CRΞ8R - Interview with David Sun from Proof of Beauty
Primer: Proof of Beauty is a very thoughtful generative art studio that produces projects that are essentially marking the most historic moments in our lives in a very crypto native way. Join Gabriel Haines as he interviews David Sun, founder of Proof of Beauty Studios, as he shares what their two projects, $HASH and $LONDON are all about.
Who is David Sun?
Got into crypto during the 2017 ICO bubble
He was in college, buying random coins from Coinbase
Bought Litecoin and made good money, thus he became interested
Read the Bitcoin whitepaper and knew that he wanted to work in crypto at that time
Joined 0x Protocol as an engineer
Very quiet as a protocol to the extent that a regular user might not even know he is using it
0x Protocol had been around for a long time and it powers a lot of back end transactions
Has a great front end product called Matcha.xyz and David worked in it for a while
Fetches the best prices from all the DEXes
Loved CryptoKitties and wanted to work on something in the NFT space
Left around mid-March in 2021, started Proof of Beauty and doing that full time now
Why did he start Proof of Beauty (POB)?
Back in 2018, he was doing generative art as a hobby for fun
Remembered seeing crypto art with a mosaic of generative art that represents a block
Generative art with thoughtful crypto design will be cool stuff that people would appreciate
Did not do anything for 3 years, just letting the idea marinate
In September 2020, he started to build what is to become the $HASH project
Took 3 to 4 months to build and release it and was very well received
Realised that this is no longer just a side project and he can go full time into it
$HASH and now $LONDON is emblematic of the effort as a studio to push what blockchain can do culturally
"Okay, this is not just a side project. Now I can go full time and really look back to my 2018 vision of creating a studio that isn't strictly financially motivated, that that has the freedom, the capacity, the vision to find ways to use blockchain as part of the art and not just a way to distribute the art."
- David Sun
Where does the interest in history come from?
"I think history tells so much about us as a race, about our culture, about what we can and can't do and our aspirations. And, you know, the crypto space moves at a pace that is nearly impossible to record. Sometimes I go on Crypto Twitter and feel like there's something new every few hours. So I just saw it as an opportunity to manifest my personal appreciation of history, and more importantly, appreciation of artistic history."
- David Sun
Always enjoyed history since young
Really interested in war history, like WW2 and the American civil war
We remember history through art
A lot of people will think of the French revolution through the oil paintings
Or Vietnam war and WW2 through the war photos
In the recent Afghanistan issues, people will remember the scene where the helicopter is leaving and it reminds them of the Vietnam evacuation
Pictures are powerful and can stir strong emotions in us
Teaches us the lessons of days old and reminds us how fallible we are
Proof of Beauty (POB) studios
What is POB all about?
The most fundamental unit of history on the blockchain is a transaction
Each specific transaction can be referred to by its transaction hash
The $HASH project by POB is to take the transaction hash, fetch all the data from it to generate an artwork to capture that instance of history, thus acting like digital memorabilia
You can go Etherscan or Block Explorer to get the transaction hash
Once you have the transaction hash, POB will take all the transaction data they can get and convert it to something that they internally call a gene, which is inspired by how crypto kitties work
The data taken from the transaction hash gets translated into visual information like colour complexity and texturing
The gene is fed into this black box which is the generative art system, which then creates the artwork you see on the website or OpenSea.
$HASH
What is the $HASH project?
About a year and a half ago, he wanted to make a coffee book collecting ETH history
Realised that there is not a lot of art and culture built around history, just a lot of Twitter threads and Etherscan links
There are some great blog posts but they were written for a generalised audience
Thought of solving this in a crypto native way, which is to tokenise transaction histories as NFTs
Created $HASH as a way to solve the problem of making the coffee book
This project then generates content - have about 3000 mints now with titles and descriptions and with historians writing verdicts
"And so $HASH presents a very unique opportunity to create a great incentive, a great community, a great way in a very crypto native way to document and ritually collect both our best moments and our worst hacks."
- David Sun
This circles back to the original reason why $HASH existed
The broader goal is to become the library of ETH, something like the library of Alexandria
There are millions and trillions of transactions and there hasn't been a great effort to document them beyond just Twitter threads
"We made archaeologists out of passionate crypto historians."
- David Sun
In a way, $HASH is quickly becoming a crypto native way to create a Wikipedia for transactions and ETH history
Their Discord server is full of rich conversations about the little details of ETH history because somebody spent hours digging through the primary sources from Etherscan and condensed it into an NFT
The different seasons of $HASH
$HASH project comes with seasons or generations.
Genesis was season 0 which had already been sold out, so one can only get it through secondary markets like OpenSea
Each season comes with different themes and Season 0 is called Genesis, which is a little open-ended
Currently at season 1, called SAGA.
It is about a moment in history that is related to you - a personal history
Invested a lot of time thinking about how to make personal history a collectable
There is a discount for minting personal history NFT. If it's historic and not personal, there is a flat price for that
Gabriel minted one when CR8R DAO had their first transactions out of the treasury and also another one on the day he got married
You can put in the address and go to MySaga to see an automated curated gallery of your personal history e.g. First OpenSea trade, first transactions in a DEX etc
If anything stands out and you like it, you can mint it
Put a lot of love into this because David realised in Genesis that history is not just meant to be historic, it's also meant to be emotional and personal
$LONDON
What is the $LONDON project?
They wanted to create a project that not only remembers history in a crypto native way but also create history
$LONDON is a project to celebrate the Aug 2021 London hard fork in the Ethereum blockchain
"That was kind of the general theme around London. We had a great project in the form of $HASH. That was a camcorder, it records history. But we wanted a project that makes history as well."
- David Sun
It is a social experiment to celebrate EIP-1559, which radically changes the way gas works on the Ethereum blockchain
$LONDON is an ERC-20 token, which currently governs the $LONDON Night Club DAO, which is essentially a community-run grant supporting DAOs that creates cool artistic experiments
The amount of $LONDON tokens minted is tied to the gas price paid during the minting process
This is shown in the bonding curve. The maximum of 1559 $LONDON will be minted if you pay a gas price of precisely 15.59 gwei.
This incentivises people to intentionally set the gas price at 15.59 gwei
Every time this happens, people are creating history
Interesting because the gas price is just a fee you use to get things done, so it is unintuitive to think of making a statement using gas price
Before this project, there are only about 100 transactions at about 15.59 gwei
After the project, there are 20,000 to 30,000 transactions, which makes a dent in the data on the blockchain
Right after the hard fork, they dropped an NFT called the $LONDON Gift. This is a generative art memento to memorialize the London hard fork
Only redeemable with 1559 $LONDON tokens
Capped at 8,888
For the first few hours after the London hard fork, they were the number 1 burners of ETH, which is even higher than OpenSea and Uniswap in terms of ETH burnt
Pushing the limits to display artwork
POB is interested in telling a deeper story and how to build better narrative tools to tell the very rich history that has time involved over several transactions
"A single hash tells history, but four hashes put together tells narrative."
- David Sun
Thinking of doing a coffee book
Also hoping to do a Metaverse Museum in cryptovoxels, commissioning great artists to create effectively an ETH Museum of History
They will put a lot of great $HASH in there to tell the narrative and further the storytelling
This is almost like artistically painting history
NFT
About the NFT space
Still very bullish about the NFT space
Natural for the industry to have cycles of expansion and shrinkage
Could be seeing some kind of correction because the sheer quantity of projects seem to be outstripping the available demand for them
Better to have cycles of up and down than to be stagnating
As a studio, they are not very interested in the generative art of avatars like crypto punks
They are just carving out their own space and doing their thing with history
Thinks that the very first generation of first-person shooter games feels very primitive compared to the games of the same genre now
This is because the genre is so financially successful that a lot of innovation happened, leading to better games in the future
This is similar to the NFT space. The success of initial projects bring more ideas and talents to the space
NFT projects that he is excited about
Hash mask - price performance isn't as good as others, but they are very historic and contributed to the NFT spring-summer movement. One of the OG projects
Cool Cats - loves the community, has a lot of fan art, very approachable
Bored Apes Yacht Club - loves the community, can be very tribal which is good and bad
Proof of Beauty Studios progress
Have they done what they had set out to do?
Yes, they are on the right track
The $HASH project found a way to make being an archaeologist in the digital world feasible and fun
The $LONDON project is again another blank canvas that is made possible by the crypto community making history in a historic moment
"I think $HASH as a project is a blank canvas. It started with nothing with no history minted. And eventually, people came together to define what was worth minting. So I created a blank canvas and the community gave it meaning."
- David Sun
How has David developed the community?
Not great at doing this, but very grateful that there are great community folks who are very passionate that he can learn from
His main job is to maintain the organic nature of the project and finding ways to empower certain community members to give them a bigger role to play
Hence they create DAOs for each of the projects and keep finding ways to let people take over ownership of the stories
Also to keep listening to the community and take in feedback
"Our biggest strategy as a studio is literally just be there two years from now. If we can physically be there and be a solid studio and we still have a community, we will start to reap the benefits. We don't want to not be there and see the benefits of our work and see what has transpired."
- David Sun
What are the few lessons learnt that stands out?
Having the emotional strength to get through the highs and lows comes from the community
They could be working very hard as a studio for weeks and another avatar project comes in and grabs all the attention, so it can be very frustrating not to get your work recognised
Learnt that they have to work quietly sometimes and just focus on the longer term, even as the space is moving on so fast around them
Any Advice?
Don't buy blindly into their projects
Follow their Twitter
Listen to the great stories they are telling via $HASH and $LONDON
This is not like other projects where you just hit the button and get an NFT
"I hope that this [NFT] has made generational wealth for some of you guys. And I also hope that it didn't damage your overall portfolio because you got rug pulled by certain NFT projects. But, you know, like the space is very adversarial sometimes. But I think if you really look at it at its core, there's a huge movement happening and don't leave it. Don't leave this movement."
- David Sun
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