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Celebrating AB500 with Snowfro and Art Blocks 🥳
Recorded: Aug. 7, 2025 Duration: 0:57:09Space Recording
Short Summary
Artblocks announces the launch of AB500, a curated collection celebrating five years of generative art, while transitioning to a decentralized model that empowers artists. The initiative reflects growth in the crypto art space, with plans for monthly spotlights to engage the community.
Full Transcription
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Hello, hello, hello.
My name is Adam and I'm the Community Lead here at OpenSea.
I'm always really grateful when you guys, our community, take time out of your busy days to hop on spaces with us.
We try our best to organize really special people, really special teams, and today is certainly no exception.
I'm sure everyone saw the news yesterday about Artblocks 500, which is a huge
milestone for Artblocks and of course, Snowfro, the founder, who we have on stage today, along
with some other special folks. So first, I think we can start with some introductions.
Eric, why don't you give a little bit of an intro by yourself and just share your emotional
state now that the announcement has been out for about a day?
Man, we're just going to dive right into it, Adam. Hi, Adam. Hi, OpenSea. Hi, everybody out there.
It's really good to be here. I feel really good. I feel a sense of relief. This has been building
for months. We've been working on this and I'm just really, yeah, I'm really excited with how
things are going so far. It's a long endeavor.
This is just the beginning of it.
It's just nice to get the news out of the way,
and then we can start seeing where it goes from there.
Amazing.
All right.
Anyone else on stage, give a quick intro
so we can dive right into the conversation.
Hey, I'm just up here to hang out for the vibes.
My name's Matt.
I'm here at OpenSea on the business development team,
but longtime collector and supporter of Artblocks as well,
and super excited about where things are headed moving forward.
And yeah, congratulations, Eric, on closing this chapter.
Thanks, man, and thanks for always bringing
the vibes never never fails i try hey everybody i'm jordan i'm on the artblocks team really
excited to be here also a long-time collector and fan and co-collaborator and friend of Eric's and Artblocks.
And now I get to be on this side of the house.
So super excited to be here today
and chatting about the last five years,
but then also what's to come.
Yeah, Jordan's the real conductor.
Him and the team really just kind of busted their ass
for a really long time
to make that happen. So yeah, I'm really excited about it. It's great to work with you, Jordan.
It's been so fun.
That's amazing. We have a bunch of people up on stage who love art and who love art blocks.
So I'm really excited to be able to chat with you guys today. So for those of you who are
maybe living under a rock, or you didn't see Roger's show yesterday
where Eric also talked about AB500, Eric or maybe Jordan, whoever feels better about taking
this question, can you tell us a little bit more about what AB500 is?
And then I'll have additional questions to help suss out some of the finer details.
Maybe I can take it from a philosophical side and then Jordan, maybe from the product side.
I think it might be cool to kind of tag team on that. Maybe I can take it from a philosophical side and then Jordan, maybe from the product side.
I think it might be cool to kind of tag team on that.
But philosophically, I posted this on Discord the other day, but since 2018, I've been in
the, or had been, I know I've kind of fallen off, been in the Punks Discord explaining
to people that what made the project so great was that it was complete from the start.
And I think that there's something, it's not just crypto,
although obviously crypto is a very unique place,
but there's something about something being finite
that I've always been really drawn to
and I think it's really interesting.
And there's also some really interesting,
just kind of looking back over the last five years,
it's a really interesting story.
It's a really interesting history
of kind of how things have come
about building entirely on the shoulders of the previous generation of generative artists,
let's say like Aaron Penny and Tyler Hobbs and Chettle and Emily, and who are building on the
previous generation of, you know, the Vera Molnars and the Manfred Moores. And so I think, I think it's really interesting to kind of see where we went from,
let's say 2010 to 2020 when our blocks launched.
And to me, there's, there's something about, you know,
the generative medium has drawn an incredible amount of attention over the
last few years, something that it really didn't have before,
but we really deserve both the creators and the
artworks and and we have a bunch of collectors now that probably you know five years ago didn't even
know what code-based art was and i think that over that time we drew a tremendous amount of people
starting to generate work and there's been a tremendous amount of work released and you know
genitive artists are incredibly prolific and i think there's something really special about
saying okay like this is kind of, you know,
where we are with on-chain art.
This is a time period, five years of art blocks,
five years of kind of like figuring this out
and understanding from there,
like the future is very weird and murky
in a lot of different ways.
And I don't just mean with generative art,
I just mean with humanity as a whole.
And I think it's really interesting to just kind of cap this art box is no
long, you know, everything that's in the art box, 500 art blocks published,
everything that's in the art box, 500 art blocks had a heavy hand in,
even in, even, you know, even in like the early studio, like we, you know,
the, I mean, sorry, the early factory,
everything in the factory was kind of originally meant for people to be able
to release on their own,
but we didn't have the resources or the just that there was just not enough
time to just let it be an open platform.
So it never quite was an open platform even from the start. And I,
I think there's something really interesting about what,
how this all kind of comes together when our blocks kind of says, okay,
we've published these 500 projects.
Artblocks is not looking to publish more.
We want artists to publish themselves.
We want to support these artists in the studio.
We want to support these artists in Engine.
But these are the projects
that we deliberately put out there as an organization.
And we're really proud to kind of cap it at 500 with five really special
projects coming up over the course of the next few months.
Well, I want to have a separate space with you one time to talk about humanity, AI, and
generative art, because that's come up a couple times, but we will punt that for another time.
I think that makes a ton of sense to have this sort of complete collection, as you've said it, sort of beginning to end.
There's these nice bookends on it.
And that allows you to look backward and kind of invest in sort of the discovery and invest in educating people and the preservation, which we'll talk about a little bit later.
So this makes a ton of sense.
I'm curious, this 500 number, did it come because that is just a clean and round number? Was it the number of
years that Arsblox has been releasing, which is about five, both, neither? How did that number
kind of come about? It's pretty coincidental. It just kind of, you know, last year we started
talking about this as, I mean, I don't know how technical we want to get here but like last year we were approaching the 500th project shell our blocks has multiple smart contracts and we
have generally sequentially released work with those smart contract shells in mind and so we
were approaching the 500th shell and i was like man our blocks this is 500 projects and it just
sounded cool that we had these 500 projects now technically a lot of those shells are empty because uh artists
either like uh chose not to release or there's like a missing like something went wrong with
that project shell etc so there's a bunch of empty project shells in there and then we also have
you know collaborations projects in different things in different directions so when we did
the math uh earlier this year we did the math and realized that we were headed towards having exactly 500 projects. And a little bit more technical too, like we're taking the projects
that we did that are curated in the last few months that come with like a physical component,
those each had their own separate shell, but we're putting them together as if they're the same exact
release because they are basically the same project. And so we're not counting, for example,
they are basically the same project. And so we're not counting, for example,
the Boca lamp and then the Boca digital release as two separate projects. We're counting them as
a single project, a single release. So yeah, 500. And then we're coming up on five years and,
you know, five years in crypto is a really, really, really long time. And it feels like
that for a lot of us. And we've gone through a lot, really high highs over those years and some
kind of low lows as well.
And so it just kind of felt, you know, we're headed towards our fifth Marfa this year,
which is wild.
Shout out to OpenSea for supporting that.
And it just kind of felt like the right kind of thing to kind of bring this together into
500 projects and kind of seal it off into a finite set so that we can kind of dig into it as a glass
box capsule. That makes a ton of sense. So you guys have 495 right now. Five are coming, which
as time moves forward, I'm sure we'll all learn more about that. I'm curious for those 495,
you've already alluded to things like bokeh having multiples kind of separately,
releases being counted as one. What was the curation process like for selecting which
collections are sort of in this AB500? Oh man, it's a little bit all over the place. I mean,
let's start with the very, very beginning. Very beginning, I could only get two people to release on our blocks and it was my brother daniel
uh and jeff davis and um so at the very beginning it was like could you would you please consider
putting work on our blocks and two people kind of you know were willing to do it and then but
there were people kind of like feeling it out there were already artists in our discord it was
a pretty slow discord at the time there are already artists in the discord already had a couple people that were
like okay let's just see how it goes and then you know we'll put it out there and so then after the
first releases and you know some stuff sold out we we got buy-in from a handful more artists and
we just kind of started picking up traction from there. So the original tagline of the Artbox website was actually like Ethereum generative content
on the Ethereum blockchain. And given the fact that the generative art space was so niche,
I never imagined that it would ever have to be throttled in any way whatsoever. And so we went
from, you know, a couple of people basically, you know, being willing to release to a handful of people
then kind of stepping up and saying, okay, yeah, I kind of want to do this too, to literally
hundreds of applications coming in every single week sustained for like a year and a half.
And so we've gone through some transitions.
We've kind of had to figure stuff out.
I've multiple times said we added a curatorial board for a couple of reasons, but one of them was because I was too much of a wimp to say no to people because I love generative art and I loved what we were doing and I thought it was really fun and I struggled to kind of say no to work.
same time, we had higher and higher caliber work finding its way onto the platform. And so the,
the, and then, you know, the values of these things didn't really start going up in the first
six months or so, but then the values of the things started going up dramatically as well.
And so now we felt a different pressure, which was like, you know, do we, do we sustain this
kind of like open concept and just let everybody release at any moment there's, you know, or do we really try to lean into the, just the exceptional quality of the work that was also being presented? So
we concurrently had the curated projects and the factory projects, factory projects, we just had a
long waiting list. And honestly, if you could, if you could draw a square on a screen with script,
you would release, although nothing was that simple, thankfully. And then we had the curated releases, which we had a committee, we had a curatorial board
that would gather and make the decision as to which projects were going to be released.
And we started getting into the, you know, you got to keep in mind, this is all very
organically happening, but also explosively happening.
You know, we started figuring out this cadence. And so we got into this cadence of releasing two curated projects a month,
one every two weeks. And, and at the time we were, I think we're releasing six factory projects in
between those every few weeks, or we'd skip the Wednesday for factory and release a curated,
whatever that was. And then, you know, as time went by and things got even crazier, we just said,
look, we can't just do the factory anymore. We can't just let anybody release work. It's also
a bandwidth constraint on our team. It, you know, the gas wars and like the insanity of what was
happening in 2021 were just, it was just too much. And so we decided to start curating the factory.
And what that means is, you know, we had
two tiers essentially of releasing work and we had the curated releases. And then we had, we
converted the factory into what we call presents, which is literally if you have hundreds of
projects coming in, like weekly, we had to take and pick the ones that we wanted to release from
there because as things exploded in
2021 and you know a lot more activity happened a lot more money was flowing in a lot more people
also decided that they wanted to kind of create work this way um and so it was just too much and
so we started curating the factory and that's what we call presents and then um you know we
was talking about this with roger yesterday like like the market started kind of falling out.
And, you know, our pipeline of scheduled and confirmed projects was still pretty far out.
And so, you know, I remember specifically talking to Jeff about this.
This is like, you know, putting the brakes on like an 18-wheeler going really fast.
Like you can't just slam all the brakes and it stops. Like you've got to slow down. And so we started slowly
trying to figure out how we were going to manage the change in demand and also just the change in
the market. And so what we started doing is we started slowing down our releases dramatically.
And we also eventually just eliminated the presents category and then just ended up with
the curated category.
And there's two asterisks to that. Number one, we have the collaborations categories,
which is something that we did in 22, I want to say, in 23 with Pace Gallery and with Bright Moments.
And those were projects, again, they were still like Artblocks had the final approval on all of those projects.
And we signed off and we're excited about every single one of
them uh but they were released as kind of collaboration so that's so that the so that the
publisher or the the gallery bright moments and pace could put their name on there and they could
feel like they were part of producing these projects and bringing them to the table and so
they were joint productions both from a marketing perspective but also from like working with the
artist etc and then we have the explorations category, which is launched with the friendship bracelets.
And the explorations category, you know, to me has always been one of my favorites because this is where we were allowed to kind of experiment a little bit.
And I think one of the things that's really fun about this Artbox 500, you know, kind of closing off, you know, we're going to have a few more experiments projects.
you know, kind of closing off, you know, we're going to have a few more experiments projects.
And then I kind of look at, you know, Artbox moving forward is like one big experiments category
where our explorations category, where we really get to like poke around and figure out,
you know, what, what, what, what the coolest things are that we can do with this technology
at the time, what I was most excited about was being able to make physical things out of digital
things. And so we released the friendshiphip Bracelet project, which I assume most people know that.
But when you click on the Friendship Bracelet NFT,
it shows you the exact strands of the bracelet
that you need to buy
and then shows you how to twist it
and fold it to make a bracelet.
So yeah, so those are the categories.
All of them are very deliberately released by Artblocks,
even the factory,
just in the amount of work
and people that were behind
every single one of those releases.
And then after that, you know, post 500, we are no longer curating.
We're no longer publishing.
And I think that's like the biggest message that we can send out is that, you know, these
are now projects that are going to be published either with a partner gallery, like in the,
in like Artblocks engine like
big shout out to the disruptive gallery for releasing some spectacular generative art this
year uh on engine um got to work with you know red bull on on some really fun projects in the
past obviously prohibition was really fun on getting to work on an l2 and um and so yeah those
are those are things that you know studio, those are things that, you know, Studio, Engine,
those are things that are independently published. These are things that Artbox doesn't have admin
control of those smart contracts. Those are contracts that are controlled by the user,
by the owner. And so those are kind of now where we're going to dedicate the majority of our time
moving forward. That makes a ton of sense. You use the glass case metaphor a little bit earlier on
and also in the announcement to give people a sense
of a finite and complete set.
So this question goes to everyone in the audience.
Maybe Jordan, you can kick us off
because I know Eric's been talking for a while.
You might want to grab some water.
I'm really curious for everybody on stage here,
Matt as well, and then, you know,
Eric, if you want to chime in, when did you guys start collecting digital art? And did you collect
physical things before that? Because what I've noticed, at least personally in my life, as well
as other collectors, it's sort of like an itch. And so even if you came into NFTs a little bit
later than other people, you probably have something else, whether it's comic books or
records or i
don't know photographs whatever that you collect so i'm curious when did you guys start collecting
digital art and did you collect physical items uh before that
Jordan? Or can I just not hear y'all? No, I'm maybe did. I don't know. Maybe they lost.
We might have lost him. But that's okay. I said something. I said something bad. No,
no, no, no, they probably lost Wi Fi or something. But but dude, I got booted off stage sorry i had to reconnect oh there you are yeah did you
hear my question yeah i did i heard the question i just i don't know something happened but yeah
um i think like i mean i think this goes for anyone like everyone always has a propensity
to collect something um for me yeah like i definitely kind of came into the art blocks
ecosystem probably through a different lens than than a lot of people um i definitely kind of came into the ArtBlocks ecosystem probably through a different lens than a lot of people.
I was kind of had a passion for collecting like a lot of physical art and, you know, had a background doing photography and shooting photography, collecting photos and all that stuff.
So for me, like I never even really gave crypto the time of day until I found out about ArtBlocks.
And I was literally just like, you kind of like mentioned this itch
that's like unscratchable.
And kind of once you start falling down that rabbit hole,
it's very, very easy to just not know when to stop.
Like I was just buying ETH and then buying Artblocks
and just kind of repeating that process
over and over again.
So yeah, it was definitely like a learning experience,
but I think like what made it so awesome
was like just throwing yourself into the BlockTalk Discord
or whatever and just meeting all these people that come from all these different facets
of life and kind of having that common shared passion for what was going on and being a
part of something that truly felt revolutionary and interesting.
Even just kind of the first IRL thing I ever went to,
I think it was like Miami, like in 2021 or something. And Eric and I had been like discord
friends for a while. But like, the second we met in real life, it was almost like we'd known each
other forever. So it was like kind of this weird, like thing happening. But yeah, I guess I'm not
really sure if I fully answered the question. But it's just like this kind of desire to collect.
And I think like just the networked effect of art blocks, like just exacerbates that even more, which is like something that's really special to me.
Yeah, definitely. The reason I'm sort of delving into this topic is because, you know, the glass case and this bookend metaphor has this sort of notion of like a finite and complete set. I really like that
wording. And usually when it comes to hardcore collectors, you know, there's collectors of all
types, but hardcore collectors really try to go out and get every single type of thing that they
can. And then it's this like accomplishment. It's this sort of like note of pride where you're like,
I have the whole thing. And so I'm curious, you know, that sort of mirrors what we're talking about today with
Artblocks 500.
But Eric, I'm also curious for you and your personal life, like when did you start collecting
digital art?
And then did you also collect physical items before that?
Yeah, I've been collecting stuff my whole life.
Lighters, cards, comics.
Then screen prints. One of my favorite artists in the world named Carlos
Pozo, he's a local screen, screen printer, um, and an architect and a good friend. And, uh,
before our blocks, I was, you know, starting to, cause I could, I could acquire them for like 35
bucks and it just felt really good to be able to start building, you know, a collection around that.
Um, I think, you know, I think what's interesting about this word of finite sets
is just like let's juxtapose
to 2021 and 2022,
where I think the number one thing
that I, and it sounds like 6529
came into our Discord yesterday
and he was kind of feeling it too,
but it's like too much art,
too much dilution,
like ArtBlocks needs to stop releasing.
Here's the thing.
It's like, there's, you know,
and then, you know,
I get quoted often on my little, I relish an overabundance note in Discord. There's a very big difference between
where we were then, where daily hundreds or thousands of people were entering our ecosystem.
And so there wasn't enough NFTs, forget about what was inside of them, to go around for the
number of people that were entering the ecosystem. And the idea that you limit a collection to something really small when you have growth is
really terrifying. Like you just, yeah, I guess, you know, number go up for a little bit, but
it's, we, we're doing this for the artists. We did this so that people had a way of releasing art.
That's why art blocks exist in the first place. And I think it's really interesting when you hit a number like 280,000 NFTs,
where we did this math and we start thinking about,
okay, this is like hundreds of artists, 280,000 NFTs, 500 projects.
Now we're starting to get to a number that is not going to exclude the rest of society based on an inability
to participate from a price perspective. We have artworks at Artblocks that sell today from
$40 to $200,000. And to me, there's something really interesting for the, like, you know,
anyone that knows me, I spent the last two years, three years, focusing on how to get more people to be interested in what we do in this ecosystem.
And in the pits of despair of the bear market or whatever, it's really hard to do that.
But, you know, there's also like really positive things that have happened over the last few years that have given indication that the outside world will care and will come.
And so as we are thinking about the Artbox 500,
we're thinking about how much is out there.
I think, when you think of,
I mean, I'm not trying to say that art is like a baseball card,
but when you have a baseball card set,
there might be millions and millions and millions of baseball cards.
And so some of them are a dollar.
That's too much.
This is art.
We really want to focus on elevating this as art.
But like 280,000 or 500 projects starts feeling like it feels like a lot.
Like somebody tweeted yesterday, which I've done the math now three times.
It kind of blows my mind.
500 projects in five years is 3.65 projects or a project every 3.65 days, which I still
don't understand the math of that, but,
um, it seems like a lot, but it's not a lot when more people come in and are interested
in collecting and participating in this. And so I think there's a sweet spot there. I think,
you know, it has a good ring to it. I think there's now a story that can be told around this that is easier for me to go and
explain and educate and hopefully pique the interests of people outside of this ecosystem
with everything that's in there. And then as Artblocks then continues to, you know,
elevate the collections, like for example, we announced today that this month we're going to
celebrate Chromie Squiggle. And over the course of the today that this month we're going to celebrate Chromie
Squiggle.
And over the course of the next few months, we're going to celebrate individual projects
for a whole month.
We've got some really fun stuff on the website that's coming that's going to help people
navigate the history of art blocks and kind of how things have happened.
And that's going to release little by little over time.
There are experiences that non-crypto people have on a regular basis when they experience a museum or some kind of cultural thing.
And now it feels more manageable, grokkable to do that with a collection that's finite instead of a collection that adds two or three more pieces every few months for infinity.
So, yeah, I mean, there's so much to say there. There's so
many different kind of like, in my opinion, support for why we're doing this. But at the
very end of the day, you know, you make, you can make me like an extremely selfish person and say,
I like to collect things. I like finite sets. I love the intersection of digital art and how collectible it is because it's 24-7,
permissionless, public, everybody knows what's going on. I love this. This is why we're here.
This is why I got excited about CryptoPunks. And I'm really excited to be able to nudge,
not, it's not, it's not like a perfect solution, but like nudge the art blocks kind of canon of work more towards what it feels like to explore a single collection like the CryptoPunks and let people kind of rest of the world to grok it. And then all the people that have collected these pieces now have collected pieces that
are part of a finite set.
All the artists that are in the collection are now part of a finite set of artists that
are part of this collection.
There's so many layers here that just feels like a massive unlock for me and for our team.
Yeah, when I think about a finite set,
I think about something that I can actually wrap my arms around and understand.
Because there are a lot of people, yourself, Jordan, even Matt,
who were really there at the beginning.
And every three and a half days or whatever the exact number was,
where Artblocks was releasing something,
they were participating, they were participating,
they were learning, they were looking at the art.
There's other people who came into the space much later and are sort of, I'm sure, in their
minds thinking, you know, Artblocks is going to be, or at least they were thinking this,
Artblocks is going to be releasing projects forever.
Where do I start?
How do I really engage with this ecosystem that Artblocks has created meaningfully?
And now that, you know, there's this really tight 500, it lets you like take a breath.
It lets you go to Artblocks website, OpenSea, wherever, and actually start to look and engage.
And I think that the monthly spotlights that you mentioned briefly also are going to help people do that with collections or artists that maybe they've never seen before.
Maybe they've never heard about before.
And I think there's something really, really special to that.
In this theme of collecting, I think most of the timeline saw your sweeps last night, Eric.
How close are you to collecting a full set of the Artblocks 500?
Oh, man, I did it. It happened.
Oh, you did it it happened uh you did it yeah so what what's so as a as a collector
especially knowing that artbox 500 was coming it was really hard not to collect ahead of it obviously
you know that would not be cool anyways but still it's like you have this itch and you know i yesterday
i we announced it i went on the uh on the show with roger i actually wasn't even planning on going
in and doing it but then like there was activity in discord and people were starting to talk about things and it got exciting
and then I can't somebody said something in discord that struck a chord and I was like oh
shit and then I realized that like in that process I realized that I was missing some works that I
assumed and I think maybe I've lost a wallet somewhere because I assumed I had those works
and I don't uh so I went back went back, uh, started looking, realizing that
there's like, you know, a couple of pieces that, uh, we're going to, you know, become increasingly
difficult to acquire. And so I just went through and I made the decision to kind of start buying
it, but there was one collection, it was called glass house in that, that, that had no listings
to it. And I was like, well, shit. And this this is after i i had already bought most of the
rest of them and uh a a very good friend um messaged me and said check your wallet and sent
me one and i uh i that was that was it and then at that point you know the floor had like 10x on
on one of the pieces the cole stormberg piece a beautiful piece by by him and um and i was like
okay i i get you know what's happening here i think it's very obvious and transparent buying one of the pieces, the Cole Stornberg piece, a beautiful piece by him. And I was like, okay,
I get what's happening here. I think it's very obvious and transparent, buying stuff on the
blockchain. So I was like, okay, I'll wait till that one goes down a little bit. But after I got
that glass house piece, I just pulled the trigger. And so I'm 495 out of 500. I hope it is perceived
as an expression of conviction towards this.
Obviously, I'm scratching my own selfish itch of wanting to collect,
but that is the same conviction that I've had towards collecting a full set of punks,
a full set of autoglyphs, a full set of me bits.
There's really only two big sets, maybe three.
only two big sets uh maybe maybe three i think brain drops is a really really good one but like
I think Braindrops is a really, really good one,
6529 memes and opepin you know that are just on my radar and i think you know there had to be a
big influx of capital to be able to like dive into those really deeply but like there's those
these are the things these are the collections of our time that i you know feel not only extremely drawn to, extremely aligned with the creators of, but also feel like they reflect a moment that every year, even during the bear market, it is clear and clear that the culture that we have built and what we've been doing here in this space is going to become ubiquitous to everyday society. And I'll say this too, ubiquitous art in everyday society still only applies to a fraction of the world's population.
There's a lot of people in the world that could care less who James Turrell is or any of the major artists in the world.
But there's a world where what we're doing actually increases the percentage of humans on the planet that give a shit about art and culture.
And in that case, I think because there are so many accessibly priced things,
not just within the Artblocks 500, but within this ecosystem, I think that would be a true victory.
We have increased the number of people that care about art just at Artblocks alone.
The people that stumbled into the Artblocks Discord were not art collectors at the time,
most of them, except for Bologna. And I think that applies to a lot of different collections.
And as this movement continues to grow, I think we will encourage and see more humans collecting
and participating in the arts and culture than in the past. And that's a huge win. And I think
we're kind of set up for that across the board right now. Yeah, I saw that last night and I certainly took it as a sign of conviction on this concept, on this initiative.
And also it was sort of like revisiting the wonder and the joy of some of these like earlier years, maybe before that really dark time of the bear market kind of
sapped some of that away. But it's you're in Discord and you're chatting with people and
you're talking about pieces you like or traits you like or artists you like. And then, you know,
you're looking for one and you can't find one, but then someone knows someone. There's that like
joy and connectivity about collecting that happens when other people also care about what you care about.
And I love that Art Blocks 500 is sort of bringing that back because I can imagine you will not be
the only one who is looking to create that full set of 500 when those are released. And so it's
just going to reignite that spirit of wanting to connect, wanting to talk, and wanting to sort of
network. And so I think that's really cool. You guys alluded to an
exciting future with experimentation as some of these next steps after the Artblocks 500 including
PostParams and this was launched with GWAS Dust Drop from the OpenScene Artblocks residency in
Marfa. So Jordan I'm going to throw this question over to you. For those who don't know, can you share a little bit more about what PostParams does and how it sort of fits into this
new era of experimentation at ArtBlocks? Yeah, can you hear me okay? Yep, loud and clear.
All right, great. I was talking to myself for like a minute a little earlier ago.
But all right, we're good.
Yeah, it's something we're really excited about.
Obviously, we're kind of rounding out these last few months with post params,
but we're really excited for what happens when more and more artists kind of get a sense of what this tech is capable of.
And we think it's kind of perfect timing
for the post, you know, post AB500 2026,
where more artists can experiment with it.
I don't know.
The one cool thing the last few years
about all this tech is that, you know,
you create something and you put it on the blockchain
and it's unchangeable, right?
That's kind of the feature, not the bug. Like, that's what we like. We, you know, you said it on the blockchain and it's unchangeable, right? That's kind of the feature, not the bug.
That's what we like.
You said it, forget it.
It's immutable.
It's permanent.
There's been some experiments over the past couple of years
where other people have tried to do this,
but what if there was intentional flexibility?
What if there were parameters
that could be adjusted after the fact?
But it's not really, you know,
I still think of it as a bonus or a benefit
because it's still, you're still,
the artist is creating it intentionally.
It's really on their terms that they're able to kind of set these parameters.
So some ideas is like what we saw with GWAS Drop D-Dust, where a collector can change their color palette.
So the holder of the token can change their color palette to find something that maybe their favorite color or something they like or something you know that matt that matches you know their their furniture in their house if they frame it
um so that's a really simple implementation right is the the holder can change uh the color palette
everything else stays the same but it's all it's all kind of coded it's all programmed it's all
intention from the artist so uh it's not like they can kind of coded it's all programmed it's all intention from the artist so
uh it's not like they can go change anything right or change the rarities or change any other piece
of the algorithm it's really just one specific thing that the artist intends um it starts to
get really cool when you start thinking about extra you know beyond that, where in the example of D-Dust, Jiwa can, he's got a few levers that he can play with.
And he, you know, one of them is like the dust storm.
So, you know, he created this as part of the residency, as you mentioned.
And of course, when you think of Marfa, you think of dust.
So he's created this kind of virtual dust storm that can actually
take over the entire collection. So every piece is influenced by this dust storm that can roll in.
And he's got some other little Easter eggs and things, but it's just another really
interesting way that this tech allows for customization,
and we're really excited to see what other people can do with it.
These are really just like preliminary ideas.
But once you start attaching smart contracts to it, you can have maybe, you know, you can, I don't know,
we're really excited to see what artists can, can really do with this tech.
Imagine tying it to, you know, another simple use case is the price of Ethereum or the price of another asset.
Or every time a Fadenza is sold, this NFT, you know, changes to feature, you know, the latest Fadenza.
you know, changes to feature, you know, the latest Fidenza.
Or like there's so many different opportunities and ideas that can come to impact a work of art
based on something on-chain or off-chain.
But it's really just another kind of tool in the toolbox for artists.
So we're really excited to see.
I mean, you can think of all the gaming that's been doing.
Gaming NFTs is so hot right now uh
all these things can really be i don't know just just more creativity for the artist so i think
that's the biggest thing we're excited about i want to add to that just real quick i've got uh
this project coming next week and this is this is just to really really kind of nail what we're
trying to do here um in the project i'm doing next week, it's a downloadable ROM.
It's a hard-coded kind of C file that you can play on a Game Boy Advance.
And every Game Boy has a splash screen.
So one of the things that, like, one of the ways that I'm using post-params on my drop
is that if you own a Chromie Squiggle, because the splash screen is a Chromie Squiggle.
So fully on-chain, if you own a Chromie Squiggle, and this can be used via Delegate, so you don't have to do it with your vault, you will be able to set the Chrie Squiggle. So fully on chain, if you own a Chromie Squiggle, and this can be used via
delegate, so you don't have to do it with your vault, you will be able to set the Chromie
Squiggle that you own, but you have to own it. And so at the moment of downloading the ROM,
instead of injecting Squiggle 1981, which is my favorite Squiggle and the one that I use for all
the things, and that's the default Squiggle that gets injected into the rom if you own a chromium squiggle it will automatically inject it it goes queries the original artblocks for our contract asks it for the token hash for
that squiggle and injects it into the game that you download so this it's not changing the
appearance um it although i have one that's going to change the appearance that i'm excited about
it's literally just connecting we talk talk about blockchain being Lego blocks.
And I'm excited about all the use cases for post-params.
But the idea that we are now able to wire the blockchain into an existing Art Blocks project.
I share this in Discord.
It's going to melt faces when the artists start realizing the depth of what you can do with
these things so yeah uh it's just a small touch if you want a chromium squiggle you'll be able to
have your squiggle appear on the splash screen but man it's a way to call back an old project
it's a way to kind of like reinforce and kind of give collectors uh a little bit of joy it doesn't
it shouldn't change the value of the work it It just changes your connection to this work. And I think like that to me is like one of the most exciting things that we can do
with this technology. And I think we're going to see a lot more after that. Yeah, it's really cool
to hear you guys talk about this and have sort of affirmed this era of experimentation post AB500,
because it's, it's sort of like, at least in my mind, you're creating these tools and then
releasing them out into the world. And you're almost creating this little sandbox for artists
to go play in and just see what they make and see what they uncover and see what arises. I think
that's a really cool thing that you guys are doing in service of generative art, in service of the community,
but also I think as a way to sort of honor this original 500 collection. It's really awesome.
One thing I'm curious about, and this will go out to both of you, what are some of your favorite
non-art blocks projects who've done a good job with tinkering with smart contracts or
the blockchain or pushing the bounds of what's possible?
Oh, man, so many.
Let's just start with autoglyphs.
That just kind of really set the stage for a lot of this.
Obviously, MathCastle Terraforms,
forms uh i think you're just very much at the top of that list um and uh you know work that uh
I think you're just very much at the top of that list.
matto matto i think is i don't know if there's there's there's two matters and i always get the
twitter handles confused uh with material protocol i think that's really incredible blockchain kind
of dynamic you know speaking to the artwork at uh based on on the blockchain uh and then also
like there's this ability to when you when you start messing with the blockchain there's this
ability to create almost like a massive online multiplayer environment around a single nft because
you can start receiving inputs from so many different smart contracts you can also receive
inputs from individuals as to how to you can also receive inputs from individuals
as to how to contribute to an artwork and so you know there's there's there's there's ways where
you know with async art you know that was for me the big inspiration for post programs in the first
place like uh the the ability for you know and i one of my favorites is a piece that i got from
jeff davis where i could change a couple different features in that piece but then there was the last
i think it was called the last, where it was like a dozen
or more people were able to kind of interact and change different components and different
elements of the piece.
What does it look like when it's not just one piece and a dozen people?
What does it look like when it's like a thousand pieces and a thousand people that can all
interact and engage and communicate?
Like NFTs being able to communicate with each other is is is crazy um you know uh and and so yeah that those kinds of projects are the ones i'm
really excited about uh and and there's i mean there's a ton out there but i guess i have to
start with just those three you know i i think no uh conversation about nft experimentation
is complete without mentioning jack butcher um i see he's on the call, but really it's just been inspirational
these last couple of years to see him kind of take simple concepts.
And that's kind of what he's known for, right?
To kind of distilling down complex issues into simple ideas
and then to see him kind of create with the checks and Opepin and everything in between.
It's been really, really fun to watch.
And then not to toot my own horn, but I've been experimenting with NFT since 2019.
And my team and I have, over the years, been doing some really interesting things from,
you know, in 2020 launching an NFT project called meme don't buy meme when
we were where we were kind of mixing uh d5 farming with minting nfts uh back in the early days we
were doing some really fun things with that meme meme tokens and tying them to nfts uh we we
released gaming nfts a couple years ago with with Brian Brinkman. I've probably forgotten
all the things, the fun that I've had just as a builder. And I think that's of all the things that
I do, collect, create, of all the things that I do, like Builder is like the top of my list for me.
So I've just been having a ton of fun of all
the of all the tools and creativity and then the last few years getting to work with artists and
kind of really using this tech what it's built for right which is experimentation decentralization
empowering creators so i've had a lot of fun you know we launched prohibition a couple years ago
and that was just an amazing time to kind of bring
this heartblocks tech to uh other creators other collectors and um i've just been having a blast
experimenting that's why i'm super excited to get to kind of play in this new sandbox with uh the
amazing artblocks team and uh artists and collectors and and ultimately excited to see what what these guys
can do moving forward. I got to just throw in pixel decks too. I was at the top of my tongue
and I couldn't get it out earlier. That is just an incredible demonstration of what happens when
the community when the when the blockchain like communicates with an artwork in real time.
It's mind boggling.
It's something that is very much now doable with post-params.
So yeah, these are things that keep us excited.
Yeah, it's really interesting what arises when you give artists tools and then you also give them constraints.
And then they start to operate within that sort of ecosystem or universe
or whatever you want to call it and really unexpected and wonderful things come out of that
I do have to shout you guys out though because one cool way of tinkering with sort of the blockchain
and the extension to the physical world is generative goods which I don't think technically is art blocks but also heart and craft which I minted in Paris I think two years ago ish which you know
has the blocks which people can build and take the generative work out into
the physical world and have it also produced there so that's also I think
something that I'm really excited by is like, we all have now nice frames for our generative artwork,
or we have, you know, our infinite objects or we have whatever,
but then extending it out to the physical world,
which I know ArtBlock's also just acquired Trom.
Congrats guys on having generative furniture and sculptures and art in
people's homes. There's really cool stuff being done.
So I'm, I'm very excited about what's happening here
uh all right i want to oh my gosh yeah of course i mean you guys listen you guys are doing it it's
very cool uh i have one more question and then um we'll wrap up because i know everyone's busy
uh so this morning artblocks tweeted uh about monthly spotlights for the AB500.
And August is the month of the Chromie Squiggle.
So shout out to all my Chromie Squiggle fam.
I'm rocking mine today.
I'm really curious, what will these monthly spotlights look like?
And what do you hope collectors or even people who are just curious,
what do you hope that they take away from these spotlights?
Gordon, you want to take this?
Yeah, I'll take it.
But first, when OpenSea Squiggle PFP?
Ooh.
Ooh.
We'll have to talk about this.
All right.
Yeah, we thought we'd start with the small collection, you know,
Elevate Unknown Artists.
No, this is something that I've been wanting to do since joining the company
at the end of last year is, you know, be intentional about highlighting
and honoring and celebrating these early collections.
I mean, these ones like the Squiggle and Fidenza and Ringers, they always kind of get their due.
But I think it's really important that Artblocks, who continues to collect, you know,
a small percentage of royalty from every secondary sale on OpenSea, that we, you know,
that we really honor these projects and these
artists and the collectors that hold them so i've been trying to find ways to elevate these projects
and that's something that um eric and the rest of the team share uh when it when it started to make
sense that we should do something like art blocks 500 a couple months ago we started getting into it it was just like the perfect
opportunity to kind of kick off you know regular uh celebration regular community you know events
whether it's online or offline uh and and it really kind of came down to okay we have five
months left out of the year uh let's find five projects that we want to highlight.
So we've already got those locked and loaded.
You'll have to guess and wait until next month to figure out the next one.
But yeah,
it's just a really cool opportunity to honor some of those early
collections that,
that really created the culture and community,
not just of art blocks,
but of generative art in general,
on chain art in general.
So yeah, we really really wanted to announce all these things that we're doing yesterday with the announcement but
we decided to kind of slow play it so we kicked off the announcement of our blocks 500 yesterday
and for the next couple days and weeks and months we'll start dropping more and more uh but yeah
today we announced that uh the official kind of featured collection,
featured project for the month of August is Chromie Squiggle. How could you start with
anything other than the Squiggle? So if you check out the homepage of Artblocks right now,
you'll see some featured work, some featured collections. We link out to Squiggle Dao,
some featured collections uh we link out to squiggle dao who's amazing at what they do and
this is kind of right in line with uh their existence of furthering the chromie squiggle
but yeah it just gives us an opportunity an excuse to just like gush over these uh
it's so impactful collections that mean so much to us. So you're going to see, you know, some videos.
You're going to see some written content.
We're going to host some spaces.
We're going to do some fun stuff in the Discord.
We're just going to have fun and kind of – there's going to be a lot going on, right?
We mentioned there's five more releases coming.
We've got studio releases coming up.
We've got Marfa.
We've got a million things
going on but we still want to kind of set aside a specific collection for every month of the year
so yeah it's just our way of kind of again thinking the artist and collection and joining
together as a community really to you know give credit back to some of these early collections that really, I don't know, kind of made art blocks what it is at least, um, you know,
on the culture side and yeah, it's just going to be a lot of fun.
And we want everyone to participate and, uh,
encourage everyone to yeah, to have fun with us.
It's so good.
I'm excited to see which ones come out next because of course there are like
stars within the ab500 that are sort of like well known by almost everyone in the space but there
are so many there's probably hundreds of projects that not a lot of people know them by name or
maybe can't picture them in their mind's eye when someone says the collection name or the artist so
i'm personally excited to have this sort of new experience of discovery as these
things are being featured and as you guys are creating content and spaces and everything like
that. It's going to be really exciting to follow along. And that will be the start of me trying to
put my arms around these projects even more. So with that, Eric and Jordan,
congratulations on this huge milestone.
And I guess all the artists too who contributed here.
Congrats on this huge milestone of 500.
Well, I guess it's 495 now, but you guys know what I mean.
Where you guys are preserving this foundational period
of on-chain generative art.
It means a lot to me that you guys came out and that we got to celebrate and talk and
just really give the people who are collecting and who are curious about collecting the audience
a glimpse into what this means.
Because there were a lot of tweets, there was a lot of opinions, there's just so much
noise.
It's so amazing to hear directly from you guys.
So do you guys have any other last words before we wrap it up? I just thank you. And y'all enjoy the content that's kind of
more excited to kind of dig into the past on a regular basis. You know, we often say that the
art, the NFT or the product doesn't end at the mint. And this is a way for us to be able to
actually like, you know know follow through with that
um as we are minting less as art blocks we can dedicate those resources to towards the past so
yeah really look forward to reactions and responses and feedback to everything that's coming uh and uh
and can't wait to see you know what jordan and the team put out yeah and i'll just say we want
this to be collaborative community, not a one-way
conversation in how we celebrate these things.
So we're always looking for feedback and, yeah, different ideas that come from the community.
Most of the great ideas actually do come from the community.
So hop in the Discord, hop in, you know, the replies, the DMs.
Let's, yeah, let's have fun celebrating these first 500 collections together.
And we just couldn't be more grateful and thankful,
especially to you, Adam, and OpenSea.
Well, I appreciate that.
Thank you guys again for coming.
Thank you to everyone in the audience for listening.
We appreciate your time.
I know everybody's busy.
Go check out the AB500.
And also, if you can make it to Marfa this year, I would love to see you.
This will be my second year in Marfa this year with OpenSea sponsoring.
And we're just really pumped about the future of what Artbox is doing.
So please come out personally if you can.
But if not, we will see you on the timeline.
So thanks, everybody.
We will talk to you soon.
