Will: Alright, hello and welcome everyone to another episode of Waiting to Be Signed. Maybe the most special episode yet. We're joined today by Ciphrd, founder and creator of fx(hash), and Adam Berninger, founder and creator of Tender. Trinity, co-founder of the award-winning Waiting to Be Signed podcast, is here too. We're here to talk about the release of fx(hash) 2.0. Super excited. How's it going, everybody?

Trinity: Are we just going to forget that Will forgot to include himself?

Will: I'm a given. I'm a constant. Everyone loves this bassy voice — they hear it, they know I'm here. It's perfect. Adam, you're a little sick.

Adam Berninger: I'm a little sick. I was waiting for Trinity to do your walk-in intro.

Trinity: No, Will's got the walk-in. I'm the lazy person here. I just show up. It's a great way to be.

Adam Berninger: And you provide the color. Got it.

Trinity: Exactly. Somebody's got to do it. That's also why we have you guys here — to provide the color on top of the colors. Would that be the sound? The flavor? We're going deep here.

Will: We've got some great color coming from Ciphrd's background — it's 2:00 AM in France, and he's joining us, accommodating our East Coast schedule. The mood lighting's popping off. There's so much to talk about, guys, but before we jump in — everyone who listens to the show probably already knows Adam and Tender, and knows Ciphrd and fx(hash) 2.0. So Ciphrd, before we get into the questions, can you run us down? What's coming in 2.0, and what's so exciting about this update?

Ciphrd: Hey everyone, pleasure to be here as usual. The journey to 2.0 started with the release calendar. We'd been thinking a lot about how to help artists promote their work beforehand, because we'd observed that projects would suddenly pop up on the platform without giving people enough time to appreciate what's coming and prepare. So the first step was providing that calendar roughly a month ahead of launch, which we did very recently. For the launch itself, we're integrating Ethereum, with almost feature parity to what we have on Tezos — we recently shared a table showing what will and won't be there. The main core features will all be there; some small details won't, just because of differences between the blockchains. But we did a lot of engineering work to cover most of the features. We're also releasing open editions at launch — the platform's first project will be an open edition, and open editions will be fully available to any artist after launch, on both Tezos and Ethereum. That's about it for launch itself.

Right after, we have a few features planned, one of them being an artist studio. What we introduced with the calendar was a first step toward having off-chain data to better prepare a project's release — things like work in progress, extensive descriptions, contextual data that might not be relevant on-chain but is still interesting. That'll come shortly after launch too. That's the rough overview — I'm probably forgetting something massive, since my brain's deep in implementation, but that should be about it.

Will: On our end, what we're aware of: Ethereum support, on-chain for both ETH and Tezos, platform UI updates — some of which we're already seeing, including the calendar — and the new marketplace contract, which brings new auction types, including refunding auctions, which have been long awaited. Something else that popped up as we looked at the calendar: there's a default for USD pricing if you don't specify which chain a piece is on, and one of your team members mentioned there might be USD pricing as an actual option down the road. How would that work — stablecoins, or a conversion at time of sale depending on the cryptocurrency used? And while we're on payments — will there ever be wrapped ETH or wrapped Tez for bidding and making offers? That's a pretty common feature on Ethereum, and we've seen it on OBJKT for Tezos. Is that on the roadmap too?

Ciphrd: The Ethereum implementation will use Reservoir, which is the Ethereum standard for everything marketplace-related. Under the hood, they use Seaport, the open implementation of the OpenSea protocol, which covers all the features you'd want. That doesn't inherently give you USD-to-crypto conversion at time of payment, but it does allow stablecoins to be used — some are stable enough to serve as an abstraction for listing and bidding in USD terms. If we implement it, it'll be that way, but unfortunately it won't be ready for launch. It was planned, but we pushed it back — there's a lot of complexity, especially around USDT abstraction. Down the line, we want a platform where you can see the crypto price but reason primarily in fiat: see fiat prices, make listings in fiat, all of it. Especially once we're integrating Ethereum and Tezos, which have such different values, it'll be hard for people to do that mental conversion. Tezos prices are quite low, so we expect Ethereum users to see a Tezos price and not realize how cheap and accessible it actually is — USD terms would help a lot there. But at launch, it'll be fully crypto. We'll integrate more of this in the coming weeks and months — there's also a big update planned for market stats. Lots of considerations, which is why we pushed it back.

On the rebate auction — yes, we're very excited about that too. It's been a long time coming. We're still figuring out whether it launches with Ethereum, since it's implemented there but not yet on Tezos. Either way, it'll be there at launch or in the weeks after, since the implementation itself is done.

Trinity: Just to clarify on the rebate auction — is it leveraging the same Dutch auction steps we see today, or something more linear or time-based, like what you'd see on Tonic or Art Blocks?

Ciphrd: For me, "rebate" just refers to getting a refund based on the final price — the auction model itself doesn't matter. It can be step-based or linear. At launch we'll implement steps, since with steps you can design both a linear pattern and an exponential one. We'll add others later, but every Dutch auction mechanism will have rebates as an option. It's not tied to the DA format itself.

Trinity: One of the big things we've been looking forward to with fx(hash) 2.0 is more art. There's been a strongly held position that people are waiting for 2.0 before releasing — we've seen fewer projects lately, a bit more recently with the release of on-chain on Tezos, but we're expecting a huge week once it finally launches. Adam, I know you've been working with a ton of artists in preparation. Who are you working with, and what's that journey been like? How are you using some of these brand-new features?

Adam Berninger: We're excited to use as many of the new features as we can. It's amazing that they're launching with the feature parity Ciphrd talked about, where everything that's worked for Tezos will also work for Ethereum. Launching with that robust a platform gives us a ton of options, and one thing we're trying to do is cross those features across our different releases, so we can express and triangulate just how broad that feature set is on launch day.

I'm always working on fun projects with artists many of your listeners know or will soon know, and the 2.0 launch has been an exciting moment — a lot of us have decided to double down and make launch day a special event. I can share a few of the artists coming up. Some I've been working with for nearly a year, others for just the last month or so, so there's a great range of history, and hopefully by now a real variety across Tender releases — we've done over 20 on fx(hash) alone, and this is no different. We're looking for breadth, releases that each express something different about generative art.

We've got a great one coming up with Piter Pasma. There's a release with Ippsketch that I've been working on for quite a while — it's evolved beautifully, I'm really excited about that one. Studio Yorktown is going deeper into his architectural roots with a new project. And we're bringing something new from Eko33, which has been an amazing experience — seeing what they've got under the hood and all the works in progress. So that's an exciting day, and that's just launch day itself — we're working with fx(hash) to bring at least those five projects, likely a few more. Can't share names yet, but if they're finished in the next two weeks, we may see some bonus projects on opening day too.

The whole week is looking exciting — not just Tender's releases on December 1st, but other curation partners bringing projects each successive day, plus the open release strategy from many artists. Some of that's already peppered into the calendar Ciphrd mentioned, and I expect a lot more to pop up soon. It's becoming one of those things to check daily — once it happens, I think we'll all be glued to that calendar.

Will: Huge fan of the calendar — great for our looking-ahead section, where we try to figure out what's coming, because not everyone wants to publish their project and have it just sit there for two weeks.

Trinity: And Twitter is dead.

Will: And Twitter is dead — Elon Musk killed it. So that calendar's amazing. But Adam, quick follow-up: with those five artists, now that Ethereum's available alongside Tezos, on-chain and off-chain options — as you talk with these folks, some of whom you've been working with for almost a year — are you finding people biasing toward on-chain now that it's such an appealing option, or do they want to experiment with Ethereum, maybe having never dropped there before? What are you hearing from artists as you work through this?

Adam Berninger: I think so much of the 2.0 buzz is about Ethereum. There's no denying it. A lot of people are really excited to do an fx(hash) drop, which has all the great community love and features that come with it, plus the flexibility of releasing easily, and to be able to do that with Ethereum and reach hopefully new collectors, and perhaps different price levels. That's really appealing to most of the artists I'm talking to, not just the ones I'm working with. So I think we'll see a lot of the releases in that opening week focused on Ethereum. It'll be interesting to see how that plays out over time -- whether that priority stays true or whether artists come back to Tezos. I'm curious whether we'll see more up-and-coming artists who haven't released much yet start on Tezos and then move to Ethereum once they've established a community. That's actually one of the strategies I'm discussing with a few of the artists I work with, and I think it could be quite effective. The funny thing is, with fx(hash) never having had Ethereum and everybody now wanting to do that, releasing on Tezos is actually going to stand out during opening week. So it'll be a really interesting week to see who decides to do what. Frankly, we're still making those decisions on our own releases over the coming weeks.

Trinity: I had this question tagged for the market section, but it makes sense to bring it up now that we're talking about Ethereum, Tezos, and USD denominations. In your opinions, is there a sense that bringing USD valuation to fx(hash) will bring more parity to art pricing across each chain? Obviously this is more relevant for the future state rather than the 2.0 state itself, which we want to stay excited about, but I'm curious about any implications chain versus chain.

Ciphrd: I think getting onto Ethereum will probably onboard more users, some of whom may want to get some of the previous fx(hash) projects, which in turn could increase their value to some extent. But honestly, I'm not expecting a drastic change in Tezos valuations just because we bring Ethereum onto the platform alongside it. The Ethereum network is so much more expensive, and there's so much more money in it, that it'll be hard for Tezos to compare. The projects that came on Tezos right at the beginning and left a real social and cultural impact on the platform -- I'm thinking of Zancan and many other artists who released iconic work there -- if we get more engaged generative art lovers on the platform, it will probably have a knock-on effect on those projects. What I'm hoping is that people used to paying at least $10 for one generative iteration will see that on Tezos they can experiment with a params-driven project for much less, and want to give it a try because it's right there next to what they're already looking at. So hopefully there will be some positive side effects. It's very hard to predict -- we'll probably need six months to a year before drawing any conclusions -- but I think it will have an effect, and I don't see it being a negative one for people.

Will: Anything from you, Adam?

Ciphrd: What do you think?

Adam Berninger: On the USD side, any opportunity to think in those terms benefits art collectors -- understanding the ups and downs of market movements gets easier over time. I know it's a heavy lift and something that will come gradually, but I think it could help regulate secondary markets a bit across both chains. I also think just seeing the artwork side by side can have a positive impact. That's something I've tried to prioritize with TENDER. We launched focused on fx(hash) for lots of good reasons and will always remain focused on curating iconic projects from the platform. But adding other platforms alongside it, I think, takes the conversation out of the chain and even out of the platform, and focuses it on the art. That's what's exciting about what fx(hash) is doing with 2.0 -- taking the conversation out of the chain. That's always been their approach, as I understand it: it's about generative art, art is evolving, and we're here to witness this. You still have collectors saying, "oh, that's Tez art." Elevating the conversation to just be about the art -- there's no downside to this -- is going to be hard to deny once there are Ethereum projects on the same platform. And it's going to highlight some of the pricing effects that are already there but go unnoticed. Look at the prices of some of the iconic projects Ciphrd just mentioned relative to those same artists' projects on other platforms -- sometimes they're higher on Tezos in USD terms. That's not something to ignore. I think that's an effect of the community that rallies around this art, which is integral to fx(hash). I assume they'll support projects the same way when they come to Ethereum through fx(hash). That's going to be really exciting to see.

Ciphrd: I'd like to add something interesting here: we already have pieces on Tezos and fx(hash) with pretty high prices. When we look at Ethereum collections, we see collections of 10,000 pieces at 1 or 2 ETH -- something really outstanding. But in real terms, having a body of 300 generated pieces from a collection with a floor of 1 tez is already outstanding for an artist. That's something I could only dream of a few years ago. So sometimes we forget it's already great to have that. We don't always have to aim for something crazy -- this is already sustainable to some extent.

Adam Berninger: Yeah.

Ciphrd: It's not completely sustainable for every artist -- we're fully aware of that. But for a lot of them, it's a decent way to support themselves financially, whether full-time or part-time.

Will: I love that. It's true -- we see such a diversity of market action on pieces. There are artists who make stuff because they just want to make it, and don't necessarily want or care for their work to go to $1,000 or $10,000. They're making it for themselves, or because they're a graphic designer who thinks it's fun to play with JavaScript on the side and make something cool. If they can make a couple thousand bucks or a couple ten-thousand bucks a year selling stuff because people really like them, that's such an admirable goal for so many artists releasing on these open platforms. We'll come back to the topic of open platforms later, but we need to keep investigating 2.0 a bit more. Ciphrd, aside from ETH, I think the second biggest thing is the on-chain file standard, the unpronounceable ONCHFS, as you've abbreviated it. I have to plug Dan Catt's explainer video, which does an extremely good job of talking about what this means for artists and how they can get around some of the cost issues -- we'll link to that in the podcast notes below. But in your own words, can you tell us how this on-chain standard works, and how it's different from what, say, Art Blocks or other on-chain platforms have implemented in their contracts? What are you doing that lets people upload more cheaply, more efficiently, and get around some of the costs associated with on-chain storage?

Ciphrd: Sure. First, on the naming: recently I've been joking that I'm on a duty to pollute the generative art space with unpronounceable terms for the community. fx(hash) was the first of them, ONCHFS is the other, and hopefully there's much more to come. ONCHFS stands for on-chain file system.

Maybe I can start with the current state of on-chain uploading on Ethereum. Uploading on-chain means storing the text data -- the scripts that allow the work to be reconstructed afterward -- directly on the blockchain. The current solution is actually pretty optimized: usually you'd gzip the content on-chain. Gzip is a compression format that's well supported on the web. People take their scripts, compress them through their build process, and store them on the smart contract, then fetch them when reading the contract.

The solution Art Blocks and many others use is inspired by IPFS, which is an amazing project I've referenced a few times in our documentation because I quite like it. However, one issue with the current standard for files on Ethereum is that storing libraries or projects with multiple files isn't very well supported -- the file system is basically designed for uploading random bytes of data, with some loose file abstraction on top that isn't well specified, for fetching that content. Different applications use different strategies for fetching the bytes stored on-chain.

In our context, we wanted to support more use cases in a permissionless way. For instance, look at what Art Blocks does: they upload something like p5.js on-chain, the bytes are stored, and then in their smart contracts they define that if you select p5.js, it points to that specific spot on the blockchain. What we wanted instead is for artists to work locally on their project with p5.js included in their folder, just like they'd build projects for fx(hash), other platforms, or the web in general -- and have the on-chain file system compress the files and map the existing files in their folder to instances that already exist on-chain. The idea is a sort of decentralized library system, where people can upload a library and then anyone can reference it in their code, with the file system abstraction resolving it automatically.

I'm getting into pretty complex territory, but the gist is: we saw a couple of issues in the Ethereum ecosystem. Size wasn't one of them -- they've reached a pretty optimal state there. For us, the issue was how file abstraction is handled, since the standard doesn't provide a proper file/folder object abstraction -- there's no standard way to define a folder containing multiple files. That's one point.

The second is delivery through the HTTP protocol. We did some optimizations to compress headers, file types, and so on, so files can be opened directly from a browser -- which is really the main use case. There's almost no scenario where you'd open a generative art project running in JavaScript outside a browser. So part of the goal was building in byte-level optimizations so we can serve a project through a standardized HTTP protocol.

I'd invite people to check out the documentation at onchfs.com, or more simply, Dan Catt's video, which does a much better job explaining it in simpler terms. I've lost myself a bit in there, but that's where things stand now.

Trinity: I'm not a technical person -- I think Will might be even less technical than I am, except when it comes to p5.

Will: I'm going to let that slide for the purpose of your question.

Trinity: Thank you. I appreciate that, man. High five. One of the things that was described to me is that part of the optimization here -- even though it stores things in a decentralized way -- still has a kind of Web 2.0 component, a non-on-chain piece involved in delivering it efficiently. I'm curious: is that true? And if so, does it change how we should think about the on-chain side of things?

Ciphrd: That's completely true. So when I introduced the system, just to give you some detail about what's off-chain in it, it's basically the HTTP delivery component. The files themselves are on-chain, and there's a specification for how they're organized — folders, classification, all of that. But to read that, you need some small server connected to a node via the open RPC protocol. Ethereum and Tezos nodes expose an open API that anyone can query. This small snippet can connect to any blockchain node supported by the on-chain file system. So when you say, "I want to find this project with this identifier," it fetches the content from wherever it lives across these nodes, and also prepares it for HTTP delivery — which is the important part.

Why isn't that a big deal? First, this snippet is like 100 lines of code. Anyone can run their own instance of it. Second, there's no such thing as on-chain storage without some Web2 component. Take Art Blocks: if I go to their smart contract on Etherscan and call, I don't remember the exact entry point, but something like "get script," I still need Etherscan, or some interface, some program connected to a node. Sure, you could query the node directly yourself, but then you need a node running on some AWS machine — which is also Web2. So you always need nodes that constitute the blockchain, plus some interface to access those nodes, unless you're using a CLI. And if you want to use a command line interface, you could just run a local version of our HTTP resolver.

The point is, we need one module — not Etherscan, something anyone can run — that also provides an easier specification for this whole file organization. So I don't think it's actually a weak point. And if you look at most platforms today, their metadata contains an HTTP pointer to essentially the same kind of module I'm describing — something that bridges the project ID and the actual code stored on chain. The on-chain file system is trying to solve that by creating a clear specification for this gateway. Right now, Art Blocks has their own gateway, Alba has their own, other platforms have their own — everyone reinvents it. This gives us a standard for fetching files in a standardized way.

Will: Do you imagine other platforms picking up this standard to take advantage of those efficiencies? Like, someone uploads a certain version of p5 with their project, and now it's there, free for everyone else to reference, but still on-chain. Is that the idea — that this spreads and becomes a broader standard? I assume it's open for anyone to hook into and use?

Ciphrd: Yeah, it's fully open source, so anyone can pick it up. Anyone can implement the specification on any blockchain — add a comment on GitHub saying, "it's not on this blockchain yet," and contribute a library for resolving that chain. One important detail: on Ethereum, OnchFS uses a content store, so the way bytes are stored is similar to IPFS in that it's content-addressed — for any piece of content, you get a unique ID identifying it. Under the hood, our file system uses that content store, so we already inherit the optimizations they've built for storing bytes. If one instance of p5 has already been compressed and stored on-chain, we just point to that existing content instead of storing it again. IPFS already solves this to some degree — Alba uses it, Art Blocks uses it, probably every Ethereum platform uses it. We'll be using it too, with some abstraction layered on top for our specific use cases.

Trinity: So if I were to summarize: yes, there may technically be a Web2 point of failure for OnchFS — thank you for clarifying the pronunciation, we are all grateful — but it's not dissimilar to potential points of failure in other standards. And it's a simple standard that isn't dependent on fx(hash)'s success specifically; anyone can generate and apply it, which gives it longevity for as long as someone's interested. Is that a somewhat accurate TL;DR?

Ciphrd: Not quite, actually. The benefit of this kind of file system standard is that instead of an HTTP URL in the metadata, you get an IPFS-like URL. We have a standard defining how assets are referenced — in our case, it's `onchfs://` plus the content ID. The difference is: for platforms storing things over HTTP, if that server fails, the content becomes inaccessible. In our case, we might run one gateway to access the content, but anyone can spin up their own gateway, because everything is referenced on-chain and built so that anyone can plug in. So if anything, it's far more resilient to us failing.

Trinity: Okay, I'll give myself a solid B.

Ciphrd: It's a complex system.

Will: It's complex. Everyone, rewind and listen three times — you'll eventually get it.

Trinity: But ultimately, don't worry.

Will: That all sounds awesome, I'm super excited. So many artists we've talked to over the years have wanted to work on-chain, and now it's available to them in a way that's accessible and not prohibitively expensive, thanks to this new standard. Adam, I want to bring you back in. Obviously there's ETH, on-chain work, these new auction mechanisms — you've been working with artists for almost 18 months doing all these TENDER releases on fx(hash) and other platforms. What's personally most exciting to you, as both a collaborator and an artist in your own right, about what fx(hash) is doing? What gets you hyped to release stuff here?

Adam Berninger: Good question — I think I've already answered the core reason with the Ethereum integration. There's generative art on many chains, but there's so much focus specifically on what's happening on Ethereum and on Tezos. Seeing those united on one minting platform is extremely exciting. Even just showing tokens from both chains on the same site is rare. OpenSea talked about integrating Tezos years ago — never happened. DECA's done it to a degree. We did it on TENDER, uniting Ethereum and Tezos connections so you could see your generative art in one place. You can't overstate how exciting that is for fx(hash), and the long-term impact we probably don't even understand yet.

I think one of the exciting things about most large FX releases is that there's a degree of experimentation involved — we know there's going to be real benefit, and the FX team seems willing to accept that some things will happen outside their control. That's what it means to leverage the power of a community that uses, and will use, these tools. So that's the baseline: the most exciting thing is the unknown.

There's also a really exciting immediate effect that's going to come with the 2.0 launch — I'd liken it to the 1.0 launch. This is a huge moment for a really devoted community already engaged with FX, and a big rallying moment for new collectors. There are probably a lot of artists who've been waiting to release for the 2.0 launch, so we're going to see a big influx of new art, new conversations, new Discord activity, all the social stuff that comes with it. Art is so much about the conversation around it, and this is a huge event for everybody. I hope it doesn't just engage the people already waiting for it, but also builds bridges with collecting communities who haven't gone as deep into Tezos work, or had their own reasons for looking away. Now there's a new reason to come back to FX, and I think we'll see a lot of community outreach. I'm sure the FX team has a plan — actually, that might be a good question for Ciphrd: how do you actively engage the other communities? But—

Will: Excuse me, we ask the questions here. Stay in your lane, just answer.

Trinity: Okay, you co-host once—

Adam Berninger: Before you know it, you guys are doing collaborations.

Trinity: Oh, too late, man.

Will: I've derailed the episode. Trinity, take it away — what's next?

Trinity: While we're on TENDER, and on the things Adam's excited about — I think this is truly the first time, from an fx(hash) point of view, that there's a real sense of collaboration, curation, and partnership. There have been soft partnerships in the past — things like Cure3, or some of what happened with Here and Now. But with the calendar we talked about earlier, there's a much more hands-on, proactive stance: here are people we're actively working with and believe in, like TENDER, like Bitforms. What made fx(hash) decide to go in this direction? It represents a partial shift away from the anti-curation, open-platform, "what will be will be" ethos that was so prevalent in fx(hash) beta and 1.0.

Ciphrd: You partially answered your own question — we've had many instances of this kind of partnership already: FX collabs, Cure3, physical shows where we had to work with galleries, and so on. If anything, this is an attempt to open up this creation toolset to everyone. Right now, for launch, we're experimenting with a set of curators, partners, and communities we've worked with over the past two years, trying out this release format with them. You have the ability to tag a project on the calendar, but later this will translate into the ability to create a space where you present projects — whether you want to co-release with an artist, or feature projects in agreement with an artist in a particular context.

This idea was introduced a while ago as "curated spaces." I originally had a decentralized curation system in mind, fully on-chain, but I quickly realized the economic incentives of that system weren't aligned with what we wanted. A better approach was to make it completely off-chain and put the economic incentive elsewhere. That's what curated spaces were initially meant to be — a way for people to create projects off-chain and earn economic rewards on-chain by co-releasing with others.

Honestly, I'm super excited. We've been talking with Adam about this for a while, gathering feedback on what could work and what the pain points were. For instance, the fact that he had to create a TENDER account just to co-create with artists wasn't ideal. It was a form of collaboration, but a better format might have been to present it as a gallery or a curation group — that was one of the pain points we're aiming to solve with this system. But it doesn't go against openness — everyone still has the ability to collaborate with curators. And by making curators' pages public, with ways for people to contact them, we hope to open up new use cases: artists reaching out to curators, or curators getting more inbound interest.

Adam Berninger: It's been really interesting to work with fx(hash), and I think it'll be interesting over the coming weeks to more officially work with them in the public sphere. But certainly behind the scenes, TENDER wasn't even started without a lot of discussion between Ciphrd and me — coming up on two years ago in a few weeks. Talking about what role curation does or doesn't have on the platform has been an evolving conversation, and it's been really rewarding to see the mindset evolve over those two years, and for TENDER to try to react and support needs that aren't addressed on the core platform. Whether it's adding editorial very early on, or ways of displaying curated assemblies of pieces like our Grail Grids, galleries, and things like that — I think ultimately it makes sense for some of that stuff, even the calendar, to come on board into the main platform and be executed there.

Curation is a really difficult thing to avoid in the art space, and I really respect how thoughtful fx(hash) has been about integrating it. This is a big moment for them to reach out to not just TENDER but a whole community of curators, and engage them in ways that make the launch as exciting as possible — and not just the launch, but the ongoing positioning. That's something we still need to see in action.

Ciphrd's right that the collaboration aspect of TENDER's work with artists feels very natural to me, because my personal process is so collaborative with artists. We've talked in past episodes about what collaboration means and how it's possible without actually programming. While it felt natural, I'm not sure it was always the best thing for the artist — there can be some stigma in the current ecosystem about artwork released with another name on it, especially when that name is a brand. I've fought that a little. It's hard to measure how much it impacts things, but brand matters even in the art world, and perception of an artist's integrity really matters.

So I'm curious how we — TENDER, the other curated partners, and fx(hash) itself — can help elevate the notion of curation, not as a practice of extraction, but as a process of adding to the stories told around art, to the final product of the releases, and to how communities engage with that art. There's a huge opportunity here, but it's going to take a lot of work, even outside of just putting labels on things — how does that get integrated into the community conversation? Ciphrd, curious if the fx(hash) team has plans for how to communicate and bring those attributes to life. Sorry, I'm asking more questions than answering. Shit.

Will: He's asking questions again.

Trinity: No, he's making our lives easier.

Will: Booted from the chat. He's banned. Mods. All right, Ciphrd, go ahead.

Ciphrd: That's actually a pretty good question, and I don't have an answer right now — maybe the team has discussed it, but honestly, for the last month and a half I've been deep in the technical side of the product, so I've missed a few discussions on this and a few other topics.

You've touched on an important point, though: over the last two years we've watched some curators — you being one of the main ones — bring projects onto the platform that would never have seen the light of day without your guidance. So many artists have told us how helpful it was to co-create with Adam in the ideation process. That's the kind of creative practice we want to emphasize, as opposed to the traditional gallery pattern of "I'm going to take your work, buy some, sell it, make a profit, showcase it." There's a spectrum of galleries out there, some very profit-oriented, that don't care much about elevating the practice. By providing an open ecosystem where collectors' wallets — and ultimately their appreciation for the craft — are what make curatorial practice a success, as opposed to a closed ecosystem that's faked end to end, hopefully we bring about some interesting patterns and behaviors. I don't know the exact word for it.

Adam Berninger: I really appreciate you saying that about my practice, and I totally agree about the potential value curation can bring to the space. It's similar to the value we attribute to the art itself on fx(hash). That was one of the things that immediately captured me about fx(hash) — great artworks from artists nobody's heard of can still shine, still be valued and elevated by the conversations of the collector community. We've seen that play out again and again, not just within the platform but across the whole ecosystem — artists who found some success on fx(hash) coming from almost no audience to eventually launching high-value releases on other platforms. That path is proven on the artist side. I think it'll be really interesting to see if that can happen on the curatorial side too — if you're not coming from a background of being 100% focused on profit, but 100% focused on the value of the art you're curating and ushering into the world. I'm biased, but hopefully that's ultimately rewarded long term, and I think this step into curation for fx(hash) can help that happen, maybe even accelerate it.

Ciphrd: One last thing, which shines a slightly different light on this: if at some point it becomes necessary for artists to release through a partner in order to sell their work, we'll pull the trigger and redesign the system. The goal is not to end up in a closed ecosystem where you need to know a partner to sell your work, but to give artists the ability to showcase in different fashions without independent releases suffering for it. If we ever see that happening, we'll redesign the system — but that's really not the goal. We also don't want this to have too big an impact on the platform. We don't want it to become "this is the partner calendar, and if you want to see all the releases you have to click this small tab."

Will: Great segue into a little rumor mill, a little controversial territory. Adam, we've heard that one of the upcoming projects — maybe not in the first week — will be an artist-curated project using pre-rendered images. There was an fx(hash) poll a couple months back about enabling that option for artists: pre-select images, upload them, and do what we've seen on more curated platforms like Verse and Tonic. So, first question for Adam — we know you were a vocal proponent of this proposal when it was up for debate. What do you like about it? How is it different from params, in your mind? There are some bootleg params executions that sort of allow this already, but it's not quite the same. Where does this fit for you? And for this particular project, as much as you can say — would it have been possible without this? Do you feel like only pre-rendered, curated execution would work here?

Adam Berninger: I've been vocal in a few communities — definitely in TENDER, definitely in the fx(hash) poll, probably on Twitter too — about the benefit of allowing offline-rendered images on a platform like fx(hash). Verse allows it, Tonic allows it, and even Art Blocks Engine has an entire side of the platform called Flex geared toward this. I understand why it hasn't been allowed on fx(hash) so far — there's a real challenge in assessing static image files the same way the platform moderates live code for things like copy-minting and other terms violations. So there are good reasons this hasn't happened yet.

My advocacy is really about expanding the popular definition of generative art — it doesn't have to be live-running JavaScript in a browser. Browser capabilities are much better than they used to be, but they still can't do everything. You can't run live code in R or Python, or in plenty of other languages artists work in. There's WebAssembly, there are attempts, but they don't always work great.

Ciphrd: Yeah.

Adam Berninger: I've seen so many artists jump through hoops — literally learning JavaScript from scratch just to release a project on fx(hash). That's not easy. Or an artist who could throw 50 million particles around in Houdini and blow everyone's mind, but has to pare that down to a million particles in JavaScript just to barely get by on performance. Artists are making constant sacrifices to be browser-compatible. There's a nice leveling effect to that — it helps the community assess things against common parameters — but if we're just asking what makes great art and how we get access to it, there's a huge world of generative art we don't get to see on platforms like fx(hash).

And logistically, where else would those projects go? On Tezos there haven't been many opportunities for them. You could release a hundred one-of-ones on OBJKT, but it lacks the discoverability, cohesion, and release mechanics — allowlists, Dutch auctions — that come with a platform like fx(hash). So there are a lot of limitations, and you do see them on—

Ciphrd: Tezos.

Adam Berninger: —or Foundation, or other Ethereum platforms. But the seriality of a large series coming to life isn't really implemented anywhere else besides the platforms you mentioned. Bright Moments does a great job of it too, especially with the AI collections they've released this past year.

So beyond wanting more diversity in the types of generative art on fx(hash), I'm also thinking about revenue opportunities. I care a lot about fx(hash), and I think there's a huge opportunity there, on both Tezos and Ethereum, to support these kinds of projects. I'd go even further and say generative isn't just code that happens to be in a language that may or may not run in a browser — it's also generative AI. We're seeing an explosion of AI artworks and some great supporting technologies. I love what Emprops is doing with live generative AI work, and I expect them to keep innovating and leading in that space.

There are also artists who just want to curate — make final selections for their art series and put that up as a release. Being able to do that on fx(hash) would be a huge benefit. That said, I think it would benefit from some curation. There are artists out there who've validated the way they make their art, who have proof points that it's genuinely generative for the people who care — and the community can vouch for that, curators can validate it, even add context or encourage the artist to explain how the work was made and why it's generative. There's a lot of opportunity there. I'm excited about what can happen when artists we love from, say, object releases or Super Rare — one-of-one artists — come into a platform like fx(hash) and do something bigger. I'll leave it there — curious what Ciphrd has to say on the same topic and what's ahead.

Will: I think us too, because this poll was put up to the community, debated pretty intensely for at least a week, maybe longer, and over that time the community result was against — not 54/46, more like 60-plus percent. A pretty convincing majority did not want to do this. So question to Ciphrd: first of all, Adam has a project that's going to be using this. Is this something that's coming to fx(hash) in full? And if so, what do you think the community misunderstood about that proposal, and about the negative reception it got? Of the criticisms raised in that discussion — things around copy-minting, or arguments about the spirit of fx(hash) — were any of those taken on board by the team? What's the net result — if you allow this, where does it fit into the larger scheme of fx(hash) as a platform?

Ciphrd: This is a multifaceted situation with a lot of components to consider. I think the community understood the poll pretty well, given how it was presented — it was clear, and the community's response was clear too. But what we saw in the discussion was a lot more nuanced than just yes or no. Some people said, "I voted no, but I'd actually consider this kind of project on the platform under certain conditions" — and yet their vote was a hard no. Others voted yes but had real issues with it. My point is that the way we asked the question was a bit simplistic. We didn't expect that much reaction, or we would have clarified the case more.

One thing we didn't clarify: as a platform, we could implement tools that require artists to include the off-chain source files they used to render the image — the actual assets. We could make that a requirement of the system. So even though it's a fully pre-rendered project, you'd still be able to inspect the program that generated it. If we'd asked the poll that way, we probably would have gotten a drastically different answer.

With that in mind, we think a fairer way to re-ask this is to run a trial with one or a few projects — implement it the way we've designed it, with full transparency on requirements, and only then ask the community again about this specific case. That shows the community: okay, there was a clear no, we're not going against that, but here's how it would actually work. Then we decide, based on that, whether to implement it fully — and if the answer is still no, at least we'll have done everything we could to properly show the community how it could be done.

This is also multifaceted because — Adam, you've pointed out that JavaScript is pretty bad, and it is. Artists using Houdini or other software have real trouble translating their work into JS. Sometimes it's not even possible, or the technical barriers are so big that you have to do so many optimizations just to get half the result you'd get natively. But the browser is also the technology that's most widely shared and moving the fastest, simply because it generates the most money in the world — that's why it evolves every year. WebAssembly gave us a new set of features, though it's not quite there yet — still a few big constraints, still hard to work with. Then there's WebGPU, released on Chrome a few months ago, which will probably be available on most platforms next year, minus Safari, which is always a bit late to the party.

My point is that what's difficult in the browser today will probably become easy down the line. I foresee a future where we don't run software locally at all — everything runs in the browser, because there's a clear benefit to an app that loads instantly. Browsers are built for beautiful UIs with great interactions, and they're becoming more and more powerful. We already see this: more and more desktop applications are either moving to the web or getting a major web component. A lot of the apps we use, like Discord, are really just your browser without the outer layer.

I raise this because what we implement now for offline-rendered projects might become somewhat irrelevant down the line — but that's not a reason to avoid looking into it now, since it could take 10, 20, 30 years to get there. Until then, we should support creators who don't have access to the tools we currently provide. Again, only with community approval.

My last point — and this is why I was against this feature for a while — is that we already have PNG-layer projects on the platform. Some are great, some I'm not a fan of, and we know that shipping this feature makes it a lot harder for the moderation team and the community to assess how a piece was actually made. That's extra work for us: if we have to open a Python file and run it locally just to check whether it works, that adds enormous complexity to verification. Someone could post a random file, generate hundreds of images with an AI tool, and claim it's a legitimate process — it would take moderators forever to sort through. Whereas with JS, you just run it — it's open source, you can see exactly what's there.

Adam Berninger: Do you think it's sustainable to moderate at the level you have been? Looking ahead to your expansion plans, or other use cases for the platform — I'm already thinking about the difficulty of moderating something like layered PNGs, where you don't really know what went into the layers. There's already some abstraction involved. So I'm curious about the decision to go deeper into verifying someone's Python code locally, versus letting the community make its own calls on an open platform about what's valid and what's done well. Contrarian Adam enters the scene — that's what you want, right? For radio. We're going to make good radio.

Trinity: Hell yeah.

Ciphrd: Right now we have a half-decentralized, half-centralized moderation process. Most projects are flagged by the community — a big chunk of which knows the generative art space extensively and knows how work is made. Sometimes someone will say, "I've seen this project on OpenProcessing five years ago." How do you even remember that? And sure enough, we check, and one function has been slightly shuffled. But it takes time. Right now we have one person part-time on moderation, plus some team members who moderate a bit as well, plus the whole community — who I can't thank enough — flagging projects on Discord when we can't catch something ourselves.

Verifying off-browser scripts is definitely going to add burden. If someone submits a Houdini script, how do we expect a moderator to just happen to have the latest version of Houdini installed for that one case? It's going to be tough. We'll see — if it becomes too complex, we might adjust the system, extend the review period for this type of project so we have enough time, or only accept certain languages at first — say, Python and R — and slowly open it up from there. It's hard to predict how big this will get. Experience will tell us whether the community is receptive to how we implement it, or not.

One last point: right now, in a way, we already accept this kind of project, because we have to draw the line somewhere. You can use pre-rendered components manipulated with code — but where's the line for how much code makes something a viable fx(hash) project? There's already some irony in refusing pre-rendered projects outright, since we allow pre-rendered projects that do a slight tint with CSS. We have to draw the line somewhere, and in a sense it's just an artifact of our rules that a project like that passes while a rendered-component project using only the native image doesn't.

Trinity: One quick follow-up before we move on. Are there any artists who've come to you specifically interested in using this? On the record — anyone we should be looking forward to?

Adam Berninger: I can talk about artists I'd love to see on the platform using this. I would love to see quibibi do a project on fx(hash). I would love to see Ganbrud do one, and other AI artists too. I'd love to see Pierre Casadebeig do a project using R. I would love to see more 3D generative work coming from architectural applications, or directly from Blender or Houdini — there are well-known artists using those tools, Robert Hodgins among them, and Travess Smalley. There are a lot of artists I'd love to see drop on fx(hash) who are probably limited right now by browser capabilities.

And what Ciphrd said about the browser expanding is so true — what you can do now with HTML and JavaScript is vastly better than 20 years ago, when we were all still using Flash to get by on animation. I expect it to keep getting better. If you look at the percentage of artworks released as static images, it's extremely high. And once you're at a point where live rendering itself matters less to collectors than the output, that's where a platform like this has an opportunity to expand. There's debate about where the value lies — we could get into that — but for static images specifically, I think this is a good potential solve.

Ciphrd: I'd add that these boundaries also open room for beautiful craft. Look at Piter Pasma's sculptures — the render quality matches your average 3D software, yet it runs in the browser. These constraints limit some artists' creativity, sure, but they also let us showcase exceptional minds who understand a system end to end and design an algorithm that works within the constraint, pushing through complex problems to reach something shaped by their artistic vision. Constraints like these are great for pushing the craft.

What we're seeing right now in the NFT space with 3D graphics, and still images especially, is still far from the limits of the browser — it's hard to get truly wild-looking outputs. But go to Shadertoy, a site where you can see WebGL work, or Compute.toys, which does WebGPU now — you'll see quality we haven't really seen yet in the NFT space. There's still a lot of room to improve within our current constraints. Hopefully we'll see more of this once WebGPU is available everywhere.

Adam Berninger: Totally agree about the power of constraints on producing exceptional artworks. People have been doing that long before they were "regulated." I think of photography — there are schools of photographers who will only shoot a certain way and develop a certain way: documentary photographers who will only crop in camera, only shoot black and white, who won't ever engage with a subject beyond what's in their view. And there are collectors who will only collect that type of work, whatever the rule-based approach or collecting focus is. So I think there's always existed a level of trust, or investigation, required between the artist and the collector to validate what they're seeing.

Those limitations can be quite powerful, and I'm excited about a future in generative art where more of that onus is put on artists and collectors together, and the curators who work with them, to validate that themselves — taking some of the pressure off a platform like fx(hash) to have to decide it all on its own. As we grow and expand, there's going to be more and more of that. Big opportunity there.

Will: That's an excellent opportunity to segue. Let's pull back and talk about the last year in generative art and NFTs. 2023 has been a difficult year — we're definitely in the bear market. Maybe we're about to come out of it, but who knows, we're not the podcast to call that. Over this last year, as the market's turned down, we've seen consolidation into "curated" and "premium" platforms, in air quotes. At the same time, Art Blocks is preparing to raise their fees to 30%, and OpenSea has capitulated to the Blur phenomenon and no longer honors royalties. So for each of you: how do you think about the last year in generative art and NFTs? What are the lessons learned? Where are we going?

Trinity: If you're going to ETH, you're opening to OpenSea, right?

Will: That's a good corollary — what happens with ETH. Ciphrd, please address that. We're using some of the standards OpenSea uses, so they can index these projects, but they don't honor royalties. That's a huge part of it. So sound off — 2023, what's going on? How do you feel about this last year?

Ciphrd: It's been a tough year for many artists too, who've seen the core of their revenues largely drop — that's probably been the hardest thing to witness. As a platform, if we hadn't raised money, we couldn't have grown and expanded the way we have. We could have probably kept existing on Tezos at lower cost, but given the rise of competitors with access to more funds — well, there weren't competitors like that when we first wanted to expand. What's great is we've kept seeing great projects popping up left and right, and amazing engagement from members who don't really care about the state of the market — they're just there to enjoy the practice. It's reassuring to know that if things go south, we at least have a core community we like and like building a product for, and we'll shape the tool into something different to accommodate them regardless.

If the market keeps being like this for, I don't know, ten years, it'll be hard to keep existing at our current scale. Realistically we could end up with a smaller team and a smaller scope of projects, which isn't what we want. That's why we're aiming at Ethereum and at opening opportunities for artists and for ourselves, to hopefully make this a more sustainable ecosystem for everyone. There's a lot to talk about here — maybe I'll let Adam take the mic.

Adam Berninger: Sure. I'm not sure where to focus within this massive bear year of ours, but looking forward: this is one of the most friendly and collaborative ecosystems in any industry I've worked in, and I've worked in a lot of different industries. I ran a creative agency for over a decade and worked with all kinds of companies — the competitive flavor is so strong in every industry I've been in, including the art world. So the vibe out here, of each platform looking after each other, is really nice.

The reality is there are only so many collectors currently active across all these platforms, only so much attention, only so many artists driving revenue. That can't sustain itself indefinitely — growth is needed. I love seeing so many platforms, curators, and artists looking for ways to grow exposure to new collectors and new audiences. That's going to be a critical effort for anyone looking to sustain in 2024: finding your own way to grow new audiences, whether that's collectors on other chains, other digital platforms, or real-life communities. There are lots of ways to go about it, but that growth effort will be critical, even for platforms more focused on product. That's something on my mind for 2024, and it's close to the heart of what I think TENDER can do and help with — and many other platforms too.

Ciphrd: I'd like to bounce on what you said about this being the most collaborative space you've been in. I haven't been in many other spaces, so I can't make the same comparison, but I'll say — yeah, there really are so many great collaborations happening left and right in this ecosystem. It's great to be part of it.

But I think the bear market has also driven some behaviors in the space that were a bit hard to deal with. While it's been a bear market, lots of other generative art platforms have risen, and they all need revenue at some point. We've seen aggressive strategies by some platforms targeting the artists who generate the biggest revenue, and it's impacted us to some extent — fewer of the artists who became big on fx(hash) have kept releasing there. We've been aware of the patterns some actors in the ecosystem have used. It's not personal — it's a direct byproduct of this still being a relatively small, very competitive space on the platform side.

It's been tough on platforms because of that, and it's part of why we wanted to release on Ethereum — many artists who became big on fx(hash) wanted to see other horizons and access a bigger collector base, and when we couldn't offer that, it was easy for other platforms to bring them on board, since that's exactly what they were looking for. I'd hoped it would all happen with grace, out in the open, people talking about it — but instead there was a lot of outreach happening quietly in the background whenever certain projects were published, which made it hard to maintain integrity and not resort to the same practices to go after artists. Hopefully, as the space gets bigger in terms of collectors, and as artists have more platform options, this kind of situation dies down. But yeah.

Trinity: That makes a lot of sense, and hopefully more artists will come back to fx(hash) now that we have this whole slew of new features — ONCHFS, ETH, potentially USD valuation, the list goes on, plus this curatorial layer we touched on earlier. The artist community is there, it's thriving. The collector community is there too, though maybe waiting to grow back and get bigger.

On that exposure to Blur, OpenSea, platforms that don't honor royalties — so far fx(hash) has been pretty sheltered from that, by virtue of Tezos being an artist-first chain where honoring royalties is basically a non-issue throughout the community. As we open up to ETH, what can fx(hash) do to encourage the honoring of royalties, and to make sure more trading happens on fx(hash) itself rather than on third-party platforms? We've been thinking about this a lot over the last year — would love to hear your take.

Ciphrd: We've been thinking a lot about this too. First of all, it's been painful to watch the main NFT ecosystem drift toward non-respect of royalties, just to improve collector returns. That's not the space we want to encourage. Sure, for collectors it may improve their returns short-term — some argue that lower royalties mean more collectors buying into a project. But if you keep fighting for lower royalties, eventually there are no royalties at all. And we think royalties are actually a pretty sustainable way for artists to have some stable income, if they keep producing work that stays culturally relevant, which is often the case with many artists.

I've been living off my own royalties for more than a year — I'm one of the lucky ones. But I couldn't imagine going through my first year on fx(hash) without royalties on Ringers. It would have been a really tough year. That model has proven itself great for a lot of creators, and I'm not the only one saying so.

Now, facing reality — once we release on Ethereum, we'll be exposed to this. There's a strategy where you can block platforms that don't respect royalties, but we don't think that's a sensible approach. We want to take a product and social approach instead. First, if we want people trading on fx(hash), our toolset needs to be as good as, if not better than, other platforms for collecting generative art. Sadly we haven't had time to completely redesign it the way we want — we've made small improvements, not yet at the scale we want, but that's the direction we're headed. People on fx(hash) collect generative art, so we should give them a toolset for collecting generative art that's better than what you'd find on platforms not specialized for it. That's a clear advantage we have over platforms that can't afford to build generative-art-specific tooling. So we'll keep shipping in that regard — USD pricing is one heavily requested feature, trade offers too, that kind of generative-art-specific feature will keep coming this next year because it matters a lot.

The second point is social dynamics. Maybe it's a bit naive, but I've always thought one way to help with the royalty problem is to shine some light on the virtue of respecting royalties as a collector. So we'll run initiatives to showcase collectors who play properly, who respect royalties and honor artists — give them a spotlight, maybe even in a physical exhibition, because they've supported artists and deserve recognition on the platform too. I don't know honestly if that's enough to counter what's happening on Blur and elsewhere, but we hope to at least offer another way of looking at the royalty situation. It'll take time.

I was talking with some people from the French Ministry, long story — they wanted to design a standard for enforcing royalties on-chain, and I had to tell them: that's not technically possible, unfortunately. Otherwise it would already exist. So we have to find other ways to do it, and the other way is to enforce it socially. It's going to be a lot of trial and error, because measuring the "virtue" of collecting through social highlighting is probably a clusterfuck of some kind — super complex to evaluate. But we'll experiment a lot; that's the direction we want to take.

Will: This is easily going to be our longest interview ever, so we have to move to rapid fire. Adam, you've had an extremely busy end of 2023 — you've curated releases with Feral File and Artmatr, you have an upcoming project with Art Basel Miami, and all the releases you're engineering for the fx(hash) 2.0 launch. Briefly, but fulfillingly: what can we look forward to from TENDER in 2024? How has TENDER changed throughout this bear market?

Adam Berninger: Midway through 2022, I saw some new opportunities to do something different with a platform and really focused on how to grow a new minting experience for Tender. I put a lot of development effort into that and started looking at whether I'd raise funds to support it. In the meantime, so many new platforms came to light that it took me a minute to pivot away from that plan — and I'm glad I did. I still haven't seen anything launch the same type of minting platform I'd been thinking about, but it'll happen; there are enough great builders and development teams out there to build that stuff.

I took all that focus from the first half of 2023 and redirected it toward bringing art into the world. That's why you're seeing so many releases, group shows, and events, and that's what to expect more of from Tender and myself in 2024. The difference is I'm going to focus more and more on physical expressions of the work in physical environments. I'll take a page from Maya Man here — it's not that online isn't "real," it's real in the physical world too — but I think getting works in front of people who don't know about generative art, or haven't bought into the premise of it, in a gallery setting will pay off. It'll show what we — the greater community of generative artists — can do with algorithmic works in a physical environment. That means partnering with existing gallery spaces, helping form new ones, and finding our way into prominent art fairs like Untitled Art in Miami and others around the world. Those are all great opportunities for rich conversations with new collectors.

Tender's strategy going forward is about finding a smaller quantity of higher-quality, deeply engaged collectors — people who really connect with what generative art is, the whole gamut of genres and aesthetics the medium covers — and bringing them along on a long-term collecting journey with us and with other collectors in the space. I see huge opportunity there, and also in working with more artists while doubling down on the ones who've proven, time and again, that they bring great new innovative work. We'll definitely keep supporting names you've seen Tender involved with before, both through collaboration and through our community generally, while also engaging artists who want to find generative ways of bringing their vision to life. AI is already a great tool for that, and I think it'll help bridge into other art communities and bring in new audiences.

In a nutshell, I see Tender defining itself — defining me — as a gallerist, though not in the traditional model of exclusive artist representation. It's more of a future-facing model of what a gallery can be: open, supporting a wide community of artists, medium-specific, and hopefully doing our part to advance what generative art is and what it can become for a wider audience.

Trinity: That is one hell of a rapid-fire answer. 2024 is going to be huge for Tender, and hopefully for all of us — we're going to see better days, fingers crossed. Thank you for that. Next rapid-fire, this one's for Ciphrd. Looking at your project page, it's been a year and a half since Ethereal Microcosm came out in February 2022. Are we going to see a new Ciphrd drop for fx(hash) 2.0? The people are waiting.

Ciphrd: A year and a half — and I think I've created 70 hours of footage over that time. It's sad, but yes, I can talk about it. The first project on the platform will be a collaboration between Alex, Morgan, Seb, and myself. Alex is the creator of DeepDream and a researcher at Google — a genius in the artificial life field, and a genius in general — so I'm humbled to be working with him. He's doing all the difficult stuff, which isn't usually my role, but I'm really excited about this project. He's published papers on neural cellular automata — cellular automata that can replicate natural patterns through machine learning — and we're putting a twist on that for this project. The idea is to have it launch at a small price point as an open edition. I'm such a fanboy for Alex that I was thrilled when he agreed to collaborate.

Will: It sounds like RGB Moves. Is that—

Trinity: RGB Grooves.

Will: RGB Grooves. Is there a potential title for this? Is it going to be like "Day One"?

Ciphrd: It's going to be called Time Zero, launching when the platform launches. I need to check with Alex, but the idea is to train it on RGB, our first collection, so the model itself generates some of the patterns from RGB. It's not quite AI, but close.

Will: That'll be really fun to collect. An open edition is a great way to include everyone — the community is so much more savvy and engaged now than in the earliest days of fx(hash), when people were still finding it. So many people never got to collect an RGB. Creating something open and available, rather than "sorry, you had to be here in the first 48 hours or you're out of luck," is a nice way to kick off 2.0.

Ciphrd: Me too. I wish you could see the project right now — it's really wild. I'm excited.

Will: We're all excited to collect another piece from Ciphrd. One more rapid-fire for you. You mentioned providing incentives for people to stay on the platform. It's become a bit of a meme at this point — Blur issues a token to incentivize people to not honor royalties. Is there a possibility fx(hash) issues its own long-fabled token, as a way to encourage people to honor royalties and keep trading on the platform? Is that idea completely dead? Should we stop asking? Might it emerge in 2024?

Ciphrd: It's not dead. I've said a few times why we haven't built it yet — we think it could be super valuable, but we want fair redistribution to token holders, and legally that's really complex. So we're considering different alternatives. We don't want a token that just exists for farming engagement — we want something meaningful for the generative art space long-term.

Right now we're focused on building the core features of the platform end-to-end: multi-chain support, and bringing our existing tools to a better state, since everything is still lacking features and quality-of-life improvements. Only once the pace of updates slows down, once we're more deliberate about what goes onto the platform, will it be the right timing to introduce a token — when we have more certainty about the state of the space and how the token can be interesting for creators, curators, and collectors. We don't want to rush it in a way that generates engagement but damages the ecosystem's sustainability, which we've seen happen a lot with tokens — they become the quick exit. We've seen plenty of projects die right after their token launch. That's not what we want. If anything, we want the token to be the beginning of something meaningful, not the end of the journey for the ecosystem's contributors. So — TBD. Ask me on the next podcast. Maybe there'll be more, maybe not.

Will: All right, one more, Trinity. Queue up the last one and let's wrap this mega episode.

Trinity: This one's for both of you, in celebration of the cross-platformification of fx(hash): building functionality, building platforms — ETH or Tez? Which makes your life easier? What would you rather build for?

Ciphrd: Interesting one. Building for both is a nightmare. Everything based on EVM works together beautifully; Tezos works on similar principles but with very different paradigms everywhere, so building for both is genuinely complex. Adam, you've experienced this too — we wanted two wallets connected at the same time, accounts that are off-chain versus interactive, and there's a lot of complexity in building that.

I expected the tooling on Ethereum to be far more advanced than Tezos — I felt like on Tezos we were working with stone and sticks — but honestly, while Ethereum's toolset is slightly more sophisticated, you end up hitting the same issues and the same base problems. If you're starting an application from scratch, the EVM toolset is way better, by far. But whenever we faced particular use cases, I found the Tezos toolset better suited. We have a lot of custom code because we're dealing with both Tezos and Ethereum. On Ethereum you get a level of abstraction where you just say "load wallet, get address, send transaction" — very simple. Tezos is a bit more low-level, which is actually what we need for a sophisticated tool like ours. Ethereum was harder in that regard — the low-level primitives were less supported, less easy to find.

So if I had to build fx(hash) from scratch on EVM, it would be so much simpler than on Tezos, not gonna lie. But I regret that Ethereum doesn't have similar low-level primitives to what Tezos offers. Maybe they exist and we just didn't find the right tools — we used what felt like the de facto industry standard and still found it lacking in some areas. For instance, Ethereum doesn't have anything like TzKT, where you can query blockchain data easily. They have The Graph instead, which is different and not as open as TzKT. Just one example among many. Not a very conclusive answer.

Adam Berninger: For us it's a lot easier, because we're not building apps from the ground up — we're using APIs, sometimes great ones like Ciphrd's, and sometimes challenging ones like OpenSea's, where the challenge is even getting an API key. I'm really curious how fx(hash) is going to interface with OpenSea when it comes to getting collections listed. Even Art Blocks, who you'd assume has a lot of clout in the space and drives a lot of volume through OpenSea, has had a lot of back-and-forth getting their collections and creators listed properly and royalties set up correctly. So at the scale fx(hash) operates, given how important OpenSea is to the ecosystem, I'm curious how that plays out. But the short answer is we have it quite easy using different APIs, and there's a lot in the Ethereum ecosystem that isn't as cohesive as fx(hash)'s. It's been a real pleasure to use.

Ciphrd: Thanks — I'm surprised, because our APIs are quite rudimentary. We want to improve all of that.

Adam Berninger: And you are. I understand it takes time, but they keep improving, and that's what matters.

Will: Hell yeah. That sounds like a great place to end it — an epic episode. This has been great, guys. We've plugged everything, there's no follow-up, this is just the end. 2.0 comes out the first week of December. There's going to be a ton of drops — Ethereum, on-chain, rebate auctions, a huge update for fx(hash). It's going to be huge for curators like Adam, who'll be able to further leverage all these tools to bring more artists to the community, collecting on both Tezos and Ethereum. What else can we say?

Trinity: December 1st, it's a Friday. Take vacation, cancel your plans.

Will: Take the day off. It's going to be like the old times — we'll all be sitting there in Discord together. Let's wrap this one, guys. Thank you both so much for your time, for getting us hyped for fx(hash) 2.0 and everything Tender's been bringing to the platform. So many artists we're excited to collect again.

Adam Berninger: Thank you for having us on — it's been great to talk about what's coming up. I'm so excited for fx(hash) 2.0. December 1st is going to be epic, and so is the full week following that. If anybody out there can bring a friend in, do it — there's going to be great conversations. It's a really good moment to show the excitement around this space, and how far even a little bit of money can go in collecting some great art. Can't wait.

Ciphrd: Thank you, Will and Trinity. It's always a pleasure.

Will: Absolutely, it's amazing to have you both on. And yeah — bring a friend if you have someone who's been trying to get in. Maybe they need a podcast to listen to, to break the ice and get them into collecting generative art. Or maybe they've got five or ten dollars a month to join our Patreon — that's also an easy way to get into the space and start supporting creators here. So, gotta plug that: patreon.com/WaitingToBeSigned. That's it for this one. We hope you all enjoyed it. We'll be back again soon with another episode. Bye, everyone.

Ciphrd: The rail of the week — could be signs, we're waiting, always.

Will: We're waiting.

Ciphrd: To be signed.