Since the launch of Season 1: SAGA, we been hard at work expanding upon the vision of the $HASH project. We will like to share a few thoughts on the future of $HASH and some of the exciting things we are working on.
From conversations with community members and collectors, it is clear to us that $HASH represents much more than the transaction it tokenizes. People collect moments of pivotal ETH history, celebrity moments, and their own artistic journey. $HASH is how we capture the most dear, historic, important, exciting, parts of our journey on ETH.
A natural vision arises from $HASH: it can/should become the library of ETH. As a project, it is perfectly placed as a place to archive, celebrate, and memorialize this rich history.
As ETH expands with more and more DAOs, NFTs, Defi projects; our history becomes richer and ever important to collect. As more history gets uncovered and collected as $HASH NFTs, there is a need to categorize, study, and verify interpretations of the history. As more history is archived, a nature opportunity arises to create narratives and artistic interpretations that can reach a larger audience. From this domino effect, we can define a few core roles:
Archaeologist who go on journeys to find and uncover our history
Archivist / Historians who categorize, verify, and study the history uncovered by archaeologists.
Artists / Storytellers who create narratives, stories, and interpretive art around history.
As a crypto project, it only makes sense to tap into crypto-mechanics to enable these roles.
Archaeologist
In the current state of $HASH, the 'archaeologist' is the most prominent and large body of actors in our community. The discord channels are filled with conversations around people's findings, tips and tricks with hunting, and folks cross-verifying each others findings.
Each unit of history, represented as a generative art NFT, creates an intuitive incentive for 'archaeologist'. The rarer or more important the history is, the more valuable it is on a secondary market.
Archaeologists can specialize in specific histories, digging for a communities specific moments, or track the history of popular addresses. As specific archaeologist build their reputation as expert hunters, their services can be potentially commissioned, such cases already happening.
To continue to empower the role in our community, we are revisiting core pricing and supply mechanics of $HASH. Hopefully with the new changes we lower the bar for new archaeologists to join the community. Stay tuned.
We are also working on dedicated profiles and galleries to highlight some of our most accomplished archaeologists.
Archivist + Historians
Owners of $HASH NFTs can annotate them with a title and description. This feature being typically used to document the moment of history that is captured. This arises a need to validate these NFTs.
As annotations can be subjective and malicious to a future buyer, we believe it important to establish a reputable body that the community can rely on as a reliable voice of opinion on the history captured.
We have already seen quite a few community members informally step up to this role in our discord.
To take this informal verifying a step further, we are working on the $HASH DAO, a DAO of historians and archivist working to validate, study, and categorize NFTs.
A few community members have already been selected to be part of the inaugural group of historians in this DAO. They are working hard right now verifying annotations for a few $HASH NFTs as we speak. Stay tuned for the broad launch of the DAO!
We envision this DAO growing in a multitude of ways to help best serve the community and the new demands of the $HASH-verse. The DAO can appoint new historians or establish sub-committees of historians that specialize in specific genres of history. They will act as both an informal and formal resource the community can tap into.
As demand of their verification of annotations outstrip the capacity of historians, we foresee the DAO creating an economic layer for their services. Collectors of $HASH can commission the DAO to validate annotations which increase the value of their $HASH NFTs.
The $HASH DAO is in its early stages but we believe there is a ton of opportunity for it to grow and expand its role in archiving history. In the future the DAO can potentially add 'tags' to $HASH NFTs, and individual historians can be commissioned to write the annotations themselves.
Artists + Storytellers
Humans are innate storytellers, and $HASH provides a perfect opportunity to tell the stories of ETH.
Each $HASH represents a single, indivisible, atomic building block for grander story telling. Weave together all the txns involved with a hack into a gallery and you can retell the story like never before.
We see this creative layer of content on top of $HASH NFT especially interesting; the goal is to make $HASH the Vox of ETH, a repository of interesting and powerful stories of this grand experiment that is Ethereum.
To realize this vision, we are working on creating unique curated galleries, stories written on mirror, zine NFTs, and other content on top of $HASH NFTs. We have also been reaching out to other talented artists and community members.
These stories will show off the $HASH NFTs and the history they represent. The zine being the first of our experimentations.
As we continue to define these roles in the $HASH-verse, it will become clearer that these roles synergize deeply. Curators/writers can work with historians to write/curate their stories. Artists can work with archaeologists to find the coolest history to reinterpret. Historians can work with with curators to verify and annotate $HASH NFTs that will be used in a new gallery.
With these networks effects, we believe $HASH can fulfill the role as the 'library of ETH'. As a studio we hope to empower these roles to exist.