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fx(news): Frame Minting, Pricing Details in the new UI, Disrupt at Galerie Data

written by fx(hash) team

04 Oct 20241000 EDITIONS

0.5 TEZ

Hey fx fam!

Another week, another platform update!

With the entire Entangled madness behind us, we’re already back in the swing of things, and eagerly getting ready for the next couple of weeks—there’s quite a few things coming up! This week again we’ve got an exciting mix of news for you, so here’s a quick TLDR.

Farcaster Frame Minting is now available to everyone—we provide a detailed run-down of how it works.
The Disrupt exhibition in collaboration with Galerie Data is kicked off yesterday the 3rd of October, and will be running through till the 26th. It features two brand new generative artworks by Aleksandra Jovanić and Florian Zumbrunn!
New fxhash website details , with a discussion about a small but important update in the new UI.

📩 You can also read this newsletter as a long-form tweet over on X here! Missed last week’s Newsletter? Check it out here!

With the intro out of the way, let’s get into the news 👇

Frame Minting: now open to everyone

If you’re not familiar with Frames, they’re essentially programmable interactive dApps that can be shared as posts directly in Farcaster-based social feeds.

Many decentralized platforms in the space already provide some sort of Frame functionality out of the box when you share/post certain platform links. For instance, when you paste in a link to an fxhash project you’ll see a Frame pop up automatically—go ahead and try it out for yourself!

Pasting in a link to a project on fxhash will display as a frame. Once it’s posted it’ll display two buttons, one that lets you explore random minted editions from the project, as well as another button that takes you to the project’s mint page.

Although fxhash automatically provides a frame for any project link right now, making this Frame mintable requires the feature to be enabled on the backend. For previous Frame mints, like Puneyvr’s g l y p h, this was manually done by the team. The good news is that it’s now possible for any artist to enable this feature for their Base projects! Mint-enabled Frames will display an option to directly mint in the feed:

Here’s a quick run-down of how to enable frame minting on your Base projects:

1. When minting a new project, make sure to select the Base L2 chain.

2. Then in the 8th step of the mint flow, the Distribution tab, you should notice a new toggle labeled Farcaster Frame Minting.

3. If you want to enable frame minting for your project, simply turn on this option.

4. And voilà, once you’ve published your project, posting a link to it on Farcaster should now display a “mint” button.

5. From a collector’s perspective, the only requirement to collect an edition from a frame mint is to follow the fxhash account on Farcaster—which is what the “check eligibility” button is there for. We’re thinking about allowing for other types of custom artist gates in the future! In that case the frame will notify you about these requirements.

6. One more thing of note here: fxhash will cover the mint fee for free Frame mints, up to a limit of ten mints per Farcaster ID. So if you want to treat your collectors to a gas-less mint, that’s the way to go!

And that’s pretty much it! Have fun with Frame mints, and ping us when you make a cool project—we’ll help you get some eyeballs on it! If you’re now curious to learn more about Frames in general or want to build your own custom Frame, you should check out the official Farcaster docs.

Sneak peek at how the new fxhash website will display prices

When designing an interface for a marketplace platform that allows for the sale and acquisition of various types of tokens, price visualization in the UI requires careful consideration. In brief, prices need to be easily discernible and simultaneously need to clearly convey the monetary value of the tokens at hand.

That’s why, for the incoming new fxhash website launch, we’ve decided to take a dual-price system approach that shows the price of an artwork in both the currency of the chain it was minted on (e.g., ETH, ETH-Base, XTZ) and in USD.

The new marketplace analytics page implements a dual-price system to reflect the trading volume of projects.

Below, we get into some thoughts around this design decision and ask for your feedback on our choices thus far.

Thinking about the dual-price system

Internally, how to display prices has been an important point of discussion throughout the redesign. Because, for a multichain platform like ours, it’s easy to lose track of prices between chains, and we know from reading social media that this topic matters to the community. That’s why we’re addressing it now, and hope to even get some direct community feedback about our current direction.

Overall, the most straightforward solution is also our current one. You just display the current price of an artwork in the currency of the chain it’s minted on. Boom. But is it the most informative and user-friendly approach? We don’t think it is.

Crypto markets are very volatile, often fluctuating significantly in value from day to day. Multichain environments also introduce an additional layer of complexity because prices differ so widely across chains. From a user experience point of view, having to manually convert artwork prices for collections on different chains just creates a bunch of friction. It’s not that fun seeing an artwork at 0.004 ETH side by side with another costing 129 XTZ and having no frame of reference for these costs.

An alternative approach of denominating in fiat only, including USD or your local currency, also sounds nice but will be challenged by exchange rate fluctuations. That’s why we landed on taking the best of both—crypto and USD pricing are displayed at the same time, giving you the maximum amount of instant price data we can without overdoing it.

What are your thoughts on this new approach to displaying pricing on fxhash? Love it or hate it?

Disrupt at Galerie Data

We already mentioned our collaboration with Galerie Data last week—but now it’s just around the bend: Disrupt kicked this week and opens up to the public today (Friday 4th of October).

The exhibition features two brand-new generative artworks: Aleksandra Jovanić’s The Anatomy of Fracture and Florian Zumbrunn’s Becoming. At the exhibition, the artworks will be presented in physical form. Aleksandra’s artwork takes shape in the form of hand-assembled paper cutouts, mirroring their digital equivalents, in addition to Florian’s mesmerizing colorful and abstract works as fine art prints enhanced with watercolors.

The physical exhibition will be accompanied by generative collections on fxhash, releasing on the 8th and 10th of October respectively, available to collect for everyone. Both collections are already live as generators on fxhash, so that you have ample time to explore variations until minting opens up. Go and check out Aleksandra Jovanić’s The Anatomy of Fracture & Florian Zumbrunn’s Becoming now!

If you find yourself in Paris throughout the month, we highly recommend making a pit stop at Galerie Data!

How Autoglyphs shaped generative art on the blockchain

Larva Labs' 2019 Ethereum-based project Autoglyphs is widely regarded as the first true generative art project. Although earlier projects, such as the iconic CryptoPunks collection, incorporated an element of generativity, Autoglyphs was the first to fully embed the entire art generating code directly on the blockchain.

This essentially pioneered the kind of generative art minting mechanism that we’re familiar with today—but was much ahead of its time for being entirely onchain. Autoglyphs later also inspired Art Blocks in 2020, with the fxhash open model following suit in 2021.

Jason Bailey has always had a visionary knack for recognizing important projects ahead of their time—back in 2019 he’d already sat down with the Larva Labs duo to talk about the autoglyphs project. If you feel like taking a trip back in time we recommend checking out this article where Larva Labs founders Matt Hall and John Watkinson explain how the idea for Autoglyphs came to be, and some of the challenges they faced in realizing the project.

This week we’re not solely bringing up Autoglyphs for its historic significance, but also because we saw two new pieces of content transpire this past in which the Larva Labs duo make an appearance. In conversation with Peter Bauman from Le Random they reflect on their process of discovering new technologies and repurposing them for artistic projects, starting from their early experiments with the internet and mobile technologies to their groundbreaking blockchain based work later on.

Secondly, they also got together with the NFT SHE DIDN’T podcast for an interview, where they go over their formative years leading up to the inception of the crypto punks project in a more informal manner.

Project Spotlight

Nudoru’s (Matt Perkins) collection Break Free is criminally underrated! Released during the hectic fxhash 2.0 launch, it went unnoticed for much longer than it should have—and it’s only recently been picking up the deserved attention. It’s difficult to believe that the compositions in Break Free are actually computer generated, but Matt seems to have cracked the code (pun intended) when it comes to creating organic painterly textures; they come across so effortlessly throughout the entirety of his body of work.
AlgoRhythm by yo (Lu Tsung-yu) is another hidden gem that’s surprisingly not minted out yet. In a similar manner to Break Free, yo brings to life painterly textures to create abstract geometric compositions. The project’s description indicates that it’s inspired by Robert Delaunay's series of paintings titled Rhythmes , the project marked the artist’s return to Orphism and his study of harmony in painting. There’s something special about these kinds of concentric circles, they also reoccur in Hilma af Klint’s The Swan no. 16 and no.17—it definitely works very well in a generative setting as yo proves with his piece.
Monty Bartlett’s Page33 is a month-long open edition that quickly gained more than a few mints. In Page33 the contrast between the hard angular shapes with the overall organic flow of the composition creates an interesting sort of visual tension that is quite engaging to take in.

Week in review

WTBS: interview with NukCZ

Following WTBS’ August announcement that they’d be going on an indefinite Hiatus, we are still getting treated to a number of interviews that have been previously recorded. In the most recent episode, they get together with collector NukCZ, a generative art aficionado and longstanding member of the fxhash community. The conversation tackles a number of topics, starting us off with how NukCZ transitioned from traditional collectibles to NFTs and generative art, providing tips on discovering new artists, as well as NukCZ’s thoughts on the future of generative art.

Besides being an avid collector, NukCZ is also the founder of artfocused, an initiative that revolves around elevating artists & telling their stories. This partially involves virtual “walks and talks” in which NukCZ invites artists to tell us about their projects during live conversations. You can check recordings thereof over on out the YouTube.

Marcelo Terça-Nada's Brazilian artist spotlight on Warpcast

With X becoming banned in Brazil, the community has noticeably become more fragmented—this makes it even more important to keep up with our artist friends on the different social media out there. Marcelo Terça-Nada is combating this situation with a thread of his over on Warpcast, with which he puts the spotlight on a large number of Brazilian artists active in Web3:

Link to Thread

Collecting the Algorithm: Meridian

This editorial piece on Curated puts Matt DesLauriers' iconic project Meridian in the spotlight. Meridian is a fascinating project, not only for its beautiful aesthetics but also for how well thought through it is. It's reproducible, meaning the code is in essence browser-independent, as well as having the intentional provenance mechanism that determines holders’ eligibility for physical prints. The article also talks about DesLauriers' contributions to generative art in general, highlighting his shift to a more research and tool-building-oriented approach:

Link to Article

Throwback to Node to Node 2023

The Kate Vass Galerie recently posted a throwback thread to the Node to Node 2023 exhibition that took place in October of last year, featuring a bunch of generative artists and fxhash alumni: