Teia Newsletter #2 - 21 Feb 2022

News from the community, roadmaps, celebrations and 101 logos

Can you believe that it has been almost three weeks since we launched teia.art? Here, in our second newsletter, we have updates about: the new friends feed feature, the future of hicetnunc.art, the current status of the upcoming teia marketplace contract, the new discord and working group structure, the github migration, and info about some upcoming events, celebrations, and milestones!

And as a bonus, we recently passed 101 submitted rotating logos. you can view them all on our logo viewer and still submit new logos via the google form

Community update days (twitter spaces)

On February 22 and 23, we will hold our first “Community Update Days” on twitter: Teia community members will host a variety of twitter spaces (in multiple languages) for sharing news from the community, Q&A sessions, and interviews. Find the full schedule on our blog

The new friends feed

Last week we implemented the 'friends feed' on teia.art, which was developed by @violetforest with assistance from @Cass and @NftBiker. This auto-curated feed shows the latest OBJKTs minted by the wallets from which you own tokens.

Once your wallet is synced on teia.art, you can access the friends feed through the menu:

If you want to add friends without spending Tezos, you can trade or exchange tokens with each other! If you receive an unwanted airdrop, you can remove the wallet from the friends feed by either burning or sending away the airdropped tokens.

The future of the “hicetnunc.art” domain

Currently Manitcor (of TezTools.io) holds the hicetnunc.art domain name as a custodian. This domain name was transferred to him for safekeeping in November 2021 by DNS, who originally purchased it. Since then, the domain has pointed to Manitcor’s hic et nunc mirror and has been widely used as a “community mirror” because of its simple domain.

Now that the community owned marketplace has settled on a new name and hicetnunc.xyz is back online, manitcor will transfer the domain “hicetnunc.art” to its founder crzypatchwork at the end of February.

This means that the domain “hicetnunc.art” will probably redirect to crzypatchwork’s hicetnunc.xyz after the transfer. There are already a few differences between the “community mirror” and hicetnunc.xyz: hicetnunc.xyz doesn’t support the collaboration contract or the friends feed, and it is not managed by the teia community. In the future, hicetnunc.xyz will most likely not use the teia marketplace contract that directs the platform fees to the teia community.

The situation for the other mirrors like https://hen.teztools.io/ or https://hen.hicathon.xyz/ won't be affected by this, but we have established teia.art as the primary domain for accessing teia.

If you want to continue using the teia community’s marketplace, please make sure to update your bookmarks, profile links in social media, and use the domain “teia.art” going forward. This will also ensure that once we switch to the teia community marketplace contract, your transaction fees will help fund teia and the teia community.

Read TezTool’s announcement about the domain handover on twitter

Compatibility between hic et nunc and teia

OBJKT tokens will still be visible and swappable on both teia and hic et nunc. We will strive to maintain compatibility with hicetnunc.xyz whenever possible/feasible, and we will do our best to clearly communicate any potential incompatibilities. Further details about compatibility will be published once the teia marketplace contract is live.

hic.link/teia.link shortlink services

1x1’s shortlink service “hic.art/[objktNumber]” currently redirects to teia.art. 1x1 has stated that hic.art shortlinks will remain live for at least the next 12 months but his other ‘hic.x’ link services (such as hic.link, hic.band, hic.fm, hic.wtf etc.) will stop working after March 2022.

Links in the format “teia.link/” are now usable, are the preferred format and will be kept live for the foreseeable future. See this twitter exchange for further info.

Tales from the Git

Over the past week, the development team was focused on cleaning up and merging Github repos so teia.art has now migrated from the integro labs repository to the teia community github.

The Archive/Documentation working group is also currently setting up a Github Wiki for Teia that will gather the most important static information and guides for everyone.

The next big change coming to teia.art will be the UI updates that were developed during the hicathon and which will fix some current design issues and improve readability and visual clarity for Teia.

The new smart contract

The new teia community marketplace (aka “swapping”) smart contract is almost ready to be implemented. On the technical side, the contract is complete and has been audited by Inference AG as mentioned in the last newsletter.

Currently our legal working group is seeking out some legal clearance before we deploy the new smart contract and start to collect platform fees. Establishing an online marketplace and collecting fees raises many complicated questions regarding national/international regulations and liabilities. We are all eagerly awaiting the smart contract launch, but for now it is super important to get some more answers before we can switch it on, so please bear with us! We are taking our time to do this right and limit potential issues in the future.

Swaps from hicetnuncs v2 swapping contract will be still visible when the new Teia marketplace contract goes live, so your current swaps will stay accesible through Teia.

Project coordination

Over the last week, a lot of work has gone into coordinating working groups and updating our project management resources. If you are interested in learning more, you can view our current roadmap and a list of open feature requests/ideas

Our project management volunteers have also been hard at work developing a new working group structure for our discord server and compiling an up to date list of working groups and team members and volunteers based on where the activity/work has been recently.

These working groups are planned to later transition into a “guild” structure. Each guild will have their own multisig wallet, manage their own budget, and vote on working-group specific decisions in order for the project to develop quicker and be more agile. Those guilds will form the groundwork for the structure of our organisation, with the goal of making big decisions via a DAO voting system that is currently under construction.

Our discord is currently being streamlined for clearer readability and will also reflect those working group structures. Once we have a new discord layout, we will get in touch with the volunteers who have applied via the volunteers form and start assigning tasks and organising teams. If you have applied already and haven't heard back from us – we haven't forgotten about you, we just need more time to organise.

Upcoming Events

There are several important milestones and events coming up quickly: The 1 year anniversary of hic et nunc, 700,000k OJBKTs minted, and the 4th objkt4objkt event. There are multiple minting events planned by different Tezos art community members/groups.

One year anniversary of hic et nunc

hicetnunc.xyz will have its 1st anniversary in March.

Hic et nunc (HEN or H=N) started nothing less than a revolution in the NFT market: Small gas costs and low energy consumption due to its use of the tezos blockchain, extremely high accessibility, the fully open source code that has proven to be resilient, along with its distinctly “underground art” vibe made NFTs accessible for everyone! Hic et nunc has led to an explosive growth of an unparalleled international art community, and we at teia will be forever grateful to HEN for bringing us all together.

Since Teia is a fork of hic et nunc and most of its members have been involved and active on hic et nunc, we too have the opportunity to celebrate NFT history with this milestone.

And you are not too late to join the party now!

700k OBJKTs minted

We are currently on track to reach the 700,000th OBJKT on the original HEN minting contract sometime in March. Please see the section below for some suggested guidelines on event mints. We will be promoting the platform-neutral hashtag #700kOBJKTs for this event. Please note, this 700k milestone has been calculated only by counting OBJKT tokens minted on the HEN contract, not OBJKTCOM tokens minted on objkt.com.

OBJKT4OBJKT4 Event

The Diverse NFT Art collective is planning a platform-agnostic OBJKT4OBJKT4 event on March 26th to celebrate the anniversary of first objkt4objkt event and all the accomplishments achieved by the wider tezos art community. More info on this will follow soon, so make sure to follow them on twitter!

General Tips for participating in milestone events

Of course, everyone is welcome to celebrate however they want (provided that they stay within our rules and code of conduct) but here are some voluntary guidelines and learnings from the past milestone events:

• Don't feel pressured into participating - it is supposed to be fun!
• Use the event tag (e.g. “700kOBJKTs” or “objkt4objkt4”) when minting, so that your pieces will show up in the event filters of tools like nftbiker.xyz
• Open edition size and prices: Generally, milestone events tend to work well with high edition numbers and low prices, but of course that's totally up to the artist
• (a bonus option for 700k: Set edition sizes/prices around the theme “7”)
• Suggested minimum price 0.07 - 0.1tz, or try using hicetdono (see more info below) to discourage hoarding
• Share your favorite pieces with artist and collector friends
• Collect 2 or 3 copies max of a particular mint so that as many people as possible can collect

For anyone who wants to mint free editions for any of these events, we have a hot tip: PureSpider’s hicetdono tool is perfect for keeping giveaway hoarders to a minimum. There is a special smart contract in place to make sure that only 1 edition per wallet can be claimed. With the latest update, the tool even works automatically - no more batch sending operations needed! PureSpider will also try to implement a tag filtering option on dono so people can filter out the event pieces.

We look forward to seeing everyone’s milestone mints!