On which platform does an artist choose to sell their art? The choice is to the pleasure of the collector and artist. In this post, I will detail my reasoning behind selecting Hic et Nunc to mint my first four non-fungible works. Four works were made in Cinema 4D using Forester and rendered in Octane. Three sold for 1, 10 & 30 tez. It was exhilarating making those first sales and I understood how the NFT trend spread faster than the virus.

Competing crypto-collectible auction houses are more prestigious than H&N. Several platforms require account creation and identity confirmation which are antithetical to a decentralized system. For an art collector, curation is appreciated and H&N’s open-access policy means lower quality art will proliferate. There appears to be varying levels of decentralization within the cryptoart space. The connection between the blockchain and the art itself fails to meet the extreme decentralized standards of the Bitcoin maximalist. Consider the innovation of Bitcoin being a proof-of-work blockchain with no overlying authority. Rule changes require overwhelming public consensus. Read about the oracle problem, or realize that the hoi polloi are comfortable trusting third parties and are not radical tax-evading sovereign individuals. By needing only a wallet address to participate, H&N embodies a decentralized, DIY & open-source ethos.

Does the Tezos blockchain follow a similar ethos? H&N built their community on this blockchain, but as a newcomer, I don’t know their specific reasoning. There is due diligence required on my part to learn the details of Tezos governance and its proof-of-stake mechanism. For a currency, proof-of-stake over proof-of-work never made sense to me, but proof-of-stake for timestamps seem entirely legitimate. The idea of proof-of-burn was always badass.

Opportunities afforded to the community by the ability to interact with the Tezos public ledger were not immediately apparent to me. The ability of the open-source community to develop several side applications and explorations of blockchain data is exciting. Check out the list of H&N-related tools. The community and unrestricted media types have played a major role in catapulting the platform. Check out this clock. You can pull in data from a source like IPFS to influence your art. For interaction & new media designers, all eyes should be on H&N. It is the most attractive community that I have come across, but I haven’t explored the other cryptoart sites. Let me know which aspects of which platforms are most attractive to you.

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