Shining light on favorite finds and the Art of Art to calm the mind! Artists, collectibles, community, occasional deep thoughts. Welcome to issue #5!

Formed by well known collector and OG Caktux, Tux.art is an intriguing new offer in the space. It feels to some degree like it’s still in development… but that’s because unlike the more centralized platforms which takes shortcuts to ‘make things work’ out of the box… this is aiming to remain fully open source and decentralized and that means not everything happens all at once… the community help build it to some degree.

You can literally view the smart contracts and user interface on Github! Read the ‘About Us’ section to fully get to grips with this and I’d highly recommend people do because this is an important development to watch. Yes it means it will cost gas to even save your profile info (and unfortunately it’s launched in one of those permanently high gas weeks). I wouldn’t consider myself hard line on being fully decentralized but I really respect it and can clearly see the benefits long term.

Being fully decentralized you can even use the site completely web3 and run it entirely via IPFS by running IPFS Desktop and going to ipns://tux.art. For now the platform is very heavily featuring photographers most likely because founder Vince (Caktux) has been an avid collector of photography in the space. I did find one video based artwork on there and for now loading video direct via IPFS is slow so time will tell and by running a local node they say “…you’ll have faster access to previously downloaded images and files. You’ll also help the network get more decentralized, which should improve the speed for other users.”

Try it out or at least keep a close eye on this one I know I’ll be minting something as soon as I can afford gas.

The Known Origin team mentioned this a few weeks ago on their community call but in the last few days this became official with Adobe making news about new features for NFTs. This includes a core feature with a select few platforms including Known Origin that will show authentication on the NFT listing that verifies the artwork has been signed on export from Photoshop with the same Metamask Wallet address.

It adds all important provenance and ‘proof of creation to artworks, something that has been an issue in the NFT space with so many stolen artworks being minted and sold. The ability to signed exported work is expected to roll out to other Adobe products soon as well.

Another welcome feature also now allows users of Adobe’s Behance portfolio service to directly connect their Metamask and display NFTs they’ve created on the Behance portfolio. It’s currently only connecting Ethereum based work but will soon include blockchains like Polygon, Solana, Flow and Tezos. Read more on Techcrunch about this as well.

These are some projects that have taken me beyond collectibles and art and into some Defi & AI while still intrinsically linked to NFTs and the Metaverse!

Thanks to a heads up fairly last minute I was able to get on the whitelist for the launch of a new project set up as an Incubator and launchpad for some pretty high profile metaverse related NFT projects. By owning up to various tiers of their $FLAME token you get access to Whitelists on those projects as they launch. To be honest I didn’t buy in for the whitelisting but see that as a bonus… I bought it because I think their token is going to rise quite nicely in value (this is not financial advice) simply because there is a lot of funding going into everything ‘Metaverse’ right now with mainstream media touting it as the new internet. Their first partnership is with…

He is the founder, designer and owner of iconic California skateboard lifestyle brand Diamond Supply Co and with the support of Firestarter is leading towards the opening of an entire virtual 3D wearables store in the Metaverse. First however he has just launched his NFT collection ‘The Diamond Crypto Dunks’, a collection of 15,000 randomly generated artworks. Presale is currently live for Firestarters FLAME holders and public sale starts November 2nd at 8am PST at a price of 0.08 ETH

Full disclosure I have 5000 FLAME Tokens and have minted 2 of the Diamond Crypto Dunks.

BOTTO is an AI generated art project. The AI is generating different works of art all the time and BOTTO token holders can vote in a swipe style vote for their favorites. This then ‘trains’ the AI on what kind of art it creates going forward. BUT the most popular single piece from everyones votes are now being listed on SuperRare and the first one sold for a whopping 79 ETH! The 2nd piece at time of writing is still live and highest bid at 36 ETH. The proceeds of each sale on SuperRare go directly back to buying BOTTO tokens directly from the Market and then those tokens get burned! My understanding is that this raises the price of the tokens both through purchase and then burning.

So to vote on the generated art you must ‘stake’ your tokens. As described on their docs “A simple way to understand staking would be seeing this as a ‘deposit’. You ‘deposit’ (stake) your newly acquired BOTTO into the Botto app.

In return, you generate Voting Points (VP). You are able to spend VP on voting for your favorite art pieces, which subsequently lets you influence Botto’s artistic direction!” Interestingly using those voting points doesn’t reduce the value of BOTTO you hold but it doesn’t seemingly earn you anything either… however a hint given under ‘Incentivization’ says “Botto is seemingly keen on retroactive rewards” so using your voting points is probably a good idea! 😉

https://whatsminting.live/ - fascinating to watch live animated pulses of activity people mint collectible projects and via marketplaces. I mean you could literally watch and wait to find some cool projects if you were really keen but mostly it’s just fun to see a visualization of what is making gas spike at any one time.