When my non-crypto acquaintances ask me about my fascination with crypto, I often have to take a pause to think about how to explain this.
The crypto sector is a multi-faceted beast. It has a deep technical core, drawing in diverse fields like cryptography, computer science and protocol development. It also has a heavily financialised façade, with its most salient feature being the circulation of liquidity and the monetary value attached to these flows. But the aspect that I’m most obsessed with regarding crypto—and also the hardest to explain—is its cultural potential.
The use of the word “potential” is deliberate. We are not there yet. Crypto culture is still in its infancy, prone to bouts of hysteria, as well as susceptible to the influence of cultish figures, snake oil salesmen and outright criminals. Even at its most benign, the cultural scene here appears to be peppered with gobbledegook and vacuity.
Nevertheless, I think all the above is a feature and not a bug. With or without crypto, modern life is already filled with bullshit—engulfing our popular culture and even our workplaces. Wherever money goes, tricksters of all stripes will also follow. Crypto is thus not inherently more scammy or prone to scumbaggery. It is just that its open and permissionless nature simply enables our most basal and banal characters to operate with impunity.
The intent of this essay is to share my perspective on why I still think there is much more to the cultural potential of crypto despite these shortcomings. I also want to do so in a non-technical yet thoughtful manner which can be easily understood by those who are not familiar with the space.
In this regard, I would like to offer an alternative frame to think about crypto—it should be viewed not as a distasteful or adversarial place to be avoided at all costs, but as an open, free-for-all workshop with tools that anyone can use to foster more durable and dynamic forms of digital culture.
My basic premise is as such:
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Crypto provides an improved set of tools for cultural production on the internet.
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You can conceptualise these tools in terms of the five Cs, each representing the capabilities of blockchains as a (i) catalogue, (ii) custodian, (iii) canvas, (iv) computer, and (v) casino.
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Anyone is free to wield these tools to contribute to digital culture, to ultimately create meaningful things that can be passed on to future generations.
A sea of motherfuckers on platform 24 (2019) by XCOPY reflects the distinctive glitched aesthetic that the artist is now well-known for—visually arresting, thematically macabre, with an intensity and incisiveness that makes it unmistakably XCOPY.
Through his persistent practice of posting his animated artworks on Tumblr regularly for nearly a decade before his first sale in 2018, the pseudonymous artist has built up a cult following, setting the stage for his explosive success in recent years with the advent of crypto. The use of flippant and witty titles for many of his works further add to their potency, and often strike at the heart of the contemporary cultural zeitgeist, especially on crypto-related themes, see e.g. All Time High in the City (2018) and Right-click and Save As guy (2021).
What is culture?
In A Dictionary of Sociology by the sociologist John Scott, culture is defined as “all that in human society which is socially rather than biologically transmitted”. I like this definition because it is clean and focused. Culture is essentially everything, material or immaterial, that we pass on to other people through non-biological means, e.g. through stories, art, music and other shared practices or rituals.
The process of developing culture takes time, usually only solidifying as “culture” after the relevant object, practice or idea gets passed down across multiple generations. In the context of digital culture, however, this temporal dimension is a lot more compressed. The consumer internet has not existed for the length of a human lifetime. Digital cultural objects or experiences are also a lot more ephemeral, due to the velocity in which information flows online, as well as the rapid changes in the infrastructure and interfaces which we use to engage with the internet.
Case in point: Forum signatures or “sigs”, which are banner graphics that users can append below their posts in online forums, were very popular in online gaming forums back when I was a teenager. I recall making lots of them and posting them for engagement in the forums that I participated in. There were even tournaments in which we can “duel” with other users to see which of our submitted sigs get more votes. Unfortunately, I’ve since lost my sigs as I changed my computers over the years, and my uploaded ones on image hosting sites would have been long gone by now. Many of these gaming forums have also become defunct, as other platforms emerged to capture the attention of subsequent generations of terminally-online teenagers.
The ebb and flow of digital culture is thus very real. Many online objects or experiences simply cannot stand the test of time, for the internet is susceptible to bit rot on a network scale.
The five Cs of crypto
I’ve highlighted the ephemerality and volatility of digital culture, not because I think crypto can help to completely mitigate these structural conditions—it can’t—but because I think it offers a good balance of tools that can help improve the process of cultural production on the internet in spite of these conditions.
My mental model for crypto’s toolkit for cultural production can be summed up in terms of five Cs, each representing an analogy for the capabilities of blockchains. I believe this provides a simple yet comprehensive framework to allow one to appreciate crypto’s potential as an enabler for digital culture.
I’ve created a simple conceptual diagram to reflect my framework of the 5 Cs, and published it on Zora as a free mint. If this resonates with you, you can go here to mint a copy. The mint period is a year, the planned duration of my sabbatical.
(1) The blockchain as a catalogue
Blockchains are not difficult to understand conceptually. I like to describe them simply as databases with some special properties. In one sentence: blockchains hold data that are distributed across a network (decentralised), within which anyone can add data as long as they follow the rules enshrined in the codebase (permissionless), and whose data can be seen by everyone (transparent) but cannot be tampered by anyone besides the owner of that data (censorship-resistant).
Open and verifiable catalogues
These special properties make blockchains inherently suitable to serve as catalogues of cultural objects online:
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The transparency of blockchains allows anyone to view these catalogues, in line with the open nature of the internet. The listings on such catalogues are also not static, and will be automatically updated as people transact with the listed objects. In addition, anyone can query the history of all transactions involving each listed object on blockchains, which facilitates the formation of more open markets around cultural objects online.
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The permissionless nature of blockchains also means that anyone can contribute listings. There are fewer barriers to entry to add to such catalogues on blockchains, and so they cannot be easily gatekept. This will help to make digital culture more accessible and participatory.
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Given that data on blockchains are censorship-resistant, users can also have greater assurance that listings on blockchains are authentic. While blockchains cannot fully establish the provenance of digital objects offchain since there are still some trust assumptions needed to link a blockchain address to a particular creator, they provide a virtually unforgeable relationship between a digital object on the blockchain and a blockchain address. This reduces the overall burden of verification on users—if we see that a creator has posted their blockchain address on multiple independent sources, e.g. on social media and on digital art galleries or secondary marketplaces, we can be reasonably sure that the listed objects created from their blockchain address will be authentic.
How such listings work on blockchains is through the use of a common technical standard. For Ethereum and other similar smart contract blockchains, this is done via tokenisation. The ERC-721 token standard (or the equivalent for other blockchains) enables digital information to be tokenised as non-fungible tokens (NFTs), with each NFT being analogous to a listing on a catalogue. For Bitcoin, ordinal theory allows digital information to be inscribed on individual satoshis, the smallest subdivision of a bitcoin. Each inscribed satoshi, also known as an ordinal, would be analogous to a listing on a catalogue.
Interoperable catalogues
As such listings are based on a common technical standard, i.e. NFTs or ordinals, their associated catalogues can be interoperable across multiple platforms on the same blockchain. You can browse them and make transactions off them using different applications—similar to how a jpeg file can be opened by a variety of image viewing or editing software.
This interoperability is a powerful feature, as it allows for the distribution of cultural objects on the blockchain to be decentralised across multiple platforms and marketplaces, e.g. OpenSea, Blur and Magic Eden. As creators and consumers of these objects, we will have the option to decide which platform or marketplace to use based on our needs. We will also not be held hostage by the policies of a single marketplace, or be catastrophically affected if a platform goes down.
In sum, as an open, verifiable and interoperable catalogue of digital objects, crypto has the potential to become a comprehensive map that helps participants to navigate online culture. I believe this is incredibly empowering, as we will then have more agency to decide how we want to produce and consume this culture. This is the starting point for why I think we should start being more intentional about building culture onchain.
You Are Here (2024) by 0xfff is a conceptual artwork that plays with the theme of interoperability in a different way, across separate blockchains. With the help of LayerZero, a protocol that enables applications and tokens to interoperate across blockchains, each token in this project can be bridged across several blockchains that are compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). Each bridge transfer of a token will in turn leave a trail on the token, enabling it to serve as a catalogue of past journeys along bridges and across boundaries.
“You Are Here 11155111”, featured above, is owned by the artist. Out of the 34 tokens in this project, it is the token that has been bridged the most number of times (66) at the time of writing. Its intricate trails make up something like a well-trodden map. Collectively, they hint at the wide space that creators can tap on to design new and interesting cultural experiences, thanks to the interoperability of blockchains.
(2) The blockchain as a custodian
Beyond catalogues, blockchains also serve as custodians. They allow us to own digital objects.
Think about this for a second, especially how paradoxical it sounds. Digital objects are inherently replicable—anyone can “right click and save” digital files, thus creating infinite copies of such files across the internet. Ownership of such digital objects online has therefore always been extremely tenuous.
Digital objects as property
Blockchains can help to separate ownership and usage of digital objects. You can think of an NFT or an ordinal as a tamper-proof certificate of ownership on the blockchain. Given that only the person controlling the private key of a blockchain address will be able to transact using that address, you can have absolute custody over any NFT or ordinal that is held by a particular blockchain address as long as you control the private key. This NFT or ordinal you hold cannot be held by any other blockchain address. Digital objects tied to an NFT or an ordinal can therefore be owned just like any other physical property.
In fact, the courts in Singapore have recognised NFTs as property, paving the way for owners to enjoy legally-enforceable property rights over their digital assets—both financial and cultural—on the blockchain.
Digital Zones of Immaterial Pictorial Sensibility (2017) by Mitchell F Chan is modelled after Yves Klein’s Zones of Immaterial Pictorial Sensibility (1958-1961), a work of conceptual art that has raised many questions about the nature of ownership.
Klein created several “Zones” consisting of empty space, which could only be bought with pure gold. After the purchase, Klein would issue a receipt to each collector, who would then be given two choices: (i) keep the receipt, or (ii) participate in a ritual at the River Seine in Paris, in which the collector had to burn the receipt and Klein would throw half the gold in the river in the presence of witnesses. In Klein’s view, true ownership of the artwork meant that the piece had to be completely integrated with the owner, such that it belonged to them absolutely and intrinsically. This meant that the material record of the artwork, i.e. the receipt, had to be destroyed, so that the work cannot be resold and gain an existence independent of the original owner.
For the “Digital Zones”, Mitchell created 101 pieces that displayed a pure white blank screen when viewed online. Each piece can only be purchased with ETH via the artist’s smart contract on Ethereum, and in return, the collector of each piece will receive a token. Similar to Klein’s ritual, the collector would have the option to destroy their token via a ritual function on the artist’s smart contract, with Mitchell correspondingly sending away the ETH.
This transposing of Klein’s “Zones” into a digital context by Mitchell emphasises the increasingly immateriality of our contemporary culture, in which virtual experiences have become accepted as a substitute for physical experiences. Against this backdrop, the work invites us to reflect on how the separation of the commodity form of the artwork from its experienced form, which are both immaterial in different ways, can impact how the collector relates to and values the piece they owns. Indeed, one has to ask: what do we really own when we purchase an NFT of an immaterial, digital artwork?
(Note: Mitchell has also published a 33-page essay to accompany the work, which is worth going through if you are interested in further details about both Klein’s “Zones” and his work.)
Tangible ownership, infinite distribution
Even as cultural objects on the blockchain are now legally or practically ownable, they still retain the capabilities that their digital nature allows, i.e. their replicability and spreadability. In other words, cultural objects on the blockchain can be simultaneously abundant and scarce. They can be distributed and consumed widely, while each can only be owned by a single blockchain address at a time.
This unique combination of attributes inverts how we conventionally think of value in property. In the digital context, objects that are tangibly scarce may not necessary be seen as more rare and hence more valuable. Conversely, the more they are shared, the more valuable they may become. Not everything online can go viral after all.
The writer and cultural studies scholar McKenzie Wark has written about this with respect to art collecting:
“What might be more interesting is to consider how the very properties of spreadability that characterize digital objects can be turned to advantage to make them collectable as well. Paradoxically, an object whose image is very widely spread is a rare object, in the sense that few objects have their images spread widely. This can be exploited to create value in art objects that are not in the traditional sense rare and singular. The future of collecting may be less in owning the thing that nobody else has, and more in owning the thing that everybody else has.”
Nyan Cat is a popular internet meme based on an animated cat with the body of a cherry pop tart flying through outer space with a rainbow trail. On the ten-year anniversary of when Nyan Cat was first published online (2 April 2011), its creator Chris Torres remastered the animation and sold it as a one-of-one NFT through an auction. The winning bid came in at 300 ETH, demonstrating how popular internet memes can command significant value.
Custodians of ownership, stewards of value
By serving as the custodians of the necessary information required to demonstrate ownership, blockchains enable digital cultural objects to not only be easily transacted online, but also to more readily accrue value as digitally-native property. And just as how property in the physical world has undergirded the tremendous build-up of wealth in our society, the equivalent of property in digital culture will likewise be the foundation upon which we can grow, sustain and distribute value on the internet.
When we can enjoy more robust and secure ownership over our assets thanks to the custodial capabilities of blockchains, you can be sure that we will do our utmost to maximise the value that can be built on top of them. With blockchains as custodians of digital culture, the owners of its constituent cultural assets—at least those with a long-term mindset—will naturally be incentivised to become its stewards.
It would certainly be interesting to see whether ownership on the blockchain can drive alignment between the creators and consumers of cultural objects, and create a locus for both financial and cultural capital to converge and unlock novel forms of creativity and collective meaning-making. If this can be sustained over a longer term, I’m optimistic that such alignment can be a net positive for the development of digital culture.
Founded by thefunnyguys, a pseudonymous digital art collector, and Zack Taylor, Le Random is positioned as a “first-of-its-kind, digital generative art institution” with two parts: (i) a collection of generative artworks on the blockchain that can convey the depth and breadth of the generative art movement; and (ii) an editorial platform that seeks to contextualise the movement’s place in art history and celebrate its cultural significance. The name “Le Random” is a tribute to the late generative artist Vera Molnar, who has spoken about randomness as a key component of her practice.
The care in which Le Random is collecting, contextualising and elevating onchain generative art is notable. Its impressive collection is meticulously catalogued and beautifully laid out on its website. The generative art timeline that Peter Bauman, Le Random’s editor-in-chief, has been developing also provides an impressive tapestry of generative art from its pre-modern origins to the current era marked by the advent of blockchains as an artistic medium. The editorial pieces on Le Random’s website are thoughtful and timely as well, featuring nuanced commentary and insightful interviews with artists. All in all, Le Random is one of the foremost examples of collectors of blockchain-based digital art who are also serving as passionate stewards of the space.
(3) The blockchain as a canvas
More than just a platform for transacting and owning cultural objects online, blockchains should be regarded as a medium for creation in their own right too. They are canvases on which data—the building blocks of our digital culture—can be linked to or directly inscribed.
In most cases, a digital object cannot be fully stored on a blockchain. Due to the cost of uploading large amounts of data within the limited storage space of blockchains, the actual media file underlying an NFT is typically hosted offchain, e.g. on a decentralised file storage platform like the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) or Arweave. This introduces the risk of such NFTs becoming broken links—empty tokens pointing to nothingness—if the files on these external storage platforms become corrupted or disappear entirely.
Notwithstanding this risk (which can be mitigated to some extent for IPFS-based NFTs by pinning), I think blockchains can still serve as compelling and engaging canvases for digital culture.
Dynamic digital objects
To me, the appeal of digital objects on the blockchain goes beyond the construct of the token merely as a pointer to a piece of media, e.g. an image, a video or a song. What is fascinating about digital objects on the blockchain is the fact that they can be dynamic in meaningful ways, even while the owner’s sovereignty over these objects remains unchanged.
The design space for such dynamic digital objects is incredibly wide. Creators can design these objects such that the cultural information they embody can be transformed based on the owner’s own input or in response to other events reflected onchain. This makes digital culture come alive for individual owners or consumers, giving them agency to shape their digital experiences while also connecting them to a larger shared reality.
Such dynamic digital objects would have clear use cases in gaming, which already plays a significant role in our digital culture.
Axie Infinity is a blockchain-based game centred on playable avatars called Axies, which can be battled and bred to earn resources and collectible within the game. Each Axie is represented by an NFT on the Ronin blockchain, and can be levelled up using points called Axie Experience Points, which are earned through gameplay. Axies with higher levels will be able to upgrade more parts, effectively making them a dynamic NFT that can be improved with time, effort and skill.
Other use cases would include collectibles that are responsive and interactive within their digital environment; as well as in art, whereby the artist employs crypto-related mechanics to offer a commentary or perspective on the blockchain as a creative medium and shared cultural space.
Finiliars—or Finis in short—are a motley crew of digital avatars that change their mood and expressions based on changes in price of specific cryptocurrencies. First created and exhibited by artist Ed Fornieles in 2017, the Finis were subsequently updated, expanded and launched as NFTs in 2021. Collectively, Finis seek to map out the abstract financial flows that underlie global capital, especially within the crypto sector. Their cute features also bait us to form emotional attachments with them, forcing us to reflect on the relationship between empathetic and financial investments. Finiliar #1259, which is pictured above, tracks the price of the Solana token ($SOL) on an hourly basis.
The Fini project team has also worked with other crypto projects to launch special edition Finis. For example, the Zapper Finis (Frazel and Dazel) were open-edition NFTs launched in partnership with Zapper, which is a platform that helps users to track the value of their crypto portfolios. Frazel and Dazel’s expressions and actions take reference from the changes in the portfolio values of their owners.
Gazers (2021) by Matt Kane is a long-form generative art project consisting of 1,000 code-based artworks launched via Art Blocks on the Ethereum blockchain. Each artwork takes reference from the lunar calendar, dynamically evolving with each day and with each new phase of the moon. Gazers taps on humanity’s long-running association with the moon as a marker of time, to emphasise the ephemerality and urgency of the present moment, while also prompting us to look up and reflect on the future—towards our own versions of the moon.
Gazers #751, whose static version is displayed above, was recently acquired by Kanbas, a pseudonymous collector of digital art. During the solar eclipse on 8 April 2024 that was visible from North America, Kanbas posted a video of Gazer #751 ablaze with a shimmering, glowing aura (see tweet below). It remains a sight to behold, and a demonstration of how digital art on the blockchain can offer dynamic experiences connecting our digital and physical realities in delightful ways.
Durable digital objects
At the other end of the spectrum, there is also another interesting subset of digital objects on the blockchain that are designed to be exceedingly durable, such that they are nearly eternal or immutable.
The distinctive feature of these durable digital objects is that as long as their underlying blockchain remains running, they will continue to exist. This is because the essential data needed to render these digital objects are housed on the blockchain directly, such that they have few external dependencies.
In some cases, such objects may still depend on widely-distributed libraries or developer tools, e.g. some of Art Blocks’ generative art NFTs. That said, the broad point is that the blockchain serves as an all-encompassing canvas for these objects, within which they need to have all their essential supplies to achieve their intended expression.
For onchain NFTs on Ethereum and similar smart contract blockchains, instead of pointing to an offchain or externally-hosted media file, they link only to onchain data, which are typically stored in smart contracts on the same blockchain. For Bitcoin, the data underlying an ordinal is inscribed directly as metadata within a transaction of a specific satoshi. In this regard, all ordinals are nearly always immutable, unlike NFTs, which depend on the data that they are linked to.
In any case, what makes such onchain digital objects conceptually interesting to me is the temporal dimension—how they force us to consider the longevity of our digital experiences, which are often ephemeral. It seems quite plausible that the onchain digital objects on our most Lindy blockchains, e.g. Bitcoin and Ethereum, will outlive those of us alive today. They may hibernate, but they will never die. Even if their owners lose their private keys, they will not disappear and just become immobilised.
With this in mind, I do ponder about the kinds of meaning we will ascribe to onchain digital cultural objects that can transcend our individual lives. What will their memories hold, as they are owned and transacted on the blockchain? How will the relationship between their onchain durability and their offchain cultural legacies evolve with the passage of time?
CENTS (2024) by artist Rutherford Chang is centred on the gesture of putting 10,000 cents on 10,000 satoshis, linking the smallest units of the US Dollar and Bitcoin immutably using ordinals as a medium. Inspired by the discrepancy in value between the metal value of copper pennies minted in 1982 and before (now ~2.5 cents) and their stated monetary value (~1 cent), the artist selected 10,000 pennies to be removed from circulation, and archivally documented them. Their images were then immutably inscribed onto satoshis as ordinals, while the physical coins were smelted and cast into a solid copper cube.
Besides serving as a commentary on how material and immaterial value is perceived across different contexts, CENTS is also a meditation on the impact of time on value. Chang himself has spoken about collecting pennies as early as 2017. More importantly, the sense of history that CENTS conveys gives it substantial weight. Each penny, though manufactured to be fungible, now bears unique traces of its passage through time in the hands of successive owners. CENTS can thus be considered a work of generative art, “shaped by the algorithm of the world's wear and tear” as the collector become.eth wrote in a tweet.
Moreover, the story of each penny does not end with its transmutation into a digital artifact, given that it will take on a new history on the blockchain, to be owned and transacted within a new digital and social reality. As durable digital objects connecting multiple temporal and economic contexts, CENTS certainly has the potential to become a leading art collection on Bitcoin, and be regarded as a precious store of value in time to come. CENTS was launched on sovrn.art in collaboration with Inscribing Atlantis and Gamma.
alignDRAW is a text-to-image generative AI model created by Elman Mansimov and a team of developers in 2015 after Elman completed his computer science undergraduate course at the University of Toronto. Published in a conference paper in 2016, alignDRAW is widely credited as the first text-to-image model, which laid the foundations for the various image and video-generating AI tools that are easily accessible today.
As these generative AI tools continue to transform image creation and our visual culture, alignDRAW serves as a milestone marking the beginning of this paradigm shift. Recognising this, Fellowship worked with Elman Mansimov to mint all 2,709 images ever created from the alignDRAW model as NFTs on the Ethereum blockchain in 2023. 168 of these, produced from 21 unique text prompts as sets of 8 images, were published in the 2016 paper. The other 2,541 images, produced from 21 text prompts (15 unique, 6 matching the prompts from the paper), were separately uploaded on the University of Toronto website in November 2015.
Fellowship has designed a technical architecture that enabled each image to be stored onchain in their original byte format with no alterations or enhancements. This was done in a progressive manner to take advantage of periods with lower gas prices on Ethereum. By preserving the alignDRAW images durably and immutably on the Ethereum blockchain, this approach affirms its historic role in heralding a new era of human-machine collaboration at the confluence of both science and the arts.
Another interesting angle to perceive such onchain digital objects lies in how their creators work within the technical limitations of data storage on blockchains. The artistry underpinning such objects is centred around optimising data, making use of every byte in as elegant a manner to effect one’s creative vision.
As Chainleft, a data scientist and artist of onchain works, described in an essay: onchain art is “a homage to the timeless belief that within the tiny, we capture the infinite”. Indeed, from the little nooks and crannies of blockspace, we may just be able to plant the seeds of a more expansive yet durable form of digital culture.
Autoglyphs (2019) by Larva Labs began as an exploration on creating a “completely self-contained” artwork that can operate within the severe data storage limitations of the Ethereum blockchain. The result is a highly-optimised generative algorithm—existing completely within a smart contract—which can produce a pattern of text in ASCII format. This text pattern can then be translated into an image separately, based on instructions encoded in the smart contract.
This approach pays homage to early generative artists like Michael Noll, Ken Knowlton and Sol LeWitt, whose works offer a perspective of artworks not as representations but as systems. In turn, Autoglyphs—as a self-contained, medium-native system for the creation, ownership and distribution of digital art on the blockchain—has inspired many generative artists to continue to push the boundaries of blockchains as an artistic medium. It is no wonder that Autoglyphs has been likened to the onchain equivalent of prehistoric cave paintings.
Curated, a fund collecting crypto art, also has a concise editorial piece outlining the key features of Autoglyphs, which is a good starting point to make sense of the outputs visually and understand their collectability.
(4) The blockchain as a computer
Pushing the concept of a canvas even further, we can also view blockchains as computers as well.
By computers, I don’t mean only processing devices that simply execute instructions within fixed parameters, but something broader harkening back to the early vision of personal computers that the computer scientist J. C. R. Licklider espoused while working at the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) in the early 1960s:
“Computers are destined to become interactive intellectual amplifiers for all humans pervasively networked worldwide.”
There are two key concepts here worth highlighting:
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Firstly, computers are not just information processors, but intellectual amplifiers—a platform to enable a more dynamic, learning-by-simulating methodology of thinking that computing makes possible.
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Secondly, computers are communication devices, empowering us to coordinate with others as part of a larger network.
Let’s unpack them in the context of exploring how the computing possibilities offered by blockchains can shape digital culture.
Composable digital objects as cultural amplifiers
Ethereum has been described as a “World Computer” right from its early days. In this sense, Ethereum and other similar blockchains can be understood as distributed computing platforms, on which applications can be built and run globally. This is enabled by the capacity for these blockchains to deploy smart contracts that can execute complex functions going beyond simply transferring tokens between accounts.
With the EVM (or the equivalent for other blockchains) providing a common computing engine to run smart contracts, the digital objects that these smart contracts create and control can be designed to be composable. In other words, they can be combined or built on in different ways to unlock new use cases, just as how developers have been tapping on application programming interfaces (APIs) to build ever-more powerful software products.
Digital objects on the blockchain therefore do not only represent dynamic pieces of software, but can also be dynamically connected to other objects or applications onchain. This composability enables digital objects on blockchains to be greater than the sum of its parts—serving as building blocks that can yield broader, more engaging, and perhaps even unprecedented digital experiences.
After all, components of digital culture rarely exist in isolation, even outside of crypto. What usually gives a particular cultural object or concept staying power in the digital space is how readily it is integrated with other elements, or remixed to create derivative works, which further drive attention to the original object or concept. In fact, the rise of TikTok as an entertainment platform has been attributed to how its tools have helped to streamline the process of remixing videos, effectively turning video into composable media and thus facilitating network effects of creativity.
Coming back to crypto, I believe that composable digital objects on the blockchain can serve as cultural amplifiers for digital culture. This would be similar to how Licklider had postulated that computers could become “intellectual amplifiers” by enabling new ways of thinking, e.g. “via dynamic simulations” as the computer scientist Alan Kay had described. In this respect, onchain composability can enhance the remixing process for both creators and consumers, as well as catalyse new ways of creating digital culture.
For one, blockchains allows for more robust tracking of the connections between digital objects on the blockchain, which can help facilitate attribution and other licensing arrangements (e.g. Story Protocol and Overpass). This will also support monetisation of derivative works, ensuring that the original creators and remixers can be appropriately remunerated.
Beyond these practical benefits, onchain composability can also open up new vistas for artistic work or cultural experiences. While we’re only seeing the early innings of efforts on this front, I am hopeful that this feature of blockchains can serve as the ground zero for creativity within digital culture to compound—dynamically, durably, expansively.
Terraforms (2021), an onchain art project by Mathcastles, reflects an attempt to leverage the unique computational affordances of the blockchain to create art that cannot be created anywhere else.
On the surface, Terraforms consists of nearly 10,000 onchain animated land parcels on the Ethereum blockchain that collectively make up a 3D world referred to as the "Hypercastle". But its core artistic idea—centred on distributed computation as an artform—is expressed through its underlying technical infrastructure. As Michael Yuan, a software engineer, has superbly outlined in an essay on Terraforms, this consists of a set of smart contracts to store the raw data for the parcels, define the structural parameters of the Hypercastle, generate noise to add a natural feel to the renderings, and generate the parcels at runtime.
This technical infrastructure supports composability at many levels. The raw data contracts can support other onchain applications. The rendering contract allows for multiple, independent versions of the Hypercastle to be generated—a multiverse!—while the NFTs provide a canonical version of the Hyperstructure for owners and the wider community to coalesce and build tools around. Antenna mode, which was introduced during the recent v2 upgrade, will also allow parcels to receive “broadcasts” from other smart contracts (as-yet-unreleased), opening up another way for interested parties to contribute to the continual reshaping of the Hypercastle’s terrain.
It will probably take a standalone essay to do justice to Terraforms as a complex and multi-dimensional work of art (see Malte Rauch’s excellent write-up on Terraforms for glitch Gallery). But I have highlighted it as an example here to showcase how an onchain artwork can make full use of composability through its technical infrastructure to put forth an aesthetic vision that is at once both ambitious and open-ended. As Terraforms becomes anchored within the canon of onchain art, it may very well prove to be a rallying point for other artists and cultural stakeholders to explore new, imaginative possibilities based on distributed computation as a medium for thought and creative expression.
Networked digital objects as loci of coordination
Just as how the broader internet has expanded, blockchains require network effects to grow and flourish. They are essentially networked communication devices with a common economic substrate. Taking aside the question of technical capacity then, the more people there are using a blockchain, the more attentional and financial liquidity that blockchain will possess, and consequently the more creative energy it will have to incubate culture.
As distributed computers, blockchains enable not only onchain composability, but also onchain network effects. Digital cultural objects on blockchains ought to tap on both in order to maximise their potential as cultural amplifiers. A large network provides a large surface area of possibilities for composability to work its magic.
In addition, value will predominantly accrue at the network level rather than at an object level, as it becomes cheaper to create digital content with generative AI, link them onchain using Layer 2 blockchains (L2s), and distribute them to audiences across multiple digital contexts via decentralised social media. This is the premise of Chris F’s “Token Constellation Theory”, part of his Starholder world-building project. It posits that we may increasingly engage with digital objects on the blockchain not as individual tokens, but as constellations of digital tokens experienced as a collective.
Such constellations of composable and networked digital objects will give rise to the need for coordination, to attract and direct the flow of value across the collective. Network actors will inevitably try to self-organise and exert their own agency amidst such “complex adaptive media systems”. This adds a new dimensionality to digital cultural objects on the blockchain. They should no longer be regarded merely as discrete, ownable objects to be transmitted or transacted for their cultural value, but as networked objects with their own spheres of emergent behaviour and cultural influence—agents of an unscripted, open-ended multi-player game on top of distributed computers.
This idea that networked digital objects can serve as loci of coordination for digital culture has been experimented on and advanced most extensively by decentralised autonomous organisations (DAOs). However, it remains to be seen whether this construct is an effective coordinating platform to drive value to a collection of networked digital objects or the broader space.
Nouns pioneered a unique fundraising and distribution mechanism, in which an onchain digital avatar (called a Noun) is generated and auctioned off every day forever. The winning bid then feeds into the treasury of the Nouns DAO, comprising of owners of each Noun, who can then propose and vote on how the treasury funds can be used. To date, the DAO has largely funded initiatives to proliferate the Nouns brand in popular culture, e.g. creating a movie featuring Nouns, and for charitable causes, e.g. funding and distributing prescription glasses to kids in need.
However, the decentralised governance process within Nouns DAO has not been without contention among its members, with some of the view that the DAO had squandered funds on profligate initiatives. In September 2023, a subset of Nouns owners voted to take their Nouns out from the DAO and create a “forked” DAO from their pro-rated share of the original DAO’s treasury. Owners in the forked DAO could then quit and claim their underlying assets. At the point of this fork, the Nouns DAO lost over half of its US$50 million treasury. Many of the Nouns which left the original DAO were said to be owned by arbitrageurs, who bought the Nouns below “book value” and capitalised on the fork to redeem them for a higher price. Since then, there have been another two forks of Nouns DAO in October and November 2023, which demonstrate the inherent difficulties in forging consensus around what a collection of digital objects should be harnessed for.
Artists have also leveraged on the network possibilities the blockchain as part of their artworks. They can deliberately incorporate coordination mechanisms into their artworks, or leave the space open for their collectors to do so in their own ways—a nod to the permissionless nature of this space.
Regardless, the deliberate or emergent acts of coordination around such artworks do put them squarely within a broader artistic lineage derived from performance art and participatory art, allowing the artists to engage with the social reality of cultural activity on blockchains in a direct and medium-specific manner.
In August 2023, the digital artist Sam Spratt released The Monument Game on Nifty Gateway, an artwork centered on an epic 1/1 digital painting, on which 256 “Players” holding a separate, editioned artwork from the artist were invited to record their observations at specific locations of the painting. The artwork builds on the deep lore that the artist had established in his prior digital paintings, but with enough space for the “Players” to add a final layer of varnish—or in Sam’s own words, “to give a little piece of themselves” to the work and the world it represents.
The Council of Luci—a cadre of the artist’s collectors and supporters who hold a “Skull of Luci” artwork and token created by the artist—voted on three winning observations by the Players. These three winning Players were then given the opportunity to sacrifice their “Player” editioned artwork for a Skull and thus join the Council.
The beauty in this entire artwork emanates not only from the evocatively-illustrated painting itself, but also the manifold connections linking it to the broader universe of Sam’s creation. The observations bind each player with the edition they have collected, which in turn are inscribed permanently into the canvas of painting. The involvement of the Skulls, which were derivative artworks first given to unique bidders of the artists’ early artworks, further links this artwork with the dynamics of the past, allowing history to inform the present and thus influence the future. Viewed as a whole, “The Monument Game” is an intricate system in which story, community and play are thoughtfully woven together on the blockchain.
MUTATIO, a collaboration between two pseudonymous artists XCOPY and NeonGlitch86, was an open-edition work released on the Base L2 in March 2024, for a couple of dollars in ETH per edition. Within a 24-hour window, more than a million editions were minted from over 30,000 unique blockchain addresses.
Many were clearly speculating that the artists may introduce further uses for each edition, perhaps burning them to unlock new artwork or experiences. That said, the combination of low mint prices and a high number of editions may prove to be a ripe space for experimentation with new onchain mechanisms. Already, someone has created a fungible token ($FLIES) backed by MUTATIO editions, allowing the artwork to be plumbed through DeFi infrastructure and traded more easily. To me, MUTATIO brings to life the idea that networked digital objects can be loci of coordination, and gestures towards a future in which artists are “conjurers of swarms”—of networked objects, tokens, words, memes, ideas, capital and anything in between.
(5) The blockchain as a casino
Finally, we cannot run away from the fact that the most prevalent use case for blockchains thus far has been as casinos.
Financialising culture
As always-on, always-accessible computers that anyone can create on, blockchains have proven to be an attractive destination for speculative capital. Here, there are little to no barriers for its liquidity to slosh around—seeking new highs, chasing yields, and seeding hopes of untold riches. With relatively little barriers to create tokens representing anything, the supply side is also taken care of. Anyone can spin up new coins or new digital objects with relative ease, and then beckon the tsunami of liquidity to come.
Amidst the euphoria of the NFT market in 2021-2022, we witnessed the rampant financialisation of almost any digital content via NFTs, spanning the gamut from fine art to a motley range of digital collectibles and paraphernalia, e.g. old tweets, selfies, and even an audio recording of one’s farts.
While the crash in demand for these NFTs came almost as swift as its rise, what is clear is that crypto has enabled the domains of culture and finance to be more intertwined than before. For the first time in the short history of the internet, we can now create digital objects and have an open, unstoppable market for these assets at our fingertips.
This hyper-financialisation of digital culture is repugnant if you’re not into gambling, as it creates a lot of distortionary effects in terms of how it should be valued. For example, pump-and-dump influencers may artificially drive up the price of their targeted NFTs or ordinals and then exit them for profit thereafter, to the detriment of existing collectors.
That said, we should also recognise that culture has all along been financialised, as is evident from the practice of gold farming in online gaming or how parts of the contemporary art world have operated. Crypto simply makes the underlying relationship between culture and money much more apparent, and in some sense, honest. For those out to make a quick buck, there is no need to pretend. They also can’t do this in stealth, as all their onchain transactions would be traceable publicly.
With information on past transactions accessible on the blockchain, we can also develop our own independent conclusions on how particular cultural assets should be valued. This is like playing in a casino where the past data on each game, e.g. winning rate, are accessible to all players. At the very least then, when transacting in digital cultural objects on the blockchain, we can take the necessary precautions or simply go in with our eyes wide open. To me, this is a far more preferable way to navigate the market for digital art and culture, even if I have to contend with gamblers and charlatans on the way.
Degenerative (2021) by 0xDEAFBEEF is a slot machine game implemented on the Ethereum blockchain. The collection begins with a pre-minted set of level 0 machines as NFTs, whose owners can submit transactions on the associated smart contract to gamble and try to hit jackpot. Doing so will grant them mint passes to mint an additional slot machine on the next incremental level. Slot machines at higher levels will have a lower probability of hitting jackpot, as well as a lower supply cap. At the time of writing, the level 2 slot machine (token 47) displayed above has the highest number of jackpots won (6) in the entire collection. This was achieved from 40 rolls—a winning rate of 15%, significantly higher than the 3.5% jackpot probability assigned for its level.
The work was created in the context of generative art and cryptoeconomics colliding during the highs of the 2021 market. At that time, many speculators under the pretense of art appreciation were effectively treating generative artworks like playing cards, gambling on their attributes to profit from the market. In the artist’s own words, Degenerative thus seeks to pose a genuine question to creators and collectors about their motives for participating in the generative art space at that particular point in time: “[Did that] moment represent: A revolutionary paradigm for digital art patronage? A one-time opportunity to claw for scarce resources? A senseless, frenzied expenditure of time and energy? A rational decision in an age of precarity?”
From casinos to integrated resorts
In Singapore, our casinos are part of larger, mixed-use developments called “integrated resorts”. The idea for such resorts integrating leisure, entertainment and business functions was that the casino component would help to make the entire development financially feasible, by subsidising the other components such as hotels, retail, convention spaces, theatres, etc.
This is not a novel concept. Other casino developments around the world have also taken a similar approach, expanding their attractions beyond gambling to draw more people in. The evolution of Las Vegas itself is testament to this—its mafia-run casinos has given way to professionally-managed and family-friendly mega-resorts that are now world-renowned for their range and quality of entertainment offerings.
I think a parallel evolution is underway in crypto. There are many more ways to participate in crypto culture now than just being a gambler and adding to the discourse around making money. Today, one can create, curate and collect quality digital art on the blockchain; engage with other people via decentralised social media protocols like Farcaster, and use consumer applications that tap on various blockchain-related uses, e.g. for ticketing, membership and loyalty programs. Many of the applications supporting such functions were in turn funded—directly or indirectly—from the wealth effect generated by the crypto casino.
Indeed, “the onchain resort is being built on top of the onchain casino”, as Bradley Freeman, a product marketing manager with Stack, has observed with regard to consumer crypto. He also noted that both the casino and resort have a symbiotic relationship, and this is apparent through the ecosystems that memecoins are creating.
For example, the memecoin $DEGEN on the Base L2 can be seen as a cryptocurrency connecting two different worlds—as a cryptocurrency for speculators to punt on the success of the Base L2 and/or the Farcaster protocol, while also serving as an incentive to build up other use cases within and on top of both ecosystems. $DEGEN has a unique distribution mechanism centred on eligible users tipping other users on Farcaster. While there are certainly users trying to game the distribution mechanism to receive more $DEGEN tips, it is heartening to see this memecoin being channelled towards positive-sum games, such as supporting artists, writers, and anyone who is contributing to the space in meaningful ways. It is also being used to power other application, e.g. $DEGEN has become the native token for its own blockchain, the Degen Chain, and it is used to incentivise content creation on Drakula, which aims to be a blockchain-based alternative to TikTok.
Launched only in January 2024, it is still early days for $DEGEN. But its success thus far hints at the potential for sustainable consumer crypto ecosystems to be built alongside the crypto casino. As the foundations of onchain integrated resorts are being laid today, we can look towards a future where mass culture is brought onto or cultivated on blockchains.
Poroscity (2023) by Niceaunties, is a video artwork made by Niceaunties using AI tools, launched as part of a four-part series during the artist’s daily show on Fellowship’s daily.xyz platform on 30 November 2023. The video showcases Auntieverse City, a dreamy, surreal urban environment characterised by its dynamic, organic architecture and its colourful inhabitants, which include aunties living their best lives.
Auntieverse City reflects the artists’ conception of how our physical cities should be, full of colour, fun and vibrancy. In a similar vein, our onchain integrated resorts and cities should likewise be places where we can be free to enjoy and do fun and meaningful things together with our friends.
A workshop for digital culture
I’ve spent some time to articulate in considerable detail my mental model of the five Cs, to demonstrate that blockchains already provide a rather robust toolkit for producing and consuming digital culture.
Going back to what I wrote at the start, we can view crypto as an open, free-for-all workshop. Here, there are many types of tools that we can use to foster more durable and dynamic forms of digital culture, even amidst its inherent ephemerality and volatility.
The main types of tools in the crypto workshop are summarised below:
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Catalogues that are open, verifiable and interoperable, helping us to map and navigate the sprawling, constantly-evolving realm of digital culture.
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Custodians that enable us to possess ownership rights over digital objects, encouraging us to become stewards of these objects, and of digital culture more broadly.
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Canvases on which we can create dynamic and durable digital objects, offering novel digital experiences that are interactive, engaging and memorable.
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Computers providing a medium for digital objects to become more effectively composable and networked, thereby opening a new frontier in the evolution of digital culture and unlocking new possibilities to engage with it as a shared social endeavour.
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Casinos that financialise and fund digital culture, through providing an avenue for speculation to become investments, which go towards building more broad-based and sustainable cultural ecosystems onchain.
To end off this essay, I’ve updated my conceptual diagram to include some key words in this essay. If the framework of the 5 Cs in this essay resonates with you, you can mint the original conceptual diagram for free on Zora.
Crypto culture is dead, long live crypto culture
How we wield these tools is of course an individual prerogative. Blockchains by themselves cannot compel us to act in a particular manner. Instead, it is up to us to decide how to use the unique affordances enabled by blockchains.
In this essay, I have therefore made no attempt to delineate what I think is good or bad culture. It is no point being a culture purist, as the radical openness of the internet and public blockchains naturally invites messiness and chaos. It is just how we are as humans—full of contradictions and tensions, yet brimming with possibilities and potential. When we have the freedom to create, we produce both endless junk and timeless grails. We love to tear things down, but also delight in building things up. We hunger for conflict, yet long for community. We think in terms of singularities, while containing multitudes.
Being onchain will not change this offchain nature. And so when crypto offers an open, free-for-all workshop, with many glistening, shiny tools on display, we do what we have always done. We rush in to play, following our immediate instincts. In the process, we make a mess with these tools. We holler and clamour over others, insisting that others use those tools our way. We also scheme and manoeuvre, so that these tools are directed for our self-interest and not those of others.
But amidst this cacophony, we will also realise that these tools in the crypto workshop can be used to create beauty, no different from other tools that we have grown to be familiar with. Some of us will thus heed the call of an equally primal but perhaps more subtle calling—to try to carve out a space to tinker, to hone a craft, to create artifacts with these tools that can make us feel. In doing so, we attempt to organise and inspire those around us, with visions and values around this new toolkit. Against the finiteness of our lives, we keep using all these tools at our disposal to reach out for the infinite. Ultimately, all of us will fail and die, but in this striving, we shoot our best shot in creating things that can live beyond us.
The sum total of all these activities is what I understand to be culture—the use of tools to create things to pass on. In the context of the internet, crypto offers us a novel and unprecedented toolkit to do the same.
With its five Cs, we now have the ability to build hyperstructures—platforms that can, in the words of Zora co-founder Jacob Horne, “run for free and forever, without maintenance, interruption or intermediaries”. On these hyperstructures, we can in turn grasp and transact in hyperobjects freely and unstoppably, through which we can compose the necessary raw materials to craft meaning that can hopefully persist through the hyperreality of the digital age we inhabit.
At the same time, we must also be realistic. Whether we see the internet as a homogenising, algo-driven “Filterworld” or a scary, silence-inducing “dark forest”, most of the things we will create will never see the light of day, even if created on blockchains. But blockchains allow us to at least put down a waypoint, so that there is a possibility that a kindred spirit may catch a glimpse of it someday—to hear the faint reverberations of a fallen tree in an inhabited forest from many generations ago.
In this sense, digital culture on blockchains is perpetually in a state of coming alive. May it survive and never die.
The internet / loves you back,
if you let it. / Hearts beat to show
systems are go, / all in sync.
Souls of machines / pulse from afar:
keepalive, keepalive. / One avatar
dotes on another. / This is how we survive.
Cursive Binary: Heart Mantra (2021) is a poem by Sasha Stiles, translated into “Cursive Binary”, a language proposed by the artist that fuses her own handwriting with the 0s and 1s of binary code. By merging the human and the machine in this manner, the artist seeks to reflect a transhumanist ideal—a central theme in her body of work—that encourages intimacy with technology, while ensuring that it remains imbued with a human-oriented sensitivity.
Disclaimer: I have collected works by some of the artists featured in this essay, partly for investment, partly for personal enjoyment. Nevertheless, nothing in this essay constitutes investment advice. Please do your own research or consult your own advisers concerning any potential investment decision.
Credits: The header image of this essay was made with Midjourney v6.