BasePaint: collaborative onchain pixel art with shared revenue

Transcript

GM GM welcome to web 3 Academy your one trusted source to capitalize on the next big phase of the internet don't get caught in the hype cycle I'm jbird and I believe that onchain Revenue sharing models are going to change the world that's why I'm carving a path for doers to confidently build and invest in web 3 today's episode is all about base paint now you might have heard of base paint during on chain summer it was one of the onchain apps built on base that really took off and for good reason Zack one of the co-founders here today to tell us all about it let me set this up for you

there are very few consumer apps that are fun to use and not about speculation right now so base paint was conceived as an art project that could easily be built on top of on chain and could not be done offchain this is only possible onchain and in this app artists collaborate and share in the profits generated from their collaboration from their Collective work so every day since their launch in August artists come together on base paint and then they paint a shared canvas for 24 hours this is pixel art and then once that 24 hours passes the artwork is Minted as an open Edition nft and then the profits are

distributed amongst the contributors based on the number of pixels that they contribute now as a result of this over 2500 artists have contributed to over 70 pieces and generated over 190 e in profit to artists so we're talking about Major Impact here and Zach who joined us today has a very interesting perspective on the import right now that we build onchain apps that are not speculative in nature because that comes from he started his crypto Journey at consensus

in 2018 he's worked with Bitcoin core he's worked with filecoin arweave he's worked with gitcoin so he's worked with a lot of projects in the space and his background as a product designer really showed him that we need more fun things to do on chain that are not necessarily about speculation now I guess there is a little bit of speculation in Bas paint because if you collect these pieces you might hope that they go up in value but that's not the point here the point here is that he has built an app that really achieves two things one it allows for collaboration on chain which is something that we're starting to hear we hear the words co-creation we hear curator rewards we hear all these words

that are new that have not existed really before on chain it's same as at the start of the internet there's a lot of new terms well these are the new terms that are really excited about here at web Theory Academy and then the other thing is it allows this Revenue share model and we have not been able to do Revenue share in this way before it is not possible in the web 2 world and so that is really really exciting for everybody that is building in this space for everybody's participating this space because these things are going to lead to entire new business models to an entire new way that we can interact online and IRL as a result of building on blockchain so without further Ado

super excited for you to listen to this conversation with Zach All About base paint and the future of onchain collaboration and rev share models before we jump in we'll just take a minute to hear from our sponsor modern newsletters are built on paragraph that's right paragraph is a brand new newsletter platform that combines the best parts of web 2 and web 3 to supercharge newsletters for both writers and readers build a community not just an audience paragraph uses blockchain Tech to allow readers to collect and own the words that matter to them this takes reading a newsletter to the next level with paragraph readers can mint collect and show off quotes from their favorite newsletters this opens new possibilities

like creators sharing Revenue with fans I also love their new feature paragraph AI this integrates gp4 natively in paragraphs create edit and improve your writing effortlessly with one click and guess what we at web3 Academy are on board and have already moved our content over to paragraph We believe this is the future of newsletters because of profound engagement it creates between creators and fans so whether you're a Creator writer or an ADV reader it's time to check out paragraph and capitalize on the opportunity of being early GM GM Zack welcome to web 3 Academy GM super excited to be here

thanks for having me yeah really excited to have you you just passed a 100 days of Base P paint I think you're at 106 or 107 I can't remember exact so congrats first of all it's you've been incredible to watch you you know it's only been a 100 days the accomplishments you've had so far I know about 600 artists are participating in each daily piece of art and then these pieces are being auctioned off in an open Edition mint and anywhere between 200 up to I think maybe 3500 is the highest piece that has had minors on it hundreds of eth being in total volume did you expect base paint to be this successful when you

launched it no not at all no I was jamming with winter a friend of mine and I think on the ramp up you know we were we had kind of set ourselves a d deadline to do this in two weeks because that's all either of us had time for and I told him it had been like it's just it's been a dis it's been a difficult winter right and so I told him if 100 people use this I'll be happy like because it's just been like it's been such a grind to get people to try something new and and do new things on chain and so yeah like I I think both of us were kind of expecting this is a really cool idea it was kind of like a artistic expression of what we wanted onchain consumer applications to be and we wanted to kind of like do it along

with the bass launch because we were thinking like that'd be a really good way to like at least get people on that first day and it was something where we were like you know this will be really fun people will play with it for a week and then it'll fizzle out and we can say like we launch this really fun you know our place on shame thing so it was really that was the expect the expectations of it cannot believe we're on day 100 and so 100 days in I'm sure the the amount of effort you're putting into this has changed that beyond your expectation how has your your work changed how have your expectations changed yeah I well I mean the work has changed simply because like I think with the exception of every project there's like a lot of work into the initial bootstrapping right so like

on the week leading up to it we were cold dming artists that we knew probably didn't even know like I know winter was working his connections like get intro to artists that he really admired I had worked with some artists previously at the start of my mat and we were just kind of like dming people going like we got this big launch we don't know how it's going to go can I like put this thing in your hand and off hand on Ward you into this to just like try it out so there's a ton of focus oning those first like five to 10 users now that we've kind of like transitioned and the art is kind of like almost runs itself we have these amazing artists who you know if you're there on the start of the day that's one of the most interesting times

to join Jo because the theme drops suddenly you're like oh this is the new theme and artists start like sketching out what the cohesive thing could be or like the well for today for instance they're drawing they drew a path out and like a rose garden sort of thing and then other artists start innovating like drawing on top of it which has just been really fascinating to kind of go from like zero to one people not really sure what this is like starting to experiment to like this emergence of like a higher higher order I guess is kind of like the best way to explain it where it's like it's not just individual stamps around like a specific theme it's a cohesive piece of artwork done by these different artists so our role has shifted a little bit more on the Strategic side so like

chatting with folks who wanted run themed days like partnership sort of thing we are kind of reimagining the brush system so that folks still have access I think one of the design principles is like low cost keep it as accessible as possible so we want to make it to where people can come in they can paint but in a system that sort of discourages spammers and people pix pixel harvesting not necessarily there for the art but they for like whatever money they can they can scrape away on the mints and so it's turned more into like a strategic like what's kind of like yeah strategic sort of understanding where the community is kind of headed and then trying to innovate on that path I think interesting which is a good problem to

have yeah I mean users man like hey build a lot of crypto projects it's nice to have users every once in a while okay so I just want to go through some high level numbers and then I want to explain base paint to everybody to make sure they understand it but I grabbed some of these numbers before we hit record here so to so far 190 eth in profit has been distributed to about 2500 artists you've had 15,000 unique collectors that have collected about 70,000 pieces of Art and you've this number I love you've onboarded 5,000 new Wallets on to base which is really amazing to see or over 5,000 I believe

so not only are these people already in the ecosystem you're bringing new people into web 3 which we've talked a lot about how consumer apps are going to do that on our show and how we're so we're just so early right now that we don't have enough people on chain but there is going to be that moment when adoption really comes not from speculation and investment and people buying crypto for speculation it'll come from people just downloading an app and wanting to play and wanting to participate because it's fun because it's easy because it's simple and then there's some other benefits like Revenue share or co-creation and these are the things that base paint has so with that sort of background for somebody who hasn't heard

of Bas paint before can you explain how it works yeah absolutely so I think like the the closest analogy that most people will probably be familiar with is reddits are place that was actually kind of the starting point for me I think winter had been playing around with this idea before even earlier but before we launched I walked by my wife on the couch doing our place and I'd seen it before and I had it explained before but just watching her behavior there's like an aha moment kind of an unlock and it's a shared canvas where different people on different subreddits coordinate to draw different things using pixel art so Bas paint is inspired by our place it's essentially a shared canvas so when you

log in you can see everyone else painting you see their cursors painting pixel art it is a open canvas so for 24 hours people can paint what they want there's a theme and a limited color palette so folks can can draw around those themes and then after 24 hours the canvas is Frozen it's locked and then it's moved into an open Edition and then that open addition is it's open for 24 hours you could mint as many people as as they want can mint as many additions copies as they want and then at the end of the 24 hours it's over once that 24 hours is completed the profits of the open Edition mint are then distributed to every artist that participated the

day before it is distributed proportionally based off of the number of pixels that you've put down and it's also a total number of pixels so uh you draw something on hour one and on hour 23 it gets covered up that's fine you still get credit for it it's still part of the art it's still part of this story kind of the emerging artwork over those 24 hours so yeah that's kind of a super top level of how base pain works okay so I want to double click on a few of those things just to make sure people understand the really the mechanisms of all this if you haven't engaged in base pain before and I hope after this episode that everybody will go either become an artist or become a collector on Bas paint because it is a lot of fun

so first let's just talk about how does an artist get access to participate in this 24-hour open canvas that's a great question so we have a basically we have a we love nfts so we built a lot of Bas bait utilizing nfts there's two different nfts there's two different nft or smart contracts for base pay One controls the canvas and the profits and distribution everything the other smart contract controls what we call base pay brushes brushes are essentially what an artist comes in and they Min a brush costs the same as a canvas there's no I think it's 0.26 which eth which is was four bucks at the time it's probably five bucks now we continues to go up we'll have to

reduce prices because we want kind of to keep this accessible but an artist comes in they me to brush the brush is not an open addition originally we had one brush mint every 15 minutes that the came too much because otter found it and started gaming the system so we had to slow down the the brush minint honestly brushes are kind of like the thing that we're most interested in completely redesigning because there's still some still some mechanisms we haven't quite figured out yet and we have some really cool ideas that we're working on we haven't quite got it and so an artist comes in they mint their brush if they're able to and then that's their brush every brush has a pixel count so a starter brush has 100 pixels that you

can lay down and then that is essentially how the number of pixels that you can put down on the canvas is enforced it's on chain your your brush one of the attributes of it is pixels whenever you Mint or whenever you commit your art to the canvas it checks the number of pixels that you're laying down against the number of pixels in your brush and once that finishes the brush the canvas rolls over and then your 100 pixels is basically replenished daily so every new Canabis you have a new 100 pixels or however many paint pixels you have in the the brush to paint on the canvas so we basically have two main stakeholders in your community or in your ecosystem you're building we have artists or

contributors or creators and then we have collectors you mentioned that you had a bot issue which no surprise very unfortunate but that's all part of onchain activities when you have the possibility to make money I know that you have taken steps such as requiring an ens or a coinbase wallet profile can you talk about what you've done to eliminate Bots I mean we haven't eliminated them unfortunately we just made it harder to bot First Step was an ens name just requiring an ens name especially in the early days when mints were pretty low basically it's all about like kind of like cost to bot right like

profit profit motive around that and so we were thinking like okay like $5 to register or any of that's May that kind of outweighs some of the profit motive for for some of these guys they can't spin up too many of them becomes more and more expensive to DDOS or brushman system The Next Step was age of wallet so we instituted like a wallet has to be I think like we first we started with 15 days and we noticed people were spinning up a whole bunch of wallets to let them age into 15 days and we kind of continue to increase it I think it's now at like a 100 days and then finally yeah we've moved on we're we're currently testing out something called it was a coin ATT attestation I believe oh you are very interesting we just talked about that on the show last week cool very yeah so

we're trying that we we just I think winter just deployed it two or three days ago and I'm kind of basically I'm watching the brush contract now and watching the mins go because we had paused them for a little bit just because we were like this kind of a losing sort of like a losing game so we restarted the brush EV with coinbase attestation and I basically have the smart contracts up and I'm like clicking on each brush and looking at what they're painting to see if that has helped with the bot problem at all we're still still figuring it out can you explain just since you brought up coinbase attestation we talked a little bit about it on our weekly news show the rollup last week because we're so excited about onchain identity and verified identity is such an not just

for the onchain world to be honest it's a problem for the entire it it'll solve a lot of issues we have like globally you know you could do a whole on that can you explain how you're using coinbase attestations like and what it allows you to do I'm unfortunately I can't that was something winter shipped over the weekend I I did not I was not privy to so unfortunately not no worries no worries all good okay so you have the painters who or the artists who come in they meant to brush and is there am I correct that there's two levels of brushes there's four oh wait four okay three four yeah there's four there's four levels so when we started there was only two because again we weren't sure if people are going to show up so we

started with two we started with a gold brush that had 5,000 pixels we started with 100 pixels mostly because we were like well if it's just winter and I filling up the entire canvas then that's what we'll do you know like it'll be a fun day project thing where we can we can do that basically what happened was after two or three weeks more people came in more people were making really cool things with just 100 pixels we have like kind of a running thread I need to kind of continue to post to that we have a running thread on Twitter of just like amazing 100 pixel brushes because one of the first things that we hear when our artists come in is like 100 pixels is too few people have shown incredible Ingenuity with just 100 pixels like Dune is one of my favorite canvases and the

centerpiece of the entire canvas was someone that someone made really early on it was 100 pixels they just made they painted the a single fman kind of like in like the golden ratio like right at the point where you would want it in like a proper painting and people just kind of like connected to to it they they hooked on to it and then they created this incredible piece surrounding this single 100 pixel painting that this person made so we realized that we needed to start graduating people in but pixel inflation was going to become a thing 5,000 pixels in the context of our canvas which is only I believe it's like 144 pixels by 144 or 188 I can't remember it's Game Boy it's actually a Game Boy that could be really overwhelming so then we introduced three or two two other levels

which is a broads brush and a silver brush at 5,000 pixels and 1 th000 pixels and and as people add to it we upgrade their brush and that's what I was going to ask they just get upgraded on chain or is that a manual process right now that you are upgrading them as a result of their contribution I yes to buff it is a manual process that happens on chain okay again part of the brush refactor we're trying to reconsider how we make this like more of a predictable thing we started experimenting with loading uh Community like Community curation via the themes I think that's something we're interested in exploring on the brush side as well very interesting yeah okay so that actually you bring up the themes leaves me to my next question so I come onto the platform I'm mint a brush cost me about

$4 or5 us whatever the equivalent of eth is and then I have this brush and so now I can contribute to the Daily theme tell us about the daily theme how is it picked and tell us a little bit about the parameters because I think if you haven't participated in this before you might think this sounds like total chaos like how could a nice piece of art now I can tell you these are beautiful pieces of art I've looked through all 100 plus of them and they're amazing but give us an idea of how that happens yeah so uh starting out uh the themes were just selected by winter and I and then we started running out of ideas and so we figured the community would probably have really good ideas in terms of like

what they wanted to pain and so the first stab at Community curation for themes and essentially like like just to free your audience a theme is just a thing that it's basically meant to kind of inform the art that is being drawn on the canvas it could be a theme like Dune like the book Dune it could be x copy which was like one of her highest minted one's Pokemon or something as like I would say broad as like Loi or Tokyo but it's a thing that is meant to kind of like constrain the number of things that you're drawing on the canvas for the first 30 days we kind of just came up with a whole bunch of themes and tried to match them with like really compelling pallets that we had sourced from lopack from colors from a couple of different places and then like kind of

innovated found like some pallets that we really liked as well and then basically what happened was yeah I mean like by day 30 we started running out of ideas and I've always been a big fan of nouns and this idea of like community-led creation and curation and and so we actually worked with prop house for our first round of Thieves which I still think turned out incredible and essentially had everyone submit theme ideas and and then the canvases that you meant because like that's the collector that's the people that have signal that they like the art and want to own the art and so we basically say that the collector the person that owns the art is then able to Signal their interest in what they would like to see drawn and so over prop house

we did the first week uh it was awesome it was really well but we realized we weren't saving ourselves a ton of work when we were transferring the themes from prop house back into the app and something that I've really liked about Bas paint has been we've tried to keep as much of the crypto experience in app as possible so like we don't have a Discord we have a chat next to the canvas we don't necessarily have like a snapshot Forum or anything like that we have theme voting within the application itself and so we basically reversed it we said okay well instead of coming up with a cool theme and finding a good pallet what if we gave people a really good pallet and then ask them what should what theme matches that pallette and we rolled it out maybe three weeks ago and so now every day there's a new

pallet people will come to they look at the pallet they submit their suggestions for the first 12 hours all the votes are hidden so that you just kind of like you can either submit your own pallet or you can vote on on something you like and then in the last 12 hours the votes are revealed so you can kind of see which ones are edging those out and then folks can then like kind of continue to vote whichever one is has the highest number of canvases signal that this is the theme that they like that theme is the is the new base paint is the theme for that day and you need to have collected at least one piece in order to vote yeah yeah but we do it quadratic style so one canvas is one vote I think four canvases is two votes and so on and so forth okay

so it is weighted voting but it's like quadratic funding like getcoin does that type thing which is too mathematical for me but basically idea is it's not one token one vote a bit more balanced than that yeah we just so far we haven't seen Wales come in and just Dominate and so that's kind of what we wanted like we didn't want one person who had a thousand canvases to just say now draw me this now draw me this right like we wanted to still make it community and where the smaller holders had a much stronger stay say than just like with a pure holder system right there's three things that you can do mainly in the app you can paint if you're a Creator and you get a brush as we talked about you can vote if you want to if you're a

collector and you want to vote on what the next day's theme is and you can Mint or collect if you are a collector or you want to support the project let's talk about the minting and the collecting phas because we haven't really touched on that yet so you mentioned is it immediately after the piece of art is finished that it opens for o Open Edition take us through that process yeah absolutely so uh on the front page you see people painting right um on the top right corner and you see a countdown says like 12 hours remaining 5 hours remaining 30 minutes remaining and once that hits zero we call it the canvas flip so the canvas is cleared the new pallet appears you see the new theme

and then on the mid page of the new C the canvas from the previous 24 hours like the artwork that we just worked on is populated inside of the mint page and then you're able to Mint it and it currently displays kind of like the highest number of contributors and we have ideas on how to make that a lot more engaging we want to celebrate New contributors as well that sort of thing so there's ideas on how to make it but yeah it's essentially as soon as that canvas flips you're able to bit okay and I just to share some of the results here I was looking at your most popular mints so day 44 was lens Garden lens lens is a partner of ours and we're big fans of everything they're doing so love love seeing that and it's a beautiful piece that use it has lots of brand imagery

and things from the lens ecosystem and that minted almost 3,500 times and and that was 645 artists that shared 8.1 eth so that would have been a decent Payday for a lot of those artists day 22 with x copy was number two that minted 2300 times 500 artists earned 5.5 eth day 25 was Pokemon Red verse blue Meed 2,000 times 540 artists earned 4.8 eth so you've got you know I the higher end now on the lower end a more a low day would be I think about 200 collectors but it's always about 600

artists it seems yeah 200 collectors maybe and it would mint total volume maybe 0. five e or something like that yeah yeah absolutely yeah that's about I mean so to me like that's kind of the that's the interesting challenge of Bas pay right now is the building things that utilize the canvases in a way to like I don't know continue to continue to reward correct collectors because collectors are rewarding the artists and so you want to like continue to incorporate canvases as ways to kind of inform the project to kind of complete the loop because that is like that's the stakeholder Loop you know the artists and the and then the collectors and you want to kind of inform want to make that a virtuous cycle where one feeds into the other and so I think a lot of people who

don't know Bas paint it's very easy to say oh that's a niche artist app right that's an app for artist oh I'm not an artist I don't belong here but I think that a lot of people are missing the bigger picture here and i' love to talk about that and maybe that gets into the conversation of the future of base paint I'm not sure where this goes but to me there's two key things at play here that were not possible before onchain and that's what we love to talk about here at Web Academy is what can only be done on chain and those two things are are this co-creation or collaboration which does not necessarily

have to apply to Art co-creation and collaboration is something that a lot of people are talking about using on chain but I don't necessarily there isn't enough examples of it yet that there hasn't been a model figured out and then the other is this Revenue sharing idea that you should get compensation for your contribution and in your case it's great that there's these your Revenue shares based upon the number number of pixels you contribute so it's very quantifiable which might not be so easy in other use cases I'm curious you know what have you learned from this project what has it inspired in you and how are you thinking about maybe the future of base paint or maybe other Concepts or

models on chain yeah I mean that's a good question so I'm probably goingon to need to think about that for a little bit to me like co-creation like to your point because I know you know you said I I think it's a valid hesitancy I'm not an artist so how can I how can I contribute we have people who aren't I would say traditional artists come in and contribute the AC of collaboration actually allows you to still contribute meaningfully even if you aren't Michelangelo right and I think that's part of like one of the beautiful aspects of Bas pain one of my favorite things of the last like two to three years that's not even web three related like the Duets on Tik Tok right it was like almost like an Exquisite corpse of

like one person would post one video one person would post a secondary video and occasionally you got these like really wonderful chains of people adding to the joke even as like it kind of continued to progress and so by the end of it you watch the original video probably 20 times but it was still entertaining every time because each new innovation kind of surprised and delighted you as a as a viewer and so I I see collaboration everywhere not just in web 3 one of the things that excited me about Bas paint is that Bas web 3 enables kind of like a new form of collaboration but like also like incentivized collaboration right it doesn't you do have vandals occasionally

but most people drawing art are incentivized to make the best art possible because that theoretically leads to a higher mint it's a really direct incentive alignment input output good art equals good art around a good theme equals higher mint day right like and you even kind of cited it in the gallery that the most popular mints were the ones with kind of like the broadest appeal so even collectors are kind of like incentivized to think like oh well people like this or I've you know I've seen like people really to do that they're not just like collectors they're almost like curators when they start buying into the base paint system so it's just been really fun in terms of like what I'm really interested to experiment with I'm really interested to experiment further in

storytelling right like that Tik Tock idea that is like storytelling and that like it's sort of like an Exquisite corpse where people keep adding to the story or like the message each new video is like a new revealed detail and the same story being retold over and over again but I am really interested in you know either on bass pain or elsewhere kind of this idea of people kind of like coming together and then co-creating lore within the project itself and then the outcome of that being something where everyone is relate is not just like rewarding financially but then also like has a say in kind of like the future of I guess like the next steps in within the next chapter within it I think it's just kind of interesting way to think about that

yeah I think that there's it's really hard to wrap your your mind around this stuff right now you know like you say we've all heard this storytelling in nfts if you're in in nfts you can't not hear storytelling it's like part of everybody's road map and you know Creator lore and whatnot and this idea of co-creation is very possible when you have a token or a way to what I love that you guys have done is you've created a way to Simply enable anybody to participate by you know it's a very low cost to Mint a brush but then you also have levels where as you contribute more then you can level up to a higher level where you have I guess a wider

range of contribution that you can make your you know in in the case of base paint you have more you can do on the canvas in the case of maybe a storytelling you could produce more in the story but I think it's hard for people to grasp but okay but how do I come up with a story with a whole bunch of people at the same time here's a good example oh my God Kirby OMG Kirby I don't know if you've heard of them they were really big maybe like they were big in the Bull Run they got a lot of attention because they created a dow that together created Music and the way they did it was that you could join the Dow by collecting their nft it was an nft collection and

then they I don't know if it was quadratic voting or what the voting mechanism was but in some way once you had an nft you could vote on the music and what they quickly realized was what worked the best was actually if they came together in Discord and did like jam sessions and then that led to the best output now in the case of the art you have the chat along the side of the art right but there's not necessarily I feel like the thing about a canvas is it's quite I don't want to one-dimensional in a way right there's only so much you can do with it right whereas with a story or with with a song

who knows you can go a lot of different directions but this idea of okay we can build our community we can know who the active members are because we can have an onchain Tok toen and then we can give them simple ways to contribute and to get involved and everybody can feel part of the output whatever that might be that type of co-creation I think we're go we're going to see a lot more of that I mean even Nike Swoosh has talked a lot about how their platform is all about co-creation they've done a little bit of it with I think they had a contest where artists could draw their future shoes and you could enter into it and I don't it was necessarily on chain but we're

seeing this theme more and more across the ecosystem I don't know if that brings up anything for you but that's sort of what I'm seeing Oh I mean I mean yes I want to plus line what you just said in that pixel to me pixel art was very intentional and that it's a very approachable medium the people that are great at it are geniuses so I don't want to downplay the skill kind of required to create it but at the same time it's at least more approachable it's kind of like snow boarding it's easier to get up on a board and stay up on a board now to be great you still have to be great but you don't you aren't necessarily falling quite as much as as skiing and I kind of feel like it's approachable especially like there's just constraints I'm also

going to say that like constraints in general are the artist's friend so I think the the more open a canvas is and be that like an actual Canvas OR like a music uh canvas or a story like a blank writing page like the more paralyzing that is and the more discordant the more discordant I think like that the end artwork is I think that's one of my favorite things with the artwork itself as we have kind of evolved people have found kind of like creating these like kind of Center P pieces for everyone else to help to hang their artwork on so honestly what I'd be really interested in is almost like a rotating primary secondary art Jam so like if we were going to imagine a bass paint for music

right I don't know if it would make sense for a single for everyone to like upload their tracks at once I think it'd be be more interesting to have one person upload a primary and then have four other people upload like a secondary track kind of like in support of that and then just kind of like rotate it so like I'm almost imagining like four composers getting together and each one takes a turn leading that day and then the the other four kind of like yeah produce like sort of like that secondary mix to it I I I read the Rick Rubin book on creativity recently which is great I'm going to add to everyone else saying it's great it's great but he said something to be effective ler like there are moments where someone has to leave that's to me is like one of the

most paralyzing things of decentralization like you said voting right of course all great artwork starts in the voting even in the voting booth Booth right like I don't I don't know if that's true and I do think that there is if you're going to think about acts of co-creation and like collaboration on chain you do have to think about it in terms of like a natural lead lead follow you know primary secondary and that tension there which I think we like to me this wasn't intentional it was like half intentional but to me like the 5,000 pixels versus the 1,000 pixels that kind of created that natural primary secondary the people that we knew that were amazing pixel artists we gave 5,000 pixels to on day one because we you're amazing you're gonna paint

something amazing and everyone else with the 100 pixels like you can experiment you can at in their work you can work on your own stuff but I think kind of allowing just enough chaos to let surprises emerge while also finding the people that you know are I would say like bought in and have the level of skill to create the thing that needs to compete in the market right like it's the old Reed Hastings quote like we're not competing Netflix isn't competing with HBO it's competing with fortnite and sleep your onchain activity is competing with everyone else's onchain and offchain activity so it has to be like a certain level of good it can't just be like pure chaos but I think yeah like finding that Dynamic of like lead

versus follow primary secondary and allowing people to contribute without necessarily placing all of the weight on their shoulders of making it great and finding people who are capable of great work that that's like one of the Dynamics I think about in that a lot what about the revenue share model I'm sure when you started this you said yourself you you didn't think it would go as long as it did or be as successful as it's been so I'm sure you didn't anticipate that there would be over 190 eth distributed to these artists do you think about it differently now that you see that there's more money being made how are you approaching that love it to me art so eth distributed to

artists is the thing I'm probably secondary to the artwork itself because the artwork itself is beautiful but the thing I'm incredibly proud of is the fact that artists have made two e five E like I'm I'm not quite sure on the totals but and I saw someone doing dashboard in terms of like total profitability for artists but like I'm gonna be honest it's really hard to be an artist it's very difficult especially with kind of like the emergence of AI Etc like you just kind of see this like Perpetual push down like depression of wages right with artists and it's been especially hard for nft artists one of the things that really excited be about nfts is that it's the First deflationary Technology to hit art in uh Millennia

right like it's the first thing that made art more rare versus more common and so the idea that we were able to sh like basically like take the revenue we didn't do like a treasury thing where people voted and then you got like you know you had kind of like ran into sort of like the politics of that you just distributed it straight to the artist that's like the second biggest highlight for me with Bas pain it's so exciting to see and I think one thing is important to recognize is it's not just pixel artists that are involved here yeah and I have seen people talk about how they minted a brush and they filled in some background colors right just to be part of it and just to participate you know

it's not going to pay your paycheck or pay your mortgage or your rent but you get a chance to get involved and I think there is that there is those levels of involv from your expertise or your skill which is really also I think a another benefit of the co-creation is the way that it builds an opportunity to learn and to grow we see that in the classroom we see that in schools where you know you create together with your classmates and we all know that experience is the best teacher but we don't see that a lot online because you can't really do any I guess we see it in the form of memes and but we have no idea who is involved we have no idea who is participating in so there's a new sort of mechanic at play

here as a result of onchain yeah so you inspired me this is something I'm going to be saying from now on because I just thought of it based off of like kind of your your excellent monologue but we saw a similar Dynamic during the Renaissance right you had Masters and then you had apprentices the apprentices would work in the master shop and they would PID on the artwork and then they would be paid out of the profits the proceeds of that piece and you kind of don't see that anymore you have apprenticeships in other types of professions like electricians and plumbers and everything that's a great analogy thank you for sharing that because that's like really click that unlocks something in my head in which this type of collaboration where you kind of like identify the primary and the secondary this does

almost create like an apprenticeship level but it's like decentralized permissionless apprenticeship you come in you can play with something really small you can add to the piece and then as you add to the piece you build a reputation and you kind of like build the ability to create more and then earn more and more with the revenue that's awesome thank you that's really super cool super cool I love it you're welcome I want to shift gears now talk a little bit about your optimism application the pgf application maybe tell us about the application but before you do for those who don't know about optimism pgrf can you just tell us a little bit about what that is and give us a background I can give you as much of a background as I'm

familiar with so optimism has a essentially has a retro fund they fund projects that essentially had like an impact on their ecosystem if you go to their retro pgf fun they actually have a formula where they talk about like how they measure impact and they essentially they have a really good chart where it says essentially like here's the impact and it's like one bar chart and then they have another that is revenue which is usually a lot smaller because it is crypto and and it's just erase to erase margins basically and then they had like the retr funding as essentially like the piece that is meant to make up the difference between the impact and then the revenue and so we were recommended to apply shout out to Bass to Jesse and the folks at Bass I'm a huge fan of just

not just like how they supported us but how they support interesting projects in the space I think Jesse is one of those true believers who he has said multiple times and this is something I believe in my bounds that we don't get to where we want to be like the the future of cryto like this decentralized future where like everything's on chain and everything we don't get to there without designing experiences that are fun to have on chain for the entire cycle and not just like the five months where things are wounding so he's reached out multiple times and said like hey like if you know people building really cool things please send them my way and so yeah Jesse recommended that that we apply to the Retro B Goods retro funding put together an application put it in and I believe voting is November 7th

through December 7th and essentially from my understanding you have badge holders who are essentially like people elected within optimism they review all the applications I believe like 620 something have have applied and there is 30 million I think it's 30 million op to be distributed amongst these 600 projects based off of the impact and then each badge holder submits a list with like kind of a recommendation and then each badge holder then goes through the list sees the recommendations and then votes on the allocation and then I don't actually know how the allocation is finalized I think it is like an average of everyone's allocation or it might just be the re the lists are used as

recommendations I'm I'm kind of un clear on yeah what I think is amazing about you know and just for as a reminder for everybody Bas is built on the op stack which is why base has incentive to also promote OTE optimism there's a great partnership there basically base shares profit with op the op Collective for using the op stack right and the op stack is a way that base spun up their L their layer too and other there's others that are using the op stack for their layer to as well and so what's amazing is optimism has and all these chains have all these holders right and the thing that optimism is really focused on

is Community engagement in their ecosystem not just in terms of having more Builders come and build on top of optimism but also in terms of okay let's turn our token holders into I almost want to go as far as saying co-creators so that might be a bit far let's turn our token holders into voters and reward them for voting and so the every optimism airdrop you actually get more tokens in the airdrop if you participate in voting within the optimism ecosystem so yeah so here we have the retroactive which is the this retro public good fund so basically it's like as you said Zach it's like any any project that's on top

of optimism or Bas because Bas is on top of optimism that you can apply there's over 600 that have applied and you can get funding for your project because you have already done something great and so if you guys are on there right now and I hope that anybody listening that is badge holder at optimism go vote for base paint so that the these guys can get some additional funding coming their way I know that there's 30 million op that gets distributed through this round this round of funny which as you said is November 7th to December 7th so yeah really exciting to see that exciting to see you guys growing there because I think the main thing that I get so excited with Bas paint and curious to

get your thoughts on this before we wrap here is we really need more fun non-speculative crypto onchain apps we just don't have enough of them and they know we can get into why that is but curious how you see sort of the ecosystem right now and what you think when you think down the road do you think we're heading in the direction of you know this the next wave of adoption will be as a result of onchain apps do you think we're that direction or do you think we're heading a different direction I think there's two different channels of adoption and I think on one hand crypto is macro it's hard to trust or are kind of like

believe that the next bull market I'm I'm sorry to be Negative Nancy hard to believe that the next bull market is going to come from consumer adoption like from like I would say non-speculative consumer adoption when on the other hand everybody's waiting for the ETF approval rates to be slashed like these are all speculative abits right these so now I will say though that in terms of a long like a long tale right like five years 10 years I do think that like actual sustainable growth is going to be from consumer experiences that prioritize the consumer and can prioritize like people having fun where web 3 is the enabling technology so like Nike Swoosh right like to me those type

of projects are incredibly bullish not necessarily for the next Bull Run before the life of cryp in general and that's kind of where I want to continue to experiment not because I think that these are going to be the projects that moon in the next 18 months 24 months whenever the next bull market is but I do think that that is like kind of existentially what crypto needs in order to be relevant to normal people what I'm personally scared I've been I've been building in crypto since 2018 I've worked on like stuff like public good stuff I worked on um research for like cbdcs I've like done a whole bunch of stuff the thing I'm scared of is spending all this time in my career working on these things really just to like build the next set of

financial rails that JP Morgan runs on like that's what I'm scared of and I think that that's what keeps me up at night and I think the way that we manifest a reality that isn't that where crypto and de socialized technology is like something that people use and are delighted by is by focusing on these consumer experiences and so that's why I'm incredibly bullish of it on the next five years and 10 years yeah yeah I think you bring up a really great point there and I think that's what the normies or the non web3 people are missing right now and it's tough to blame them try to explain to somebody e-commerce before we had e-commerce right they'd be like what do you mean I'm GNA trust I'm gonna buy something

online and use my credit card I don't trust that person how do I get it shipping we don't ship things yet like that's not what we do we don't have so it's the same idea and most of the world sees blockchain as crypto exclusively and they see it as this monetary Revolution and think that's what web 3 Academy we're trying to teach that it's not just a monetary Revolution it's a revolution of the entire internet and all of our digital assets and our identity and our voting and all these other things that go so far beyond that but at the same time speculation is what brings people in so we have this just hello world of crypto quote and it is something like you have to acknowledge

that that is kind of the reality that we're building in but I do think it is possible it is possible to build something where speculation isn't like the core use case and I would love to see more people build that if you're doing it DM me and I'll help however I can because I still want to see more of those experiences out in the world I love it I love it for those who want to get involved in Bas paint how do they get involved where do they go how can they how I mean where can they DM you actually you said they could DM you what's your Twitter ad Z hearing is my Twitter so yeah DM me and I'm happy that I've been building products for probably 14 years now in crypto since 2018 I've helped a lot of teams I love helping teams I love

building new things with new people so please reach out if you've got questions or ways that I can be helpful to get involved with Bas paint I would say show up show up on Bas paint. XYZ that's the app you can participate in the chat you can meant to brush you can me canvases just join in have fun have fun with us and if you like The Vibes you want to get a deeper end and then we are always looking for new contributors on a deeper level technical Etc as well cool awesome we'll throw some links in the show notes as well for everybody so they can find those easily if you don't remember couple quick questions vo wrap here a little bit of a speed round what's an nft you'll never sell oh man I think nfts I'll never sell so the first pfp

kind of like generative project I found that I got really excited about I probably won't sell in fact I'd love to pick up some more solo. so I think it was Denison Bertram and then weally and then a painter friend of his they did these really cool abstract portraits which was my pfp for a while and they're just really cool like I'm never going to sell that probably never sell uh my Bas schools because the Vibes and I don't know there's a couple of others I'm not a good nft Trader so if I buy it it's kind of the kiss of death that it's never going up but I have a lot of Art than I love that I'm never getting rid of yeah yeah I hear you I have similar experience with nft it's one thing you've bought recently for under $100

that brings you Joy doesn't have to be a digital good doesn't have to be a digital good that's a good question because I've picked up a couple of switch games that have been pretty darn good halflife the remake of halflife is was free actually on his 25th birthday yeah I really like video games I like gaming so I think experimenting with like small indie games has probably been that oh vampire Survivor it was like five bucks on Steam it's the simplest game imaginable there's an amazing not clip documentary about it it was really just a guy building it in his spare time he used all of these like kind of found parts to like kind of Cobble together this like idea that he had it caught fired people with crazy for it now he

has like a company around this thing that he threw together on the weekend I played that over the week a couple of days ago and I got obsessed with it it shows how incredible Simplicity and like just simple simple simple mechanisms are that people can just kind of like hook on to and just it just sort of like feeds this play Loop so yeah vampire Survivor for like five bucks or 20 bucks has been like has been really not just fun but really instructive in terms of like how I'm thinking about Bas pain and other digital products yeah was say ironically I feel like you just described Bas paint when you said he started something on the weekend and then it became a full company and a team yeah I found I found it pretty pretty inspiring I'm not gonna lie that no clip documentary was pretty pretty good to

read cool okay last question if you had a billboard that one billion people were going to see what would you write on it oh I've already so I've this already happened I don't know if it's a billion people but the Taylor uh in base paint he rented the Time Square billboard for okay 20 seconds and we played a time lapse of a base paint of one of the base paint canvases so there's like a I'll send you the link so you can include in the show notes but there's literally a video of a Bas paint canvas time lapse as it's being drawn over 24 hours in Time Square with everybody looking at this going like what is X x copy and why do these people care about it that was awesome so I would probably just repeat that i' probably just pull a Taylor

repeat that because that was pretty awesome and is this Taylor who's also the founder of perk shop as well yeah yeah yeah like OG he's awesome cool cool so I'm just curious how much does it cost for 20 seconds on in Time Square do you know I have no idea I think it's actually somewhat cheap I think actually that might be the $100 if I had done it I would have said that would have been the best $100 I've spent recently because I think it is like in that price range interest I just posted that thing in the chat that was awesome and so I would just do a billboard with that there you go I love it Zach thanks so much for the time appreciate everything you guys are building excited to continue to watch the progress of Base pain amazing thanks so much this has been an awesome

conversation I really appreciate it so much fun to jam and yeah man hope if folks got something out of this if they have questions if they want to build something cool and I can be helpful please hit me up love it thanks for listening it everybody have a great day thank you for listening to web through Academy your one trusted source to capitalize on the next big phase of the internet if you enjoyed this episode please share it and subscribe or follow so that you don't miss the next one while you're at it there's a link in the description for our free newsletter where we provide timely and relevant web 3 insights so you can confidently build and invest in web 3 make sure to subscribe today one final note this podcast is for educational purposes only and nothing we say is financial advice crypto and web3 are risky and you should

never invest more than you're willing to lose thank you friends and see you in the next one