NFT Story Collection: Romance of Engineers, the Aesthetic Journey of a Taiwanese Collectible Hacker

This article was written on Facebook on 2022/12/24

Taiwanese engineer Chiyan Tupao developed an automated art trading program and is now trying to create works using generative art programs.

​Reading before departure: Regarding the story of Red Eyes, Huang Xin wrote an energetic article . This article is an extension of Huang Xin’s writing, please jump to read first)

Chiyan is a typical Taiwanese engineer whose mobile phone is locked up in a "chicken farm" when working. Last year, he started a collecting career because of the Tezos blockchain.

​Chiyan’s collecting career is divided into three stages. In each stage, you will find that Chiyan is a very serious and smart person. He is simply a representative of Taiwanese engineers (hard label). Until we met Red Eye himself, we all jokingly called Red Eye an artificial intelligence AI developed by a secret organization in Taiwan, because the automated programs it developed were really astonishing to those of us who don’t have coding abilities. In fact, Chiyan is not a homebody at all. He is tall and sunny. He is a homebody when he is working hard to study a subject.

At first, Chiyan began to study smart contracts and blockchain in order to grab "TezDozen". Last year, Aluan Wang Xinren and Sichuan Fritillaria jointly launched the TezDozen project, which symbolizes the twelve zodiac signs. It was once a hot commodity but could not be grabbed. This made Xiang Yu’s red eyes work hard and learn the time of each block and how to combine each block. The transaction requirement allowed miners to package, and eventually even automated batch transaction functions were developed.

The first stage of red eye is "automation of collection". Most people are already very powerful if they reach this level, but I didn't expect that Red Eye would reach a higher level next.

At this time last year, the fxhash open generative art NFT platform was born. Because of its fully open nature, fxhash is like a "world's" flea market, making artists from all over the world eager to try it, including first-line artists and creators who want to try their skills. This is a melting pot of creative ideas, and it is also a place for gold mining, which can be viewed in a new world. At this time, Chiyan already has the ability to automate transactions. For Chiyan, collection is a kind of arbitrage, and arbitrage is a game. Of course, you need to study the game with great concentration, so that you can understand the unspoken rules of the market and absorb the capital of whale collectors.

"Market-driven aesthetic development" is the second stage of red eyes.

At this time, Red Eye has developed an automated trading program. In addition to automating and automating its outstanding audio identification ability (inferring the congestion level of each block through sound, and then calculating gas fees and transaction push timing) , Red Eye also created a robot army. For the works they liked, they sent dozens of accounts at a time to grab orders, and then sold them at higher prices one by one.

I later learned that for creators, this is an operation to protect the market; for consumers, this is called arbitrage leverage. Red Eyes did not develop this system because of his business sense, but because of his persistence in "games".

The level of holding the red eye once shocked the world. Chi Yan has always been low-key, making money in a low-key manner, and he is not afraid to share his teaching methods. On one occasion, his large-scale collection behavior may have blocked the financial path of other overseas collectors. Several of the sub-accounts were caught and put on trial on the fxhash discussion board. Due to the pseudo-anonymous nature of the blockchain (that is, you can prevent others from knowing who you are, but all your transaction records are very transparent and traceable), well-known overseas collectors and artists began to search for the codename "Redeye" "(Red Eye)'s related account. At that time, even Aran was affected because Red Eye helped Aran buy works. The official even linked Chiyan's account to the group and marked it as a suspicious account. Red-Eye's way of protest was to change his account photo to a real Red-Eye - Terminator - a red-eyed robot from the future.

Red Eye used dozens of robots to automatically trade to amplify his profits and risks. The amount of funds invested each time was even greater than before. Just because the work is guaranteed to be available in the primary market does not mean that the work can be sold at a profit. How to select products becomes the real issue.​

The aesthetics of red eyes were born. Because Volume DAO houses a large number of artists and collectors, they often discuss which works are "good" works at night. The so-called good, in a simple and crude explanation, is that works can be sold to make money. As for taking short-term profits, it is better to enter the eternal palace of art and make big profits. This philosophy is at ease in people's hearts. There is no absolute standard for the quality of a work. If there were, it would have been overturned by failed arbitrageurs long ago because the market is reflexive.

During this year’s endless discussions, every experienced collector generally has his or her own collection criteria. Here we can slightly reveal the wrong wealth code: Well-known artists in previous lives (before entering the blockchain world) may not necessarily It means that his works will sell well, neither a consistent style nor a variety of styles guarantees success, there are successful cases both for perseverance and occasional work, for good community relations and high-selling records for Flowers of the Gaoling, and for short-term floor prices, there is no guarantee that they will rise. It means that the future will not be bullish. Generative art NFT is really a 100% symbolic asset. It is dematerialized and multi-dimensional. It does not have any specific functions and can be regarded as a cultural commodity.

In this high-speed iterative process of refining gu, Chiyan developed his own aesthetic taste. He started from short-term arbitrage and entered the stage of long-term holding of some objects; his preferences also moved from concrete works to abstract works, and then back again. concrete. At this time, Chiyan had already developed the "Single Work Diversity Viewing Program" and "Automated Trading Program." The funds that needed to be settled had already been exhausted. The stable profits did not satisfy Chiyan, so Chiyan began to teach himself creative programming writing. .

So Red Eye officially entered the third stage, "Collector's Turn/Creation"

​I wouldn’t say that Akane is the Web3 version of Daisuke Miyazu, but he is no different from young artists imitating Basquiat’s works and selling them. It’s just that what makes him “better” than the imitation artists in real life is that he has already collected a large number of good works and knows what makes good works good, and he is about to copy these “good” works as a game to verify Will these be favored by more collectors?

Of course, in the field of generative art, Chi Yan not only looks at the "work", but also the "code" of the work. Now he uses his own code to try to create his own creative journey. Last night he published his first work in his life, "Fairy Dust Trail". On the platform fxhash, which he has been researching and collecting for a whole year, of course the price is affordable, so it was naturally collected.

The trajectory of Red Eyes is a kind of romance that belongs to engineers, cracking, profiting, and reconstructing, and personal aesthetics driven by the market, the most secretive field. You said that Red Eyes did not elaborate, but this is the process of his play, and we are just the accompanying audience. I even think that Red Eye’s action itself is an anti-art process. If one day the synthetic art market pays for "contemporary criticism", I can guarantee that Chiyan's creations will also contain this "good" element.

Web3 is a field where collectors and creators are very close. This closeness is not only the closeness between communities, but also the closeness within individuals. Therefore, artists are often collectors of numerous works. At the same time, collectors can easily turn around and start creating.

Last year, Chi Yan jumped into the pit because he wanted to collect the NFT he wanted. Now he has turned from a master of automated collection to trying to engage in production and creation. This is Chi Yan’s story, an amazing journey of Web3, Let’s look forward to Akane’s next work.