An Art DeCC0s Meditation, On Mint's Day Eve

Admittedly a bit all over the place, but quite enthusiastic

Here we are on 12/12. Mint day. We made it. A journey which for us at MOCA began back in March is finally reaching its —well, not its conclusion, per se— but its zenith.

10,000 Art DeCC0s PFPs are launching tomorrow, 12/12/24, at 12:12pm EST, for the low-low price of .0242069 ETH.

Only at https://decc0s.museumofcryptoart.com/

If you are among those wonderful individuals who:

• Have a piece in any of the Museum’s Collections (Genesis/Permanent/DaïmAlYad)

• Contributed to the MOCAIC 2023 Fundraiser

• Own a MOCA ROOM or ROOMPass

(and I suspect quite a few of you are), we want to make absolutely sure you are on this Art DeCC0 journey with us. Therefore, we’re giving everyone above a Free Art DeCC0 mint. Your wallet addresses have already been whitelisted, so please make sure you mint one as soon as you can.

Head to https://decc0s.museumofcryptoart.com/ to check if your wallet qualifies. Tomorrow, when the mint goes live, you’ll be able to see if you qualify for a Free Mint as soon as you connect your wallet (Problems? Contact CohentheWriter directly).

A Few Thoughts on How Far We’ve Come

It feels surreal to actually be at this point. The only other project I’ve worked on for any comparable length was a novel I wrote some years back, and, now that I think about it, the emotions are similar. Pride. Nerves. Disbelief. Uncertainty. I’m glowing, I’m shaking, I’m a mess, I’ve never been better.

We’ve been tending to this project daily for 9 months, watching it grow, giving it direction, making a thousand tiny tweaks, grooming and curating and generating generating generating hundreds upon hundreds of thousands of characters and backgrounds, writing descriptions and blogs and tweets galore, getting the word out, doing everything in our power to communicate to the world just how much love, devotion, attention, prowess, and creativity has been poured into each and every one of these 10,000 DeCC0s.

And now we are on the precipice. And it is scary. The abyss before us. But it is a great comfort to have you with us on this journey, as it has been a great comfort to have had you with us at every step thus far. Ultimately, this is something we made to share with you. We have found ourselves consistently surprised, delighted, and energized by the pieces in this collection, and it is our most fervent wish that you will feel the same. A lot of heart, passion, and soul went into these 10,000 pieces. I hope that’s evident when you see them.

The Future of Art DeCC0s

Just as we did with our MOCAIC Fundraiser last year, Art DeCC0s represent a bit of a reconnaissance project: Who is still here with us in crypto art? Who is still supporting the things we’re building?

These feel like especially timely questions, given that economic conditions in crypto, when rising steadily upwards, historically bring a sizable kind of…unpredictably, one could say. So who is here now? And what does today’s crypto art culture want out of MOCA? How can we be the best steward and supporter of this movement? Perhaps that requires more than collection, exhibition, curation. More than social media commentary. More than blog posts and podcasts. Through Art DeCC0s, we want to identify our tribe so that we can go forward most accurately acting in their interests.

An interest shared between our team and the wider crypto world is AI. A bit of an admission: AI was a central part of this project. ComfyUI interfaces, StableDiffusion models, things far above my own ability to understand, all were used daily in Art DeCC0s creation. And it is only just now, within the last few weeks, that it feels okay to say that aloud.

We are witnessing an ever-growing wave of enthusiasm for AI, and, as evidenced by the skyrocketing popularity of ai16z and its open-source Eliza framework, it seems we’ve collectively reached a point of sufficient normalcy with the existence of this technology that we can begin actually turning our wonkiest dreams into hard code.

The availability and spread of AI agents, specifically, is something Colborn and I have talked about ad nauseum on MOCA LIVE, and it comes up in almost all of our internal team meetings. The ideological goal of DeCC0s has always been to offer holders an unprecedentedly specific and expressive kind of digital identity, something no other PFP has really seemed to bring to its logical conclusion. AI agent-hood, where these PFPs are not just relegated to one’s Twitter PFP but the visual identifiers for an actor capable of action, that’s a use-case for PFPs that we believe will be normalized quite quickly in the coming months. This is among the most pertinent arenas in which we believe Art DeCC0s can contribute, experiment, and represent.

New, open-sourced processes for the creation and deployment of AI agents are being pioneered everyday. We believe that Art DeCC0s will have an identifiable role in the acceleration of this tech.

So that’s the kind of stuff we’re thinking about regarding the future.

But more important than what we plan to do with DeCC0s is what you plan to do with them. Art DeCC0s are designed to be representative. Fully CC0, of course. What will you do with yours? Show us, and we’ll support you in any ways we can.

Lastly: Our Honoraries

Finally, we just wanted to share with you the 54 Honorary DeCC0s we’ve created so far. We have ~100 left to generate, curate, and mint, so expect more Honorary DeCC0s for weeks to come. Because we have a lot of people to celebrate. Fortunately, we have all the time in the world to do it.

(Have collected everyone’s individual Honorary DeCC0s here: Pindar Van Arman, Clay Devlin, SatsMoon, Rob, of Makersplace, Ezra Shibboleth, StellaBelle, An Loremi, Coldie, Nate Alex, Ash Connell, ArtheMort, Leandro Bellone, Dan Sickles, Rizzle, SnowFro, OONA, Matt Kane, Judy Mam, SuperRare Zack, Fanny Lakoubay, Patrick Amadon, Anne Spalter, Artnome, Artie Handz, Natrix, Cozomo de’Medici, Danil Pan, KryptoMokus, Zak Krevitt, Josie Bellini, EmpressTrash, Fabin Rasheed, Ibraheem Leone, Rene Schmidt,Colborn Bell, Max Cohen, UntitledXYZ, LuluCollages, DaïmAlYad, Julian Brangold, Ana María Caballero, LuluXXX, Deeze, Patricio Worthalter, Martin Lukas Ostachowski, Hackatao, Giannis Sourdis, Megan Kaspar, Kaloh, Trevor Jones.)

And with that, we’re off. Thank you all so much for being with us, once again. We are so looking forward to seeing you tomorrow.

Happy DeCC0 Day.

-On behalf of all your friends at the Museum of Crypto Art,

Max