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Generative art NFT platform fxhash announces a $5 million seed raise with venture capital firms and angel investors including Tezos Foundation, PunkVenturesDAO, Casey Reas, and thefunnyguys (Le Random). The funds will be used to hire more team members, support development of a 2.0 release (integrating Ethereum) and tools for art institutions, and bolster the platform’s mission of “empowering anyone, anywhere, to artistically express themselves with code,” they tweet (image: Zancan Garden, Monoliths, 2021).

“It almost doesn’t matter what the market is doing … if crypto’s down—great—everything’s on sale.”
– Pseudonymous NFT collector and Waiting To Be Signed co-host Trinity, opining that as the “generative art community starts to separate itself from Web3,” the Tezos NFT ecosystem will flourish (“because it’s such a non-financialized chain”)
“The line between utility, saving one’s market, and wash trading seems to be blurred.”
– Blockchain researcher HENFT_Reporter, sharing a tabulation of artists buying their own NFTs across all major Tezos platforms from winter 2021 to fall 2022. Whether this data reveals abject market manipulation, necessary customer service, or requires more granularity is the subject of subsequent debate.

Much to the delight of writers, concrete poets, and ASCII artists, creative coders Play and EREN launch Typed, a text-based NFT market place on the Tezos chain. Featuring a spartan interface reminiscent of the Hic et Nunc glory days, Typed allows minting of bare-bones text entries, inviting all kinds of character-based experimentation. Within hours of being announced on Twitter, the platform was bustling with activity (image: Leander Herzog’s adaption of his generative art hit Agglo).

The Processing Foundation, a champion of software literacy within the visual arts and developer of the eponymous creative coding toolkits, announces that it received a record-breaking $10 million in donations in 2021, a majority of which came from artists donating cryptocurrency. This generous support has “allowed the Foundation’s work to become sustainable for the first time,” writes Executive Director Dorothy R. Santos, citing particularly generous artists such as Joshua Davis, Monica Rizzolli, Jared Tarbell, and Lia. Santos further announces that the foundation’s board decided to suspend new Ethereum donations over environmental concerns. Support for Tezos, a more energy-efficient cryptocurrency, will continue.

A hotspot in the Tezos NFT ecosystem, generative art marketplace fxhash emerges from beta. Version 1.0 boasts more robust architecture and speedier page updating (latency plagued past popular mints), and the new smart contract allows royalty splits between collaborators and Dutch auctions (which gives collectors better access to the primary market and discourages scalpers). “We’ve applied a global layer of polish across the whole website,” the fxhash team notes.

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Hic et Nunc (HEN) founder Rafael Lima pulls the plug on the popular ‘indie’ NFT marketplace, following what some allege were heated discussions on the community’s Discord channel. First, the website disappeared, then the market’s smart contract was posted to the official Twitter page. Launched in March on the low-cost, low-carbon Tezos chain, HEN became an instant artist favourite (esp. in the Global South) and just recently celebrated 500,000 minted NFTs.

“Someone wrote the worst crypto-bot and I’m taking advantage of it. Am I a bad person?”
– Artist Josef Luis Pelz, announcing a bot exploit. The bot in question purchased any NFT he swapped on Hic Et Nunc—so he gamed the whale for 2,379 Tezos ($12K USD).
“My idealistic read of Hic et Nunc peaked during the platform’s first hackathon in May, when 150 artists and developers came together to work towards improving the platform. On June 28th, the momentum came to a halt.”
Clara Peh, on how a hack of the open source alt NFT marketplace revealed the vulnerability of its model. “Hic et Nunc is essentially developer Rafael Lima’s passion project,” writes Peh, “and he is assisted by hardworking and generous enthusiasts who share a similar vision.”

Analysing the “John Karel window phenomenon”—creators minting tributes to the CGI artist’s popular NFT window series—Sterling Crispin considers a hypothetical profit sharing model. “As of June 20th the movement produced 2,329 transactions totalling 5,496.91 Tez in sales,” writes Sterling. In his model, the highest earners would help reward the movement’s instigators. “I think that a network of artists profit sharing could encourage experimentation, and be a more equitable way of fostering emergent online communities.”

“As much as we celebrate digital art and its democratization—where’s the acknowledgement from the NFT crowd of the thousands of people who develop the tools used to make the hot-selling works NFT platforms are being flooded with?”
Karsten Schmidt, generative artist and prolific toolmaker, making an impassioned case for an NFT revenue-split feature to support open source projects on hic et nunc

An effort to encourage NFT artists and collectors to transition to greener blockchains, curator Juliette Bibasse and visual artist Joanie Lemercier kick off a series of coordinated cryptoart releases on Hic et Nunc, an indie marketplace on the energy-efficient Tezos chain. Named “The FEN” (image: generative type by Mike Brondbjerg), the campaign launches with pieces by Dave Whyte, Zai Divecha, and Auriea Harvey. Drops from more than 30 other artists will follow in the coming weeks.

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