Nowhere Gallery retrospective
I want to write up a bit of a retrospective about what we did over at Nowhere Gallery (NWG) because there were a lot of interesting things planned, but very little came to fruition.
NWG was to be an artist-run gallery of NFT projects, essentially putting all the control into the artists’ hands for their whole NFT experience. Ultimately, the gallery became a victim of—I don’t know what else to call it—excessively brushing hairy dogs.
I like that expression because I think it accurately captures a lot of the issues we had faced and how we approached them—it also very much speaks to what we thought might be possible.
At the start of 2021, I was on paternity leave and NFTs were so popular and earning lots of money. Basically, I was thinking, what the heck is this? I had a little knowledge of Ethereum smart contracts, but I never played with them. My partner being an artist, I thought I might check it out.
There was a popular site with a discord at the time called Zora and I was busy learning what was what. I had basically made the realization that NFTs were just an “on chain” of a key-value store, but you could modify the API a little bit with your own custom contract. It’s nothing mind blowing, but the fact that the state is shared on the blockchain, it’s novel, I guess. Anyway, I ended up bumping into a friend in the Zora discord.
We got to chatting and he shared with me the idea for NWG. So I decided, sure, let’s give it a go.
One of the things that was really spreading the excitement for NFTs is that the control was going to be in the hands of the artists, and not platforms or corporations. So it was pretty exciting, plus the fact that certain tokens would just explode in popularity and people would pay a lot of money for them. But the key thing was “control”.
As we got started, one of the things that started to become a problem was the price of Ethereum gas. It was really expensive to do any sort of on- chain interactions with a contract. In addition to that, Ethereum was still using proof-of-work for mining blocks. That meant that vast amounts of CPU were just being wasted to process the blocks. This was something lots of folks were cognizant of and wanted to reduce.
One of the ideas I had come up with was allowing folks to pre-bid on our NFTs but do so via signatures instead of trying to mint tokens on chain. Basically, someone would go to our site, login with their wallet, then they would “bid” a certain amount of money. Their bid would then get timestamped and signed by us via a backend server we ran, and this signed packet would then become a “voucher” of sorts. We would give folks a week of time to bid, silent auction style. This was also intentional as it would remove any time-pressure to try to catch the “drop”. Instead, we gave folks the opertunity to put what they thought they would pay.
After the week ended, we would tally up all the bids that we signed and we would sort the bids in order, descending from highest to lowest, and take the top 1000, then set the “bar” at the lowest price of those 1000.
Then, on contract, we would set what the limit was, and anyone with a signed voucher for a price above our limit, could redeem their voucher for a token.
So we rolled that out, we were all really excited. Shared it on some popular discords like Friends with Benefits. Then when it came time to launch the bidding we scrambled to finish the site—I pulled a rare all-nighter to do so.
We ended up only getting 30 folks signed up for the bids. It was cool, but not anywhere near what we were hoping.
This is kind of where things went off the rails for us. We wanted to “fix” this somehow, entice people to collect our NFT. And so we started to add more things that folks could collect from us. For example, for the early bidders, we’d reward them with a “Universe” token and that would be something to give extra privileges to early supporters and super fans of our artists.
We couldn’t quite nail it down fast enough either, as there was lots of pivoting in this time. Ultimately, we strayed from trying to just deliver the original NFT we were building and starting adding more things before we finished.
And then life caught up. Day jobs took over.
And months passed.
And years passed.
Every once in a while, there’d be a small burst of new enthusiasm amongst ourselves, but it ended up becomign something that nobody really had the energy to carry over the finish line.
And there you have it.
Moral of the story really is the same thing most startup advisors are always saying: just finish the thing.