At its inception, the Museum of Crypto Art was focused on preservation and recognition. We wanted to ensure that the crypto art world as it existed before December of 2020 — its creators, collectors, works, and touchstones — were recorded forever. We hoped that incoming artists and audiences would eternally use M○C△ as an encyclopedia of who was here in the beginning, what they did, and why it mattered.
Throughout 2022, M○C△ will pivot towards a new goal: Decentralization. We invite artists, collectors, developers, and everyone else in the broader crypto art community to help build the Museum into something which reflects themselves and their subcultures, and which is as wide and multifaceted as the art we love. With this holistic reposition, we want to demonstrate why decentralization matters, how it may be applied, and what incredible innovations arise when it is. Action over talk.
Thus, we’ve been creating a suite of technology that both decentralizes the curation of the Museum and provides the public with open-source tools for virtual world construction and crypto art metadata experimentation.
These tools include:
- The M○C△Dapp
- ROOMs and WINGs
- Multipass + Exhibitions
- M○C△Community Collection
- M○C△ Forum
- And our Virtual AI Curator, built by karan4d
Enter our technological ecosystem through any of these links, and immersive yourself in all things M○C△.
In the spirit of full transparency, we wanted to discuss exactly why these products came to be, and how they define M○C△ unique push for decentralization.
Own the Museum with ROOMs and WINGs
ROOMs and WINGs are the next proper leap in M○C△’s evolution, the way we encourage individuals, collectors, and institutions to help expand the actual museum itself.
We’re providing our community an opportunity to own a piece of the museum itself.
Not in a governmental way (there’s $moca for that) but in a tangible, demonstrable way. While the Museum of Crypto Art has a central hub — a Dapp and a Metaverse plot — our ROOMs and WINGs are offshoots of the Museum that collectors can erect anywhere in any Metaverse, showcasing whatever work they want within, anything which is meaningful to each of them, which therefore is meaningful to us.
Acquiring a ROOM or WING NFT via our ROOM Pass auction system is akin to acquiring a small segment of M○C△: an interoperable Metaverse structure we’ve built specifically for the display of NFTs and crypto art. Everything exhibited inside is a legitimized and intended extension of the Museum itself.
Decentralizing in this foundational way is a matter of respect. We respect our community enough to leave the Museum’s legacy and reputation in your hands. It’s a respect built on trust. And one built on gratitude.
Gratitude is key: Over the coming months, as we begin delivering the ROOMs and WINGs currently in development, we will unveil a reward system for holders as a way of saying thank you. Because owning a ROOM or WING means you’re truly in this with us. And we appreciate that more than we can express.
Some of these rewards may be experiential, others may be editioned artworks from legendary artists, and some may be surprises from future masters whom we see as carrying the torch of crypto art forward.
Thus, we hope ROOM and WING holders will come to see themselves how we do: as M○C△’s stewards. Perhaps one day we may all sit beside each other, under our shared vine and fig tree, looking on at the wide world we’ve built together.
Curate the Museum with M○C△ Exhibitions
In 2021, we opened our Community Collection, meaning anyone could have their NFTs displayed in the Museum proper so long as they had set up their (free) Multipass. Currently, more than 6000 unique NFTs have been uploaded into the Community Collection, making it the largest decentralized art collection in the world, accounting for nearly 97% of our total collection. We’ve made participation in the Community Collection as easy as signing up for M○C△’s Multipass and activating NFTs into the collection. It’s a 100% non-custodial, free, and hyper-intuitive process.
But what is a collection without curation? It’s random, slapdash. Characters without a narrative. A plot in search of motion. Light without anything to illuminate.
Centralized curation, however, is a net negative. It implies that any one person/group/institution’s method of organizing or understanding art is superior. We don’t want to merely flout this kind of curation, we want to dissemble it altogether.
Thus, we’ve created M○C△ Exhibitions, an 100% free and innovative way to showcase NFTs in an aesthetic, collaborative, curatorial environment. Our Exhibition tool allows individuals, partnerships, and DAO’s to seamlessly add NFTs into curated expositions, a functionality which prioritizes accessibility and ease-of-use. Exhibitions were built with casting — to smart frames and monitors — in mind, and they can be easily shared on Twitter too.
We want these Exhibitions to be breeding grounds for heightened conversation around artistic curation and context — aesthetic, historical, or thematic, perhaps — and believe they are already one of the premier NFT display methods in the ecosystem.
Expand the Museum with the Community Ladder
The Community Ladder continues! Since late 2021, we’ve been transferring thousands of $moca directly into community treasuries, a gift for those NFT communities which are most activated into our Community Collection. Each month throughout 2022, we’ll be rewarding the top-10 communities with straight cash. The process is free, easy, and incentivizes the continued growth of the largest decentralized art collection on Earth, perhaps our most ambitious goal. Activate NFTs now! We need you to. And we will pay you handsomely for it 👀👀👀👀.
Experience the Museum with Karan4D’s Virtual Curator
Verrrrrrry quietly, we have been building something monumental, something to address one of the traditional museum model’s major problems. In traditional IRL museums, visitors are left to walk through the gargantuan spaces aimlessly, lacking individual guidance, full of unanswered questions. So we thought, “What if there were a way for every M○C△ visitor to have a personalized guide within the Museum, someone to answer their questions, provide analysis, and offer insight?” It would provide an unrivaled curatorial experience, and it would fully decentralize an experience that has been, to this point, hyper-exclusive.
Karan4D, M○C△’s resident AI expert, has spent months building a GPT-model AI to do just that. We’ve fed this “Virtual Curator” over 100,000 words of art criticism, comments from our M○C△ Forum, and some of the best art theory in the space, and it’s almost ready to meet you.
The Virtual Curator is an unprecedented AI project, one which will not just reinvent how people experience the Museum of Crypto Art, but which will redefine our expectations of museums in general. We invite you to join the M○C△ Forum and help craft our Curator’s voice. Every word therein will be integrated into the model. Comment, post, philosophize. We humbly request your input.
As we develop and release these projects throughout 2022, we hope the web3 community can look to us as a true model of decentralization (and if not, tell us how we can improve!), sparking a widespread desire to get in and get involved. Everything we’ve heretofore discussed is the product of a deep, consistent interrogation of the Traditional Art/Museum world’s exclusive aspects. Soon, we hope to help the whole world see the thrill of a decentralized museum, and the power of decentralization in general.
Won’t you help us too?
