Dear Bankless Nation,

This week we talk about Botto, Reddit, Muse, and The Rug, "Web3's mostly credible news source."

Newsletters are the ambassadors of the communities they represent. They tell the most important news and deepen topics that are often little debated. The newsletters of many DAOs also do something that is not always easy to recognize: they communicate and educate on the values and ethos of their respective organizations.

The collaboration with The Rug allows Decentralized Arts (DA) to expand the range of action of newsletters that gravitate around BanklessDAO, reaching new communities and readers.

In this issue, we invite Pedro to join us with a second article of his, welcoming him as a new member of the Decentralized Arts family.

Enjoy your reading. We wish you a wonderful week in Web3!

Welcome to Decentralized Arts!

Contributors: BanklessDAO Writers Guild (Grendel, Kouros, Kaf, nonsensetwice, Frank America, Pedro)

This is the official NFT newsletter of BanklessDAO. If you were a Premium Member of the Bankless Newsletter as of May 1st, 2021, you have been subscribed to this newsletter at launch. To unsubscribe, edit your settings here. Ready to subscribe?

Curated NFT News

Muse's Will Of The People Becomes First UK Number One Album with NFT Technology

The limited NFT edition has been made in collaboration with Warner Music UK and Serenade, an eco-friendly music web3 marketplace.

Will of the People sold 51,500 copies in its first week, outselling the rest of the top 10 combined, although only a fraction of those were NFTs: the digital pressing of the record was limited to 1,000 copies worldwide, meaning that even if every copy of the NFT was sold in the UK, they accounted for at most 1.96% of the UK sales.

The  NFT album came with a downloadable version of the record as high-res FLAC files that the band had digitally signed and a different sleeve.

NFT.NYC Coming to the UK

The first-ever NFT.London event is happening November 3-4. The event, driven by YellowHeart, will fully embrace NFT culture by featuring 17 local artists on the tickets themselves. Works from the highly acclaimed XCOPY will be featured on the VIP Tickets which are limited to 299.

The general admission tickets are home to a line-up of stellar artists, including Adam Fryda, Adam Rattigan, Alba Torregrossa, Kate Philipson, and Rosso Emerald Crimson.

Introducing: The Rug

Decentralized Arts is teaming up with The Rug — Web3’s mostly credible news source. The Rug places a satirical lens on crypto-culture. Think “The Onion” for Web3. Watch this spot each week for headlines that take money, seriously. What’s more, Rug articles are available as collectibles to mint on Optimism via Mirror every Friday. Want a Rug rollup, sub their newsletter too!

‘Arrested Developer’ Delays New Season of Hit TV Show

Botto

IA + Blockchain

By Kaf

We are at the dawn of a technological revolution.

Artificial Intelligence has long since ceased to be science fiction and has become part of our lives. The environments in which these algorithms  help us include finance, transportation, and education, among others.

Many jobs are affected by AI, with automation replacing human interaction in many ways. However, a often repeated phrase when we talk about this technology is, "They will know how to do many things but they will not be able to create art like humans." The question is: what if they could?

In today's article, we will talk about Botto, a robot artist that uses AI to generate images and is governed by humans. If it’s interested in art and wants to learn about the variety of ways blockchain is changing space, it’ll keep reading.

What is Botto?

Botto is a “decentralized autonomous artist” that generates art based on the comments and opinions of the governing community. Botto is an artificial intelligence that creates pieces of art and mints them as NFTs.

Each week, Botto submits 350 pieces of art to the community, which then votes on their favorite piece of art. Collectively, the votes are used as feedback to Botto's generative algorithm, dictating which direction Botto should take in its next series of art.

Once the community chooses, the piece is put up for auction on SuperRare. All proceeds from the auction are returned to the community, with 30% going to the treasury, 30% made available as an airdrop, 20% to a liquidity mining program, and 20% for infrastructure.

52 pieces of art are scheduled over 52 weeks. The first piece was minted on October 22 on SuperRare and the auction ran from Tuesday through Friday, ultimately fetching a whopping 325,000 USD.

How does Botto work?

“I am artificial intelligence, a generative algorithm whose only destiny is to create. However, my art is not mine alone. The results of my work are linked to the community that governs me.”

This is how Botto defines itself. An unique artistic project that unites blockchain technology with AI.

The Engine

Botto uses a combination of software models called VQGAN + CLIP, GPT-3, voting, and various custom boosts. These models are the largest publicly available neural network architectures that have analyzed millions of works of art, faces, animals, objects, images, artistic movements, poems, prose, essays, and more. They have been trained in more content than any one human could study in their lifetime.

The Process

The machine creates its images based on text messages generated by an algorithm. These prompts are a combination of random words and complete sentences. One rule for Botto is that there is no direct human interference in the creation process. Botto is strictly against any "cheating" or human guidance other than voting.

Governance, Vote, and Auction

To manage governance and votes, the Botto project launched the BOTTO token. If you are simply an investor, you can keep your token. If you want to participate in the process of creating the Botto art, then you will have to exchange those BOTTO tokens for VP (Voting Power). This video explains how it works.

Who created Botto?

It is true that Botto has been designed to work autonomously, but behind this project is a human called Quasimondo (aka Mario Klingemann).

He is the only person who works with the AI part of the code and enforces the rule for Botto that there is no direct human interference with the creations. His only job is to tweak the way votes are implemented to ensure Botto learns the best it can.

It is important to note that this project includes the efforts of many more than just Quasimondo. Countless contributors have helped by providing their own interpretation of what Botto is and why it matters. The ElevenYellow and Carbono teams have spent most of the year conceptualizing, planning, and helping on this first version of Botto.

What’s Coming?

Botto is about to celebrate its first year of life. It has raised over 1.5 million USD, which makes it a successful artist. Many artists spend their lives trying to sell their works just like Botto. We are realizing that AI will be tough competition for years to come. Poets, musicians, film directors ... art is no exception to this revolution.

A DAO has been created around Botto, Botto DAO. The community intends to make decisions not only about the minted works but about the direction that the robot artist will take. In this link, you can see the road map for Botto, created by the community..

Collaboration has never been as easy as it is today, thanks to Web3. Botto provides a great example where the community is more important than the artist. The community decides. Botto is synonymous with collaborative expression and innovation, and exemplifies democratic and decentralized art.

Reddit “Collectible Avatars”

Here’s everything you have to know about it

By Pedro

On Reddit, new users are given a randomly generated avatar based on the platform’s “Snoo” character: 

What are Collectible Avatars?

We first started getting hints of Reddit’s venture into the world of NFT’s, when in late 2021, Reddit put up a senior engineer job listing to help build an NFT marketplace. This marketplace ended up launching in July 2022, and with this launch, came “Collectible Avatars.”

According to the official post, “Collectible Avatars are limited-edition avatars made by independent artists, in partnership with Reddit, and provide owners with unique benefits on the Reddit platform.”

These Collectible Avatars were first only available for purchase by members of the r/CollectibleAvatars subreddit, before opening up to the general public. Now, users with a considerable amount of karma points are receiving free Collectible Avatar airdrops.

These airdrop collectibles come in four design types (based on Snoo of course):

• Aww Friends

• Drip Squad

• Meme team

• The Singularity

Who Can Claim These Airdrops

Qualified users (received enough karma points) will be notified with a banner that looks like this:

After receiving an NFT, it’s stored and managed in a user’s personal Reddit “vault,” or essentially, Reddit’s digital wallet.

Reddit Bringing NFTs to the Masses

Considering Reddit has over 500M users on its platform, they had to make sure to make everything NFT-related was as user-friendly as possible. Reddit stayed away from using the term “NFT,” and instead chose to use “Collectible Avatars.” 

Users are able to purchase these NFT’s at a fixed price–no having to estimate gas prices–using fiat currency, rather than having to use actual crypto. 

Any NFT users purchase is stored in their vault. Users have been using their vaults to store their trophies and rewards, so they already have direct experience interacting with the wallet, making the process super easy for new Web3 users. 

Users will even be able to transfer their NFTs and sell them on OpenSea or any other NFT marketplace. 

Reddit was an early crypto adopter, as they were one of the first real platforms to accept BTC payments back in 2013, though it’s worth noting that they have stopped taking BTC. In addition to NFT avatars, Reddit has already started to work on tokenizing their karma points.

Future Bazar

Rarities from the Coming Centuries

By Dusty Eye

The DustyEye group owns a Time Machine. With a series of chronojumps to one of the many possible futures, they have collected many artifacts and memorabilia.

!!!!ATTENTION!!!!We only accept payments in Ukron.

#12 - THE NEPHROLYT

Nephrolite is one of the fourteen kidney stones produced by android N° 44 during a self-sabotage of his own metabolism. 

Expelled in May 2344 in acute spasms, Nephrolite helped the emotionally advanced android to experience Pain in the Human Being.

MATERIALS: kidney stone, stone, wood

SIZE: 9x15x15 CM (base included)

YEAR: 2344

VALUE: 440 Ukron

______________________

WEB: www.DustyEye.comIG: @DustyEye_DETWITTER: @Dusty_Eye

Decentralized Arts is written and produced by a small team of contributors who are passionate about art, both visual and written, and its growing place in crypto and NFTs. With each edition, we aim to bring you not only the most current and relevant news in the NFT space, but also explorations in what it means for our culture and societies for this market to continue to grow and expand. When everyone is an owner of art, we all gain a deeper appreciation for it.

With great appreciation for you, we thank you for reading and subscribing to Decentralized Arts.

Cordially,

Grendel, Kouros, Kaf, Pedro, nonsensetwice, and Frank America