[Purchases & Prunings] October 2023

Collecting in October was chill and relaxed. A welcome cooldown from a more active than forecast previous few months.

There’s a habitual itch that collecting definitely scratches, but just like any other habit forming activity, it’s crucial to set redlines, especially when the medium of exchange is crypto (aka the slipperiest and easiest form of money ever invented) to ensure things remain consistently fun for the long run.

Thankfully, my redline is simple: I only collect what I love - or at least I try to as much as I can.

Over the last month I had the great fortune to produce drops for Kitty Bast, Gabe Weis, Ben Hopper, and Starbucks which I collected an edition each from in addition to a few editions of some dank onchain writing by William M. Peaster and WASD.

But my favorite piece I collected in October was DAOsaka Etherean, a surprise limited edition mint from the Suriname born, Netherlands based artist Jivinci.

This particular mint marks and directly references the four year anniversary of Decentralized Samurai (2019), a work that Jivinci created for DAOsaka, the first DAO-powered crowd-commissioned multi-work collection of digital art that, in addition to Jivinci, included works created by a small group of pioneering artists like XCOPY, Miss Al Simpson, MLIBTY, Shortcut, Ophelia Fu, Abysms, and Troy Fitzpatric aka Gary Cartlidge aka Lazarus2571 in collaboration with KnownOrigin and Pet3rpan.

Each artist contributed a unique work of art, with two works editioned as 1/1s and the remainder a mix of either 15 or 25 editions each. The crowd commission event raised $900 from a group of patrons (myself included) that submitted funds into a proto-splitter smart contract that routed funds directly to the group of artists to compensate them for their contributions.

It took a little while for all of the editions to sell out after the primary sale kicked off in line with Devcon 5 which was held in Osaka that year (hence the project name). After splitting 5% of the $1400 in gross sales amongst the participating artists, the original patrons were able to sign a cryptographic message using the same ETH address they used to contribute their initial commission, proving they were indeed and original patron, to trustlessly claim a percentage of the gross revenue on a pro-rate basis equal to the share of their original contribution.

I can’t overstate how fucking badass and revolutionary this whole project was. It represented what I thought the future of DAOs could be (and prefaced future onchain DAO-powered projects like NOUNS).

DAOsaka Etherean is a reminder of that beautiful promise from an incredibly exciting, formative time in crypto. It holds that spirit of pioneering collaboration on a global scale made possible by code, artists, and true believers.

Never forget.