🤝

The urges to create, collect and own are ancient. NFTs, give digital media feature parity - enabling unique objects and allowing them to persist without a central authority. They also add features and simplify behaviors.

We are still in the early days of learning how people will use smart contracts. For now, one of the most prominent use cases is easier trading. Unlike in traditional art markets, we have real-time transparency for most factors and permissionless access. Almost any token is also highly financialized. This has some beneficial and interesting results, but it also comes with costs.

Too often it incentivizes the least imaginative mechanics. The laws of supply and demand dictate how to think about edition sizes and rarity. And there is a place for that, but when every decision about minting a token also comes with the consideration of re-sale value we lose the fun and some of the promise of crypto. And if the most interesting collections stay small and exclusive we will not open up this space to a larger group.

When Decagon launched it was like a breath of fresh air. The outputs have the unmistakable look and quality of Kjetil Golid but the dynamic nature of always increasing levels is interesting. DXP plays with ERC-20 token designs and gamification of other projects, but what it primarily incentivizes is viewing, curating, promoting, and discovering interesting new art. Decagons can be traded and have a rarity mechanic in their mint id, but there is no cap on how many can be minted.

Despite the uncapped supply I have kept buying new Decagons and just passed 50 tokens. It's no accident that they have become my single largest collection held by token count despite having no expectation of resale value. Buying and upgrading decagons or just spending time on Deca has become one of my favorite activities.

That's why I am excited about Etch. It shares all characteristics that I enjoy about Decagons but gives us a more active role in the creation process. For all of this, I would like to express my gratitude. I have minted 1 etch (presumably #1957) and 3 lifts (#720, #721, and #722 unless the gas gods fail me).

The etch I'm sending to Kjel Gold. Without the beauty of the Decagon algorithm, I would have never been drawn into this ecosystem.

The first lift I'm sending to bonafidehan. Deca has not only become one of the best places to spend time and discover and re-discover art it's also an inspiration in incentive design and community building.

The second lift I'm sending to Matt Kane. Like for Kjel it would have been easy to just build on his past success and focus on quickly selling a couple of traditional collections for what would have without a large sum of money. Instead, he chose experimentation that in my eyes has a much larger potential to move this space forward.

The third lift I'm keeping to myself. In the original version - as seen in the first lift - 4 rings are intertwined. I'd like to think that by creating this etch I'm also creating a small connection between the four of us that will be etched onto the blockchain. I'm excited to see whether others choose to lift this Etch to further add to this connection.

It feels wrong to keep any proceeds from potential lifts and I will transfer any meaningful sums to three accounts that inspired this etch. Making this a native feature is a natural evolution for Etch in my eyes. I would allow people to express gratitude for creators and content pieces and add a visually stunning and permanently recorded form of raising funds for them.

I would also love to see an equivalent of Friendship Decagons for Etches. This would have allowed me to send out 4 connected Etches instead of relying on Lifts.

May we see many more connections.

🤝