Will: All right, hello and welcome everyone to a special episode of Waiting to Be Signed, an interview discussion episode. We've got our friend Lars Pronoia back on the show. How's it going, man?

Pronoia: Going very well. Excited.

Will: It's been maybe 18 months since the last time you were on — you guest hosted an episode when Trinity was away. That was a great conversation, and I've always wanted to have you back on. Now we've got an amazing opportunity to just chat about everything that's been going on with fx(hash) and $fxh and art coins.

Pronoia: Time flies, man. 18 months already. And fx(hash) — was that released in December 2021?

Will: I think it came out in October 2021.

Pronoia: Damn, that's been a while. Still feels like yesterday, which is kind of strange.

Will: It goes without saying, since we're going to be talking about fx(hash) and prices in this episode, that none of this is financial advice — usual disclaimers apply. But we will be talking about price and trading, since that's kind of the point. So use it for entertainment purposes only. Last time you were on, you were either just starting at Trillitech or hadn't started yet — that's how long it's been. Now you've come and gone. What have you been up to since we last spoke?

Pronoia: Eighteen months ago was right around when I started at Trilli — I was there for about a year and five months. I had a lot of great times there, learned a lot about the ecosystem, had great interactions with different partners and artists, and worked with fx(hash) on programs we'd run together. I got to go to the Entangled gallery release, which was amazing to see up close, technical process and all.

I stopped about three months ago, after a trip to China. When I came back, I felt I needed some time away — both from the space and from Trillitech. I'd felt a lack of impact for a while and needed to figure out what I actually wanted. I took two months off, then took a job at the Central Bureau of Statistics, the Dutch statistics bureau. That's part-time and nice, and I'm doing some consultancy on the side in NFTs and art, which has been fun. I'm enjoying having more free time — I'm at about 24 hours a week now, which is a real change of pace, especially since I went straight from university into working. This is my first real stretch of freedom in years.

Will: One of the controversies — or maybe that's not even the right word — around the launch of the fx(hash) token and the new Open Forum protocol has been that they've deprioritized the platform's support for Tezos. They'll keep the legacy contracts and allow secondary trading, but no new minting. How do you feel about the shift to Base?

Pronoia: I have a lot of thoughts here. First, there's the core financial reality of running a web3 company, especially an NFT company. Forget DeFi's cash flow problems for a second — the core problem for an NFT platform is that you have to keep bringing in artists and collectors, supply keeps increasing, and you have to manage both the secondary volume on older collections and generate new primary volume. Balancing that is always difficult. fx(hash) had two or three years where, frankly, from the outside, it looked like they were burning money. Looking at other NFT platforms shutting down — MakersPlace, or Rodeo pivoting entirely — I think it was inevitable that their old model wasn't working this cycle, especially for new primary drops. We've seen secondary success on Art Blocks recently, but it's really siloed to a few so-called blue chips that are more like investment vehicles at this point. So that's the financial reality.

Then there's what I'd call decoupling — you said "deprioritize," but I'd go a level further and say they're decoupling from their relationship with Tezos as a partner and artist-support entity. I don't think they want to work with Tezos anymore. They've been fairly transparent about it — teasing the bridge, then announcing the contracts would stop accepting new mints — but I found the execution a bit unnecessarily harsh. I can't speak to what happened behind the scenes since I've been away from Trilli for a while, but I wish they'd found a way to keep some Tezos support alive, even if handed over to the community, and had talked it through with major artists and community members first — is there an open-source way to manage this, or someone else to carry it forward? I'm sure the team faced hard decisions, especially since they clearly love the art on Tezos and the people who built those contracts. So I'm giving them some slack, and hoping they respect that heritage — building the story around it matters a lot.

That heritage is the third part of this for me. It's essential for the platform's future growth to acknowledge that this heritage is what made fx(hash) what it is today. Even doing something completely different, that story has real strength — cultural capital. Those core artists you started with are the ones you want with you on the new journey, and you owe them some level of respect.

The fourth part is Base itself, as an opportunity. Pure speculation on my part, but I think their thinking is: if we show Base and the Coinbase team we're fully committed — Base Summer, token launches, the Base app — we can work more closely together, which helps both from an investment perspective and a distribution perspective, with Coinbase able to put their tokens in front of the biggest audience there is, on a chain with a very liquid environment. I completely understand the logic. I still have questions about decentralization, but for now I see Base as a fun L2.

Will: You've got to get those coveted Jesse retweets, right?

Pronoia: It's a strange mechanic to me. I've been pretty critical of Jesse in the past — he tends to present things in a rosy light. He's said things like, "Oh my God, I'm making money on Sora right now, I can't believe it." That gets close to scammer territory, because the economic reality of Sora is that the money he's making comes from users — from people following his wallet, chasing retweets, trying to get the project going. He may not be selling the tokens, but he's still hyping his number going up. I hope he stays away from that kind of statement going forward. Sora probably has a place, but it shouldn't be presented as some magic money solution.

Will: I'm not very interested in Sora or the idea of tokenizing tweets. One theme of this show over almost four years has been that we don't like most of what crypto has to offer, other than the art and culture side. Tokenizing tweets isn't culture, or a substitute for it. Maybe 0.01% of tweets are worth collecting, but not everyone should be issuing a coin. That's part of why I like what fx(hash) is doing with tokens.

Pronoia: Right.

Will: It gives artists a way to tokenize the culture they're actually producing — because at the end of the day, they're making art you can collect through the protocol.

Pronoia: Small note on that — my media-theory brain kicked in: the medium is the message. If I compare Sora to fx(hash), the medium is the coin in both cases. But the message with Sora is "coins don't really matter, it's just fun, let's have an economic vehicle for everything." With fx(hash), the message behind the coin is "focus on your craft, build something long-term, build a brand." That's a difference I appreciate — a more focused approach.

Will: Maybe we can circle back at the end to the Tezos-to-Base bridging on their roadmap. But let's focus on fx(hash) for now. You were early to fx(hash) back in the day — the earliest docs talked about $fxh in terms of revenue sharing, subDAOs, curation, decentralized governance of the platform itself. Then we had Paul on at the end of 2024, talking about what was then a nascent art-coin plan that sounded a lot like meme coins with no real utility. Now, in August, the platform's been live for almost two months with this current shape of the art-coin protocol. Do you feel like they've arrived at the right place? As someone who cares about decentralization, do you want to see governance eventually attached to the $fxh token? What do you make of the journey they've been on?

Pronoia: So the core of your question is whether they've arrived at the right place, or at the place I might have wanted. I think some of it is a means to an end financially — needing to get out of this cycle where NFTs aren't the best investment or earning vehicle, especially for the platforms. But another part of it is them seeing the cultural shift around coining, the more TradFi approach to art. Had I ever imagined them coming to this point? No. I never thought this generative art platform doing an open-source, Wikipedia-like version of Art Blocks, where everybody can just participate, would at some point do brand coins or art coins or DeFi. Nobody looking at Ciphrd's talks two or three years ago would have said, "That's going to become a financial DeFi thing." But at the same time, we weren't at a cultural point yet where personal coins and coining things in general were accepted the way they are now.

I think American regulation specifically has allowed these cultural shifts to happen at a higher level. Think back to that tweet by Jesse — if you had a President Biden, Jesse would think three or four times before tweeting something that pumpy. But that's normalized now. Major artists are normalizing to this too. Look at Refik Anadol, and the example he's setting by completely financializing his art, even to the point of recommending people buy his art in his Discord and keep pumping it. So on one hand, it brings a lot of cult of personality around this whole coining thing — it's all about brand value and financials. But at the same time, it's a social and cultural reality happening in crypto. Even though I'm not happy about where crypto as a space is going overall, I really appreciate that fx(hash) is trying to find a novel way to interact with this cultural shift. They've done that quite powerfully by introducing a new art format directly tied into the financial supply of the coins, while also challenging artists to do something new and creative.

So as a starting base, that's great. And I'm excited about them broadening the scope to other forms — still art, one-of-ones, AI-based long-forms, maybe eventually AI art agents, whatever that might be. Yes, the platform is going to become even more decoupled from that original idea. But because the team is so central to their morale and how they work, I trust them to still apply real creative thought to each of those processes. I hope they come out on top.

So did they arrive where I thought they would? No. If you'd asked me three or four years ago to think three or four years ahead, I'd have said: cultural institution, working with large curatorial platforms, doing festivals, big releases. But having seen it up close while working at Trillitech — it's hard, and it's expensive. The ROI on something like a booth at a fair, where you sell two or three big artworks, covers costs and gets some mainstream attention, but mainstream isn't streaming into crypto, as we all know. Crypto can be quite a hugbox. That's the reality. I wish crypto had expanded beyond the degens into consumer-friendly art lovers, but those people seem to stay on Instagram for now.

Will: I think we're quite far away from that. What you're describing with events is basically marketing — that's the problem. At best you're getting revenue-neutral marketing, marketing that covers its own costs, so you can't really grow that way. Maybe in theory, long term, if you got a lot of adoption. But clearly we didn't get the adoption we were hoping for. Adam, with the HEFT gallery, and a few others in New York have launched galleries now that really try to de-emphasize the NFT side. If you go to HEFT — I don't know if you've been to New York since it opened — there's no mention of NFTs anywhere. All you see is really great art on the wall.

Pronoia: You can lean two ways. You can lean heavily into the financialization and NFT side, which is what fx(hash) is doing. Or you do what HEFT is doing — lean away from it, because that side of the art world is so hard to get into that it's especially important to remove the barrier that pops up in every collector's head when they walk past a piece and see the word "NFT." It just happens — there's a cultural bias against NFTs, beyond the hugbox that NFT Twitter and NFT crypto is. But I appreciate fx(hash) daring this space to be a little more creative in its thinking, and daring the degens to appreciate art a bit instead of always watching the charts. Sure, some posts go to three million, but if it's just one image post, you're not exploring it with your mind beyond that.

Will: I think part of what they're trying to do with this new system is dare the degens to care about art again. Talking to Ciphrd a few months ago, when they launched this, they acknowledged as a platform, as a company, that the flippers and degens we used to resent as collectors — the ones who sniped every drop and resold them, forcing earnest collectors to pay flipper prices and deal with gas wars — yes, that was annoying. But it also created a lot of the liquidity, attention, and fun of collecting, watching the number go up. There's something undeniable in crypto about the necessity for a number to go up. Now they've externalized that into this multi-layered DeFi system that's been memed into what we're calling the flywheel. So, first, can you explain the flywheel for people who aren't familiar with the term? And do you believe this system is actually designed to fly and wheel the way we hope it does?

Pronoia: You said a few interesting things there. The platform trying to get the degens in — what Ciphrd said — I think crypto as a whole, in these conversations, tends to talk about the art world as if it's this fair place where artists just make art, share it on the street, sell it, and anyone can come up. That's not the reality of the art world. And I'm very much against this entitled idea that we deserve to get the drop at a certain price, that we deserve to be treated all equal, whatever it is. The economic reality of platforms, and of the art world in general, is that yes, there is a first-mover advantage. If you're on the platform and get into a drop that becomes big, you have that advantage. If you come after the bots, after they've sold — if you're still early on the long-term timeline, you don't have to worry about all that. If you're afraid of losing money early on and don't trust the artist to build up the coin over time, then don't buy it. Nobody's forcing you to. Just mint it and hold.

So I don't like this entitled thinking about the flywheel, where everyone assumes they all have to be in on it and everyone's making money. That's not the case anywhere — this is a check for people. This is a PvP space in the most essential sense. Unless outside capital comes in — VC money, liquidity, new degens who aren't from our base — we're all trading against each other. And even if those new people come in, they become part of the in-group, and you're trading against them too. That's the reality of trading, especially on the art side of crypto. It stops us from moving forward if we're constantly focused on making everything fair for everyone.

What the flywheel actually is: an opportunity for people invested in a product early to make money over the long term, because the flywheel ensures that everyone coming in afterward is either burning supply — which lowers supply — or buying artworks, which increases the value of the artworks, which in turn increases the value of the tokens to mint. That's a two-way street. The third piece is the brand flywheel — if they release a second project, it's still on the same coin, still burning tokens. So over a longer timeframe, you can also speculate on the flywheel itself.

But the flywheel isn't the idea that once you buy a token, it automatically makes you money as people trade it. That's not real. People present it that way sometimes, but what actually happens is you end up with a wallet full of coins, and maybe 1% of them hit some high and catch the flywheel money, while most don't. That's also a reality. So when you hear people say "flywheel," think of it as: we intend for the platform to grow, and we intend for that growth to flow back into the community — not into the standard capitalist model of shareholders, VCs, etc. Some of that flywheel still goes to the platform, of course — people have to eat, salaries have to be paid. So you're still paying a kind of tax even on the flywheel input. It's PvP minus the platform's cut.

Keeping it real: people talk about this stuff, especially in crypto podcasts, as if it's some positive-sum game, even when it's really just a thousand people trading among each other. It's not. So yes, use the word "flywheel" — it's fun, it's memey, it's cool. But understand that it is a meme, and real growth matters more than the flywheel mechanism itself. That said, I think they've built a great flywheel system where the money comes back to the center.

Will: It seems that way so far. We're still in this period where it's two, sometimes three, sometimes just one release a week, and they haven't fully opened the platform. I think our view of it right now is a little warped because the releases are so metered out. For example, right after we finish recording, there's a release today — Beezora is dropping something, the first release in three or four days. So it's going to get a lot of attention. But once the platform opens up and we're getting ten coin drops a day, maybe more depending on how many artists are ready on the sidelines, I think you're right — some people are going to really struggle to graduate out of the bonding curve. They might have two, three, four projects ready to go and still not get that accumulated effect on their coin, just like on any open platform, not all art catches people's attention and mints out. It's a little tricky right now because of how they've rolled out these releases — it feels like every coin can find some base level of success. But I think that's just the nature of this slow drip.

Pronoia: Yeah, if you look at Virtuals, for example, they have a similar bonding curve, also on Base. Most of the projects that go into Genesis — that's the point system they have for early backers — don't make it out of the bonding curve. Most don't. Most try three or four times. I don't think there's an early graduate option, and some go to an instant-publishing version where you skip the bonding curve entirely and just throw it on the market.

I'm curious what happens when fx(hash) opens things up. Because the approach is more focused on art — an art coin being specific to a person and a project, not just a post — I think artists will be warier about launching. I'd guess the artists who already launched had reached out to fx(hash) directly to figure out how it works; that's what we're seeing in these early releases.

What I'm really curious about is whether fx(hash) can attract enough attention in the coming months to get bigger artists interested in the tokens. I think the Ciphrd token is important here — it's the highest-value token, but it also has someone behind it who's committed to the platform and to his own craft. My assumption is Ciphrd will try out these new features and keep releasing work, showing other artists how to make an art coin successful. Once we see some of that success, I hope it pulls in some of the larger artists.

I'm also excited about AI artists coming in — I think AI long-form is a seriously underappreciated format. Emprops, for example, is underappreciated by a mile; not many people are minting there. There was another platform, K11 I think it was called. I think opening things up to that format is really interesting. Stills are another interesting idea too — if you can get someone like Grant Yoon, who already loves the generative art ecosystem and wants to try generative projects, still projects, and one-of-ones, that's a win. There are a lot of artists who are fans of fx(hash) and want to see it succeed, but they're wary after seeing some of these tokens underperform — especially compared to seeing a creator coin on Zora hit $2 million in no time.

So I'm hoping they bring in a lot of new artists, and my advice would be: broaden as fast as you can, push for more releases. I'd rather see a lot of new art coins launched than see the team focus on making everything "fair" and trying to appease everyone who's angry.

Will: I'll caveat this next question with the truth that we were both probably top-100-ish users of fx(hash) — I know you were, and I was right on the cusp. We both got pretty good airdrops. That probably biases how we feel about the platform, and about our investment. But I know you've been watching this whole thing unfold closely, you trade, you've participated in Virtuals, and as a young guy in crypto you know a lot about this stuff. What's your strategy been for trading $fxh since the release? Do you have a methodology, some kind of price prediction for where the market cap could go?

Pronoia: I'm a vibe-based trader, mostly. I've been in crypto since around 2015 or 2016 — I was about 16 at the time — so I got familiar with charts and resistance levels pretty early. But I've always traded sentiment and vibes above resistance levels and structures and time frames. Those are my three things: vibes, sentiment in the community, and time frame.

So when I'm looking at a coin, I'm thinking: how much vibe-based clout does this artist have? Do people love the artwork, are people talking about it? Then there's the sentiment around the platform in general and how the token market is moving, which influences how the launch goes. Ty Vek is a great example — the art is excellent. I was looking at the site a few days before, basically vibe-checking it: if you're doing this financially, you look at the outputs and think, okay, people are going to want to mint this, people are going to go deep, which means they'll use more tokens to mint and pay into a large portion of the supply.

So I bought in right after the bonding curve — I didn't want to mess with the snipers — and I still got quite a lot of tokens. I sold throughout the period when people were minting and going deep into the collection, and retained 20% of what I bought. That's how I approach these coins. The timeframe I choose depends on how fast things are moving and how high the volume is. If volume goes to zero, which has happened with a lot of these tokens, I'm not afraid to sell and cash in that liquidity.

The one where I have a different timeframe approach is the Ciphrd coin, which I'll keep buying whether it goes down or up — it doesn't matter to me. I see that as a long-term investment in the platform, same as holding $fxh in general. My overall strategy: take out about 20% to cash after each coin drop, and put 80% back into $fxh. At this point I've roughly 2x'd, almost 3x'd my airdrop.

Will: Hell yeah, dude. That's pretty good — that probably puts you at least in the top 10% for people who aren't botting and sniping.

Pronoia: Pierrot's probably doing a lot better, but yeah, I don't have a script.

Will: Do you think about fx(hash)'s market cap and the overarching platform — like the Virtuals-style token — in any particular way? We're at the bottom of the second major move up right now, and it seems to be driven a lot by outsiders coming in, getting excited from posts, the price goes up, and then either people take profits and bring it back down, or people like us with big airdrops decide to sell for whatever reason — there are plenty of reasons someone might sell that have nothing to do with their faith in the platform.

So it feels rather obvious to me that when you look at the success of Zora and of Virtuals — granted, art is a smaller market, but it's also fundamentally cooler, and it's a space that's already drawn a lot of attention — with the market cap back down around $6 million now, it feels almost inevitable we keep going higher over the next year. Do you agree there's a path there?

Pronoia: I'm avoiding the word "inevitable," or anything close to "we're going to make money on this token." When I get an airdrop, that's non-risk-averse money — money I'll use in the most risk-seeking way possible to try to grow, since to me it's play money at that point, especially once I've already taken some cash out.

From a risk-seeking perspective, yes, at $6 million I think it's a good shot. But you don't know — let's say the Base hype dies down, Zora comes back from a half-billion-dollar valuation to something like $100 million or $50 million and settles there, mints dry up, fx(hash) gets dragged down with it even lower than the mint price, things don't mint out, and the whole thing declines. I'm just painting different scenarios — I'm not saying any one is more likely.

I'm willing to take the chance, but I'm not telling anyone to buy more tokens. The bullish case is appealing to me. Would I hold this much of the asset if it weren't from an airdrop? No — it's still a very risky asset at a low price with relatively low volume, which can move up and down fast. If you're trying to trade this over just two or three months, be careful. So yes, I lean toward my bull case, but I stay very mindful of risk.

Will: I've made my views pretty public — I think it makes a lot of sense that even if temporary, we'll see at least one moment where the price really spikes, maybe to something like a $50 million market cap. I don't know if that's sustainable, because there's so much hard-to-predict risk — a vulnerability in the contract could get discovered that an audit missed, and that could blow up the whole platform. Things like that you just can't predict.

Pronoia: Technical risk and security risk are always part of the assessment, but I'd fold that into the "timeframe" bucket, because eventually something will go wrong somewhere — that's just how it works over time. So you always take profit, you always scale out when something's happening, especially in a high-risk asset. That's rule one, and I see a lot of people in crypto skip it and get hurt.

On the vibe and sentiment side, I fully agree with your assessment — there will be a time when the vibe is higher than it is right now, and the sentiment around Base and liquidity in the broader ecosystem will probably be higher at some point too. But it might also be much lower at some point. I can't predict which comes first — that's genuinely hard. I'm willing to see it go down to like $2 million, but I think a lot of people won't have the hands for that.

Will: Right. So it sounds like, to summarize: you're happy to hold $fxh because you got such a generous airdrop, and you're trading art coins as a way to compound back into $fxh while also pulling some cash out of the system.

Pronoia: Yeah, that's making use of the flywheel we talked about. The money going into art coins comes back to $fxh, because they're all paired against $fxh — from the bonding curve up through the highest point of demand right after the drop, it's essentially $fxh streaming into the token's liquidity. So there's always liquidity to exit into if the coin graduates and gets some volume early on.

People should be mindful of that — there are always people ready to grab that liquidity when it happens. So maybe wait a while, spend a few days looking at the artwork, or wait until it's been explored to a deeper depth, like with Ty Vek right now, before investing. Leave the liquidity-grabbing trading to people without much emotional sensitivity to it. That's my advice.

Will: You mentioned you really like the Ty Vek project, from the art standpoint and the vibe standpoint. How do you feel about OpenForm in general as a new way to create and mint generative art? Any other projects you've really enjoyed and collected? Are you actually using your art tokens to collect right now, or is that something you're waiting on?

Pronoia: I've minted the Ty Vek project, the Galoh project, quite a few of the Ciphrd project, a few Slips as well, and of course Wanderer on my secondary account. The minting equation is very hard for me to calculate from a financial perspective because the prices are relative to each other and always going up and down. So I'm not approaching it that way. What I like right now is that it's basically airdrop money — I can spend it on art, enjoy the art, and still feel financially fine about it without feeling like I'm overspending.

I wish I could just pay the artists straight away sometimes instead of them having to sit on their coin, but long-term, I think that's a very interesting concept. Open forms as a conceptual thing is a great introduction — a good way to showcase that there can be a synergetic nature between generative art and coins. But I think the more brand-friendly, broadly appealing thing will be the ability to make all types of artworks, with all types of tools at your disposal, a market integrated into the platform, a visualization of all the artworks together — that full artist experience that started from generative but is much broader than that. That's what I'm looking forward to. OpenForms is a great start, and I think the other forms will be easier to integrate from here. I hope the timeline isn't a year out. If I were talking to the team, I'd say: right now is the time to spend some extra money, bring on extra devs with what you've made this past month or two. Just go at it.

Will: I know it's on their roadmap. I don't know enough about the technical side, but I know they're working on a new system for the pools — Doppler, right? I think that's what they're waiting on before opening it up to artists more broadly. And opening up the platform to artists again would probably also mean bringing back what we'd call traditional long form. There might be some reason to hold off on one-of-ones for a while, though — launching a coin off a one-of-one would probably have to be off a set, like "I'm bringing 50 curated pieces." Otherwise I don't know how you'd get enough action and interest in an art coin.

Pronoia: I think you'd attach it to an open form or a long form. The best version I can imagine: Zancan releases Garden, then at some point releases Garden Zero as a 1 of 1, and then maybe later releases another version of Grass.js tied to the original collection, letting people who bought the coin from the first collection further invest in the narrative — and also auction it. Auctioning is a very special mechanic. We saw it with Dark Farms — auctioning the token by the artist is very effective, because collectors fight amongst each other. It feels like the value keeps increasing because the token gets burned, but you're also outbidding each other and getting an artwork back for it. I think that's very effective, and they'll probably do something similar.

Beyond that, I'd want as many options as possible. Someone like Zancan or William Mapan or Iskra probably wouldn't want to just do one open form and then another open form — they'd want to try a few different things with an art coin. Getting those options ready would be good. I'd also recommend letting people launch a coin with the prospect of art releasing at a later date. That's an interesting mechanic — you release a brand or artist coin as a kind of fundraiser, and then at some point release a special project, or multiple projects, over the long term. Maybe a gallery could do something like that, or an artist with a longer-term plan. Tying the release to a single project gives people a very deep connection to that project and the coin, but I don't think that's always the best route for someone who wants more of a personal brand coin.

Will: I can see it being a challenge for a lot of the bigger artists you mentioned, especially since open form is new — and kudos to all the artists who've participated in this launch, taking a risk on this new form. It's not as simple as being a good generative artist with great code and great taste. There are extra degrees of planning involved in doing a successful open form release. Even us as collectors and spectators are still kind of thinking out loud about what makes a good open form project. We haven't really figured out how to evaluate it properly.

Pronoia: If you look at long form — for someone like Snowfro or Zancan, it's about limiting an existing algorithm you already have to an infinite scale. You've already built that refreshing mechanic. Grass.js was probably developed for those one-of-ones and curated pieces beforehand, since he'd already released those. Snowfro had the squiggle algorithm just for fun. Open forms is a very different concept — you have to work through the idea of evolving, add extra mechanics. It's not just a limiting factor, it's an extra requirement. So it's a more difficult art form, which is also why I'm excited to see long forms released with coins — I want to see the next big long form come out of fx(hash). Art Blocks is closing shop, right?

Will: We don't know. But it seems like—

Pronoia: They're winding down, moving into art and other things. They're becoming a spiritual being — the ghost in the sky for the space, that's kind of how they're approaching it — and they want to keep the value in those 500 collections. I understand it, but I still want new and exciting long-form collections. I want to invest in a generative artist with a career that spans longer than just a few years. I'm hoping they can bring that energy into the long forms too. Mapan, please.

Will: I use William as a great example of someone I wish the art coin stuff had been ready and proven for with his sketchbook series, because I didn't love how constrained those projects were. My take is they were limited to 64 pieces primarily to drive price, not for the sake of the algorithm. Ideally an artist should be expressing the algorithm to its fullest extent, not doing what's best for price — and art coins let you have both in theory. You could have supported 800 Sketchbook B mints, because every single one now puts more value back into the art coin itself.

I preferred Sketchbook B even more than Sketchbook A, but it ended up going for about an eighth of the price, just because of market conditions at the time. I would have loved to see that project done with an art coin execution and a bigger series. Hopefully they'll pay attention.

Pronoia: For an artist like him specifically, just releasing the art coin is a big enough event by itself — it deserves that attention without mixing it up with expectations about what the next drop looks like. People love Mapan; they love the history of the work he's made and see him as a valuable cultural institution in this space. If you tie the coin right away to a singular project, and people don't engage with the project as much, it tears down the initial hype and value of that token.

So I do wish they allowed a system where you first release your token, create a big event around it, treat it as a fundraiser for your future career, and then start putting out artworks throughout the year.

Will: I see it the other way, though I guess it depends on the artist. Having talked to a lot of artists, I don't think they like the pressure of expectation and demand from collectors. If you release an art coin without a project, with the expectation that its future value comes from released works, and you're someone like William who's used to spending a year or more between releases — sure, the initial release of a Mapan coin might be a big story and generate a lot of temporary volume. But days or weeks down the road, when no project materializes, what's going to drive the volume of that token leading up to a release? I don't think he checks Twitter anymore, but people are going to be pissed if things don't come out.

Pronoia: I have two thoughts on that. First, NFTs already do this. If you're buying an early artist's work — Mapan's a bit different, but generally — there's already an expectation that the artist will stay active, keep working on their career, even be online sometimes. It's gotten to the point where someone like Tyler Hobbs has to hire a full gallery management Twitter system to put out his posts, just so he can relax with his family and his collectors aren't chasing him about the price of Fidenza. That's how heavy the pressure already is. I don't think a coin adds much extra to that.

Artists should be upfront: if you trust me as an artist, as someone creating, I'm not promising any specific project. If you like me, this is my brand coin, my artist coin — the works I release on fx(hash) and in the ecosystem will use the token in some way, but I'm not guaranteeing any specific artwork ties to it. That's important for artists to state clearly, so collectors are aware of expectations upfront. And don't give in to anyone pushing those expectations — just block them if someone says, "Hey, are you going to release something for the price?" Are you holding a Mapan token because you think Mapan is a great artist doing great cultural things? Sure. But can you expect specific output from him? You're not a customer who gets a refund — you're investing in a speculative asset.

Will: At the very least, it goes through the liquidity pool. If you get tired of holding, you can sell — unlike a lot of NFTs, where selling isn't always readily apparent.

Pronoia: Which is even more painful for a lot of people, and it drives them to even more insane ways of pressuring artists. A collector will say, "This collection I hold — you're not promoting it enough. This collection I love isn't being appreciated enough." You can have that opinion, but the way some people state it to the artist, almost the madness of it — I don't like that at all. Just bull-post. You can bull-post. That's all.

Will: If you were an artist thinking about releasing an art coin — and let's assume the paradigm now is that you have to release it with a project, not launch a token without one — how would you advise someone to think about pricing in their native token, ETH fees for the various modes of collecting and evolving, and things like cadence of release, buying or selling more of your own coin, the need to pay bills? It's a big question. I think it's still too early to know a lot of this for certain, but are you intuiting anything around how artists should be thinking about ownership of these coins? Not ownership literally, but owning the process.

Pronoia: I'd approach it from a business timeframe perspective — be very clear-cut about it. I think artists are still figuring this out on the platform, but if I were an artist, I'd set out a TWAP over time with my own coin: set amounts unlocking and selling publicly over a set period, and be transparent about the sales you're making. Keep them small, keep them spread out, and don't dump everything into the liquidity pool at once. Market management isn't something artists should need a degree in — just don't shoot everything at one time. Pick a cadence, weekly or monthly, whatever covers salary or expenses, and stick to it. If you don't need to sell at all and you're a larger artist who wants to build over a long time, you can do that too and just keep accumulating capital. Some artists might even consider not really owning their own token at all — being a shepherd of it rather than financially entangled to the point where they have to sell. That's an interesting approach, though a much harder one.

Will: A lot of artists right now are buying at the earliest point in the bonding curve — getting 20, maybe 30%, or in the case of Ty Vek, who bought 50% of the initial token supply. There's this temporary phase where the bots and snipers come in, the price whips up and down, then they exit and it settles to a natural place where collectors are actually interacting with it. At that point you're looking at $10-20K worth of market cap. Selling even 1-2% isn't going to pay a lot of bills for the average person there.

Pronoia: No.

Will: It feels like the real strategy around selling the coin comes much later, once you've released more projects.

Pronoia: A flywheel needs to start up — it needs to gain traction, start doing its thing. That's not going to happen in the first week after a project unless you've already amassed so much cultural capital that the release itself moves the token. If you make an amazing project with real depth, the token mechanics will help drive the value up — we saw that with Ty Vek. But over time you still need to do things to keep the buying pressure up. There will be high times and low times. As an artist, I'd sell more in the high times, obviously when you're releasing projects, but don't forget to take out some liquidity during the low periods too.

Will: There's an interesting opportunity for messaging around this. Say you're on project three — every project, if you're a reasonably successful artist, is naturally additive to the flywheel. More pressure on the token, more tokens locked up. So project two should be priced in fewer art tokens than project one, and project three priced in fewer still, because the art token should be worth more than when you first released. Maybe it's 5x more expensive than at genesis, and you say, "I'm going to sell 5% of the supply because people still want to go back and collect project one" — and now that's really expensive just because of that dynamic.

Pronoia: Right, lowering the price through the selling.

Will: It's going to come with blowback, because there will be people holding the coin long term, and you'll get complainers. But like you said, that's just how it goes.

Pronoia: The only thing you need to worry about — if you care about sentiment and your coin doing well, fine, care about that, and that's why you might sell slowly. But the personal expectations of people, what they individually want you to do — don't bother yourself with that. Just think about what's good for the coin, what's good for you, and how to balance those two things. That's all you need to worry about. If selling quickly causes other people to sell too, that's not because they're mad — that's just how markets work. Markets will respond if you dump a lot of liquidity at once. That's a reality. But artists, please don't listen to the whiners.

Will: A lot of that price action just isn't visible with NFTs — we live it, but we don't see it, because things just don't sell. Here it's more visceral: you watch the line go up and down, the -15% in red or the +10% in green. With NFTs, being non-fungible, everything is constantly being accounted for, or manipulated, in a much less visible way.

Pronoia: Right — with NFTs you sometimes don't even notice how much money you're losing.

Will: You look at the floor price and think, "oh, that's not so bad." Then you realize it's been sitting there for a year. And when you look at accepted offers, they're like 90% under that floor price. It's very hard to get a proper sense of what a piece in your collection is actually worth, especially if it's not a William Mapan or a Zancan or someone with more readily available interest.

Pronoia: I always assume the price is whatever the current offer is, not the floor price.

Will: This has been awesome, I love thinking about this stuff. It might sound cringe to artists, but it's genuinely exciting to think this actively about art markets again — to have a reason to be on the platform, in Discord, collecting, posting the new art I'm picking up on fx(hash). It's been a great experience for me. Hopefully you've been enjoying it too.

Pronoia: I've been enjoying it, and I've been enjoying yapping as well. Do English people say "on the nose"?

Will: Yeah.

Pronoia: Okay — well, it's up the nose. It's very clear what you're doing: you're yapping, genuinely about things you care about, but doing it quite forcefully. Some people find that annoying and want it gone, but I think it's fun, and a good way to increase a project's relevance. People can sort out the genuine yappers from the less genuine ones themselves.

Will: I've given myself a rule of trying to write one good tweet a day that expresses earnest sentiment and isn't just empty — something with actual content, though it's hard. I want to stay on the leaderboard at least one more month before the platform gets too big or too competitive for me.

Pronoia: I've been in the top 10, top 15 of the yap leaderboard, and honestly I hope I get bid out. I went through a whole stretch, especially after I left Trillitech, where I wasn't tweeting or interacting much, so my engagement is pretty wrecked, but I'm still doing well. I'm hoping bigger players come in and out-yap me — I'll take the hit and probably cash out on the other side.

Will: That would be the benefit, I guess. Before we go — let's go back to the beginning. How do you feel, logistically, morally, technically, about the plan to bring Tezos projects over to Base, or to ETH L1? I think it's actually ETH L1 they're planning.

Pronoia: I gave some fair criticism on Twitter. What I'll say is: I wouldn't want this to happen if they'd chosen to remain with Tezos. My preference would've been for them to keep spending 30 to 40% of their cultural, social, and technical capital on Tezos. They didn't decide to do that — they've decoupled, they've broken off, and at that point the only thing I can do is accept it.

Will: Mm-hmm.

Pronoia: When I was at Trilli, I was very much hoping it wouldn't happen and trying my best to prevent it. It happened anyway. Whether I agree or disagree with the decision, I have to deal with the situation now — and with the decoupling that's already occurred. I think having markets close together and working synchronously matters, especially with a coin involved. Right now, the fx(hash) market on Tezos secondary is in no way connected to the platform's main value drivers. I can't make $500 on fx(hash) and think, "I'll spend that on the platform's cultural capital," which I think is essential. So — push that future closer, now that they've already decided to close shop there. Get the connections people want: on OpenSea, on the same coin-trading platform, within the same wallet infrastructure, purchasable via direct transfer or direct swap with ETH. That's going to increase liquidity for the collections and create attention for the platform. Those beautiful genesis collections have a place in people's hearts, and they should come more to the front. I think fx(hash) is underestimating the power of those collections, and I wish they'd acknowledge more that those collections are essential to their cultural capital as a platform. So I don't agree with the move from Tezos, but now that it's happening, let's get it over with, get the market integrated, and let people spend their profits on that classic art. That's a real flywheel, in my opinion.

Will: That's a lot of steps to make happen currently.

Pronoia: You see it — nobody's doing it. There are traders making $5,000, $6,000 on these trading coins. I think the community would be a lot less angry at those traders if they turned around and spent even $1-2K of it on those classic collections. That would change the whole mood.

Will: What you're saying makes sense, but the biggest inhibitor I see is that the Coinbase wallet doesn't support Tezos right now. It would take them as an entity choosing to do the work to bring Tezos into that.

Pronoia: No — I think the bridging needs to happen at this point, because wallets are just a layer on top. Temple Wallet supports both ETH and Tezos, but that doesn't mean ETH people start using Tezos through Temple Wallet. Same thing — I don't think people in the Base app are suddenly going to start buying Tezos NFTs, and I don't think Base is going to integrate Tezos. So get it closer on a technical level — get it at least to ETH L1, and keep it there. Bridge fx(hash) automatically, one click on OpenSea — that's already possible with other tokens, buying from Base directly to ETH L1 in your wallet. That integration is so smooth, nothing beats it in terms of market synchronicity. Even if MetaMask added full Tezos support today, it'd be a great day for Tezos, but I don't think it creates value right away.

Will: I only see it creating value in the simplicity of swapping. In the scenario you described — I make $6,000 profit on fx(hash) and want to buy an RGB — if I could one-click swap that fx(hash) profit to Tezos through the wallet, with only one wallet connected to fx(hash), that's a lot less friction. But what you're describing is different: if those classic pieces were already on ETH, already bridged over, it becomes a lot easier for traders to collect them.

Pronoia: In an ideal world, they would have still supported Tezos contracts, and you could directly transfer to Tezos. But that means setting up contracts for locking tokens on Tezos, making swaps cheap enough for that to actually make sense between the two networks, keeping all the contracts alive, keeping the full secondary marketplace working, and adding new features that are coming onto Base as well — because they need to be synchronous if you want that to work. It's difficult keeping those two layers synchronous.

So get them to... I never thought I'd say this, but in the scenario you just described, someone makes some money, buys some Ringers because they love the platform and care about the cultural capital, and doesn't know what to do with the fx(hash) tokens they earned. It's also a way for those collections to get more attention and for people to recognize fx(hash) more. I think they really missed out on not having some form of that from day one. Let's see how fast they can get it done.

Will: I'm curious what their logistical solution will be, and to what level they're going to involve artists. I think we can name one artist right now — Zancan — who probably would explicitly not want his pieces moved over. But if this is a tool put in the hands of collectors to just have autonomy and move their pieces onto a different blockchain...

Pronoia: I don't know how that's going to work. If you want to transfer a token, you can transfer it. The artist has allowed you to buy the artwork — the artist might not like what you do with it, but if I throw the artwork out the window or step on it with my boot, it's not illegal. It might be immoral, and the artist might not like it, but this space is most of the time not about being moral with the way you treat artists' assets. That's not the reality, especially now that you're dealing with all these degen traders. They're really not caring much about dilution or bringing things back into the market at the wrong time.

Will: I wouldn't be surprised if some degen traders who've done a lot of art collecting see this as a potential arbitrage opportunity — throwing out low bids on Ringers, Zancan pieces, Contrapuntos, Dragons, a lot of the revered historical fx(hash) collections — just to be the vector for bringing them over and be first to have them on ETH L1 OpenSea. Like, "I bought this for $300 in Tezos and I'm trying to get $1,000 for it on ETH."

Pronoia: It's an arbitrage opportunity, and it's also an opportunity to spend within the ecosystem without removing your tokens right away or selling them back into the liquidity pool. Once you've made money on an artwork, you probably still have some tokens left of that artist you can mint with at some point. Then you have your $fxh stack, which can only really buy those artworks — but not all the artworks that came before. Team, come on — I know you have it on the right side of the roadmap right now, not thinking about it too much, but I would...

Maybe even just hire someone to get that done, even if it costs a little more. I think the return rate will be good, and you'll be getting a lot more money held within the ecosystem instead of flowing out into liquidity pools with people just cashing out dollars.

Will: Interesting. All right, I feel like that's a great place to end it. Give Pronoia a follow, @Pronoia10 on Twitter. Anything else you want to plug before we wrap up? Any final words, praise for Tyler, the Creator?

Pronoia: Tyler, the Creator is really good — I went to the Chromakopia tour with my little sister, that was really sick. I like the new album. You don't like the new album. We can respectfully disagree on that.

Will: I've got to listen again.

Pronoia: Yeah, get some good speakers on, get a vibe going. If anyone — I'm doing ten hours of consultancy a week, so if any artists need help designing their tokenomics, thinking about how to work with the community, or curating artworks, I'm always there, and I do good rates. Same goes for crypto companies. Other than that, I'm just working my government job, so nothing else to plug.

Will: This was great — awesome chatting with you again. Thanks so much for coming on. Hope everyone listening enjoyed it.

Pronoia: Hope you enjoyed the yapping. Thank you, man.

Will: Thank you. All right, everyone, we'll be back again soon-ish with another episode. Thanks for listening.

Pronoia: Peace.

Will: Thanks to Lars. Bye, man. See ya.

Pronoia: Always. We're waiting to be fried.