KnownOrigin Update — Feb 12th 2020 – KnownOrigin
Hi all, with the New Year now feeling like a distant memory, it’s been at least month since our last chunky update so it’s definitely time to let you know what we’ve been working on.
First I think it’s worth looking at the stats for January. We kicked off the year with the best month ever in terms of sales, as well as onboarding over 30 artists, and saw the largest amount of traffic to the marketplace since we launch.
In early February, Hackatao released The Whale 🐳, an incredibly detailed artwork. This sold out an edition of 23, selling out in under 5 hours to 16 lucky collectors. Raising a total of 16.94 ETH, over $4000 at the time of sale — a real spectacle to watch unfold. Also a great demonstration of the power of awesome artwork sold in limited edition digital runs, congratulations Sergio Scalet 👏
Our second effort and a maturing of a curation and revenue generating DAO. With a little cash injection from a gitcoin grant 🙏 and some help from the MetaCartel, Andy Gray has been working on getting a simple Moloch based DAO with proposals, voting and fund management to generate multi-editions assets on KO — very ️on trend!
Next is to build a frontend, and to understand more about how it will be used and to look at what other DAO Ops tools we can leverage such as Signal DAO.
January saw the team go down to London to speak at NFT London. We were greeted by an amazing bunch of NFT enthusiasts, a well organised event and free flowing beer 🍺. We had great fun meeting some collectors and artists in real life for the first time, the presentation is now available to view (see tweet).
KnownOrigin on Cent
Last week James Morgan sat down to do a short podcast with Rizzle and Matthew from Cent for You Deserve a Drin¢ talking about all things KO and CryptoArt. He thoroughly enjoyed being part of it, something he hasn’t really done before so hopefully you’ll enjoy this insight. Be sure to check it out.
Trickledown 💰
In other news we’ve been working with Helen Knowles on an art project named Trickle Down: A New Vertical Sovereignty. In January it launched and will be touring around the UK, Europe and maybe further afield. It showcases the so called “trickledown” effect in the form of immersive video, audio and digital installations in combination with a smart contract enabled physical artwork which acts as the trigger, splitting real money between those participants involved.
Being involved in such innovative projects is a direct consequences of KnownOrigin 🙏 and provides great crossover from the traditional scene into this new world we are all part of.
As ever we’ve been chipping away at the never-ending list of improvements, feature requests and bug fixes we have for KnownOrigin, below is a flavour of whats we’ve been working on.
WebM — Video 📹 with Audio 🎵
Most notable to announce is support for webm — we have been slowly ticking off all the boxes needed to add this new file format to the platform and its nearly ready for prime time.
Now, we will very soon support much wider set of file types then we have ever before, including — jpeg, png, apng, gif, svg, animated svgs, webp, webm
We hope that additional new formats are well received and enjoyed by creatives and collectors alike. All new formats work on OpenSea bar a thumbnailing issue we are working with the OpenSea team to resolve. We are also aware that some wallets will not show the raw assets either but hopefully this will also improve with time and adoption.
Fundamentally it’s an experiment in launching richer media types so only time will tell if it works and there is an appetite for it.
Motion has captivated the art scene ever since the first film by Eadweard Muybridge in 1878 brought the concept from idea to reality.
As part of the launch of webm the phenomenal VR artist @A_Giant_Swan has created an immersive artwork showcasing the potential of this new media type. Check out the artwork below and let us know what you think.
From a technical point of view webm represent a high quality, low size and open format which supports video and audio. Giant Swan’ first rendition above is a 58 second high quality audio and video visual masterpiece embedded in a file size of only 16mb!️ 🌸
It’s not all perfect unfortunately in that Safari & iOS 😫 do not currently fully support webm but I think this is the first in a set of experiments in format types.
If there are other formats you want to see added, reach out and let us know on telegram and let us know what you think of webm: https://t.me/knownorigin_io
Image handling
This month has seen some efforts put into improving how artworks are uploaded to the platform as well as how they are then handled and served to visitors of the site.
After a few initial bugs we have seen site speeds increase, upload failure rates drop and load times have come down 🚤. We currently server approx several terabytes in bandwidth of image assets alone each month, representing one the largest infrastructure overheads for us as a platform. Providing a solid UX experience is key to really showing off the artworks in all their glory.
Serving artworks is at the core of the platform and something we will always need to manage, hopefully we’ve given it the necessary focus to expand the site further in the future. These changes also open the door to large file sizes and more complex assets in the future.
Login Improvements
We use the awesome open source web3connect project to present our users and artists with a selection of web3 wallet providers including injected providers like MetaMask as well also Porits, Formatic and any wallet which supports the Wallet Connect protocol (a personal favourite of mine)
With their latest update we now remember your provider of choice, automatically logging you in. So opening new tabs and windows should not mean you have to login every time, a commonly asked for feature.
Additional metadata
With the addition of new files formats we have made a few new changes to the metadata which should hopefully increase the interoperability of assets as they move around the Ethereum ecosystem.
asset_type—each edition created will now have attached a newattributewhich gives insights into the type of file attached to the NFT e.g.video/webmis set when a WebM edition is created. Also we are now fully qualifying all artworks with the correct file extension to help browsers in rendering and display them properly when not viewed on the KO site.external_uri— a non-standard but a widely utilised field in the space now points to the original KO Artist page. Soon as well all tokens on OpenSea will link to the actual token page on KnownOrigin as well.
Data Insights
A few months ago we release insights.knownorigin.io and we have continued to bring as much data to the forefront as we think is both useful, accurate and possible. This month we have fixed several data inconsistencies and have added a new page detailing high level stats on artists and their supply, including number of editions, total tokens issued, percentage sold vs gifted. We’ll be working on this more in the coming weeks. KO’s graph project can be found here and freely queried if anyone is interested https://thegraph.com/explorer/subgraph/knownorigin/known-origin
Edition Stats
We’ve been collating several key new metrics on editions, with the aim to gain some insights into how the cryptoart space is working and how editions are being accessed. Early examples of edition stats cover concepts on:
- Counts of sales, gifts and average sale prices.
- Total number of addresses which own and edition, gleaning multiple metrics such as total owners at purchase time, total history and the total number owners at present. Understand what is valuable and what isn’t is however hard to determine.
- Timing based metrics for sales such as time to first sale, total time until sellout and how often tokens move about.
If you have any thoughts on what data is useful and what you want to see please reach out to us.
We will continue to mine and surface data in the coming months
With only a small team we are often challenged with what to work on in the sense that priorities often change and trade offs exist in regards to speed and cost of making changes.
Currently our focus is on clearing up the artist/collector profile on the platform, merging these into a single identity which should hopefully clear up the minting, collecting and viewing journeys for those visiting the site.
Finally, later on in the month we head back to London to hack on a cool NFT idea we’ve had brewing for ETH London. More details will be announced but hopefully some new and innovative for the space in general…
Published at Wed, 12 Feb 2020 15:41:35 +0000
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