers and make beautiful things, same as collectors want to snap their fingers and see the price go up — but it takes time. It took me a long time. Even the Chromie Squiggle — I didn't even look at that as art at first. So it's about managing expectations.

Sansa is going to facilitate minting within this self-publishing studio area, but it's also going to change things for engine partners. One thing I find amazing is that we have over fifty engine partners, and every single one of them has had to build the same thing from scratch. Partly that was intentional — we wanted engine partners to create their own bespoke experiences, because I wanted them to have the same experience we had in the Art Blocks Discord in 2020 with their audience and community. But the reality is that community, back when we were saying these things, was maybe 100,000 to 500,000 people, and it's shrunk to maybe 2,000 to 5,000. That community ends up fatigued because it's the same people getting hit from every direction with things to buy.

Art Blocks has reduced our cadence from over 200 projects in 2021, to low hundreds in 2022, to 97 in 2023, to significantly less in 2024. We have to recognize that all those projects were going to be released whether we accepted them or not — they'd just launch elsewhere. So while we were trying to acknowledge collector fatigue, it never felt like it was happening fast enough. We were always worried that an engine partner's initial instinct would be to just tap that same pool of collectors, even as we were aggressively trying to reduce cadence and stay relevant at the same time. A lot of engine partners did a phenomenal job bringing their own community or real value to the Art Blocks community. But we need to make sure all our engine partners can provide at least a baseline service — to me, that means: if you mint something, you see the output immediately. That's much harder to build than a mint button. And second, you have a place to view everything you've minted from that partner. In 2024, that should be table stakes for any platform, engine partner or not.

So Sansa becomes an aggregator of everything under one roof — the home of Art Blocks. Everything we build for Sansa benefits every engine partner, every studio artist, every flagship artist, every collector, all at the same time. It's a shift in how we think about resources: everything we do potentially benefits 40,000 people the moment it's released. That's what Sansa really enables — an infrastructure where we're adding value to one system, because we have a fairly big team of engineers who are just knocking stuff out. You don't see a lot of it because it's not visible in everyday minting, but last year alone we shipped a huge amount. The Creator Dashboard was one of our biggest projects — making it easier and more intuitive for creators to release on Art Blocks. That's now available to anyone releasing on the platform. Same with mint buttons and our minter suite, which we invested in last year — a hub for minters, where we develop some internally and also let outside developers build minters that can be audited and plugged in to make things more interoperable.

So anyone releasing on Art Blocks gets access to the full minter suite, plus other features — a lot of little things people might roll their eyes at, which I won't detail since they're not on the public roadmap yet, but I geek out about them. The goal is for a creator to think, "If I release here, I'm gifting my collectors XYZ," and for collectors to think, "If I collect here, I get to do XYZ." That connects to something I hear constantly lately: what can I actually do with my NFT? It's the number one question I get from people outside the space — "I don't want to just look at stuff on my phone all the time, what can I do with it?" For fine art, that's easy: show it on a digital screen, etc. But as we expand beyond fine art — because the whole world isn't always talking about art, we've got gaming and all sorts of things — that question becomes more important, and Sansa really unlocks that too.

Trinity: I know that you have a real question, Will, but anybody who doesn't know what to do with their NFT, you can send it to wtbs.eth or wtbs.tez. We're always accepting donations.

Erick Calderon: What are you going to do with it?

Will: Depends on the NFT.

Erick Calderon: Yeah, I guess so.

Will: Maybe we print it. Hearing you describe it, it sounds like the allowlisted set of partners who'll be in from day one is going to be pretty big — basically every artist who's made it through the process with Art Blocks Presents and Curated, plus all the partners already using Art Blocks Engine in some fashion, like TENDER, Bright Moments, etc. So you don't just have your pool of artists who release on Art Blocks — you have other platforms or entities with their own artists who are trusted to bring people in too. Very quickly that could scale up to thousands of artists having access to these tools, which is great. But we came from fx(hash), that's how we got started, and over the last eighteen months, with other open platforms launching — and I'm sure you're close to Prohibition too — there's tons of art out there that just isn't selling, even if it's good. What's the proposition you feel Sansa brings with this semi-open approach — lower price points, open editions or inclusive editions being part of it? What's the solve for this bifurcation in the market, where if you're not releasing with Art Blocks or Verse or another highly curated service, good luck? How do you feel Sansa approaches that differently from other platforms?

Erick Calderon: It's not necessarily Sansa — it's Art Blocks as a platform as a whole. This is the Art Blocks ecosystem; Sansa is just housing it.

Will: But it's not curated, right? That's the thing. We even saw with Presents — which is now going away, we haven't had a Presents project in a while — increasingly more projects not minting out, and this collector-attributed value tied to being curated. Something like Verse Solos, people do tend to follow artists, but even curated-caliber artists who go to an open platform might make 20% of what they'd have made on a curated project. What's the vision here?

Erick Calderon: There are two layers to this. First is what I talked about earlier — we probably have more artists than collectors right now. It's plain economics. Generative artists are also very prolific; it's insane how quickly people can run through new releases and mints. There's a lot out there and a lot to sift through.

The other thing that really matters to me: when I think about engine partners, I think about an opportunity for an organization to bring the magic of generative, individual expression and creation to their audience. That's hard to sell when you have to not just find an artist and collaborate on something cool, but also build a Discord server, build a website, understand smart contracts, institute wallet security — because you have ongoing responsibilities. We have to maintain the site, deal with traffic spikes if you have a really stellar project. With all of that coming out of the box as a package, a brand can just concentrate on how they can be most impactful.

Trinity: Yeah.

Erick Calderon: If I imagine a massive brand coming in, my dream is that they release a million generative artworks to their community of 5 million people who buy their shirts or apparel, whether they give them away or sell them—that's up to them, since they're not necessarily selling to our community. That's a million people who now only need a 20-minute conversation to understand what we do at Art Blocks, instead of an hour and a half.

If that brand created a Discord with a new-mints channel—and this gets into how much I want to talk about the physical side of things, which is really where my brain is these days—you'd get people who had no idea what generative art or NFTs were, sitting in a channel rooting for each other because someone got a special one, a blue one, a yellow one. You'd see a flourishing secondary marketplace where people are mostly just trading, and because it's a branded thing, it's not even meant to be speculative. It's like, "I bought this hat because I thought it was cool, and I just want to wear it." That's one layer easier for brands to invest in something for their audience.

Right now, a lot of brands come into our space because they see dollar signs in our audience—they invest because they think they'll make money from it. And in some cases they will, because they're putting out phenomenal stuff. But in this case, I think a brand can invest in delighting and surprising their audience with a new technology that differentiates them from every other brand doing the same thing in their category. They could become the onboarding route for the next generation of collectors.

That generation is going to be onboarded via Prohibition, fx(hash), and other open platforms full of amazing projects that haven't minted out. Then, over time, maybe 1% of those people rise to the level of GM Studio and other great platforms you can collect at a more reasonable price. And then there's the next level up from that. Little by little—people want us to just grab a hook and pull people straight into the most expensive experience in generative art. But the reality is that a lot of people who'd be excited and curious about this aren't in a financial position to spend that much money. They're just curious.

I hear this constantly from parents whose kids play Roblox: those kids would much rather get Roblox dollars for Christmas than real cash. That hasn't sunk in for people yet—the next generation is going to natively interact this way. And for them to get there, we need brands to push things forward that get them comfortable, educationally and down the rabbit hole. That's why Generative Goods exists. That's why Prohibition exists—brands like that can get things out at a reasonable price point.

It's not just that, either. Those brands are also conduits for discovering new ways people can be onboarded beyond the current standard, which is: download MetaMask, buy some ETH on Coinbase, transfer it over, cross your fingers it arrives, only to find out you didn't bring over enough to cover the gas fee and now you're stuck. That's not going to onboard people unless there's a financial incentive on the other end of that pipeline. If there's a financial incentive, sure, people will deal with all of that. But when there isn't—when the payoff is less guaranteed—what onboards people is delight, excitement, and curiosity. And curiosity and delight are a $20-to-$50 thing for the average consumer, not a $10,000-to-$50,000 thing.

I've been told I'm delusional for this. Our Heart and Craft project has a max supply of a million, only because that's the smart contract restriction. It's going to be open for years. If I'm doing my job right, eventually we'll sell every single one—that's not that many when you consider a broader consumer base. And once we do, every one of those people will be onboarded and curious about our ecosystem. If it takes five years, I don't care. Jordan and I talk about this all the time: there is no timeline.

What's interesting is we're packaging stuff for South by Southwest. I can give out gift cards for Carton Craft mints because the project isn't sold out and won't be for a long time. So I can actually take the risk of programming a mint onto a card—tap it, and it mints something new. You can't do that if a project's close to selling out, because you might hand someone a card only to find out it's sold out. This lets us start having interactions that feel more normal to average consumer behavior, and I'm so excited about that.

I think about generative business cards for artists. If you've been to enough events, you've met those people who hand you a business card that's actually a plotter drawing, and every single one is unique. I cherish those—I have a whole collection of them. I see an opportunity for generative art to represent individuality to people in a way that goes beyond the speculation we see today.

I've said this on a lot of calls: I'm here to demonstrate the value of NFTs and digital objects beyond scarcity, FOMO, and the promise of future value. That's a really hard nut to crack, but I believe that if I can do it, I'll incentivize a massive number of people to dip their toes in the water the way we all did the first time. Instead of there being 2,000 to 5,000 active people collecting generative art—if there's even that many—we'd be at significantly more, in a much better place, with more buzz around the ecosystem. And we could all go back to thinking about the art again, instead of the dwindling collector base.

Trinity: The art, and other types of non-fungible goods you could do other things with—to me, you just pitched this to IKEA as the next big Art Blocks engine partner. I know that's something you've been talking about for a long time, and weirdly it's the same analogy I've been making, completely unrelated and not knowing you'd been saying this for years, to people I work with about the opportunities in this space.

So it sounds like this is more about the ecosystem play, the platform play. Parts of it ring true to what Highlight has been doing with cross-chain work, especially enabling people to have a place to put stuff without needing their own site. But it also sounds like you're setting up potential pipelines—you already mentioned Generative Goods—into the redeemable side of things, building out modular services that bring additional value beyond just "here's a thing, mint it."

Erick Calderon: In NFT Paris, I threw this word out there: not just primary and secondary, but the tertiary market — everything you can do via provable ownership of an NFT. Organizations like Woven have already done a phenomenal job letting you print your stuff, and plenty of others too. I believe there's a significant chance that the next inflow, especially at the consumer level, will be people onboarded via the tertiary market.

I'll quote a bit of my keynote in Paris. Some people come here to play in a casino, and that's totally fine — that's how I started in 2017 with altcoins, and it was a lot of fun. I watched it go up, watched it come back down, and thought, yep, that's not for me, and moved on. Some people are here purely to collect fine art, and that's awesome — that's half of what I do, just enjoy the fine art space. But some people might just want a hat with a cool logo on it, and they're perfectly satisfied with just wearing a cool hat. Even if the hat comes with an NFC tag attached, it's perfectly acceptable if they throw away that NFT, because all they wanted out of the object was a cool hat.

If the hat's $700, out of the question. If the hat's $30, and it's unique, and there's another rack of hats that are also $30 but all the same, you're not making a financial decision, you're making an aesthetic one — "oh, that's a cool hat." There's no wrong answer there. But some percentage of the people who buy that hat are, a year later, staking Ethereum and flying halfway across the world to a West Texas art town to nerd out about generative art. Tiny percentage. But how many people just walk by a hat store and think, "that's a cool hat, I'm gonna buy that"? We don't need a huge percentage of hat buyers to convert — we just need a lot of people buying the hat.

I believe the creativity in our ecosystem is such that it shouldn't be difficult for the incredible talent we have to create interesting enough designs and IP — and I'm not just talking about hats, this applies to a billion other things — to entice the average consumer into "oh, that's cool, I'm going to buy that." Then: "Oh, it comes with an NFT. I don't care about NFTs, I'm going to throw it in the trash." Or: "I don't care about NFTs, but I'll throw it in a drawer because I don't want to throw my receipt away." Or the very small percentage who actually transfer it into their wallet because they already have one.

I actually used this example on a call yesterday: take a brand like Supreme. People eat that up. If I got to do a generative collection with Supreme, an edition of a million, and Supreme was willing to do a million unique embroidered hats — because I've created a system where I can embroider a million hats that are all different in the same time and for the same cost as a million identical hats, by writing the stitches at the algorithmic level so the embroidery machine just runs through a DST file — I do believe it would sell out. For Supreme, a million might be a big edition, but not too big, since you see Supreme stuff everywhere. And I believe a million people would end up with a pipeline to redeeming an NFT. Maybe 800,000 of them would just throw it away — they don't care about the NFT. Although, honestly, Supreme people might even leave the tag hanging just to keep it preserved.

I think that would be a way for a brand to demonstrate innovation in what otherwise feels homogeneous. We complain about homogeneity in generative art, but it's everywhere — we're buying everything on Amazon, everything looks the same, cars within the same class perform the same, are the same size within millimeters. Industrialization and technology have gotten to a point where we can all make great things for very little effort. So what differentiates? Individuality. We've proven there's a desire for that in the digital world with PFPs and generative art — people are drawn to things that make them unique, that represent them in a distinct way within a larger space. That doesn't mean I have to wear my CryptoPunk mask to a party. But now, when I get in my car and press start, my little CryptoPunk pops up as my profile picture. The joy I get out of that is unbelievable to explain, and I don't think I'll be the only crazy person who feels that. Maybe I am — that's fine, I own it.

I think a significant number of people are going to be onboarded via the tertiary market, and a new conversation is going to be born from that — brilliant, beautiful — and it's all going to lead back to what Derek Edwards always calls this trinity, where everything leads back to Punks, Squiggles, and Autoglyphs. I'm flattered he says that, and proud to be included in that dialogue. But in my opinion, all of this leads back to those first few years where we had provably human artists making algorithms that inspired a new generation, a dialogue, news articles, podcasts. You mentioned ten — I think last year alone I did about a hundred. There's so much content, so much for the nerd who likes rabbit holes to explore, an unlimited amount of information to dive into. It's exciting. I think we've created the base plate for this, and now we can build on top of it. That's really what Sansa is here to do — create a base plate, a container, for all of these exciting things: the art, the content, the physicals, the games. Because I believe that in the future, the word "generative" is going to be mainstream, commonplace, a bigger part of everyday consumer life. I'm excited about that future — it's what gets me out of bed every day.

Trinity: You're making that future a reality. The time horizon is something we always have to think about, as well as solving some of those onboarding issues into crypto.

Erick Calderon: Even just denominating things not in ETH — look at Ordinals projects, where it's like, how many zeros do you need after the decimal point? Coincidentally, today you can buy a Heart and Craft on the Generative Goods website — a new mint — for less than it costs to mint elsewhere, because we have an inventory of 300 gift cards. But that's priced in dollars, and we're not going to change the price in dollars; it's always been listed at $29 or whatever. Pricing in dollars, I think, is pretty critical to this. I got crucified a lot for that early on — still get a little crucified — but that's what the new self-publishing studio is also for. An artist isn't going to want to take a big risk pricing in dollars on Art Blocks proper, but they can experiment with it elsewhere, without the whole ecosystem having a conniption fit.

Now we have room for experimentation, innovation, tinkering — we didn't have that before. I don't know if you can tell, but I'm a tinkerer. I like to mess around and figure stuff out, and we'd gotten to a point where the flexibility just wasn't there anymore, and that's not how I operate. So a lot of this is about flexibility — being able to lean back into the joy and excitement of being part of this crazy, innovative movement, while preserving a special place for the things that truly raise the bar. I'm happy here, comfortable here, and incredibly proud of how it was received yesterday from the community. We didn't sleep, worrying about how quickly chaos can ensue around here. We got really positive reception from the artists and from the community — people saying, "this makes sense, we've gotten here." Now we can really lean into all the things we have — 42 people, tremendous expertise, meticulous contributors — to knock it out of the park and push forward into this next phase of whatever this is.

Will: We're getting low on time, so I want to pivot into the other half of this — well, probably not half in your mind, maybe 5%, given how long we've talked about Sansa. I don't know if "rebranding" is even the right word — maybe more like a refreshing of the Curated process and the Curated brand. It's TBD how long you're pausing Curated for; we don't need an answer to that.

Erick Calderon: I have an answer for you.

Will: Okay, hold it so I can finish the question. What are some of the driving factors behind this refresh of the Curated concept, and what are some of the changes you're going to make? Is it more actively seeking artists versus just the application process? Is it revamping aspects of the curatorial process — adding or changing people on the board?

Trinity: Or are you pivoting away entirely?

Will: If you can lift the veil a little on that — and when can we expect to see the next Curated project?

Erick Calderon: You'll see the next curated project when we have one ready — something we're just exceptionally proud to present. Everything we've released on Art Blocks, I consider amazing. This isn't about being "more platform," it's about being more Web3 — or not being Web3-deaf. I'm proud of every single project. I've collected multiples of every single one; that collection is my pride and joy. But in this space, people expect you to raise the bar. The status quo isn't acceptable here. And given the tremendous influx of generative artists and generative art, there's just a lot of really good work out there now.

We have a team of people who can dedicate themselves fully to a project — everything from community events to giving artists room to experiment outside the standard Art Blocks structure. That's the evolution of curation for Art Blocks. When we're ready to announce a project, it needs to feel like a step up, because that's what we owe the community. If we're going to release something that's a step up from what I already consider the most incredible generative art projects in the world, we owe it to the artist to give it our all. We owe it to everyone who's collected the previous 500 Art Blocks releases to keep evolving the brand and its prestige amid a sea of generative art.

Generative artists are prolific, and they're all incredible — at this point they're basically all my friends. Which makes it the hardest thing. I think we may have mentioned this in the artist channel on Discord: my least favorite part of the last three years — other than getting yelled at in Discord — is saying no to a project. That's actually why the curation board started in the first place: I didn't have the guts to say no myself. We don't like saying no. It doesn't feel good to look at phenomenal work and think, "this just isn't elevated above the last batch," especially as this medium keeps exploding. It's hard, and it sucks. So we kept trying to find a middle ground, kept giving ourselves fewer excuses to say no. Now, instead of a fixed release schedule — something every two weeks — we're going to release when we want to release.

To me, that's in service of the artist's work being released. It's in service of everyone who's ever collected anything from the Art Blocks release structure — those 500 projects. And it's in service of our team, because our team has the skill set, the experience, and the community. We have so much to offer, and if we pour it all into one project, it's going to be really beautiful. That's where we're headed.

Here's an analogy: if you check into a hotel expecting a suite and get a regular room instead — even at the best hotel in the world — you're going to be disappointed, because you told your friends you got upgraded. But if you check in expecting a regular room at one of the best hotels in the world and get upgraded to a suite, that feels good. The default entry point for releasing on Art Blocks will be self-publishing through this new studio setup, because there's so much art, and we're saying no to too many things — and that doesn't feel good. We shouldn't close ourselves off from supporting the careers of artists we helped get off the ground in the first place.

So curation is being redefined. Selection is being redefined. Cadence is being redefined. Support is being redefined. Everything is being redefined across the board. We're still working out a lot of the details, but it's all going to be turned upside down in pursuit of absolute excellence — with an ear to our Web3-native community, which I'm very much a part of, and with an ear to collector fatigue, which I feel myself, as a collector of Art Blocks.

Will: Yeah.

Erick Calderon: If I'm fatigued, and I love all the art I'm collecting, how do other people feel? And we're listening to what artists want, too — which is often just more. They don't fully understand the relationship between Art Blocks and the artist. Are we representing them? No — I'm not asking anybody to sign an exclusive agreement, that just doesn't feel Web3 to me. Are we a publisher? Kind of. It's a mushy area. Maybe I'd push back on trying to put us in a box at all, because this is Web3 — a lot of things don't fit into a box. Maybe we're creating a new paradigm, and we're excited about that. Ian Rogers had a great tweet yesterday about being both the label and the producer. We're figuring this out. It's hard for a brand to navigate this and stay in everyone's good graces, but we're doing our best.

By drawing a stark distinction with curated — Art Blocks Curated, which we're now just calling Curated, since it was never called that before, it was always just "Art Blocks," internally "Art Blocks Flagship" — and by not having Presents projects anymore, we can simplify. Everything we put out is going out with blood, sweat, and tears from everyone on our team.

Trinity: I love hearing all that. One thing we've talked about a lot on this podcast is that, compared to other platforms that are admittedly trying to catch up to what Art Blocks has achieved in market excitement, prices, audience, and community, Art Blocks has stayed committed to long-form generative art released as a Dutch auction with an allowlist — a "friendship bracelet," if you will — on Ethereum L1. Is that something you're open to challenging in the future? Things like artist-curated or collector-curated drops, English auctions, fixed price, connections to physical goods, or exploring other L1s or L2s?

Erick Calderon: Not other L1s — maybe if it were EVM-compatible, but we've invested so much into what I consider the most streamlined method of releasing generative art in the world that we're not going to regress into something you have to piece together, no matter how much liquidity or opportunity is there. That also leaves room for other people to go have fun and explore.

The Dutch auction is a really sensitive topic for me, because I feel like I'm the bottleneck for the entire organization on this, based on my own values. I don't hate the Dutch auction as a consumer — I take a lot of pride in the moment of minting being the moment you receive your art. That might seem nuanced, maybe even unnecessary — a lot of collectors I highly value have reached a point where they don't even take their chances minting anymore. They'd rather curate their collection from the start and shape it via the secondary market. Often, because of market conditions, secondary is cheaper than primary anyway, so it's even easier for them to pick what they want.

So we're exploring everything. Take an English auction: for everything good about it, there's a hiccup — tax implications, not minting immediately, going to sleep and waking up to find you didn't get a mint even after bidding high. Bots can still bot the whole thing, even bot everyone else out of an auction entirely. But there's real demand for it, and we want to listen to our collectors. It's hard because the rest of my team wants to try it too, and I'm the one holding things up. So I've put in some guardrails — for example, let's try it on Sansa first. We built an English auction minter; let's let people tinker and experiment with it and see how it goes, see if it solves the problems or not.

We get attacked a lot over projects being "botted," but a lot of the speculative buying and selling on the secondary market lately is actually individuals, not bots — different people buying different things, not one person buying thousands. It's a new generation of speculators killing the vibe. It sucks, but it is what it is. Ultimately I'm being asked to trade my values around decentralization to accommodate bad actors, and I understand that tension. A Dutch auction is a provably fair mechanism. So is an English auction. So is fixed price — but then we get into allowlists, and gatekeeping, and we're right back to what pushed me away from the traditional art world and toward Web3 in the first place.

Will: We're right at time here, Erick, and want to be respectful of that — I know you've got a busy day, Trinity has somewhere to be, and I have a meeting soon. So this feels like a good place to sign off, unless you want to give us a heartfelt pitch to attend Marfa this year. As two parents of young kids, we rarely get to do stuff like that, but it's constantly been on our radar.

Erick Calderon: I'm almost scared to pitch people on Marfa — 95% of last year's attendees said they'd be returning, and we can only host about 600 people; the town just doesn't have enough Airbnbs. I'm really proud of what we've built, and Marfa is a demonstration of that. It might not feel like a direct gift to collectors — being an OG or part of the ecosystem — but to me it is a gift. It's expensive, hard to put together, complicated, and we ask a lot of people. But it's something we do for our community, and it's often regarded as a really special moment in Web3 each year. It's a good filter for people who are there to talk about art and technology. One day we'll offer babysitting services, since people ask me about that all the time.

Will: Thank you so much, Erick. It's been awesome to finally talk with you — this has been a goal of ours for a while, even before we made contact.

Erick Calderon: It feels like we didn't cover enough — we might have to do this again, because I have a lot more to say, guys.

Will: I've got about 20 follow-ups we didn't get to. This could've gone another hour and a half easily, but I think we have to sign off here. That's it for this one, everyone. Thanks to Erick — go join the Art Blocks Discord.

Erick Calderon: Join our Discord, follow us on Twitter.

Will: Sounds like there are a lot of announcements coming up.

Erick Calderon: Thank y'all so much. Have a wonderful weekend.

Will: You too. Bye.

Erick Calderon: Bye.

Trinity: Always lit.

Erick Calderon: We're Waiting to Be Signed to 99.

Trinity: The rail of the week.