Okay. Well, welcome, everyone. We are super excited today to have Snowfro Eric, the founder of Art Blocks with us. Art Blocks, I think most people know this but for those who don't, is by far the dominant platform or enabling technology for generative art. So far a very large percentage of the important generative art projects were launched in Art Blocks and the large amount of the market activity is on Art Blocks. And so I'm very honored and excited that he's joining us today. We're going to cover his background, how he got here in the first place. Where the future of Art Blocks and generative art is going and then maybe touch upon some broader industry topics and what they might mean. So Eric first, thank you very much and thank you, welcome to the course. Thanks for having me. This is a little special. This is my first metaverse course. So pretty excited to be here. Let's start with the easy question. How did you end up in the NFT field? How did you end up founding Art Blocks? Why did you find out what? What's the point and purpose of submission of Art Blocks? Well, let's start with NFT. So in 2017, I got really excited about Ethereum early, like January 2017, early in the year and started tinkering with smart contracts and really just like, you know, I was excited about Bitcoin and blockchain technology. But when I discovered the concept of a smart contract, it really clicked. And it felt like honestly, I feel like the smart contract is the killer app of blockchain technology. It's just so technical that it may not be what the mainstream sees that as. But I tinkered, wrote some smart contracts, tried to, like everybody else figure out how to integrate the technology into their regular life. I was in charge of a ceramic tile importing business. So couldn't be less technical, but always looking for like, exploring for ways of like, you know, finding the technology living in the real world. During that time, I saw a lot of organizations release projects in the NFT space, I mean, sorry, in the crypto space. I oftentimes found them to be a square peg around hole, just, you know, have meetings with people and it was just like, blockchain, blockchain, blockchain. And like, how am I going to use this? What am I going to do with it? And I was actually really kind of put off by just like the rush towards utilizing the technology without thinking about how actual use case would be with the product market. It would be the distribution mechanisms, et cetera. Fast forward to June 2017, I was on Reddit and I saw a link for the CryptoPunks project. Clicked it, read it, read all the information that was created and put together by Larva labs and just like old moment for me, it was like, yeah, this is, this is, this is awesome. First of all, it was a generative art project, a 10,000 character generative art project, which, you know, I've always been really big in the generative art. And a project that to me was demonstrating in a very simple decentralized manner, the beauty of the technology, the simplicity and the power of being able to prove ownership of a digital asset. So I claimed a bunch of CryptoPunks, a lot of them were zombies, 34 to be exact. And I then dove right in and never looked back. It was very slow at the beginning in terms of people in the space, spent the next few years onboarding anybody that was interested in hearing about the technology, both IRL and in the CryptoPunks Discord, which was oftentimes a very slow place and oftentimes a pretty exciting place. All the while continuing a practice of creating art with code, something that I had started about six, seven years prior to that, tinkering with projection mapping and generating visual outputs with, with code. And finally, in 2020, after Art Blocks version one, two and three, just kind of feeling like I had an idea that wasn't able to really kind of put into action, I launched Art Blocks formally is what you see it today, which is the fourth iteration of Art Blocks conceptually as a platform intending to host, hopefully, the best generative art from the best generative artists in the world, using a technology that in my opinion demonstrates the power of watching an FT, which is a distribution mechanism for individualized outputs, the one of one of acts concept in a way that really would have been very difficult time consuming in the past for an artist. And to kind of put it all in a box, a generative artist prior to Art Blocks would have created an algorithm, produced visual outputs from that algorithm, save them on their hard drive and pre-block change just displayed them, post them on Instagram, maybe work with the gallery, printed them, had exhibitions, et cetera. Post NFTs would save them on their hard drive, tokenize them, and then list them on a marketplace. And what Art Blocks did is actually cut those three steps out of the middle and make it to where the algorithmic artist would just upload the algorithm to the blockchain. And when the collector came to make a purchase, they would be purchasing a new iteration, a new output of that algorithm. And it would happen on demand, on the fly, the artist actually doesn't know exactly what's going to come out of the mentor, but has highly curated their algorithm in advance. And the collector, it becomes the creator, the one that actually makes the artwork happen. And the artwork is immediately and automatically deposited into their wallet. The product market fit is not what I expected. This is a hobby, and this was a hobby, and just literally like a hugely nerdy hobby that I thought had a tiny little niche audience. But the product market fit has demonstrated a desire, I think, for humans to be individuals and to display and collect things that are unique to them, and the technology enables that to happen in a way that could happen before. Can you spend a couple of minutes on exactly how the process works? Because I think some people might not understand what it means, and if T is on chain, that the algorithm is on chain, it is created at the time of the minting. And I say this, not even new people to the space actually, even people who are not new to the space, often don't understand exactly how it works. You may have spent two minutes on that. Yeah. I was recently on a panel with a very smart man that was talking about this concept of the stores of value. And there's a lot of things in the NFT space that can act as a store of value, but one thing that makes things a store of value is this sovereign bearer asset concept, right? Where there's no external influences in your ability to, A, prove ownership, and B, experience the artwork in a future. And so one of the things that's really interesting about our box is that we are very strict with artists and require them to upload algorithmic art. This is computer-generated art. They upload the code that generates the art. So blockchain storage is very expensive, prohibitively expensive. It's impossible to store an image on the blockchain without spending a lot of money on gas. And the idea here that the artwork stored on chain could generate a one megabyte image or a 1000 megabyte image, depending on the resolution at which the image was displayed was really intriguing to me. Like, if the limitation of the blockchain is storage, meaning that we can't really store high-resolution files on it, but if we want art to persist because it's stored on blockchain technology, to me the solution was storing the root of it, the algorithm of it on the blockchain. And that algorithm, something that we're very strict with artists to make it what we call resolution agnostic, meaning that it can be displayed and will display identically at any resolution that computer are capable of displaying, felt incredibly compelling as a way of utilizing the medium. And so, you know, people have recently referred to this as like the most true form of internet art or utilizing internet technology or digital technology to create art simply because it is meant to stand a test of time. And it stands a test of time from a resolution perspective, which we kind of didn't expect to need until later, maybe four or five years down the road, I figure maybe that they would release some new resolution television that would really demonstrate the power of the resolution agosticism of an artworks artwork. Yet, this year, during a conference, there was a installation that we got to display artworks, artworks on a three-story screen at the Samsung headquarters in New York. And we were able to generate the artwork for a three-story screen at the full resolution that that screen could provide. And no matter what you do with any artwork that's stored as a JPEG or a GIF, you cannot. You either have to up sample, digitally up sample that artwork, or you have to display it at a smaller size than what the screen is capable of doing. And there's something very powerful about something where all of the information required to recreate that algorithm is stored on chain. We used to say most of the information, but now we're seeing other community members upload, even the libraries like P5JS and 3JS that we use to generate these outputs are now also being stored on chain. So all of the information necessary to restore this artwork is stored on chain and it's able to be produced at any resolution. And it's a sovereign bare asset where nobody is deciding or making decisions as to how you utilize the NFT. As long as you own that digital asset, as long as you own that NFT, you own the rights that are conveyed by the artist, depending on the license that they provided, generally it's either a Creative Commons for license, the NFT license, or even a Creative Commons zero license, the CC zero license. And then you are at your leisure to how you utilize that, how you control, how you store that digital asset, knowing that that digital asset will persist as long as the blockchain persists. And that's what the future looks like, but given the transparency and the beauty of blockchain technology, I think that blockchain technology will last for a long time. And we're really excited about what that looks like, where these assets that were created in 2020, 2021, 2022, maybe in the year 2075 are still being able to be reproduced at full scale, full resolution. And you are still the owner of that asset in a way that's provable. It's revolutionary to be able to prove ownership of something digital, and then to then take it further and be able to reproduce that digital thing at any resolution, or within any environment is something that I think is truly special. And has a lot to do with why there's so much value placed on these artworks. And the point is that when someone mints at the time that they're minting, there is a random aspect that has to do with the time that they press the button, right? And this is how somehow there are a lot of you that are in a way a co-creator, in a limited sense perhaps, but the moment that they chose to click, determine what the work looked like, right? And then there is this concept of entropy, which is a concept of the amount of randomness, or where the source of randomness comes from. And on the blockchain, there's no pure randomness. It's pseudo-randomness, which means that there's always a deterministic nature of watching technology. But we utilize a bunch of fun little tips and tricks to make it more complex, borderline, or I would, you should never say impossible, but very, very difficult for someone to game the determinism of an art block piece. And what's beautiful about it is, you know, sometimes say, oh, if I would have minted number 25, I would have gotten something nicer or something different. The reality is that every little component from the balance of the USDC smart contract to the block ID and transaction hash changes and shapes the entropy of what went into the piece, and so every mint is truly uncontrolled by the user, or mostly uncontrolled by the user and random. And that forces the artists to really craft and curate an algorithm where they are putting their stamp of approval on every single output that's going to come out of that, because they need neither. They know the collector has control over what they're actually going to get in the end. Right, so what you're saying is, if I minted number 26, and I said, oh, man, 25 is beautiful, I wish I had just clicked earlier. If I had clicked earlier, the likelihood that I would have gotten 25 is infinitesimally small because unless it was the exact same millisecond or milliseconds that the previous person would click 25, 25 would have been different. Even that, but even the fact that your wallet address is different. So all of these things come into play into the entropy, and our blocks has evolved significantly the pseudo random number generator or the pseudo random generator that we're using. So even with the new smart contracts, it's even different from that. But ideally, there was enough entropy in there to where, you know, and this could be a tangent, so maybe we don't go to you window, but oftentimes people are like, oh, I want my birthday, or I want my DNA to be inside of an artwork. My response is that, you know, if my DNA generates something green and your DNA generates something yellow, and I know that my DNA generated that green one because it's my DNA, sure. But if my DNA generated something and yours generated something different, and we couldn't tell the difference between who generated who's, then really, it doesn't really matter what the source of entropy is as long as it's pseudo random or random. And it doesn't, I don't know that people actually want to have too much of a say in what the output is. I think, at least for me, I like being able to control fully, well, limitedly because it's pseudo random, but be able to craft what the algorithm produces. And oftentimes, you know, we see people kind of go down this path, especially with our boxes, we kind of expand people are like, hey, can I put my birthday or my wallet address or my DNA, make that be the source of random for the piece. And I think it's actually fun and intriguing, but the result would be not palpable. And if the results not palpable, then it's an unnecessary intrusion into the block, the air gapped nature of the blockchain. And that's something that kind of goes back to like the art is on chain. And then also the generation of the seed is on chain, and therefore everything is air gapped and free from human meddling, for the most part, using this technology and the provenance there. I mean, obviously the NFT technology provides some crazy provenance in terms of ownership history and, you know, some financial information, but this added provenance of everything generated, stored on chain in an air gapped fashion, I think further enhances the durability of these things that people are looking at as not just like beautiful art and cultural items now, but also stores a value for the future. Makes perfect sense. Any touch upon something else you said, a common way people describe these types of collections is one of one of X that each one's unique, but they're part of a broader whole Tyler Hobbes calls them long form generative collections. And I think there's at least one point of view that this really is the natural medium for generative art. It's found its home because you can let everyone can see the algorithm operating at the same time. What's your view on this? Yeah, this goes in so many levels. I mean, if you just take a step back to one of one, right? I'm sorry, one of X. So in the physical world, you trust a photographer to do an addition of 10, but you don't know how many. I mean, we need to make sure that we can trust artists just institutionally, like down to the roots, we need to be in a position to trust artists. I live here in Houston and I love that the contemporary art museum here in Houston has this slogan that says, trust artist period, right? So we need to trust artists, but there's something really beautiful about NFT technology where if it's a one of X, if it's a one of 10, it's demonstrable. The artist is publicly accepting a capped limitation for that addition. Sure, they could go mint the same art on another platform, but it would be traceable and you would still be able to get back to what the original was. Sure, they can go print an addition of 10 and sign 10 additions and call those one of 10, two of 10, three of 10. But ultimately, if we trust the artist to like act in their best interest and within the cultural norm that the art profession kind of provides, there's an opportunity for the artists to demonstrably choose an addition size. Now, an addition size of 100 of the same output is perfectly suitable for photography, 3D art, stuff made on procreate, I mean, things that are made with the hand. But in an increasingly digital world, we are drawn to a digital representation that distinguishes us from other people. And so while there's nothing technically wrong with making a PFP or an avatar out of an addition of 100 where it's like everybody can potentially have that, 100 people can have that same avatar. The internet has trained us to try to be as individualistic as we are in real life. And it's impossible. It's physically impossible. I could be called out for saying things that are impossible. So maybe it's very, very, very improbable that there would be two humans with the same air count and facial structure, I mean, literally identical humans. And I think that kind of translates well into the digital space. The concept of one of one of X is that the Larva labs guys could not have, I mean, technically you could have created 10,000 crypto punks individually by placing pixels. Like that would not have been a good use of time, especially knowing the power of what the technology can provide. But what they did is they wrote an algorithm that created 10,000 pixels and 10,000, I mean, 10 characters with 24 inch by 24 pixel by 24 pixel characters. And when they first came out, it felt like it was too many, especially in the typical norm of art, like 10,000 works of art in one fell swoop is a lot. It felt like a lot. There was really a few hundred people maybe participating actively in the space in the first couple of years after the release of the CryptoPugs project. But what we've learned is that as, forget about the speculation, the FOMO and all the money involved, like as this technology finds a foothold in our daily lives of transparency. And you know, my daily life is very different than the majority of humans because I use Metamask on a daily basis to authenticate who I am. So I understand we're not there yet in the mainstream. But as this technology has kind of taken a foothold, we realize that 10,000 is nothing. 10,000 is very, very, very few. And that's demonstrated by the value, the kind of insane value that CryptoPunks and Board Apes have. And that value is what we are assigning as humans to being individuals. Because I don't believe that the value of 10,000 CryptoPunks would be what it is today if it was 10,000 of the same CryptoPunk as in addition of 10,000 or even the same 100 editions of 100, the value would not be what it is today. The value is what it is today because of a sense of individuality. If I'm flicking through Twitter, I see your avatar, your PFP way before I see your name and I know who you are. Unless it's like a funk or, oh, actually that's facing the other direction or maybe like a B1 punk, but that has a different background. Like, there's something really special in the digital world about the individuality. And this goes back to this product, market fit, and I'm not trying to make art sound like a product and collect or sound like a market. But the distribution mechanism for an artist to create something with a demonstrable addition size in a large addition without intermediary steps and all the information used to recreate that artwork is on chain. It's just unprecedented stuff to be able to put it together like that. And I definitely want to reiterate that that is not when I launched Art Blocks like I was excited about the one of one of X concept. I was excited about art being on chain, but I did not fully understand the product market fit, the distribution mechanism and the value proposition that this would have beyond the small niche generative art world. I literally saw this as a cool tool for generative artists, did not fully embrace or understand this product market fit until a couple of months into it when I started to realize just like how powerful the sense of community was around being a the creator of an artwork alongside the artist, the one that created the piece and then the sharing of it within a community of people with the artist president. Yeah, I still to this day kind of like and shocked at how it exploded, but also totally understand from a human perspective why it is exploded. And so one of one of X continues to be something that we pursue. I often say that the lowest friction use case of one of one of X is pixels on a screen with demonstrated a wonderful kind of community reception to the pixels on a screen being artwork that just lives in the digital space. And now we're really excited and earlier you asked, you know, what does the feature of Art Blocks look like? I don't think this ends at pixels on a screen. I do think that this permeates into the real world. And while I'm not fully in tune or understand like what the implications are of physical and digital goods that are meaningfully connected, it makes me. It just feels like an unresolved thing in my gut. The idea of like an ephemeral physical object that's derived from a digital object that you are the sole and provable owner of is something that I find fascinating and something that I really look forward to exploring beyond the pixels on a screen concept. And I really think that's where Art Blocks is going to be hopefully, you know, shepherding the world into enabling their audiences to own both digital and physical one of one of X's as opposed to like one copies of the same exact object when applicable. Obviously like we may not need spatulas that are one of one of X's. But yeah, in a future where I can mint a car and the car is unique to me for whatever reason. Yeah, I would look forward to that. And maybe that's 50 years down the road. I don't know, but I'd be excited about it. You had mentioned something at the beginning. It's very minor, but I want to flag it because it's the same way I think about the space. You had said the puncture generative. In my view is that most PFP collections, the way they're done, are also generative. And so if you think about the PFP's end-generative art, it means the vast majority of NFT spaces as it is today is in fact generative. Is that right? Yes, absolutely. Yeah, it's all, I mean, unless someone's drawing each individual one, yeah, it's by definition generative. I think it's further confirmation that generative might have found its native medium with NFTs. I think that there's a chance that if crypto punks were not generative, I may not have claimed them because it was a pain in the ass back then to claim an NFT. There was no metamasker, I didn't know about it, and I'd sink my Ethereum wallet, etc. And what caught my eye was the fact that it was generative and the fact that something generative was made accessible in this way. And people always say like larva labs is essentially instituted a 10k number for a PFP. It felt like a lot. A lot that came after that came from that concept of a generative thing, crypto kitties, also generative. And then everything that came after that, that was minted on demand was in fact generative, whether there was a reveal process afterwards or not, it was still a generative piece. Okay, this is an amazing background. Let's talk about the next steps in Art Blocks. And let's start again with some basics, Art Blocks used to have three collection types, curated, playground and factory. Now there's a different set, there's collaborations, there's also an API. How was it before? How was it now? What are the differences in the types of collections? Why did you make the change? Why did the series end? And so I'd love to hear about that. Well, first of all, I made collections initially when it was just me. And then Jeff Davis was working alongside me actually contract basis initially just because he was such a wonderful person to work with and like so involved early on. But when I was still kind of making all the decisions for the most part, I started getting the sense of dread of being the naysayer. And I am generally someone that is a very inclusive person. I don't like to leave people out. I don't like to say no to people generally, although I've had to say that more and more in. But then at the same time, before Art Blocks launched, I got very little traction. Some of the best artists in the world that I've since launched on Art Blocks, like fully ignored tweet messages and direct messages, Reddit messages when I reached out in 2018, 2019, 2020 to talk about Art Blocks. And I totally understand why it was a shit show of information that I would just like regurgitate to them and be like, yeah, this is crazy. Or they just went on fire. In the first few weeks of Art Blocks, everything except for the Chromium School sold out immediately. And I think it peaked a lot of artists' interest and oftentimes with things that make people money, there are people that make things because they're artists and they love it and they're excited about sharing. And then there's people that make things because they can and because they can make money. And I did not feel that I was the right person to mean making those decisions. I didn't have time. First of all, I was not sleeping. And so I was making those decisions on behalf of the platform for artists that I don't know and I didn't know and I didn't have time to research. And so the first thing I did was create this territorial board to potentially say no to art. Very little art initially was said no to. And I still wanted Art Blocks to be a fully open platform. So I still wanted a place for people to release art. I just wanted to celebrate the best art. And so I added a couple categories. First of all, playground because we had some very prolific artists that were wanting to release more work that had already released on Art Blocks. And I didn't want to call it curated because I wanted there to be like a little pause just to give some breathing room. And then what we called the factory which was originally intended to be the open platform for anybody that can code a pixel onto a screen to code a pixel onto a screen. And that also served as a fall back for as we were getting more and more artists. I mean within a couple of weeks of opening an artist application, we had 300 artists apply. It was just like an impossibility to keep up with stuff. It gave us a bucket to put art that we were excited or wanted to give people a shot at like producing art in this way but did not want it to be feet. Like it wasn't at the level of the art that was coming that was to be featured in the curated section. So then after a year and a half, there was a shift in curation where we added a second curation process which is a screening process internally. And from feedback from some of the some of the really strong artists on the Art Block website and this idea that we wanted to make sure that all of the artwork on our box, not just curated, perpetuated the value of effort that artists put into their work. We started screening a significant percentage of artworks and lost the ability to kind of host everybody's art on our blocks. And it was really kind of sad for me because I really was really excited about the open democratized nature of the platform. But also when I launched Art Box, I didn't realize that we would have such incredibly powerful and significant artwork released on the platform. You know, given that I'm a huge fan of generative art and I'm a huge fan of these artists, like for years I had followed these artists like way before Art Box existed and like the best thing that I could do that we could do as a platform in service of those artists was to make sure that all of the art on the platform was of a certain level of quality. So what happened is we started accepting only about 15% of the artworks that were submitted to Art Box. But because of the perception of what happened and last year there was a kind of a mad rush to Art Box, we couldn't keep anything live on the platform. Everything would sell out immediately, crazy prices. I mean, the FOMO and speculation was real and it was significant and it was really, I think it was a step back for Art Box and for generative art. Like I think it was detrimental to the long term meaning of this type of art. In other words, I would very much have preferred this kind of slope than this kind of slope because if you're very crypto enough, you know that everything goes up, comes down. We started getting responses from artists that were screened but not curated and say things like, well, I don't want to be released on the factory. I don't want to be released in like the second class, whatever thing. And A, I would take it way more personally than I should because a lot of my favorite artworks are in the factory. And factory, a lot of the artwork is incredible. It just wasn't pushing boundaries. And there's a lot of really good examples of things that are in the factory that had they been released six months earlier, they would have absolutely been curated. But if you see the progression of like pushing the boundaries of dinner to art and the curated section, you realize that like it could be a brilliant work within the art and an artist could have worked on it for years, months, whatever. And it still wasn't pushing a boundary for the medium. And so they wouldn't want to release it on Art Box and so then we'd see the artwork release on other platforms. And I'd be like, man, 15% acceptance rate is pretty elite, in my opinion, especially given that there's not a huge number of generative artists in the world. And it hurt. Like it hurt us, the team, to see that happen. It was like demoralizing. And to know that we might have like screened an artist in and they were like they were dissatisfied with like the experience. And what it made us go back to think about is like, okay, is the word factory a turnoff, right? Like originally it was meant to be a factory. This is just anybody that can code can put art on the platform. But over time it was no longer just churning out meaning to churn out work or let anybody release. And so we started to second guess the word factory. We also realized that the curated that the playground badge and to explain playground or what we call heritage playground now was any work that was released. By an artist that had previously been curated because they had like a previous they had like a freeze period. They couldn't release new period of work six months or they couldn't submit to curation, but they could still have really great artwork. I think a lot of the work in the playground is and could very well be curated. I think for example, Meridian by Matt Deloria is one of my favorite pieces on our box period. And it's a playground piece, right? But to me that easily could have been a curated piece. It came sooner after his original release that it wasn't eligible to be curated. But what we're realizing is that playground actually became a designation for artists that had been previously curated more than a category in and of itself. And I also got a lot of communication as I, you know, I spent the year this year and last year essentially integrated in intermingling with both the traditional art world and the entity space and a lot of people would mention that they're confused even after someone explaining to them what the different categories were. They still felt confusion and uncertainty. And so the amazing team that I get to work with every single day at our box put our brains together and simplified it. And we really just, you know, changing the name from factory to presents is basically saying our blocks is presenting this work as a wonderful example of generative art. And the concept of playground is shifted to A, we have the heritage playground collection. But E, a playground project is something that that tag just means that that artists have been previously curated. And I do think that artists should be recognized for having achieved curation at some point or a curated project at some point in the process. So now we have those two categories curated. We also removed the designation for the series. In other words, we had series designations every quarter, it would be a new series. And the reason I did this is I did this for a lot of reasons. As a collector, I really always enjoyed collecting comic cards by series. Literally Marvel series one, series two and series three is the original reason the card collecting is the original kind of idea of coming up with a series. And then the series though became the other reason for the series was that somebody that may not be able to collect all curated Art Blocks pieces would be able to say and feel the satisfaction of having collected all of series one. So it was a compartmentalization. It was a way of enabling people to participate and have a set, something that I've always been drawn to is full sets, having a set of something and being able to say, look at my series three sets, even if they could not participate in all of them. What happened though is we had a very early project called elevated deconstructions, which gosh, the simplicity of that project is so special and also one of my favorite projects in Art Blocks. It was an addition of 200 and it demonstrated a bottleneck in collectability. And I don't have a problem with the bottleneck in collectability other than it's really good information. It was a really good reference point. For the future, when here we are saying we want to represent the best gender of art in the world, but the best gender of art might not actually do well at an addition of 1,000 or 500. That may just not be the intent. Long form, while I love it, obviously everything from Fidenza to CryptoPunks and all these things, like I love the long form gender of art concept. I also remember early on screening projects that were incredible, but should not be an addition bigger than 50 or 100. So we got into this conundrum where we were like, hey, it would be really nice to release curated projects in addition to 50, 100, 200. As someone that was collecting one of every single curated drop, in fact, multiples of that, I realized also how terrifying it would be to be a collector and be presented with a curated drop of 50 and realize that in order to maintain this set, I would have to purchase something that was going to be in so potentially high demand. And so we dropped the series designation and now curated is just curated. So all of the heritage series went through eight. To me, fits inside of this really beautiful acrylic box of like, this is the roots, this is the beginning of our blocks, this is how we got started. You see a really clear progression in technical capabilities of projects over the course of that time. And then it ends at a point where we are now recognizing in Art Blocks that we want to be able to recognize a project is curated and have it be an addition of 50 or 100 or 200. And so moving forward, the curatorial board is asked what they recommend and we've been doing this for a little while now, what they recommend for addition size. And that is what within a plus or minus what the final edition will be. And I would love to see the curatorial board decide that something would be an addition of 50 or 100, obviously have the artist agree and sign off on that and see what it looks like to have something that we are considering to be the pioneering work in the field of gender of art, but in addition to 50. And that's where the series destination has been dropped, playground, factory destinations have been dropped and we now have our blocks curated, pushing boundaries, our box presents, incredible algorithmic, like I still consider them masterpieces. Then we have the collaboration section, which we're really proud of that right now we're currently deep in some collaborative projects with with face gallery, one of the leading art galleries in the world. And then most recently we added something I've been thinking about for a really long time, which is living in a new category called explorations and we added a project called a friendship bracelet, which is an exploration beyond just the artwork, although the artwork is to me the NFT is the artwork, but what it looks like to actually carry instructions in the same provenance and permanence of the Ethereum blockchain, integrate and embed instructions into an artwork on how to make a physical object. That doesn't fit the art for art itself narrative that we've really built and formulated for Art Blocks, but it definitely fits an exploration of what gender of art can and will be for the future. And so the team came up with this really wonderful category titled for explorations, where we will put things that Art Blocks is essentially dreaming up or commissioning ourselves. And so we commissioned the artist to in their style create this beautiful thing that may demonstrate something, whether it's a, you know, minting experience that you have to like visit somewhere to get to or a, you know, physical item that you can create giving back to our artists community in a way other than just releasing their work, commissioning their work and putting the kind of the weight of what we created in our blocks behind something that will generally hopefully be either always low cost or free. Obviously that could change as ideas and projects come into the fold. But yeah, really excited about that category. That's where we're really going to kind of spring into this future of art or content or design being created generatively beyond just like what the people's on the screen are. Amazing. Well, look forward to see how the next phase goes. Let's now go to, I guess, less technical practical questions, more conceptual ones. We're going to try and rally suit utilities faster and some slower. I had seen some work that the unit kind of two valuations team did. Art Blocks is some gigantic percentage of the market cap of generative work. 85% percent, 97, 83. It depends on the day. Is that good, bad? Does it matter? Is it healthy unhealthy? Does it matter? I mean, I think what matters is what happens and how this unfolds in five years and what's going to guide that is people's intentions. There's so many things that happen in the space. People get shamed for selling art. It's like, well, I never really intended on selling my crypto bunks when I got them. Then there are situations that arise where it makes a lot of sense. Number one, I got excited about creating Art Blocks. I would sell zombies for $200, $500, which is kind of crazy to think about to pay for that. Also, as a father of two, eventually someone gives you an offer for an NFT that you have a lot of and you say, okay, it would literally just be reckless for me not to accept this offer and change the trajectory of my family's life. Shaming is so bad. Also people get shamed off in for having very big collections. The reality is that these people will be stewards of this art and it's just way too early to tell how they will steward the art. I'll give you a perfect example. I know the owner of the Houdis Houdat account that owns over 1,000 Chromie Squiggles and I feel very confident in that person's intents and vision and alignment with me personally, with generative art and the future of the Chromie Squiggle. I feel like those squiggles are in really good hands. We don't always know who the person is on the other end and we don't always know what the intentions are of the person, the platform, the mechanic, but the space moves very quickly. It is only a matter of time before we start really understanding what that dominant position in generative and or crypto art will mean and it could very well be detrimental to the future of this space, but it could also be incredibly powerful if these people hold these collections, start displaying these collections and do great things with it. There's also the concept of fractionalization which on the one hand, I do die a little bit inside when someone fractionalizes a squiggle. It just feels weird. But then on the other hand, I think it's an incredibly powerful technology. It's brilliant. It's beautiful for democratization of art and obviously we have SEC, regulatory compliance type stuff which hopefully will be kind of worked through over the course of the next year or two. But as much as I am uncomfortable with the little squiggle being fractionalized, I actually am more excited about the power from a decentralized ownership perspective of the value proposition of fractionalizing, not just art, but anything in this space. That combination of the fractionalized stuff plus the stuff that's in high collection, I really think that we're going to see how that plays out over the next year or two. I think it's too early to tell. I'm a very optimistic person and I tend to believe that people do things for the right reasons for the most part and so I'm hoping for the best. Next question. There is a tremendous debate going on about royalties. One side of the debate is like, wait, this is one of the good things about the NFC space that artists can earn along with their collectors over time. And another side of the debate is basically like, oh, you're so naive. This is never going to work. I mean, effectively it's that it's dressed up in a lot of things about blockchains and code is long, whatever, but it basically is that. Wait, where are you in this topic? Oh, man, do we have an extra hour? I would say a couple of things. Number one, I think one of the things that really drove the point in for me was at a some point somebody on my Twitter feed referring to royalties as a transfer tax. You know, a lot of, and I think we live in a very broken society and so I'm not actually going to like speak highly of what's happening with our taxes, but a lot of the reason that taxes exist ideally is like, you know, to help pay for infrastructure and roads and things that we utilize. And generally, the word transfer tax to me is troublesome in the fact that like taxes when utilized correctly are for the greater good and benefit the greater good. But anyways, it's kind of an aside, but you know, oftentimes I see it referred to as a transfer tax and that kind of bugs me a little bit. I firmly believe that creator royalties are revolutionary. I think it's highly problematic. And you know, when I give lectures, I often, you know, I've gotten to speak to at this point, thousands of not tens of thousands of people this year to give higher education, giving lectures about generative art, NFTs, whatever. And I make it a point to point out that baked in has never existed for royalties, even though they're often referred to in articles as like being baked into the smart contract, baked into the artwork. They have and will always be a cultural norm. And you cannot force culture. You just can't. I just, I don't even care about smart contracts in this premise right now. I'm just talking about in human life and society, you cannot force culture. But when there's a really good culture, people rally and support around that culture. And whether that culture is, you know, I don't know what blue jeans were big in the 90s or whatever, or something relevant today, like royalties or environmental concerns, et cetera, people rally around culture, A, because no one can force them to rally around culture. Otherwise, it's not culture, it's technology. And the, you know, I'm speaking as one of the people with the highest vested interests, personally, in the perpetuation of secondary market royalties. I don't know what the charts would say, but I'd say that I'm pretty high up there in the charts of total royalties received as a creator. I also have a really high vested interest in platform royalties, right? So like Art Blocs also survives, partly because of royalties and, or creator fees or platform fees. And I guess I fail to understand, for example, if you want to go on an open C and you want to see your Art Blocs artwork, like Art Blocs artwork is intended to be on chain. It's reproducible from the blockchain, right? Like that to me is the value proposition of Art Blocs. The value proposition of Art Blocs from a consumer perspective is like this beautiful back end that our engineers have built out to like really make strong and enable people to mint and see, consume that generator already immediately. The ongoing server costs of hosting the previously generated artwork, and this is both for generative and IPFS based art, even though IPFS right now is fairly centralized and propped up. We have to pay for those services. So as a platform, you know, everyone's like, what's Art Blocs? I just, now we've been releasing a lot of really cool stuff at Art Blocs, but like for six months people were like, when marketing, when this, when that, it's like, there's actually a limitation to what one human can do. So in order for Art Blocs to have grown, Art Blocs had to grow in terms of a team in the terms of staff. So we're nearly 40 people now. We have two choices. We can have an ongoing revenue source that allows us to participate in our own success as a platform in the same way that the royalties concept enables an artist to participate in their own success as an individual. Or we have to sell more stuff. So the concept of Peter, Robin, Peter to pay Paul, in other words, oh man, we've got to pay all these server fees next next month. So let's just release a bunch of artwork. First of all, eventually that artwork just won't sell. There's actually limited amount of, there's a finite amount of money in the space, whether it be able to get to infinite sometimes or not. And so when something has to persist in perpetuity, you can choose to pay creator fees, to pay platform fees. And this is just kind of focusing on the platform fees for a second, so that when you want to go list your artwork on OpenSea, there is metadata, there is a image that appears in the OpenSea window or any other marketplace that you want. Or you can choose, say, hey, look, the value proposition of art box is actually the stuff is stored on chain. So when you go sell your NFT, let's not cut the artist and let's not cut the platform any percentages. But maybe you have to go to Etherscan and regenerate your art to see what you're about to buy or what you're about to sell. People want the art to appear. People want the art to be there so that they can utilize the fast-paced speculative concepts of NFT, because generally the people that fight the creator royalties are more on the, generally more on the speculative side, not always, but generatively, generally. But you want the facility of being able to transact on a marketplace, but you don't actually want to acknowledge that somebody had to pay for that image appearing in your browser. And the more popular art box is, and I'm just using art boxes as an example, but this can be applied further, the more resources that are required to serve that image and to generate those algorithms and to produce algorithmic outputs. And so to me, it is very simple that the platform would benefit from more people utilizing the platform and that there would be a perpetual reward for the platform, for perpetually hosting the artwork. To me, that feels very simple and straightforward. And that's hard to argue with, right? Go download your art and put it on IPFS and then let the platform not need to continue hosting your artwork if you don't want to pay those fees. Now, when you go to the artist, it's a bit more complex, right? Because the beauty of artist royalties are not apparent other than the artist making money until the norm has existed for a while. So I often say I consider myself an outlier when I talk about creator royalties. I don't think that I still wake up wondering if everything that's happening is real or not. And I've said before, I'm not someone that's driven by money. And so I have a very different perspective, I think. Then a lot of people, and I have nothing against people that are drawn and driven by making money, in fact, I think that's probably the normal way to operate and I consider myself kind of a weirdo in that sense. But I've also had a lot of success with some of the NFTs that I've acquired and subsequently accepted offers that we're life-changing for. Now, take that number, this crazy outlier number that maybe artists like myself and X-copy and some of the bigger, generative artists in this space are making and cut that by a hundred. And now consider what that amount of money, whether it's 50 bucks or $500, a week would do for someone that is making a living on art. First of all, one of the most prideful moments for me in the world of art box so far is the fact that there are now dozens of artists that created art, that were creatives part-time or as a hobby that have been able to quit their job to pursue artful time. And back to trusting artists, artists generally have good intentions and we need more art in this world. We need more conversation about art, we need more critique about art in this space. We need more artists. The world doesn't hurt when you have more artists. The world might hurt when you have more other types of professions but not artists. So let's get more artists out there. There's such a psychological issue when you as an artist, I'll put it this way, I never thought that royalties would be where they are today. But man, when I released ChromiSqueals, they were $10 apiece. And last I checked, they were $22,000 apiece. I think it's incredibly difficult to understand and process how somebody would think that it's okay psychologically for someone to create something and sell it for $10 and see somebody else sell it for hundreds if not thousands of times what it was originally sold for. Yeah, I priced it at $10 because I was happy with that price point and that's great. But artists have historically watched other people profit exponentially on their work and their craft and this technology enables us through cultural mechanisms to perpetuate a process where artists now get to participate in their own success. And whether that's $50 a week or $5,000 a week, it doesn't actually matter because the $50 a week extra for an artist over the course of 10 years instead of releasing hundreds of artworks because they need to continue to put food on the table. It's like you have accumulated a little bit of IP for every artwork that you have released and in the long run, art will thrive because there's less pressure. There's just in some cases a little bit and in other cases a lot less pressure to produce. And I can speak from experience. I have this project being released in Mexico City in two weeks. I generally am a fairly overwhelmed person with Art Blocks and just the space in general and a family and I committed to releasing an artwork and I'm actually very proud of it. But the amount of time that I've had to spend on it is insane. And the idea that I would rush through something like that because I needed to sell my next thing, the same idea that Art Blocks would have to sell more art to pay for ongoing surgeries for employees to grow the team versus letting the artwork continue to give in a small percentage for the perpetuity of the assistance of that artwork. To me, it's hard to understand why people would have such a strong opposition to that. And I empathize with everybody. I empathize with people that are selling an entity for less than what they paid for it. Sometimes as the crypto prunks project has demonstrated and some early Art Blocks projects have demonstrated, people act as if somebody held a gun to their head in order to make a purchase and make an acquisition versus them taking responsibility for purchasing the thing that they purchased. If I buy a house for a million bucks today and I have to sell it for half a million bucks next year, you bet the realtor is going to make their commission regardless of whether I made money on it or not. And there's a lot of other examples of that in society. So I just think that like, royalties are cultural norms, there's this beautiful opportunity to like change things. There's this beautiful opportunity in this nascent space to be more giving, to be more charitable, to build that culture into what we're doing as artists, as platforms. There's a beautiful opportunity in this nascent space to try to be more inclusive and diverse, to concentrate on gender diversity. There's an opportunity here and it may or may not materialize, but if it doesn't, I personally will look back at it as a missed opportunity. And that is the same with royalties, with charitable giving, with inclusivity and all sorts of other parts of this. It's like we are at the very root of something that could be revolutionary. It already is in some cases for this entire planet. We are stewards of this and this is an opportunity for us to really put things forward in the best way in a way that makes sense for the longevity of the artwork, for the artists, for the artists estate. When I'm long gone, the fact that my children may benefit from this thing that I created today, gosh, that feels good. And I feel like it's a cultural norm and no smart contract restrictions and no shaming and no overall fomo bullying speculation in the space is going to enforce that. It's cultural and the more it remains cultural, I think the longer that it's going to remain as a norm and we need to fight for that and we need to fight for the culture. Last example, because I could speak on this for a long time, the thing that fascinates me the most is when a collector purchases a Chromies Google OTC from a seller that doesn't want to pay royalties, right? Like they just don't want to deal with the market, they don't want to pay royalties and the collector sends me the royalties, not the seller, but the buyer. And I don't think that royalties should be imposed upon the buyer. I actually think that they're perfectly fine on the collector. The fact that there is a cultural, because at this point there's nothing I can do to control it, there's a cultural drive that the collector has to take a moment, send me a message on Twitter and say, hey, what's your e-federis and what's our blocks as e-federis so that I can send these royalties, these creator fees, these platform fees. Man, that speaks so much more than the opposite, which is in my opinion, trying to institute contract level restrictions in this space, because the more you try to restrict somebody, look, if you want to be decentralized, then you be decentralized. If it's decentralized, that means that you can't actually impose some of these rules. And the more you try to create rules, and this is very often visible in our political system in the United States, for example, the more you try to impose rules, the more you try to shame someone, the more you try to implicate people in things, the more defiant they get, and the more vitriol they have in defending that right or that ability. And to me, it is almost encouraging defiance to try to impose something. And okay, this is really the last thing I'll say. Our blocks released a rule last year where you can only mint one NFT per wallet, because things were getting out of control with bots. You know what that did? It made it to where people wrote bots that minted 100 NFTs with 100 different wallets. Like, what was I thinking? Thinking that I could get in the middle of a decentralized technology and try to fix something that was actually unfixable. There is actually no solution. People would yell on this score, what about the bots? What are you doing about the bots? Like, there was actually no solution, but we felt so pressured to accommodate and to understand people's frustrations. And it worked for the first two or three drops. But then after that, it all went to shit. And today, we don't actually know how many humans own our block pieces, because we encouraged, we shot ourselves in the foot and we encouraged people to generate new wallets because they wanted to mint more than one NFT. And if that had been a successful tactic, then I would have a different opinion on some of the restrictions that are happening in the NFT space today with royalties. But it was unsuccessful because we knew deep down inside that it could be circumvented. You cannot block someone from selling an NFT without royalties. You cannot block someone from minting only one NFT or force someone to mint only one NFT. You can create hurdles. You can make it, you can encumber them with other tasks to pull it off. But as long as we're celebrating decentralization, you can't prevent it in a fully decentralized manner. And to us, at our box in general, we believe in the fact that an NFT is a sovereign fair asset and something that we do not have any say in once it's minted. And so we hope that people will continue to perpetuate the royalty conversation as a cultural norm in support of artists and support of creators. And what we're going to do is we're going to, instead of trying to punish people for acting in a way that doesn't feel right to us, we're going to reward people. And how that looks, I don't know, maybe in a far distant future, I, as snowflake, do a drop and allow this people that have participated in the royalty convention or the cultural standard and don't allow people that don't. I don't know. I'm not saying I'm going to do that. It's just because of the beauty of the transparency, it's like, you know, we can fight decentralization or we can totally embrace it. There's a beautiful transparency. And that transparency is something that will enable us as a platform to reward the people that are perpetuating this cultural standard that has really changed so many different people's lives. Whoa, that's quite an answer. Sorry. It's just top of mind. I also don't want to get into a Twitter debate with like thousands of people that feel so strongly about this. And I, you know, I really don't think it's wrong to impose creator royalties at the smart contract level. I just don't, I just, you know, a lot of times it's posed as, you know, in support of the artist. But I think long term, it's actually maybe detrimental. And so we just don't want to perpetuate it in our blocks. I do love the idea that an artist is taking a stand by imposing contract level restrictions. I think they're sending a strong signal. It's a very important signal. And I think that that should exist and should continue to exist. But for a platform that is relying on fully on decentralization of algorithms stored on chain, it feels like the wrong move for us at our blocks to impose that kind of stuff. And it feels like we've already learned our lesson with a one per wallet limit and we will continue to embrace decentralization as much as possible. So I have a question that is a, it's kind of the same question. Though it might seem like there's two different things. PFP projects to some greater or lesser degree have managed to create some level of community around the tokens of the project. One of X seem like they could do that in somehow a similar way in a way that just pure one of ones might not because there's like a natural community there. And the, but I do think most generative artists have treated, you know, one of one of X is very new and interesting and onshade and amazing and differentiated. But most I think of the artworks artists have treated, okay, you've got a piece of my art. You have a piece of my art. That's fine. I don't know that there has been a ton of innovation thinking about do we want to do more with my thousand holders of whatever. Hazers take something in the news this week, right? It still feels a little bit unidirectional from the artists to the collector. I think relevant to this question and it's not the same question. It's a different question, but it's kind of the same question. You don't see a ton of CC zero projects because the logic of a CC zero project, I think tends to be that well, there'll be a broader engagement within and outside the community to bring this lore into the public sphere, the global digital commons, et cetera. And I think one of those kind of come from the same place. To be honest, that it's still a fairly traditional. I've made a piece of art and you've bought it and I hope you display it nicely. And it kind of stops there. But my question is, and noting that this is still all very unknown and un clarified even in the PFP space, but could you imagine some version of these techniques that we're seeing in the PFP space somehow applied to a generative art collection? So I imagine a lot with the Chrome's Google and I think that Chrome's Google might be one of the more hybrid in the fact that it's a larger edition and it is often regarded as representing something or representing a community. And lately a lot of people are saying that it kind of represents NFTs in a way which I would never put that cloak on just because I would want to be so whatever. But I think that, okay, well first of all, it's your first question. It does feel a little unidirectional for a couple of reasons. Number one, it's all very new. So we're just getting started here. Also artists creating art for the sake of art itself have generally just made art for the sake of art itself. That's what they have done. It is the ones that are thinking about the secondary implications that are really going to blow people's minds. And so I agree in some cases that it feels unidirectional, but I also don't necessarily think that is a problem. I think some artists, and this, man, this goes to the CC0 debate, the licensing debate, it's kind of like people should be held accountable for what they set out to do and following through with anything that they promised to set out to do. People should not be held accountable for a fantasy of what someone thinks somebody should do because that's what they think is the right thing to do. And so if an artist sets out to release an artwork, and it's really good artwork, the people buy it, and the artist doesn't reward that community, other than actually being in the discord and talking about their art, which I think is actually like a very beautiful utility that's built into specifically art block artworks. And not all artists stick around, but a lot of them do, especially when they have a great reception of their art. They're on Twitter, they engage. What other, I mean, I can't text or get on discord with Damien Hirst, let's say, or other major artists at will, whereas in this space, part of the utility is just the artist being present. I think that as artists form their careers, and they realize that there's an opportunity in this space to develop a slightly different career path than the traditional artist does. If you apply the concepts of creativity that are required to make beautiful works of art, and you then zoom out and realize that this entire movement is in and of itself a really interesting conceptual performance artwork. I think when you start seeing artists apply creativity to the concept, to the community, to the, like, just experience, we're going to be blown away, and we're going to be really rewarded for having been a collector of that artist. And not all artists are going to do that, and that's okay. A lot of artists are still in shock for the amount of money that they made on their artwork. A lot of artists didn't want to make that much money on their artwork, especially last year when things were crazy. Like there's some serious mental health concerns that we address all the time internally at Art Blocks for the team, for the artists, even for the collectors, all of them because of the insanity of the space. But ultimately, I don't think artists or people should ever be held accountable to do anything with their artwork beyond what they originally set out to do. And if they do, it should be celebrated and appreciated as, like, icing on the cake. And as an example, I definitely am incredibly terrified of Fogo and speculation, and somebody texted me yesterday and told me, Skrillex had all time high, and part of me wants to celebrate, and part of me literally just wants to go hide under a rock, because the more people pay for these things, the more entitled that they will get. So right now, I think it's still reasonable, and Art Blocks is just hitting milestone after milestone, and people feel that things are happening, and I guess they attribute some of the success of Art Blocks to the success of the Chromysquiggle, and vice versa. But then things slow down. And it's completely predictable. It's as predictable as the sun rising, that if the price of the Chromysquiggle starts to drop, people will start saying, and this happened earlier, I remember when punks, I mean, when apes rose dramatically, and someone's like, what's interesting? Skrillex and apes, and someone's response on Twitter was, apes know how to market, and I'm like, yeah, I'm not going to market. I'm not going to go out and market this squiggle. All the things that are happening, to me, feel very organic. I just, you know, I would like in the future to do really nice things for Skrillex holders. I don't feel that it's appropriate for me to do that until the entire collection just mentioned out for what it's worth. And I definitely don't want to like suggest that I'm going to do that because I'm fully cognizant of what that could potentially do for the value of the Chromysquiggle. If I said anyone with a Chromysquiggle is going to be able to mint an artwork of my next year, which is absolutely not what I'm doing to be clear, it could potentially increase the value of the Chromysquiggle. And that is not a good reason for the value of the Chromysquiggle to go up if it's something that I've created to be a work of art for the Seagorn itself. It's okay to have platforms like Proof and V-Friends promise future value in terms of utility of air drops. That's okay because they have the resources to perpetuate that, to continue to do that. Not a lot of people can, but I fully believe that, you know, the Kevin Rose's and Gary V's of this world can continue to delight their communities with things over time. But the art that's created for the Seagorn itself, like it doesn't feel like it should be required to do that. But you and I both know that in the event that an artist were to do something delightful like that, it would be welcomed and received and celebrated and appreciated. And generally, as artists, we like to do things that make people happy. I do, at least. Like, I'm literally, that's what I do. I like to try to do whatever I can to make people smile and make people happy. And so the opportunities will come in the future to delight the people that are supporters of my work. And I would like to do that. But the moment someone starts forcing me to do that or say that I owe them something is detrimental to my desire as an artist to do that. And I think this is a big problem with the CryptoPunks community and why eventually the Larva labs team sold the IP. It's like, you know, you create this thing and then the world tells you what to do with your baby. And if you don't want to do it, the world tells you that you're an idiot or that you're stupid or that you're wrong or that you're, you know, extract whatever they might want to say. And that wasn't the original intention of the artwork. So I don't think that anybody owes anybody anything other than what they promised when they set out to do stuff. We've been very, very careful at our blogs and I'm very careful with my artwork in particular to never promise anybody any future value. You know, the friendship-based project that we just released is an example of value for our blogs collectors. But it's not intended to be some speculative thing. But if it has value one day, that's great. That's fantastic. But we never promised it to anybody. We never made anybody buy an art box artwork in order to live deemed or to receive this air drop. We delighted people with these really nice things that recognize people's participation in this space. I think it's only been two years for art box artists. I think of all of the art box artists, not that many have quit their job, but the ones that have quit their jobs will find ways to delight the people that have collected their work. If anything, to make them want to be repeat customers of that work. And so I think those opportunities just haven't been explored yet. It feels like we've been doing this for a couple of decades, but it's only been a year and a half to years. And I think we need to give people a little bit of space and time to kind of really think about. I think a lot of the artists that released art on our blogs literally have no idea what's about to happen to them. And oftentimes they talk about that moment when they unpause the project and how their life has changed ever since, not just financially, but also pressure, but also community. They have like fans and we should let humans take a moment to absorb everything that's happening. I'll be the first to say that I personally have not, I can't stress this enough, I have not been able to take a moment and reflect and absorb and understand everything that's happening. We're humans and we need time to understand and it's going to take a long time to understand exactly what happens. And once the people that want to continue in this space understand what those implications are, I'm pretty confident it will stop feeling so unidirectional and it'll start feeling a lot more dynamic. And in the meantime, you know, again, like no one's forcing anyone to buy anything, but damn, like I've collected a bunch of art blogs, I think they're beautiful works of genital art and buying art for the sake of art itself feels like the right thing to do. And if it goes up in value, would they great? And if it doesn't, you know, I have to build 20 houses at this point just to show what genital art collection or, you know, just build a big metaverse and show it all there. So anyways, I'm kind of rambling there, but I just think that there's a certain amount of entitlement in the space and holding anybody accountable for anything beyond what they set out to do feels wrong to me. But I'm someone that's pretty laissez-faire and I believe that, you know, people should do what they want with their bodies and people should just, you know, as long as they're doing good, they should be allowed to make their own decisions. Okay. My last question is this because I know we've delayed you to your next meeting and I want to do that. My last question is what question should I have asked you, but I didn't. Ooh. Oh, man, you've asked some good ones. Some very pertinent ones. Yeah. You didn't ask me who my favorite Art Blocks artist is, which is something I'm very grateful for. I don't know if you can get that question and have to like pick a child, like my favorite child. Yeah, that's it. I don't know. I think you nailed it. Okay. Well, thank you so much for joining us. We very much appreciate the time. The insight, I will say I can't. I couldn't be more excited about the future of generative art, both in the net, both as art, but then I think in other digital objects that will become generative. And then maybe as you say in the long run, we'll figure out how we do this in the physical world as well. But in the meantime, for sure, for virtual goods, this will absolutely happen. And I mean, one mental model I have, I think it's, it makes the world a more beautiful place. Absolutely. And that just so literally makes the world a more beautiful place, a more unique and diverse and, you know, just dynamic, dynamic world. And I can't wait to see everybody wearing friendship bracelets next time I see you. All right, sir. Thank you so much. Thank you so much for having me. I appreciate it. Hello. Hi, hi. Hi. Good morning, good evening. Good morning to you, I guess. Good evening here in Europe. Thank you very much for this amazing discussion you've had with 6'5 to 9", with just what's that and it was really brilliant. As you might know, we ask our guests if they can to spend a few more minutes with us taking questions from our students. So thank you very much for being here for that. Just a note for the people that are listening to us now either on the OM or YouTube. As always, please post your questions either in the OM chat or on Twitter using the hashtag NFTQNA. Please don't post live questions on YouTube because we're not monitoring that chat. So let me start off with a number of questions from the students already. Some of them are quite practical, let's say, regarding how our blocks operates. But rather start with the discussion you just had with, I mean, we just heard the discussion that you've had with 6'5 to 9", regarding royalties. I know that you sort of had the... yeah, it's a hot topic for everyone. I see lots of discussions in the chat while you were discussing with 6'5 to 9". So I know you advocated for a more, let's say, less effort or kind of cultural norm approach to how this thing is going to be resolved instead of, let's say, imposing restrictions on smart contracts. But I'd like to ask you, in the decentralized world and especially in the original Bitcoin communities and everything, there was this mode of code is low and that rules should be embedded in smart contracts and be respected by everyone because otherwise it's going to be clear. So how do you feel regarding this? Can we trust the collective to come up with a unified homogeneous like, resolved to this question or should we at some point agree on what should happen and make it on the contract level? Well, number one, I just want people to understand that this will never actually be resolved. This will never be something that is just stamped, done, finished, move on. Number two, I do believe that code should be law, but only when the code can be law. And so we embrace decentralization, we embrace the sovereignty of owning these things in a way that really didn't exist before you. I mean, we couldn't own digital assets before. We can't. We can provably own the digital asset, but we can't provably force anyone to pay a royalty. You can't block someone from operating without paying a royalty. You can hamper their efforts. You can make it difficult. You can make it complicated, but you can't block it unless you get really restrictive and you start actually putting restrictions on the ability to transfer an NFT with permission. So there is a world where you can actually guarantee royalties, but you'd have to restrict the ability to transfer. And so I'll give you an example. Last year I created this kind of, I worked with a consultant created this crazy level of security, cold storage, two week delay for all of my R-blocks NFTs. And then I transferred 2,400 R-blocks NFTs to this wallet. And it would feel pretty weird to me if there was some mechanism required for me to have approval in order for me to transfer. I wasn't selling them. No royalty should be paid when you transfer from one wallet to the other. But you have to transfer your assets every now and then imagine someone gets hacked, compromised. And you're watching stuff happening and I guess you need approval that even the hacker can't steal your NFTs. I guess that's maybe that's a good thing right there. But yeah, I mean, ultimately I don't know that unless you go to those levels of restrictions, which what happens if the approver loses their keys? Are you no longer able to transfer your NFT again? You know, there's a lot of things that make me uncomfortable with that level of control. And if you don't go to that level of control, then code is not law. And unfortunately if code is not law, I believe that we're encouraging people to act in a way that will prove that code is not law. Because that's generally how society likes to be both good people and bad people. They like to show and prove that their position is valid. And that's one position that seems very easy to prove that you can get around these restrictions at any point. And there's a lot of arguments that it's hard to get around the restrictions and it is. It's actually really kind of annoying to try to figure out how to get through, how to wrap an NFT. But it only gets easier as people build tools to make it easier. And over time, my opinion is that, you know, there's this thought that like, you know, our royalty is going to zero. I don't actually think or I can't tell you with certainty that I'm correct. But I think there's actually two paths. I think that there's a path that royalties go to zero because people try to enforce royalties at the smart contract level in a way that's completely impossible to enforce unless we restrict transfer ship. And then there's the other path where royalties go to zero because of the cultural, you know, because we believe that we should reward people that operate in good behavior and then everybody just becomes a bad, you know, actor, I guess. I don't think that people that don't pay royalties are bad humans. By the way, I just, everybody has their motives for being in the space, right? And that's what we need to understand. But I think for someone to stand up and say, this is the way for royalties not to go to zero. And the other way, the potential culturally sensitive, non-restrictive, you know, positive reinforcement way is the wrong way. I feel like that's actually a pretty bold statement to make also. And I don't, again, there's no solution here. And I think it's just more of like, let's see how it goes. We've been told that Art Blocks, artworks consistently have a higher percentage of sales that include a royalty than a lot of others. And I think that this narrative that we've pushed so hard, I mean, to the point of dying on a hill of buy the art for the sake of art itself, like support the artists, participate in this new thing of collecting art and understanding art and whatever, that seems to have an implication towards people's desire to want to continue to support the artists. And I guess the last thing I'd say is if somebody wants to sell a chromisquiggle and do not pay, like just so adamant about not paying a chromisquiggle royalty, not sending me fees or not sending art block their fees, like, I just can't imagine, you know, reaching out and be like, you're an asshole. It's just, it is what it is. Like we just need to kind of embrace it and work through it. I agree. Very related question. I think you sort of answered it, but I'm going to ask it anyway. Aside from what you think is fair or desired, what do you think will eventually happen? Where is the royalties narrative converging to? I think that's interesting. I can't remember if I mentioned in the interview before, but a lot of royalties that I receive and Art Blocks receives, because this is really interesting, right? We have two parties here. We have two interested parties and some people would make an argument that the creator fees are more important than the platform fees. And obviously, we want to support the creators. Also, people want upgrades and updates to our blocks and they want us to grow the platform, make it bigger and grow the team and give you more features. And so, you know, we also have to be cognizant of the fact that these, you know, the expansion of the platform sometimes requires revenue. I think that given that a lot of collectors sometimes will purchase a squiggle from a person that doesn't want to pay royalties. And the purchaser takes it upon themselves to reach out to me to request the information to send the royalties is a demonstration of this being a completely unenforceable cultural norm where the creator and the collector are creating a long-term relationship that is going to be mutually beneficial. That collector is making sure that, you know, as I release new work, maybe I'm going to ask them for feedback. I mean, this is actually a pertinent example. There's a collecting group that reached out to semi-royalties for a squiggle they recently purchased and I was like, by the way, I'm working on this project for Mexico City, for Bright Moments, you know, I'd love to get your feedback on it. And they got a bit of an early view on it and they got to give me a little bit of feedback. Like, some people don't give a shit about that and that's fine. So like, if you don't care about that kind of relationship, then no big deal. Oftentimes, we are angry at the traditional art world for being so restrictive and gating and like only certain people get access. But, you know, I've said this before, like, if you're rewarding people for being a good customer, you know, at the traditional art gallery, if you're rewarding someone for being a thoughtful, meaningful collector that gives you feedback and advice and goes out of their way to like, send you royalties, even when the seller didn't want to. Do you think that it would make any sense for me to completely ignore those people and instead release an artwork that's available for anybody to mint? It feels like if I was that person that was going out of my way to pay the royalties, if I was going out of that way, out of my way to give feedback and I was not given an opportunity to kind of have early access to a piece or at least an early raffle to a piece, I would feel a little bit let down and betrayed. And so I just think people need to be aware of that. Like, I will never release another 10K PFP-type level artwork, you know, and there's a lot more squiggle owners than there are potential artworks that I can have in the future. And I think it's very reasonable for me to want to reward the people that are trading my squiggles and paying royalties, not punish the people that don't, but reward the people that are. And I think that creators have a lot of power here in that sense. And the only time will tell how this all plays up. But I really think that this is something that's going to be a pretty impactful part. It's going to be 30% less now that everything's kind of going to shit on these marketplaces, but it's still going to be part of the narrative. At least for our blocks, it will continue to be the theme of supporting our artists. Yeah. Okay. So moving on to the more practical questions, but still related to the reality, I guess. So I have one student asking, if there are any CC0 work looks projects at the moment. I'm asking if someone could make derivatives of squiggles if they're a non-holder. So CC0, we do, we have a few. And I've been very public about my stance on CC0. I think it's very, something very intriguing. And I think it's wonderful that the world is exploring it. Obviously, I don't have the guts encouraged to release something CC0, but that doesn't mean that it's wrong. I'd say up there with my favorites, there's a project called Supermental. And then I believe, is it, I'll go rhythms, but I'll go beats by Han and Ichael Estaniel are also released to CC0. And I'm sure there's a multitude more out there. It's a really interesting concept, since this is a university conversation, I'd like to get a little bit of to show here. At Art Blocks, we do all these exhibitions. And we like to ask A, the artist, of course, their permission to exhibit their work, but it'd be we like to ask the collector for their permission to exhibit the work. And there's just too many artworks for us not to do that, right? Like if someone collector says, I don't want to show it, well, we can always show another person's work. And a very smart artist came back to me one time with the CC0 release and said, well, why are you asking collectors for permission to show the work at CC0? You have this permission, right? And I thought that was a really interesting point. And I actually very much defend it and understand it. The idea that CC0 is stripping potentially permission from the artist from displaying their work, I mean, but then also from the collector, I think it's fascinating. And so I think we still believe it very strongly that with Art Blocks, it's like whether it's CC0 or not, like somebody is the owner of that artwork. And we'd love to get permission. We'd like to get a blessing that that artwork is going to appear. So it's leading to some really interesting things. Because if Art Blots were to ever make prints and we wanted a token gate, prints, obviously just the way infinite objects, token gates, squiggles, would we token gate CC0? Because why would we? Right? You don't have to own it. So anyways, I think it's going to be really fun to explore what CC0 means in the world of art. Obviously in the world of PFPs, it has some really interesting impacts and implications. And then in the world of art for art itself, I think it's going to be a really fun next couple of years as we explore what all that means. Regarding the Chromisquiggle, that's a little bit more complex. So there is a license. It's called the NFT license. And I've been working with an attorney on expanding the NFT license. And I'm way overdue. I mean, it's in my backpack. I'm ready to release it. Just have some tiny little stuff that gets in the way. If you don't own it, no. The NFT license says that if you own the NFT, you can commercialize the light, the lightliness of the NFT of the Chromisquiggle for up to $100,000 a year without asking me any kind of permission. There's things that happen if you exceed $100,000 in revenue a year. So that gets a little bit complex. And that's why it's really important to reach out and kind of be in touch with the creator in advance of what you're doing. Because if the project exceeds $100,000, then there are licensing agreements that need to come into place. The NFT license that we're releasing is trying to be a little bit more innovative in saying, look, if you release a project, you get your $100,000 a year max end of story. If you reach out to me in advance and clear with me what you're working on, now, to be clear, you don't have to clear anything with me. You can go make shwarma, squiggle, whatever you want to do. But if you start exceeding that cap, I can and will, if you're making something that makes me uncomfortable, like maybe squiggle underwear or something, say, okay, you are no longer allowed to continue making this product. With the updated squiggle license, what I'm doing to try to encourage people to reach out and give me their ideas of what they're working on so that I can give them in advance the yes, even when you exceed the license. We're expanding the value, the revenue to $250,000 a year instead of $100,000 a year for anyone that's willing to reach out in advance and clear what they're working on, not for the first $250,000 but for what happens after you exceed that. If you don't own a chromium squiggle, the only thing that you can really do is if you have a website and you make something for people that own chromium squiggles, then you could potentially help people that own a chromium squiggle make something that they want to make. That's not super clear in the license and so what we did is say, okay, yeah, you can do this, but number one, you can't advertise it as chromium squiggles by SnowPro. It cannot help you generate more revenue by utilizing the brand and you have to token get it. In other words, you have to agree in advance that any products that you make for anybody that owns a chromium squiggle that they are the rightful owner of that chromium squiggle before you make it. Hello, can you hear me? Yes. Did I lose you? Hello? Uh oh. Oh, okay, you can hear me. Yeah, I can hear you now. I think we were cut off. I lost a few when you were saying what happens if you are a nonholder and what the updated license clarifies about this situation. If you're a nonholder, you cannot exploit any specific chromium squiggles, but you can help other people exploit their own. In other words, you can have a website that sells merch that allows someone that owns a chromium squiggle to make their own chromium squiggle on that merch. There's just some rules on how you can imply that. But the squiggle is not CC0. It is a licensed item. And part of the value proposition I think of the NFT is owning it gives you some permissions and some rights. So if you don't own a chromium squiggle, ideally you're not out there making merch or doing anything specific with luck. And at the very least, if you're doing something with a chromium squiggle, because if you go make 20 hats, you're not going to hear from me, but you should at the very least get permission from the person that owns that chromium squiggle, or at least a blessing or a head nod. Because really, this, again, a lot of these things are cultural. None of these things matter until there's a lawsuit involved. I can't imagine really what it would be like for me to sue someone over making a bunch of shirts or a bunch of hats. I mean, we would maybe ask for a takedown if they're doing something that is egregious. I don't want squiggles printed on bad quality stuff. I don't want crappy merch with them. But if you're doing good stuff, if you're making good things, I'm excited to see more chromium squiggles out in the world and more power to you. Super. And that's to be clear, the $250,000 rule that we mentioned, is this an update to the old $100,000 limit, or is it just the case of- We haven't updated license. No, so we haven't updated license and the license is addressing what it looks like for museums and exhibition centers to acquire the NFT. Just a little bit of wording in there because that's happening a little bit more and more. And also, we're trying to give people an incentive to reach out to me and let me know what you're doing with your squiggles. So you create chromisquiggle boxers and all of a sudden, and you sell $100,000 worth of boxers, fine, no big deal. All of a sudden, they become like Nike wants to license the chromisquiggle. And all of a sudden, it's like a million dollar thing. I probably won't want chromisquiggle boxers to exist at that scale. And so I would be able to tell you, initially, hey, feel free to operate within the license. But if you exceed that, we're going to put a stop to it. Like, it definitely don't want a global brand of chromisquiggle underwear to exist. And that's kind of what that license is saying. It's kind of like saying, hey, look, as an entrepreneur, what does it take for you to make a $100,000 in revenue on a hat? Like, that's a lot of hats. And so as an entrepreneur, a lot of us just small scale, we want to just have fun. We want to make stuff. We want to see what we can do. And that's what that license is there to do, is to let people tinker and have fun and not have to ask questions unless you're getting serious. And if you're getting serious, then we want to know and we want to be involved in the process. Okay. I think we have at least a few artists among our students because I have one, two, three questions asking more or less, how can an artist be eligible to be included in an Art Blocks collection in the future? And they put a collection inside that. Well, number one absolutely has to be generated algorithmically, period. Like, there's nothing we can do at our blogs to host any artwork that already exists. In fact, the magic of Art Blocks is that the artwork does not exist until it's purchased. So if you're looking at a piece of art, it's already not compatible with that straightforward. Number two, you need to be able to write an algorithm and that algorithm needs to be written in pure JavaScript or a few libraries that are compatible with JavaScript. The majority of projects released in our blocks are pure JavaScript, P5JS or 3JS with a couple variants out there. The project needs to be already established and ready to go when you apply. A lot of people early on would apply with an idea and then be disappointed to know that we don't have coders at Art Blocks. I think it's in fact like a conflict of interest for Art Blocks to support an artist on how to create their code to then be screened and then potentially curated on the platform. It just doesn't feel right. And then also a lot of times people reach out asking for help coordinating with the coder and that has led to some kind of awkward situations. So we really don't do that either. Really, when you're applying to Art Blocks, you need to come with an algorithm ready to release on the platform. And so then it's submitted and there's two layers of screening, screening one, which accepts about 15% of the artworks that are submitted to Art Blocks. 1515. 1515. Yeah, it's a reflection of us studying very carefully the market share that we have. Like the participants in our community compared to the amount of work that was coming in, so being submitted. At some points we get 200 applications a week and we release six artworks a week at most and in fact often less. So 15% of them get through and once it gets through, that means it will be released on our blocks and it'll be released on our blocks in one of two categories. It'll either be released in our blocks curated or our box presents. So once the artwork gets through and into our box, it goes through a second round and this is where we actually have a formal, more academic board of curators that decide not which projects are great because we already think the project is great if we're releasing it on our blocks, but which projects are pushing the boundaries, which projects are kind of making us even internally rethink the way that we think about generative art or what can be done, what's possible with generative art. And those projects get tagged as curated and released on a slower schedule once every other week we release a curated project. So at this point, unless the market expands significantly, we're releasing roughly 24 curated projects a year. And yeah, that's kind of what we have. We have a new category called explorations. It's pretty fun where our blocks is actually getting to explore things that we've been thinking about for a long time, we just released a friendship bracelet project last week where these are ideas that I've had for years about what it means to own something, what the difference is between a digital and a physical that's connected and potentially has the ability to lose value when they're separated versus something that's ephemeral that has an almost intangible value to it but is still meaningful. Things like that, our blocks consumed in the example of the friendship bracelets by itself our blocks consumed me entirely to the point where I was unable to tinker and really get behind again, what is this technology, what's the power of this technology. And so if I would have had to release that project on my own, which in fact, when I first approached Alexi Andre on that project, it was almost six months ago, maybe eight months, maybe a year ago, I don't know, with the intention of releasing it as I could just separate collaborative work between me and Alexi Andre. It may never have happened but getting the weight of our blocks behind to help tell the story and explain what's happening with these physical ephemeral physical objects really made things happen. So that's the third category called explorations and then of course we have some collaborations like what we're collaborating with, pace and pace gallery, one of the biggest galleries in the world, they bring their own artists to the platform and they release artwork there as well. Great. I've got two follow up questions on that. So the first one is if the artwork is not known until it's purchased, how do artists and the curators board test the output before the artworks are minted, how do you know if the mints are likely to be beautiful as a collection, how do this happen? That's a good question. So the final edition size is going to be, let's say, an edition of 100. The final exact edition size is unknown. I mean, the final outputs of the final edition sizes are unknown but the algorithm exists and the algorithm can be run. So you can press play on the algorithm and see an example output. These example outputs demonstrate the variability of an algorithm and that algorithm could have millions, billions of possible outputs. What's special about our blocks is that we're forcing the artist to pre-curate the algorithm to make sure that they stand behind and are excited about anything that could potentially come out of that mentor and then also to sign off on a very compact final output set. So if the algorithm can handle millions of outputs, they're setting that as an edition of 1,000 or 10,000 and then they're locking that and saying the only artworks that represent this body of work, the final body of work are the ones that were created during the mint but you can press refresh on a browser and refresh over and over all the artworks. So effectively you simulate the output and you simulate the outputs. A related question is, are all Art Blocks projects minted in the same way with a common standard required and how much does it cost usually to go through the whole process? Well, we are all over the place on how we made the most standard is a Dutch auction. We use a Dutch auction as a method for there to be a little bit of price discovery and also to ensure that a strong collector is given the opportunity to collect the work because even though it be at a higher price, if they want the artwork, they can get the artwork before their second gas work. It lessens the gas works a little bit, not as much as we'd like. Artworks can be released at a fixed price. We discourage it, especially recently things have heated up a little bit more for Art Blocks and so the fixed price auctions are being bought. It's really funny to look back now at how strongly the community pushed back on the Dutch auction and really wanted us to leave things at fixed price because it made it possible for the most part for people to be able to flip more. Right now that we're seeing what a sophisticated bot can do, literally consume an entire collection, we realize, and that's what we were trying to avoid with the Dutch auction, is that we realize that if you don't have price discovery in place and one or two people can completely ruin your ability as a collector to attain that work or to have the minting experience. To me, I still think one of the most important things about Art Blocks and one of the things that will continue to define us, especially as people will explore alternative minting methods is that moment of surprise when you mint something and you don't know what you're going to get. Okay, I've got many, many questions but I'll try to respect your time because I know you're very busy so I'm trying to pick up a last one. We have time for a few more. I mean, I haven't until 9.30. I'll ask two then. So the first one is, are you concerned about supply versus demand issues? Is there an internal discussion in what looks about market conditions and the supply being issued for its collection? Yeah, we are constantly having internal discussions. Am I concerned? No, I mean, this is the thing. We often say, like, at our blocks, we are in a river that is moving very quickly through rapids with no paddles. Supply feels excessive when things slow down and then things pick up and we can't have anything in stock and then everything else, then all of this, like when there's nothing left to mint on our blocks, prices settle higher on the Dutch auction because there's nothing to buy anymore. And there's no right or wrong there, there's not like a, it's just, it's very difficult to control or to manage what that looks like. And so I think it's naive to think that anybody would be able to react quickly enough. Yes, Art Blocks could be a little bit more authoritarian and make decisions on behalf of the artist, but you have to understand, for example, an artist determines their minting style for their work, sometimes six to eight weeks before the release. So you know, something for.1 ETH today, if ETH were to go to 10,000, all of a sudden it's like $1,000 for the artwork and we can adjust those things, but you'll see that based on the transparency of the space, you know, if we have it listed for.1 ETH for five weeks, and then the week before we make this decision that ETH is just so high that it can't, you can't afford that piece, then the artist is in a really bad spot because they lower the price and then the community gets upset because we changed the price, etc. So it, I think that there's an opportunity there to study the market and be as tight as we can of the market, but understand also that it's naive to think that we can actually control anything in the market. This is as much as we can't control the price of Ethereum. Just as, I mean, what we can do, what we do have a goal for it, our blocks, let's just make this very clear, our goal at our blocks is to increase the number of people that enjoy our work. And that's not to pump our bags, that's because we believe that we have something that is going to be relevant way outside of the 400,000 wallets that currently operate within the NFT ecosystem. If you understand that and you understand there's 400,000 people that have an NFT or that are active in the MTF space and there's 200,000 our blocks of artworks, if that wallet count increases dramatically, there may not be enough art for everybody. And all of a sudden we're at a deficit and all of a sudden prices start going up. We're not doing it for that reason, but we are trying to grow awareness of generative art, grow awareness of NFT digital art, scarcity, et cetera. And so it's just kind of an interesting balance and we're working through all of it. Okay, final question. I like this very much. I could have asked this myself. So Art Blocks is a platform, but a lot of people see Art Blocks as an art brand. How do you see that? Is Art Blocks more like a museum or is it more like a launchpad? I don't know that trying to compartmentalize Art Blocks right now really makes a lot of sense. Like for example, Art Blocks started as an open platform for anybody that can create an algorithm to put code on chain and really if you could code a square pixel onto the screen and make it change with every mint, like we were happy to have you. And that has changed dramatically, right? Like there's just more demand for slots for releases than they are than there is demand for Art Blocks's artworks. What happened when we started screening is if you really think about it, we started following a little bit more of a gallery model. And that was never the intention of Art Blocks, right? So in fact, you know, we started this exhibition center in Marfa, Texas, which is kind of in the middle of nowhere, but it's this beautiful place out west actually. I'm not to fly out there. And part of the drive of this exhibition center was that there was nothing for sale. In fact, that's what's kind of cool about Art Blocks. There's really nothing for sale. The only way to buy stuff is to go out on the website and mint stuff or you get something on the secondary market, but you would never walk into an Art Blocks exhibition center and be like, see a price tag next to an artwork that's on the wall because there's no need for the exhibition center for that artwork to change hands. That's what the beauty is of decentralized exchanges. And I think that there's something really important about being an exhibition center and not having something to sell. So, you know, the gallery has to sell art. We have to sell art. So maybe we are a gallery in that sense, but long term, what I'd like Art Blocks to be is like this place where artists become discovered because you know that the next ringer's, Fadenza, you know, archetype is sitting out there in the head of a 13 year old that will learn to maybe even be inspired to learn creative coding and get involved with this because of the beauty of the things that are coming out of not just our blocks, but like FX hash and all the other wonderful generative art platforms that are out there and they're going to be inspired by it. And that person in three or four years will refine this beautiful algorithm and be released and blow everybody's minds like, you know, we don't want to have to chase. We want to host the best generative art from the best gender artists in the world. But we also want to make sure that we create a wonderful home to release the best gender of art. And so we don't know what the future of our blocks looks like in terms of a category. We do know that NFTs have been incredibly disruptive, not just from a financial perspective, but from like an understanding things perspective. NFTs have elevated global awareness and appreciation for digital art. Forget generative art for just one second. Like digital art has been something that creators have been making for years and years and years decades. And yeah, it's had recognition, but not nearly to the level of like, you know, oil on canvas and sculpture. And I think we're seeing this like beautiful thing where digital art is having a renaissance. Generative art is part of that is like, you know, sharing that moment with digital art as a whole. And we don't know what it looks like when digital art gets to that level of appreciation and acceptance as sculpture and oil on canvas. But what we do know is that people that own this art are incredibly proud to own the art. They're incredibly vocal about their ownership of the art. Some cases people might be pumping their bags. In some cases, and you see this on Twitter all the time. I've seen people transformed from pumping their bags to saying meaningful deep reflection things that come out of their mind as they look at an artwork or as they see this artist's career expand. So we're just it's just it's just changing. Everything's changing so fast. There's no way to like compartmentalize this right now. We just need to do our best to support artists to support collectors to support our team. You know, this is a bear market. It's really a weird time and you see people, major companies laying people off left and right. You see a lot of crypto organizations faltering and you realize like there's there's a lot of things here that need to happen for Art Blocks to be an adult company like not just this crypto startup, but like a real company that operates in the real world with real impact. And we're we're we're not going to shoot ourselves in the foot by trying to make any decisions right now as to what we are as long as we just continue doing everything that we can to host the best narrative art for the best artists in the world. And yeah, pushing that pushing that envelope forward. Oh, no, I lost you. I can't hear you. Sorry. I wasn't. So I was just saying that this was fascinating. I really enjoyed your discussion with six five to nine. I really enjoyed this session and I'm sure our students did too. So thank you very much for for being here. Ladies and gentlemen, Eric Snowfro. Thank you. Thank you so much for having me. Thanks for following the course everybody. This is pretty revolutionary in and of itself. So congratulations to everyone that's there listening. It's cool. Thank you. Bye bye.