A coat check ticket, a magic spell

A while back, a dig­ital acquain­tance of mine went to work for Zora, a com­pany engi­neering a cryp­to­graphic pro­tocol — really, a market — for artists. More recently, Zora pub­lished a bundle of devel­oper documentation and a client library for this pro­tocol. It cannot happen that an art-adjacent SDK is pub­lished and I do not poke at it, so poke I did.

Here’s what I learned.

I’m not going to explain the bl — ch —  (never write it out; it’s like speaking the name of Sauron) because I pre­sume you already know about this kind of dis­trib­uted cryp­to­graphic ledger. What you might not know about — I didn’t — is a spe­cial kind of entry designed to stand apart. The tech­nical term is “non-fungible token”, with the ugly acronym NFT. It’s just a dis­tin­guish­able object with unique char­acteristics. There’s nothing rad­ical about that — this newsletter is non-fungible, in that sense — but these cryp­to­graphic objects are tracked (and bought and sold) inside a system that is oth­er­wise currency-like, so their dis­tin­guisha­bility becomes noteworthy.

Radioac­tive dol­lars in Scrooge McDuck’s money bin.

Zora aims itself at artists, and its pro­tocol deals in cryp­to­graphic objects asso­ci­ated with media: images, sound files, chunks of text, whatever. First and foremost, the pro­tocol allows you to create those objects, in an oper­a­tion called “minting”, which is a nice bit of language.

This is where you dis­cover the whole system is more atten­u­ated than you imagined, because it’s not like you’re “uploading your media into the bl — ch — ”. No no no — nothing of the sort. The object is just a reference. It as­so­ciates your iden­tity with the hash of the media (remembering that a hash is a numeric fingerprint, ~unique to any sequence of bytes) along with the media’s URL, where it can actu­ally be viewed, played, read, whatever.

I minted some­thing; as a result, I now “own” a tiny dig­ital object that refers to my short story The Writer & the Witch. This oper­a­tion didn’t have any effect on my own­er­ship of, say, the copy­right to the actual work; it just brought this odd new entity, this amulet, this coat check ticket into the world (and into my dig­ital wallet).

To mint the story and pro­duce the object, I wrote a short JavaScript pro­gram that used Zora’s client library to

1. con­nect an Ethereum account that I control,

2. com­pute the hash of the story’s text, and

3. submit a request, including the account’s address and the hash, to the Zora con­tract on the Ethereum bl — ch — 

Note: this sub­mis­sion costs money! Ethereum’s trans­ac­tion fees are called “gas”, and the price of gas is shock­ingly high. When I asked my script to esti­mate how much I’d pay for the sub­mis­sion, it kept showing me an enor­mous number; I was sure it was a bug, and spent easily an hour trying to figure it out before realizing, oh, no, that’s … actu­ally the number.

And, whew, when you’re tin­kering in this domain, you’ve got to be careful, because your mis­takes can cost you money. It really changes the feeling of run­ning a script when you know it might be about to burn $20 out of your wallet.

In the end, it did burn sev­eral $20s out of my wallet, and when the minting oper­a­tion succeeded, it was with a ~$100 surcharge. If reading that makes you feel a strong wave of “why bother”, I don’t blame you!

But it turns out even egre­gious fees can’t over­whelm the plea­sure of get­ting some­thing to work for the first time.

What else can you do with Zora? You can buy and sell, of course. The vibe is “cool internet art gallery”. You find an object you like, place a bid, and, if you win, your name goes in the ledger. You can keep the object forever, lux­u­ri­ating in its aura, or you can sell it again.

That’s where some inter­esting capa­bil­i­ties pop up:

Each object main­tains a per­fect provenance—a chain of own­er­ship back to its creator. That’s legit­i­mately useful; it auto­mates some­thing that can be onerous, even treacherous, in the ~analog~ context.

When it’s minted, an object can have a profit-sharing agree­ment burned into its soul. Let’s say I sell the object I minted to the influ­en­tial col­lector Kate­rina Hash-Jones and, simply by dint of her own­er­ship, its value skyrockets. (Kate­rina only buys the best.) She sells it for 10X what she paid, but/and because of the agree­ment embedded in the object, half of that price is shared with me. And so on for the next sale, and the next, forever. My share could be 10%, or 1%, or 99%.

I think this is Zora’s most provoca­tive capability; it feels gen­uinely new.

So, I had tin­kered around, burned a few $20s, and minted my object. I was feeling mostly per­plexed by the whole experience, but/and then I read about a pair of projects that turned me around a bit.

The studio called Larva Labs has pro­duced two pio­neering bl — ch —  art projects: Cryp­toP­unks and Auto­glyphs, both of which intro­duce sets of these objects — large but finite, Pokémon-like — that can be bought and sold. Cryp­toP­unks is more popular; Auto­glyphs is lovelier. I enjoyed this pod­cast interview with the Larva Labs duo; every­body in the con­ver­sa­tion is engaged and excited but/and also prac­tical and at least a little bit skeptical.

Cryp­toP­unks are sort of the skeleton key for under­standing this whole weird market, because (1) they were the first project of this kind, (2) they’re legit­i­mately fun and charming, and (3) they are now worth a LOT of money.

Eyes: popped! Nose: bleeding! Humans: weird!

Again, I’ll remind you — this is so so crucial — when you buy Cryp­toPunk #2890, you are NOT buying an image of a little blue dude, as depicted above. Rather, you’re buying an entry in a ledger that as­so­ciates your iden­tity — yours alone — with Cryp­toPunk #2890, an image of a little blue dude. That’s it. That’s the deal.

I think the wild market for Cryp­toP­unks makes a strong case for the agree­ments avail­able on Zora. Larva Labs ini­tially dis­trib­uted these objects for free! If the Cryp­toP­unks had been minted with a 1% profit share burned in, their cre­ators would be get­ting a stream of income from all these eye-popping sales. Not a bad thing to imagine. (If you want to feel like you’re going insane, read this very dili­gent article about Cryp­toPunk valuation.)

Listen: if you look at this stuff head-on, with a cold alien gaze, it seems absurd. I told you I “own” the object rep­re­senting my short story, but if you change one char­acter in the text — add one comma — it will pro­duce a dif­ferent hash, and you can hap­pily “own” the object rep­re­senting that version, even though it’s func­tion­ally identical. Only the fact that I minted the object myself makes it meaningful. It’s all very tenuous.

But then: if you look at art head-on, with a cold alien gaze, it also seems absurd and tenuous. As the tren­chant Abe Burmeister wrote on Twitter,

anthro­po­log­i­cally speaking there is near infi­nite evi­dence humans like owning scarce objects and also like to turn common objects into socially con­structed rep­re­sen­ta­tions of value. Com­bining the two seems pretty reasonable, hard part is get­ting people to agree on which objects

This is really 100% social; it’s about con­juring a dream of own­er­ship, of value. The Crypto­Punks were, and are, a magic spell; I mean that in a basi­cally lit­eral sense.

Will Zora be able to cast a spell of its own? Impos­sible to know.

I think all of this feels more nat­ural to people who are immersed in the fine art market, or the market for rare limited-edition sneakers, etc. (I am not!) These are mar­kets in which scarcity-by-design is a huge part of the fun, and that’s not true for all, or even most, mar­kets for cre­ative work. (I’m thinking of the market for, say, streaming TV shows, or sci­ence fic­tion novels, in which the fun, as well as the value, comes from abun­dance and shared enjoyment, not scarcity and sole own­er­ship.)

So, while some of the com­pa­nies building these pro­tocols and plat­forms make grand pro­nounce­ments about rein­venting the eco­nomics of like, ALL CRE­ATIVE PRODUCTION, I think it’s more accu­rate to say they are estab­lishing a new kind of fine art market, one with some useful and provoca­tive new capa­bil­i­ties. (And/or maybe, by extension, they are proposing the “fine art-ification” of a larger swath of cre­ative production … which is a coherent goal, even if it’s not one I support.)

The whole thing is silly, but a lot of things are silly, and humans do them anyway, and derive great plea­sure in the doing. I’ll confess: I’m curious about what could be made and mar­keted in this way! One of the most inter­esting things Zora has pub­lished is here in their FAQ:

Instead of cre­ating arti­fi­cial scarcity by selling copies of dig­ital goods … we pro­pose an alternative: make one orig­inal openly acces­sible to everyone no matter who owns it, and sell that orig­inal token over and over again. As your work becomes more popular, people who want to col­lect it can buy the media — first from you, then from each other. Each time the work is resold, you get a share of the sale price.

You might detect some res­o­nance there with the “unlocking the commons” model that I’ve used sev­eral times, most recently with an e-book novella in 2020. There is a sense here of going with the grain of the internet; let­ting the bits flow freely, copied and recopied, while their coat check ticket, their daemon, that tight little cryp­to­graphic knot, sits serene, accruing value. Maybe.

My ini­tial explo­ration is complete; impov­er­ished by the price of vir­tual gas, I’ll let these ques­tions simmer for a while.

An inter­esting note from a subscriber:

I don’t make or sell art online, so this is just a theory, but one of the advan­tages of the cen­tral­ized plat­forms seems to be democ­ra­ti­za­tion of the ability to pro­mote yourself. Value comes from the amount of atten­tion and interest (which I want to say is true for any piece of art, com­bined with the scarcity factor), so it’s an inter­esting thought exper­i­ment to try to guess how the creator-consumer ecosystem would adapt on a plat­form­less system.

My intu­ition is that it will be very impor­tant for Zora and its peers to act as cen­tral gal­leries and marketplaces. So, per­haps we’ll find our­selves in another sit­u­a­tion (there have been many) where the decen­tral­ized promise of the bl — ch —  lures people onto a some­what more traditional, cen­tral­ized platform — albeit one with some inter­esting properties.

It feels like the dig­ital utopians (I have been one; I might be still) learn this lesson over and over: that accursed “cen­tralization” often coin­cides with accessibility, usability, efficiency, good design — the list goes on.

This is a useful contribution from Chris Krycho, who won­ders

what might happen if we tried Zora … but without the “mining”? And from this won­dering emerges a dream of a research pro­gram for technologists: What would the imple­men­ta­tion of such tech­nolo­gies look like? What would their edges and lim­i­ta­tions be? What would they afford, and what would they not afford? How might they be well-adapted to us and our scale? How might they be built for mutual thriving with the rest of the crea­tures with which we share God’s green earth?