Talking About the Future of Generative Art with Da

What is up everyone and welcome back to another episode of the Divi Crypto Podcast. Today, I am joined by Dan Dallayan and they are the co-founder of Archipelago. How's it going to day Dan Dallayan? Hey, I'm doing well. It's a beautiful day and Seattle. I'm excited to be on the show. Thanks for for having me. For sure. We're chatting a little bit before about Seattle and

the Pacific Northwest and my near and dear connection to San Francisco. We talked a little bit about some origin stories, but to get everybody on the same page here, let's hear how you got into Web 3 and Crypto and NFTs. I've been in crypto for a long time. I think I've got one of the most OG origin stories, which is that I originally bought Bitcoin in

2012 because I wanted to buy acid off the dark net. So those were the days of like, you know, you're like $5 Bitcoin for your sketchy transactions. I got into Ethereum very early as well. I found the white paper pre-launch and invested in the ICO and that was a bit of a sad story or like a very very good learning lesson of wallet security because I

did not properly manage my wallet in the amount of loss losing all of my ICO ether. And then I kind of stayed on the sidelines for a space for a few years. I was candidly very, very butthurt having lost that wallet. So I just didn't want to think about crypto for a while. And then back in 2017, I finally got back into it. And I jumped

into Web 3 building a technology called SourceCred, which was kind of trying to make an algorithmic system by which DOWs could pay all of their contributors without needing a hierarchy. And early 2020, I think, I think, was a very good idea. In 2021, I really got into NFTs. I kind of got my first crypto pump in 2021. And I just kind of like made sense to

me that NFTs were going to be a really big deal. And just like having the digital provenance, having like new forms of art, particularly generative art, which is art that's made by software and the algorithm. And as a software engineer, it's always held a very near and dear place to my heart. And so I saw what people were doing creating generative art that like is truly

digitally native. As an NFT, and is also really beautiful striping art. And I was just excited about that. So since then, I've been going all the way down the rabbit hole of the generative art NFT model. Yeah. Yeah. And I definitely think that art is truly one of the leading indications of like a revolution. I mean, artists have always kind of been at that forefront to

tinker and play around with new technologies and things like that. And I really like the art. And I think that's the idea that that was sort of what brought the traditional like Bitcoin and Ethereum wallets to something more than just money. It just kind of connected it to something, something more fun, playful, colorful, and beautiful in a way. So I think that it is kind of

a key ingredient to connect us to something other than just this sort of monetary transferring network. So I'd like to talk about that. I'd like to talk a little bit about what you think of the current state of NFTs. Now I giggle because there's just a lot of food all over the place, all over the industry, whether it's in crypto industry or the NFT space, however

you look at it. So I'm curious to get your take on where we are now and kind of how things have transpired over the last 12 months, let's say. Yeah. So where we are right now is we've we've kind of made it through the first really big bull in their cycle. I think with NFTs in general, where last year was like the for our first giant

like screen and flourishing in summer of NFTs. I initially started with projects like I want to say crypto punks. Obviously a lot of the early art block stuff. You saw Fidenzas as like the first piece of generative art that really like got like big meme attention. Obviously Borde Piaque Club can't be ignored as like the next like great like PFP profile picture community, as well as

like dozens of other PFPs. You know, I think that crypto has always sort of grown and thrived on these speculative cycles. And it has always seen community formation around tokens. And in a way you can see Dogecoin is one of the earliest almost the earliest crypto art projects because it's just such like an absurdist meme that is also a cryptocurrency. But with the amount of NFTs

you start to see a lot more cultural attachment to these tokens. You start to see a lot more community formation. A lot more sense that like by buying into a particular token, you're also buying into the community around it. And now we're kind of out of the bull run and into the bear cycle. And you know, like we're not seeing headline NFT valuations, you know, they're

the frothier kind of scammy or projects that don't have strong fundamentals get forgotten. But the strong projects just like rebuild and like become stronger communities off of stronger technologies. And I think that from my vantage point in generative art, which I'm extremely excited about is kind of one of the good things about it. Really like not just one of it is one of the areas where

I think that the art world and the crypto world have got really interesting intersection because generative art art made by algorithms hasn't been as accepted in art, but is such a natural fit for NFTs. And from within the generative art space, I see lots of new projects launching. I see lots of like talented builders joining the space. And I see lots of talented artists kind of

quitting their software engineering day jobs and going full time as generative artists. So I think that especially as we start to like come in towards the next great cycle, there's going to be an enormous, just like enormously high quality community content coming from space. Agreed, agreed. And it's exciting to see how fast just everything has has kind of begun building these blocks on on what started

with PFPs. And now you have 3D avatars and you have all this stuff kind of merging into these virtual experiences. And things like that, it's just really as NFTs and it's really cool to see this technology that we talk about that what I think is in 10 years is just something behind the scenes. And everybody just sort of jokes about the fact that we were talking

about the tech that was behind the scenes in the future. So openly as NFTs now and publicly. So I have a friend that is involved with squiggle Dow and we always talk about squigs. And now how? That project has really pioneered a lot of what you were talking about with generative art and just the idea of someone buying a squiggle for six figures is just a

wild concept to me. And I really enjoy that people are investing in this technology that's behind the artwork. Like the artwork adds a beautiful front end and it's, you know, makes it more, I guess digestible you could say. Then just reading. A bunch of numbers on a screen and crypto kiddies really kind of broke that open for everybody. But I'd love to get your take on

what are a couple projects that you are, you know, of course we'll talk about archipelago. But what are a couple projects that bubble to the top? Like you mentioned board apes, of course. But what are some other ones that people may have not heard of that you think could get some get more recognition that you want to have more visibility for them. And to share their

work. Yeah, so I'm going to focus within generative art. And I will mention that if you want to look at any of these projects archipelago.art. In addition to marketplace, it's a really beautiful interface for exploring generative art. So all of these projects I'm going to mention like Fidenza, like memories of Chilin, you can go to archipelago.art to find them. But I think the Fidenzas, which I

wonder how many people with some of these are familiar with that. Fidenzas are probably the biggest kind of breakaway success within generative art. And it's a project of 999 NFTs created by Tyler Hobbes. Whereas with most generative art coming from art blocks, it was each one of these NFTs was kind of randomly created from the Fidenza algorithm at the moment when the NFT was generated. So

there's a particular moment last June when you could just show up pay point 20th and mint a new Fidenza. And there really, it's a really playful series. It's a really varied series. It kind of has like really bridge texture and really beautiful artistry. So I'd say that's a great introduction to generative art. A couple other projects I think are really noteworthy include ringers by Demetri Turniac.

That's a kind of interesting abstract exploration of wrapping strings around pegs. And it looks like just like already used to like something you find in Moma. There's memory of Chilin, Bia Muisha, my famous promising her name. But that's like a really beautiful series that's kind of inspired by traditional East Asian art. It's got really like gorgeous textures. There's a project called Archetype by Chiddle Goood, which

is a sort of study of repetition and structure. And for me as an engineer, it's something that is always really appeal to me. I kind of wish we had like a video medium. It's like show you all this art. Yeah, well, that's very cool. I'll have to check some of those out. I've always enjoyed going through things like Nifty Gateway and stuff like that. But you

know, I'm curious. I'm going to do some more research on Archipelago. So let's talk about that. Let's shift gears into how that started. And you know, do you have a team and what stage do you guys at? Yeah. So Archipelago is an NFT marketplace that's focused on generative art. So anyone who's active in the NFT space will know that OpenC is kind of the de facto

marketplace. Everyone goes to. And we started this last September, because we were a bit frustrated by the ways in which OpenC was kind of not doing right by user trust and the way in which it wasn't like really showcasing the art in the way where the doctor should be. So it was a three person team myself in Dero and William Chargin. And we've just been hacking

and trying to build the best marketplace for generative art in a way that really affects the fact that we are all like, you know, we're generative art collectors. We really love the art. We really want to make the art super discoverable. Put its beauty front and center. And then also make the best experience for collecting it. And so we've both pioneered a lot of features like

making it possible to bid across these collections on specific traits. So you could bid for like, I want any spiral fedenza or any black and white meridian, for example. And then also we have just much lower fees than OpenC. We're taking only 1% rather than 1.5% of the sellers revenues. So it's very cool. And this is live. This is where people can go now. And on

main net, is it just on Ethereum or where are you kind of focused? Yep. Right now it's just on Ethereum, which is where most of the generative art actions happening. Although it's also worth noting that Tezos is starting to have a pretty thriving generative art scene around the FX hash project. Interesting. Yeah, it wasn't expecting Tezos. It is cool. It's such a surprise. Yeah, it wasn't

expecting that one. But I think there are a lot of really, really cool projects coming to different chains. So I'm curious, you know, are you guys going to expand into multiple chains that are going to be accepted on there? Are you going to focus primarily on like Ethereum and then doing some alt-dos on Ethereum or what's the goal with multi-chain? So, you know, I think that

as far as archipelago we're focused on like always producing, providing an incredibly like, polished, trustworthy, like well thought out experience. So we're for the time being, staying focused on Ethereum, just to make sure we do everything right. I think that from my outlook long term, I do imagine that we're going to start seeing alt-dos that will start to have a lot more of the NFT like

action and liquidity just as, you know, there's such a long tail of NFTs that don't exist because the gas fees are too damn high. And so I think that's something that we like as technologists need to figure out. And so I kind of imagine there will wind up being some L2 that just has really good like performance and throughput for NFT transactions. And that maybe like,

you know, NFTs like Fidenza's like auto glyphs like crypto punks. I think we could imagine these might always stay on L1 because they are such valuable assets at this point that it makes sense to pay for the extra security of transacting an L1. But I imagine that there's going to be like a long tail of like a thousand times more NFT. That will only get created

once we're in L2. That makes it just officially cheap. So moving kind of beyond archipelago, I want to get your take on where this goes. So you know, we're starting with, of course beautiful art. And we've talked a little bit, I briefly touched on how this kind of moves into a virtual experience. Where do you see NFTs in 10 years from now? Where does this all

kind of move towards? Yeah, you know, I think that a lot of our worlds right now is built on the assumption of fungibility. And so I read a random article the other day about how Target has got too much inventory and they don't want to take returns. Because once they get a return, you know, you can't just put a return back on the shelf. It needs

to get like processed, like you need to get checked. And they don't even want to deal with it. So they're coming up with some new program where they'll just pay you for the return, but not actually take it back, which very strange incentives will put that aside. And it never feels how like we've structured our economy on the assumption that things are interchangeable and fungible and

that produces a lot of waste. Because I think there are just so many like physical objects out there that are no longer in original packaging, no longer sealed, they're no longer pristine, but they still are actually usable. But we don't have a way to track the provenance, we don't have a way to really like track their existence in the digital fashion. So it winds up becoming

waste. And I think for me, I imagine that NFTs are going to be this digital and economic layer that tracks the fact that things can be valuable and non-fungible, and that the specific history and provenance of that object can in fact be part of the value of it. So I would kind of like to see a world in which we like NFT all the things. And

like instead of having so many just disposable goods, each good that's got an NFT, it's got a particular history, it's maybe got a little bit of like unique generative art on it. And I think that as we use it, we can see that there's a lot of things that are going to be very, very interesting. So I think that's what we do, like try to pivot

our economy towards being less, less just like wasteful, less consumptive and more oriented around things, having a lot of like spans and getting used. I think NFTs could actually do a big part of that. Yeah, well said. I like that. Reducing waste. I think there's a really cool concept. I forgot the name of the project where it's for carbon offsetting, and you literally burn the NFTs.

And then you're burning it to offset your footprint, which I think there's going to be all sorts of really interesting innovation around reducing waste and things like that with NFTs. And it's very exciting to see where we're at and where we're headed. And I think it was Mark Cuban who said that in the early stages of the internet, there were static websites. Like there was just

an image literally on there with some text. And similar to the early NFTs, that was how we were going to be able to see that. Now it was, but he's comparing it to computers where it's going to get so much more elaborate and we can't really quite wrap our heads around how these things are going to evolve. And nobody could predict back in the first couple

websites where it was just static. That it would be, you know, what it is right now, we're literally looking at each other recording through this across the country. So I think there's so much cool, untapped potential. And it's hard to even predict. What's going to happen with where things go? Yeah, I entirely agree. I think with these, like, these kind of transformative technologies, it takes a

while for you to see what the new scope of possibility is. And just as like, you know, even when you have early internet, like email is pretty easy to anticipate because it's a replication something that already exists. It's just like faster mail. But nobody thought that Wikipedia was going to be a thing. The idea that you just like have these collaborators was kind of like producing

like free encyclopedias. And I think that's similarly like, you know, with an NFT, it's actually an incredibly like general purpose technology. And it's already getting used for more than art and collectibles. For example, in Uniswap V3, anytime you add liquidity into a Uniswap pool, you're actually getting back an NFT that represents the like unique, like, details of your position within the goal. And so I think

that I just entirely agree. I think in terms of the technological but also the social implications of NFTs. There's so much exploration left to do. And it's going to produce so many things that none of us can really anticipate right now. But we'll seem like both transformative and obvious in retrospect. Yeah. And one, one really cool project that I think a lot of people sleep on

or don't know about is called async art. And they are doing this really cool concept from a while ago. And they are kind of interchanging artwork with other people's work. So you can kind of morph together one piece of work that's a bunch of different artists that collaborate together. And I think that there's so much fun, fun use of NFTs going on in art with, you

know, time stamps that are changing the way artwork works. You know, I remember yellow heart, I think, is the NFT app that did the kings of Leon NFTs where when you went to a concert, you bought a ticket. And right when you redeemed it, it morphed like it changed the ticket into something that was a really cool piece of artwork. And that was at Dreamverse in

New York. It was just such a cool, cool creative spin to all of it. The time changes the way that it looks and it unlocks over time and things like that. So you're totally right. I think we're, it's fun to think about things that exist right now and how this is going to transform. But there's also going to be all these new concepts that we can't

even really wrap our heads around yet that makes this exciting. That makes the whole, experiment exciting. So I want to get your take on what, what you're excited about. We kind of touched on a little bit, but for everybody that's been listening through this whole episode, I want to give them a little bonus. You've been in the space for a long time, all the way from

buying things on the dark web. To, to doing, you know, incredible artwork and getting our call ago up and running. What is it when you get up? What's the first thing that you're checking on your phone? Like how they get you out of bed? You're super hyped about it and you check your phone to say like, all right, cool. This is, this is what I'm going

to look at today. Yeah, I think in the, in the short term, something I'm really excited for. I mentioned Fidenza. She's made by the artist Tyler Hobbs and he and I are working on a gendered art project that's going to release probably in September. That's going to be kind of like a new, new take on gender of art and the light just like the mechanics of

it. But with, with, with Tyler's like mastery of the medium. It's just like, like, it's really like gorgeous art. It's a lot of fun to just like, like, we haven't like, we've shown more than like a single preview image. But it's really fun to just like play with the algorithm and see all the beauty that can come out. So I think in the short term, I'm

just like excited for that project into launch it. I think in the longer term on like kind of a bigger picture sense. I'm excited for people to start using crypto to build institutions. I think that ultimately you like what crypto as a core, it's like an institution. Building technology. It's a way of creating social consensus out of COVID. And we started with very simple institutions. Like

Bitcoin is kind of like a very, very constrained central bank that just like follows a single policy. And I think that if we look at the world around us, we can see both that as like a species, we don't have institutional capabilities that are commensurate with the problems we face, especially around like climate. And also our existence. And so these institutions are like degrading at an

alarming state. Like it's hard to say that like America is in a great state with its government and really annual level of scale. And I think that, like, for me optimistically, I think, you know, we're using all these institutions that were designed like in past centuries at a time when paper and pen was the best technology for communicating. And we like didn't know any game theory.

So we like have a really like poorly designed like election system because we just didn't know game theory at the time we came up with it. So I think the long term sense is, I think, that where crypto becomes more than just like a sort of like a whiz-bang way for like some people to speculate and get rich is when we can leverage the fact that,

okay, building institutions out of code, like that makes sense. Code is powerful. And we need better institutions. So let's build them. And I think that's also just like, it reflects part of the maturation process that crypto needs to go through as it extends beyond just being, you know, your proverbial like neckbeards and darkened hackers into beating more of a mainstream movement. I think that's part of

why I'm so excited to see the broader like NFT art movement coming to crypto because it is such a potent intersection of this new technology as well as with new artistic and creative energy. Well said. Well, those are all the questions we covered a ton in this short, short episode here. But where can people go and learn about archipelago? You know, if you go to archipelago.art,

it's an easy, it can be tricky to smell a spell, but it's easy to remember. If you go to archipelago.art, you can find there just so much beautiful, gendered of art. We've kind of got the collection sorted by popularity. And so just see, actually, Chromers Griggles are like very top of the queue right now. People are just like loving squiggles. But if you go to archipelago.art,

you can find a bunch of gendered, great gendered of art. And even buy some yourself if you're so inclined. Awesome. Well, those are all the questions I have for you. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Everybody that's listening, you can find everything that Dan D'Alihan mentioned in the show notes. But thanks for coming on and sharing your story. Yeah. Thanks so much for

having me.