Collecting Art on Tezos

Getting started with blockchains, digital asset ownership, and the related technologies and techniques alongside is not currently, or was not a simple task. I hope that this work can serve as a preliminary guide for someone new to blockchains, or new to Tezos to get started.

- xander

An Overview

Create a Wallet

• Go to templewallet.com
• Install the extension or app
• Create a new wallet
• Write down the seed

Sync your wallet

• Click on the sync wallet button (usually located at the top right of the window)
• Click on Temple
• Click connect in the wallet pop-up
• (Click sign if required)

Collect Art

• Navigate to the artpiece
• Click on the collect button (Collect for X on Teia, Buy Now on Objkt, mint iteration or purchase token on fxhash)
• Click on confirm in the wallet pop-up
• Wait for block confirmation (check on block explorer ie. tzkt )

Appreciate and Display your art (ie. Gallery.so)

• Click on Sign Up
• Click on Tezos
• Click Confirm
• Click Sign
• Click Enter Gallery
• Add a Username and short bio
• Click next
• Start curating (follow tool tips)

Introducing

Collecting in my opinion is temperamental, almost a compulsion. I have boxes of Pokemon and Yu-Gi-Oh cards, shelves of books, tins of interesting stones, screws, and bolts, erasers and pencils in tool boxes and I could go on... but for here and now, art and some Art.

I've always found artworks and processes fascinating, my father should've gone to art school instead of training to be an accountant, and did eventually end up there, a painter, experimenter, ultimately I think, a reluctant creator; and so there's been an impression on me not to hide that part of my personality in the way he seemed to.

Overtime I have collected discarded illustrations, photographed graffiti, bought pieces and magazines from art fairs and online, and most recently built a small catalogue of the cartoon page in the Evening Standard.

Discovering crypto-art, and the intersection of a novel kind of ownership it brings to digital art was like a lightbulb moment, I created my first NFT at Ethereum block #12017006 (Mar-11-2021 11:27:43 AM +UTC), and almost immediately gave up on the whole thing, the transactions consumed far more of the resources I had in crypto at the time than I was really comfortable with; and I needed to find some other way to experiment, participate, collect, and create if I was going to continue.

I explored NEAR and mintbase (I think it was called, and was on the waitlist to experiment on their new storefront platform), but by the time I could create there, I'd discovered Tezos and hicetnunc, and at Tezos block #1449873 (Apr 29, 2021, 11:35:30 AM +UTC) I funded my xander.tez wallet, and within an hour had created and collected my first Tezos NFT (or LEFT depending on your philosophy and perspective).

In the few years since I have created over a hundred tokens, and collected hundreds if not over a thousand tokens. It has given me infinite wall space to collect art for, as well as making connections with people, and building relationships that have become invaluable.

I could not recommend the whole experience more to any similarly compulsive or temperamental collectors out there. Scepticism, cynicisms, apprehensions or something else, much like the views which held me off getting involved long before I did; there's nothing like just getting involved, collecting those first few pieces is tantalising and consuming.

However, getting started can be a little complicated, and obscure, hopefully this article will help in some ways. by providing a starting point, and opening avenues of thought or producing questions requiring further research, investigation, and exploration alongside.

The Tezos community is broadly very friendly, approachable, and supportive to new entrants, and often ready to answer questions on virtually any point, or provide directions to somewhere answers might be more readily available. Definitely don’t feel alone, or afraid of feeling lost, just ask questions somewhere, from twitter to discord - I am sure someone will try their best to help.

My aim here is to describe how to get to collecting art, from not having a Tezos wallet or knowing where to get one from or how.

• Wallets? Tokens? Contracts? NFTs? LEFTs?

What even are Non-Fungible Tokens? What's a Fungible Token? When is it a Limited Edition Fungible Token?

Wallets, Identities

All we really need to know at this stage is what's a wallet, how do I get one?

A brief overview of the main wallets of different types on Tezos are: Kukai (web based), Temple (browser extension (there's an app now too), Airgap (a pair of apps), and Umami (a desktop application). I've not used them all, but will refer here to Temple as I am most familiar with it.

Having said that, probably the quickest, and most simple way of getting a wallet on Tezos for collecting is with Kukai and "Sign in with social:"

However, I personally would strongly advise against this, as you will need to create a recoverable wallet at some point anyway as your wallet becomes absolutely connected to the social account immutably with this process.

If for any reason your account is closed, deleted, or lost your wallet will be lost along with it, and for this reason among others, I would recommend using Temple from the get go, you can always import your wallet into a different wallet provider at a later stage. For a concrete example of this problem, sodagenjo's account [OBJKT] [Twitter], lost, to a momentary lapse of reason and a deleted twitter account, and the token of his shown below, that I own, for example [burned] [reminted], he decided upon re-minting, from a new wallet he could re-import, to preserve a controllable provenance record.

Create your own seed, and securely store it offline - not in a password manager in your browser, or in plain text on the same device. Write it down on paper, carve it into a piece of wood or clay, inscribe it in metal, whatever, but keep it physical, safe and secure.

If you're creating tokens as well as collecting, rather than just collecting your creator wallet is your provenance seed, and as an artist should be extremely important to you. It creates a permanent provable link from your artworks to you by means of your control of the wallet. If someone else has control of the wallet, they can provably pose as you, and it's hard to prove definitively that any malicious or unauthorised use of the wallet is not you, authorised by you, or authentically you.

It is potentially the most important step in getting started creating or collecting on the blockchain, and maintaining exclusive access to the wallet seed or private key is imperative to securing your identity on the blockchain. Your address is more than a letterbox or a house key, it's more like your passport, national insurance number, tax reference number, or something in that vein; except if you lose it it is irrecoverable.

In short:

• Go to templewallet.com
• Install the extension or app
• Create a new wallet
• Write down the seed

There's a whole rabbit hole of operational security, best practices, and maintenance of the security of access to the private key to your wallet; best, in my view, left aside for now, but I think it's something I will return to at some point to write about, as I have a lot of thoughts about the state of the market in relation to this topic.

But, create your own wallet, avoid short-cuts, and secure your seed offline as best you can.

Tezos, currencies, platforms

Once you have a wallet, you'll need some currency, natively on Tezos, that is ꜩ (Tezos (XTZ)).

Coinbase, Kraken, Binance are (probably) the big three for buying cryptocurrency - ie. the on-off ramps to fiat currencies, but use what works for you, minding regulations along the way. From there, fund your Tezos wallet, and you're good to go. Explore platforms, find artists and their artworks, communities and their niches; as well as all the de-fi, games and other things I am less knowledgeable about, most importantly, in my view, is to follow your interests, and others who share them.

Or, if you're so inclined, there are now pay with card options in some places, such as on fxhash and objkt.com.

As for platforms, the ecosystem has developed in quite some way since I got started, there are more platforms, indexers, communities, and tools. However, there are some main platforms that I will be explaining the process for with this article those are teia.art (a community continuation of hicetnunc.xyz (where my Tezos experience got started)), objkt.com (a marketplace aggregator as well as a minting platform), and fxhash.xyz (a platform focussed on generative art projects, and now also written articles such as this one).

Others that may be of interest all with their own USPs are versum.xyz, kalamint.io, akaswap.com, typed.art, and 8bidou.com - to name but a few off the top of my head, the list of platforms is ever expanding, it can be difficult to keep up, I find it easiest to follow artists than trying to keep up with the news.

• Fund your wallet
• Find art pieces you like, by artists you appreciate, and want to see more of or from
• And collect them

Platforms: Artworks, Collections, Series

But first, how do you actually go about finding something? What is the difference between the hicetnunc contract, an Objkt factory contract, or an fxhash GENTK?

In order; there's social media (twitter, instagram, discord, etc......), exploring on the platforms themselves, galleries, magazines, newspapers etc; or the great gulf of notoriety building. How do you find anything?

And in relation to tokens, contracts, and standards, different smart-contracts produce different tokens, theoretically enforcing the conformation to a particular standard. A token minted from/on the hicetnunc contract is contractually enforced to follow the FA2 (TZIP-12) token standard [1] [2]. Personally I think there's a value to tokens minted on the hicetnunc contract as opposed to being minted on a creator contract from the OBJKT factory contract deployer (or whatever it is that it's actually called). But this is all a question of provenance, provenancial source, and personal preference.

All three (teia/hicetnunc, OBJKT, and FXHASH) are open access, no permission is required to use the contracts to mint NFTs, the differences are primarily in what and how the NFTs (or LEFTs) are minted (read created).

On the hicetnunc minter contract (KT1Hkg5qeNhfwpKW4fXvq7HGZB9z2EnmCCA9), all tokens are created in order one after the other, with nothing really defining their difference, there's no splits or categories between things, it’s OBJKT#1, then OBKJT#2 etc. up to OBJKT#825275 (at time of writing). If you want a sequential series of OBJKT#'s you'd have to do something clever while creating to ensure that - and even then it might get split in a block by someone else (I guess, I don't know for sure, and haven't researched that particular point).

On the objkt.com Minting Factory contract (KT1Aq4wWmVanpQhq4TTfjZXB5AjFpx15iQMM) which has created (at time of writing) 68,851 contracts, or collections, as they're called on OBJKT.com. These are distinct from the hicetnunc contract, that, while they create similar tokens (conforming to the same standards) the Minting Factory contract manages difference, and access to that difference. Creators can create collection contracts which only they or invited creators can mint to, allowing for a, in theory, more organised view of the artworks.

I'm sure this is not a very good explanation really, but in short, the hicetnunc contract and the objkt.com Minting Factory contract are similar, except where the hicetnunc contract starts at token #0 and increases the token # after every mint, the objkt.com Minting Factory contract, creates separate contracts for each creator collection, and the token # is dependent on which contract it has been minted from, and so each 68,851 contracts when initially minted to will create token #0 increasing for each mint.

This is also made more complicated to write down given that the hicetnunc contract creates tokens in the form of OBJKT#[token_id], which is where the objkt.com platform derives its name from, and so I've tried to make it all make sense when ultimately I am trying to compare the differences between two things with the same word/name being used differently.

Confusing without even mentioning minting from the creator side and minting from the collector side, as in fxhash tokens, or OBJKT open editions. But semantic confusions aside fxhash tokens (GENTKs), are generative artworks, or programs which produce outputs, the programs are minted as projects, and the outputs are minted as tokens like the hicetnunc contract does, where the GENTK contract starts at token#0 and continues as iterations from different generative programs are minted.

For example this is GENTK token #0 (fxhash.xyz/gentk/FX0-0)

And This is GENTK token #1000 (fxhash.xyz/gentk/FX0-1000)

Ultimately the technical implementations and implications are a step beyond, and this was only really an aside to say I find the historical provenance and philosophical foundations of the open hicetnunc contract to be of specific interest, and as such is where I'll start my brief exploration of Collecting on Tezos, the topic is far too broad otherwise.

Traditional forms apply. There are art pieces; stand-alone, or part of a specific collection, or ongoing series, or however else an artist intends to remark upon their works. As such collecting is broadly the same, find artist, find artwork, buy/appreciate/save artwork.

Teia (née hicetnunc) and OBJKT.com

In the following series of videos I try to explain my process for finding pieces to collect, as well as the actual process for collecting those pieces.

Firstly, syncing wallets, and ultimately why Tezos is good for getting started as a new collector of NFTs.

Next I talk briefly about searching on OBJKT and price points of tokens, as well as my method for finding things in quite a passive way, when tokens cost next to nothing it becomes a much more enjoyable experience in appreciating different photographs and photographers.

As well as my process for collecting tokens minted on the hicetnunc contract using a combination of objkt.com and teia.art. I also run into a minor hiccough injecting a transaction to the blockchain, this happens from time to time, often for reasons unknown or unknowable at least to me. Just retrying is often your best bet, or if it's still not working, closing your browser and trying again later. As the solution often is with these things just turn it off, and turn it back on again.

The videos above discuss my process for collecting tokens minted on the hicetnunc contract. The following video explains just using objkt.com, as well as using multiple wallets and switching between them.

There's also the ability to purchase tokens using Ethereum or by card, so when using objkt.com, it's not a necessary requirement to have funded your Tezos wallet with XTZ, as Winter (the third party payment provider) manages gas fees, and transfer fees to your Tezos wallet; but you will need XTZ to do anything else with your newly purchased tokens.

These short videos should have given an overview of the process for collecting art on Tezos using Teia and objkt.com; syncing your wallet, finding a piece to collect, and collecting it.

Collecting on fxhash follows the same principles, but with a few more or different steps.

• Syncing your wallet
• Finding an art piece (generator or generation/iteration (I like generations personally, but I think iterations is more common/widespread)
• Collecting (either by minting a new generation, or directly purchasing one from the secondary market)

The world of fxhash is somewhat more complex due to the layered or nested nature of the artform. The explore tab shows generators, which have fixed supplies, from which you can mint new generations from open generators. The marketplace tab shows generations where you can purchase specific previously minted pieces.

When generators are minted out they are only available to collect via the secondary market. While novel iterations are created via a primary market, purchased directly from the artist; existing iterations make-up the secondary market.

Other tools

Before concluding I would like to briefly mention some other tools which I have found exceptionally useful in the course of collecting tokens on Tezos.

A Block Explorer - https://tzkt.io/

A block explorer is an essential tool for checking on the status of the chain, for checking whether operations have been applied. As well as for a variety of other things such as investigating the transaction history of any wallet or contract, or the on-chain storage such as for metadata, or the many other things contracts can have.

NFTBIKER - https://nftbiker.xyz/

Biker's tools are invaluable, and do so many different things it'd take ages to explain them all, their differences and potential uses, but if there's something you feel like you should be able to do on one of these Tezos marketplace platforms, you can probably do it here.

FXWHO - https://fxwho.xyz/

who?'s tools are power-user tools for fxhash which I have found extremely useful in cutting through to the key information on the marketplace, and following the progress of mints.

ONCYBER - https://oncyber.io/

Oncyber is a 3D digital gallery platform facilitating sharing curated selections from your collection. I've found it an interesting way to think about the pieces I have collected, and a useful tool to share selections with others.

Concluding

Collecting on Tezos is really easy once the initial barriers are overcome. Creating a wallet is easy, but important to get right. Collecting art is also easy but artists and artworks can be difficult to find.

Knowing what you're doing it for is also important, is it in the view to invest and increase value as in stocks or coins, is it in the view to support artists in a novel form of patronage, or is it as a simpler mechanism to keep track of things for accounting purposes, or is it to explore this pseudo-renaissance driven by digital ledger technologies?

objkt.com can give you a good overview of disparate marketplaces, and what any individual artist has minted on Tezos in one place.

Teia has a philosophical ethos I appreciate, and while I use objkt.com to explore, I tend to find Teia a nicer platform for doing the actual collecting.

fxhash is built from the ground up to facilitate the publishing and collecting of generative artworks, and so is better designed for exploring and collecting works from the generators designed for its system than objkt.com.

There can be slight discrepencies between the different platforms in terms of what they display as live information, if in doubt, check the block explorer.

The thumbnail for this piece was generated by an ai system (I don't remember which it was a while ago) and extended from square by Photoshop's generative fill feature. My Ethereum wallet history screenshot is from etherscan. The other screenshots are from Kukai and Temple's websites. The photograph is by sodagenjo (or whatever he wishes to be called online these days). GENTK token #0 - FXHASH Generative Logo was created by Ciphrd/the fxhash admin account and minted by the fxhash admin account. and GENTK token #1000 - Bingo was created by rudxane and minted by cryptoartmagazine. The videos were recorded and edited by myself, and probably to the articles detriment, no one else has edited my words (yet).

I really hope this has or can help someone, I'm always more than happy to answer any questions anyone has, or try to direct them to someone who might know how to answer them if I don't. Feel free to hop into the Photez discord and ping me, or I might get a DM on twitter.