NFT story collection: At this moment of disappearance, is it a saint or a traitor?

Let me tell you a story today. You can think of it as a major breaking news in a distant country, or you can think of it as a fable about the future. For me, this is a black hole current account of the metaverse. The story is very long and has many terms. I will try my best to explain it.

The missing trading platform

This morning Hic Et Nunc (Here and Now) shut down without warning. The official Twitter account only left a contract address, self-introduction: "Discontinued." and then disappeared from the world.

Hic Et Nunc (hereinafter referred to as HEN) is the largest NFT collection platform on the Tezos blockchain. It has only been eight months since its launch in March and has accumulated more than 500,000 NFTs. There are many computational art and new media artists gathered on it. The style of the community is mainly free, low-price, and sharing. It ranks around tenth in the world's NFT trading market.

Is this another typical “rug pull” incident in the cryptocurrency community? No, the contract is still there, the NFT is still there, and only the website has disappeared. This may be a world-class community experiment, and HEN has since escaped into the void of the decentralized network.

What is sad is that the HEN community just celebrated the HEN500K event last week. In this event, no matter they are well-known artists or emerging artists, everyone sells their works at very, very low prices, which is equivalent to allowing everyone to exchange and collect them. Such activities are actually very unusual in the NFT world. On the one hand, they destroy the market, and on the other hand, you don’t actually make much money by doing so. But Tezos is such a place, and this custom started with HEN. .

However, less than a week after the event, HEN shut down without warning, scaring the artists and collectors above. This must be a major historical event in the short history of the Tezos blockchain.

A panicked artist community

Twitter immediately exploded, with some artists who didn’t quite understand the nature of blockchain running around asking, do their works still exist? Will it disappear along with the website? Where do I publish new work?

Fortunately, this is the world of Web3 (a third-generation Internet with autonomy and ownership in your own hands). Although the platform is dead, the works are still alive. Although the web page is closed, the smart contract is still there, and the NFTs cast by the smart contract are still there, not to mention the IPFS (Interstellar File System, a decentralized peer-to-peer storage system) that stores the images. Everything is still there, only the interface layer has disappeared, and this layer, the HEN website, is the origin of the entire artist ecosystem.

Some artists jokingly said on Twitter that all artworks participating in the HEN500K event will become legends, because this is the real last word of objkt (the work number of the HEN platform), and all artists will become OG (Original Gangster) who master rarity. ), Tezos blocks will continue to pile up, but objkt will stay near number 511,000, hibernating forever.

Today HEN is closed, which represents the passing of some kind of experimental and spiritual symbol.

But a new symbol was born almost at the same time.

True decentralization.

Hic Et Nunc A Brief History

To be honest, as a public platform, HEN is too glitchy. The user interface is poor and functions are often offline. It is like a community with frequent water and power outages. However, this shortcoming is also regarded as a meme joke by a very tolerant community. .

Rafael Lima is the founder of HEN. Full of community ideals, he created the highly experimental HEN in March this year. In just eight months, the business has grown astonishingly, and of course he has also experienced many large-scale projects. Governance issues and personnel changes. Perhaps it can be said that HEN saved the Tezos blockchain, and therefore some people say that Tezos is a blockchain so poor that only NFT is left. Because of the design of PoS proof of rights, it was called the first-generation Ethereum killer when the chain was founded. However, because it strictly adheres to the style of decentralization and robust updates, its progress is slow. Nowadays, there are no Ethereum killers. Which generation is it?

But no matter what, the NFT on Tezos is called Clean NFT because it does not use computer computing power to mine and does not waste electricity. HEN's most amazing explosion of growth occurred in August of this year, in a land flowing with milk and honey.

In the past few months, HEN has had many problems, including functional governance and financial distribution issues (because of the transparency of the blockchain, you can easily capture the remittance records of the HEN wallet), resulting in the emergence of several groups of developers. run away. One of the most famous cases is objkt.com . A secondary market on the Tezos chain.

In fact, just from the name objkt.com itself, you can see the competitiveness. OBJKT itself is the code sequence of HEN's NFT minting. These five English letters were used as the new business name. No wonder Rafael would. Say objkt.com is a thief. But maybe due to tacit understanding or other reasons, this website has a good trading interface, convenient auction and collection functions, but objkt.com has not launched the service of minting NFT, so it has always been positioned in the "secondary market". It connects downstream services of all primary markets, and the largest primary market is HEN.

OBJKT market battle

The amazing month of October is called Uptober in the cryptocurrency world, and the same is true for objkt.com . In October alone, there are many new projects skipping HEN and directly using the secondary market of objkt.com . Including algorithmic artist Memo Akten’s Distributed Consciousness (AI Octopus), Indonesian artist Arya Mularama and 0x10’s GOGOs, Sutu’s Neonz , and finally jjjjjjohn’s random common skeleton of creating a one-man savior and great achievements. These PFP projects (Profile Picture, belong to Big Head) Project types that post NFT) are directly connected to objkt.com and listed on objkt.com without going through HEN's smart contract process.

Judging from objective data, HEN's trading volume has been declining since October. Some people regard this phenomenon as a cooling of the NFT market, but in fact the trading volume has been transferred to objkt.com .

Why did HEN close the site? Perhaps it is a coincidence of timing. Just last night, objkt.com announced the launch of the mint function in a high-profile manner, causing an uproar in the community. This morning, HEN announced its closure. It is difficult for me not to connect the two events.

Regardless of the cause and effect, the HEN site closure incident highlights the "anti-fragile" characteristics of the Web3 blockchain world. The disappearance of a website will not take away everything you have worked on, everything will remain where it is. It just needs another interface to present it. No one person can create the entire world and destroy the entire world by himself. This is completely different from the Web2 era. Think of anonymous websites, Apple News, and the cultural heritage that we have forgotten and disappeared.

In Web3 Paradise, a garden is not erased when gardeners come and go.

In fact, hDAO is still distributed among many holders. hDAO is a community governance token airdropped to early artists and collectors two months after HEN went online (DAO is a decentralized governance organization, and DAO’s governance voting is based on the tokens they issue. This case is hDAO) . However, HEN has not yet reached the ideal outcome of pure decentralized governance (commonly known as Dexit, Exit to DAO, decentralizing power from centralized governance to the masses).

dictator? saint?

Leaving the unfinished Roadmap behind, Rafael, like a suicide bomber, forcibly shut down the website, leaving behind the smart contract.

What concept is he trying to convey?

Is it pure anger? Childish behavior from a dictator? Or is it some kind of intriguing cyberpunk manifesto? Is he a dictator? saint? Or Judas the Betrayer?

After my friend Zaibatsu and his artist community closed HEN, they sent an NFT in the style of an oil painting, depicting Rafael Lima in military uniform. The title is DECENTRALIZED in capital letters, and the description is as follows "The first and only known portrait of Rafael Lima, founder of Hic Et Nunc. Minted Thursday November 11, 2021, a day that will live in infamy." (The first one The only known portrait of Lima, minted on 11/11 (a day of infamy) of two hundred and fifty editions, priced at NT$80, this work was sold out within hours, and the secondary market price has Rising to 1,200 yuan.

In this portrait work, the badge on the uniform is the currency code of Tezos, symbolizing that he has made a lot of money. The pendant on the left shoulder is the legendary symbol of HEN (closely related to the well-known artist group Pak). The symbol of the tattoo on the finger of the right hand is hDAO is the decentralized governance paradise that everyone yearns for.

Putting this portrait on the shelves itself was a rather internal artistic tactical action. It was a protest action born out of collective anger, and it instantly went viral in the Tezos community.

Tezos NFT, the era of divided heroes

So, is Rafael a dictator? I don’t know, but I know that HEN’s website shutdown can be regarded as some kind of decentralization of power (even if this power has long since faded away), just like the disintegration of the Soviet Union. Regardless, the closure of HEN has disturbed players from all walks of life in the Tezos NFT ecosystem. Starting today, NFT platform parties will enter a state of fierce competition early.

The birth of HEN is admirable, and the demise of HEN is admirable.

The vacuum left by it will allow various parties to compete, and the Tezos NFT market will officially enter an era of fragmentation. The leader among them is of course objkt.com . In addition, we also have akaSwap in Taiwan waiting to shine. AkaSwap has complete decentralized services, including minting, selling, giving away, etc. It is the closest service to Web3 among the NFT platforms I have seen in Taiwan so far. You can also think of it as HEN created by Taiwanese. (Quite a tribute) In fact, my "New Era Flag" was also auctioned on AkaSwap.

This would be a coopetition strategy. The secondary market is coming to eat the pie of the primary market, and the little devils in the primary market are coming to carve up this vacuum. Who can connect the contract records left by HEN, create the final user experience, and at the same time, in the community The above is justifiable, whoever can become the profiteer of this metaverse war. However, the relationship between them is not entirely competitive. The docking and circulation of assets leaves the possibility of cooperation.

Is it possible for Taiwan to gain a place in this vacuum war?

To be Continued

The whole drama has actually just officially entered the second chapter, so let us continue watching.

No matter what, it's a good thing for users. Because this is the world of Web3.

Idealists, dictators, thieves, tributes, protesters, artists, these are the stories I came to see this morning and share them with you. I should be the first person in the Chinese-speaking world to report this news.

＊

The picture shows the portrait of the dictator "DECENTRALIZED" painted by Zaibatsu and the artist community hic et ubique (I also have a collection)