Tezos, first proposed in 2014, is an open-source platform for assets and applications. It’s similar to other blockchains in that it’s a platform to create smart contracts and build decentralized applications (dApps). It can reach consensus and scale quickly while remaining safe and reliable. The platform has become one of the world’s most popular blockchains for non-fungible tokens (NFTs). Over the course of 2021, there was a significant increase in concern regarding the environmental impact of NFTs and blockchain technologies. As such, much of Tezos’ rise can be attributed to its reputation as a green alternative to far more energy-intensive blockchains, thanks to its Proof of Stake consensus mechanism. This was particularly true before the September 2022 Ethereum merge, which saw that chain’s energy consumption drop by no less than 99.5 percent, by transitioning from Proof of Work to the Proof of Stake consensus mechanism.

Digital Art on the Blockchain

Blockchain technology is the basis for the trustworthiness of digital assets, and its structure and protocols are vital for the security and authenticity of NFTs. Additionally, the blockchain is the foundation for smart contracts, which are integral for transferring and managing these digital assets. While hardware wallets like Ledger and Trezor remain solid and secure solutions for storing any sort of crypto, Temple Wallet and Kukai Wallet are the most popular wallets for trading crypto and NFTs on Tezos. Composability and souvereign digital identities are fundamental building blocks of Web3 communities. On Tezos, artists, creators and collectors usually use the tzprofiles service to validate their credentials involving different channels to maintain their consistent presence across different platforms, layers and services. Another addition worth mentioning is that since the transaction history of public blockchains are open and transparent, each artwork, collector or artist history can be traced back through the transactions of the corresponding wallet address, which turns art related activities into immutable, self-documenting processes by default. Each and every transaction can be traced back on the Tezos Blockchain Explorer, together with their verified profiles if needed. Tezos marketplaces host a wide variety of small-batch to large-scale digital art collections.

Top Marketplaces

A Tezos NFT marketplace is a platform where Tezos users may generate, trade, and purchase NFTs. One of the first marketplaces on the Tezos blockchain was Hic et Nunc, initiated by Rafael Lima. At the time, it was positioned as an experimental, rapidly evolving economical alternative to Ethereum based marketplaces. The platform unfortunately has been shut down by its founders suddenly on November 14, 2021.

The marketplace’s official accounts did not explain the unexpected closure, however fortunately, the artworks that were listed there are immutable, as they are recorded on the blockchain itself, so the community was able to release new user interfaces to interact with them and continue the evolution of art on Tezos, which gave birth to many new incarnations. One of them became known as Teia, a community-owned platform that looks and operates very similar to that of the late Hic et Nunc, and it has been quickly gaining popularity since launching in February of 2022. As the time of writing, Objkt is the largest and most popular marketplace on the Tezos chain. It’s a bit like the OpenSea for Tezos NFTs, hosting everything from JPEGs to videos and audio, aggregating and displaying works from many smaller marketplaces. Another notable space is Versum, that was built with a strong commitment to art and creators by a team of Hic et Nunc-alumni from across the world. It is a next-gen NFT platform and metaverse that provides unique functionality on a smart contract level that prevents copyminting, botting and other types of issues for collectors and creators.

Versums NFT-tokens, aka "Items" have additional features, both on- and off-chain, such as multiple quality levels of decentralized media representation generated on mint and infusions to enable tokens to be used for different decentralized mechanics. Versums native token "Materia" is issued continuously to users based on historical and current transaction activity within Versum and other auxiliary Tezos NFT ecosystems as well as its social media channels.

Going Generative

FxHash, the open platform where artists can publish Generative Tokens has caught the attention of the greater NFT community and is taking the generative art sector by storm. Launched in November 2021, FxHash is both a generative art platform and a marketplace that lives as an open ecosystem where artists can mint generative NFTs with less friction compared to other generative platforms. It was created by multitalented artist ciphrd, who has described the philosophy of FxHash as “no curation, open to everyone.” While this level of radical openness is a bold argument for sovereign, autonomous creators, without gatekeeping and selection or curation strategies, the open opportunity can easily turn the platform into a target for bad actors, scammers, copy-minters and other malicious individuals. This is why the moderators of the marketplace have implemented a variety of safety features to protect collectors. With safeguards such as reporting, moderation, flagging, and mint locking systems in place, FxHash is considered a relatively safe place to trade generative NFTs.

This piece, called L-Poem is transforming metadata of generative token #22568 into visual poetry. The image structure is built from a randomly selected iteration of “L-Template” by reading the available drawing instructions from its features and combining them with the name of its owner. The arrangement of the letters is based on this formula. This rule also becomes the title of the rendered piece, which can be seen on the bottom of the scene.

The platform is seen as a frontrunner in community-focused and digitally native ecosystems, its name combines terminology related to how blockchain transactions are created, i.e. “hash” being a signifier of a blockchain transaction like those can be found on the Tezos Blockchain Explorer. The underlying mechanics behind minting on FxHash are based around generative tokens. Simply put, these are a type of token created by an artist utilizing the main FxHash smart contract, and provide the basis for all subsequent NFTs that collectors mint on the platform. Every NFT on FxHash is simply an iteration of an original token — meaning that instead of minting a randomized token from a smart contract, collectors on FxHash are minting an NFT that is directly correlated to the original image, animation or sounds of the initial token.

C-Scape is a generative piece, involving Cellular Automaton. Made by Karsten Schmidt aka Toxi, one of the many brilliant creative developers who pushed the limits of generative art by providing open source code libraries and freely available templates.

Since the amount of participants combined with the varying qualities of the artworks can often lead to noise and an oversaturated landscape, there are some challenges in forms of a possible decrease in meaningful contributions to the platform and lessening interest in generative art in Web3 spaces in general. This is where composability comes into play. Thanks for the fact that the ledger is publicly available and open to operate with, there are many projects that bring curation and qualitative aspects into the ecosystem. Using existing, publicly available blockchain data, they are enabling the emergence of new layers of sociocultural structures. For example, Tender is a curatorial platform and community that helps bring many incredible works of generative art to discerning collectors.

According to their “TENDER Pass” description: “Holding a TENDER Pass enables enriched benefits and experiences within the Tender ecosystem. Passholders expand their access to unique collaborations with extraordinary artists, indispensable collector tools, curatorial experiences, artwork insights, fine art prints, a thriving community, and more. Tender is committed to stewarding the growth of generative art and amplifying the voices of artists and collectors across the entire lifecycle: from creation to collection to curation, and back again. Every Pass minted and resold directly enables Tender to continue creating the platform and experiences that serve this mission.”

Experimental Microplatforms

Tezos differs from many other projects because it is a highly participatory blockchain. It entails more users having influence over network policies than on other chains. Tezos NFT marketplaces benefit significantly from this since it indicates that Tezos is in an excellent position to evolve and adapt in response to market demands. Compared to most other NFT markets, including the Ethereum ecosystem, the cost of minting NFTs and additional related charges are lower, so experimental projects, hacking, radical experimentation and rapid development of concepts and ideas are likely to happen on Tezos, using the TzKT API. One notable example is TypedArt, a minimalistic, text-only platform, where people can mint and collect stories, poems, ASCII, and similar types of text-based art. The tokens are called “typed” and they are stored on the blockchain, while the content of the token is stored in IPFS. Since minting activities are usually signaled and boosted through social channels and microblogging platforms like Twitter or Discord, sometimes this format can work surprisingly well (and fast) through reposting, sharing and mentioning.

Another interesting experimental platform is 8bidou, a place for minting and selling pixel art. Pieces minted here are on-chain artifacts. This differs from creating pixel art and minting it through most other platforms in that, the connection between where the metadata links to and the image itself can’t be lost. 8Bidou comes out of Japan where it is known as 八火堂. It was created by hrtkassh, who continues to develop the platform at a steady pace, alongside a vibrant community of artists and developers.

Speaking of community and collaboration, there is also a very promising project by pifragile called EditArt, which is a generative art platform where collectors can become creators by co-creating a piece of art with the artist. With five value sliders that can be tuned by the collector when minting a piece, each artwork will be created as an individually selected instance from the algorithmic latent space: first an artist creates a parameterized artwork, which will be uploaded to IPFS and the address of it is immutably stored in a custom smart contract deployed for each artwork. If a collector mints a piece, the parameters for the piece are submitted to the smart contract and as well immutably stored on chain.

Editart has special privileges on the contract to set a displayURI and a thumbnailURI for the user's convenience, and for a smooth integration into other platforms. The artifactURI on the other hand, which represents the actual NFT, is totally immutable after mint.

Curation, revisited

As previously mentioned, open access, the level of inclusion and the degree of freedom are essential aspects of the Tezos Web3 artistic landscape. These are extremely important and positive propositions in the era of hyper-capitalist (often unequal) economical structures, however they can also lead to noise, oversaturated markets, involving malicious actors in the space, which can cause less interest and trust among a diverse set of collectors. This is why these open communities need special focus on new ways of curation methods and consensus mechanisms, that transcend the traditional forms of gatekeeping and non-transparent preselection strategies. These aspects are evolving very quickly and in many interesting ways. The previously mentioned Tender is one beautiful example of them, yet of course there are many other interesting activities out there from high quality live minting sessions related to IRL events organized by VolumeDAO, Bright Moments or Feral File, to inspiring decentralized Web3 review journals and editorials in the space, such as Right Click Save, or Tickle.

Sequencing: an example for live minting - using VolumeDAO's live Live Mint Machine, where the creators aim to recreate the classic experience of generative art minting in a physical space.

Vertical Crypto, a curatorial house for art & culture on the blockchain initiated by Micol Ap is one of the earliest communities around, started in the Hic et Nunc era. The studio offers crypto art residencies, runs digital galleries, organizing IRL events such as Proof of People, which is a curatorial exploration of the autonomy of the person in the artistic process, showcasing over 50 artists from around the globe, multi sensory experiences built on the Tezos blockchain, involving live music performances, and even a digital fashion showroom.

When thinking of our society that is overwhelmed by rapid technological developments, for initiatives like Web3 communities and DAOs with advanced and sophisticated blockchain-based decision-making solutions, the important part often might not to rush into the technology but to deeply understand what’s meaningful and interesting to the community they’re trying to serve with it, and think of how people from different backgrounds might react and build on these tools and ideas.