It has been a while since I wrote anything! I’ve been quite busy, in my defense. This article will cover a few remarkable projects that probably wouldn’t have happened without the technology that powers NFTs.
First of all, the main reason I’ve been absent lately: WIP (Work In Progress) Publishing has launched! I am happy to report that I have special plans for this piece that won’t become apparent until the various online outlets have had custody of it for a little while, so stay tuned! The projects we’ll cover in this article involve the Choose Your Own Adventure NFT Series WIPP is working on with people from the Libernet DAO community and others around the DAOsphere; the Rare Pizzas Degen NFT Art Project, which has been delayed until June 28 to ensure that there are absolutely ZERO compromises in terms of quality with respect to the art; and last but certainly not least the CryptoWriter CryptoFinney project you’ve almost certainly heard of due to its masterful execution and successful launch.
The Never-Ending Choose-Your-Own-Adventure
First up: the Literary NFT Community is getting going and your author is right in the center of it. Not to make excuses, folks, because it seems ridiculous to plead that one has been too busy reading and writing to write, but I’m pleased to announce that I’ve founded a company to bring NFT technology to the literary industries and help writers to more effectively monetize their written works.
Thus far, the project is still in a very early phase we’ve codenamed Genesis, which involves releasing some NFTBooks to the market and seeing what people think of them. Sales are rather brisk thus far, and the circle of buyers which started within the leadership of the company now seems to involve some people I don’t know yet. The response from the community has been breathtaking, however, with two launch parties in TokenSmart’s Discord server already behind us. We have a great deal of momentum and are generally quite excited about most of what is going on.
Now that we have a bit more background about the community and the focus on NFTBooks, it’s time to talk about something insane. A book that really never ends. A choose-your-own-adventure job like they used to do back in the 90’s, but with a good deal more sophistication, technically speaking. We still need to come up with a systematic way to link stories from/to one another, but several different structures are emerging to allow writers to interact with the story chunks other writers have already created. The thing about a CYOA book is that it’s very important to link all of the stories together in as seamless a way as possible; but imagine that the number of stories thusly link-able was infinite. The reader would be fine—as long as a beginning, middle, and end could be constructed, the various story legos that weren’t used would be entirely irrelevant.
We see, today, two layers to the commercial side of the thing here: layer 1 is the NFTs themselves, which can be created by single authors and minted according to the standards developed by WIP Publishing on platforms such as Unifty.com; layer 2 is the NFTs we could potentially create to represent particular story arcs within this greater universe. Hence, at some point, if enough writers get involved, there could be a market in which readers compete to construct their own path through the greater story universe by purchasing all the NFTs they need to create the perfect narrative, and perhaps even linking them together in novel ways. Imagine going to OpenSea and purchasing a bundle of interlinked NFTs that told a story, using the works of authors who were not related to the greater story in any way whatsoever but who had rather simply constructed the best vignettes their imaginations could yield! The very mechanism itself smacks of a powerful analogy calling to mind the fundamental nature of life itself, and the community is open so feel free to explore the Discord if you’re interested in participating or if you have ideas for the project!
The Rare Pizzas Degen Art Project
This project, which I’ve been a part of since the beginning—I’m doing the book for it, of course!—has a special place in my heart. It represents a dream of what the world might look like if we were to eliminate scarcity in all the worst places. There are still, somehow, people in this world who do not have enough food to eat. It’s pathetic! We should be doing better about this, with all of the miracles of modern technology at our disposal. Enter the PizzaDAO, whose slogan is “Pizza shud b free.”
The PizzaDAO is the collective of artists, entrepreneurs, coders, outreachers, networkers, and passionate evangelists who have taken it upon themselves to create an art project of unprecedented scope. The scope of the project is not only art, it is degen art involving 314 different artists and a unique, bespoke “baking” algorithm which uses artificial intelligence to determine baking time for each pizza and modifies the artwork in the way you’d expect, if you placed these objects into an oven for a period of time and actually baked them. But beyond the technical sophistication of the project, there is an economic layer which is utterly unprecedented. 51% of the proceeds from the sale of any RarePizzas artifact (whether it’s a Pizza Pop, a Pizza Stick, a Pizza Box, or a Book!) will go into a fund that buys pizza for people who like pizza and aren’t expecting their pie to be free.
On Bitcoin Pizza Day, 11 years after Laszlo paid 10,000 Bitcoins for 2 pizzas, the RarePizzas project will purchase pizza for people around the world in what is undoubtedly the world’s largest pizza party. How long will the record stand? I suppose the answer depends upon the sales of RarePizzas NFTs! If a lot of money ends up entering the pizza-buying account, who knows what insanity might result? If the project meets with a lukewarm reception, it’s still likely that annual Bitcoin Pizza Day shenanigans will ensue for several years.
The Cryptowriter CryptoFinney Project
Though Cryptowriter is not technically a DAO, it espouses many of the same values DAOs do. It is a community of people who spend their time researching various cryptocurrencies and the trends in the market in exchange for either USDC (US Dollar Coin) or Finney Coins. The publication asks for exclusivity for 24-hours but then allows the author to republish everything from the written content to the cover image to any other platform they might choose. This egalitarian approach has borne results, but not without some difficulties along the way. Recently, Cryptowriter was de-platformed by Voice.com which paid a subsidy and hosted content. Voice was taken offline in a rebranding effort which seems to be oriented around modifying the network to focus on allowing users to mint NFTs instead of focusing upon heavy user authentication protocols.
The decision to nuke the Voice platform has been met with a mixed response among the Cryptowriter community, but has co-occurred with something incredible. The CryptoFinney project, driven by Cryptowriter CEO Kenny Lienhard, has yielded extraordinary value to the Cryptowriter family largely owing to the extraordinary skill with which it has been marketed and released. I still haven’t found my Punk CryptoFinney yet, but with the way some of my projects are going, I ought to be able to simply buy one from someone in the near future! And thanks to WAX and EOS royalties created and enforced by the AtomicHub platform, it is certain that my favorite cryptocurrency blog will benefit when I do.
Cryptowriter has largely moved all activities here, to the Substack platform, with which I am barely familiar at all, but as a writer I am still incredibly excited to have an outlet for my innermost musings on the state of the various markets and/or enterprises. Even more so now that I am CEO of WIP Publishing, a title which would ordinarily prevent one from engaging in activities such as writing blog posts for news/media outlets. I simply love blogging because there is so much freedom to explore whatever I choose to explore here. I’m glad to see that the artists get to apply their creativity in this space, too.
Conclusions
To me, the most remarkable thing in the world right now is that groups of humans are choosing to self-organize around ideas that wouldn’t have occurred to us before. We’re iterating in a space that didn’t exist yet, last year. We’re moving toward a world that is, in my opinion at the very least, likely to be substantially more badass than the world we’re leaving to move toward it. I am in the minority on this, but I beg my reader to hear me out here: things we did not account for are taking place. Economies are being structured to create beneficial social conditions in a way we simply did not think about in the past.
If we can create a never-ending Choose Your Own Adventure story, an art project that buys people pizza, and a platform-agnostic publication that lives and breathes its community’s love—if all of these remarkable things are possible, I would argue that the world is substantially different from the way most of us conceive of it. It is different because it is better than we expected it to be. Our good feelings are the part that drives these events, and there is substantial power in these feelings.
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That Pizza Party is going to be amazing. And yeah, what RhysKent said, open-ended adventure needs to happen.
Love it! Nice write up Dylan