Liquid Editions

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The future of Pokémon cards? 🤔

"Waiting for people to realize that all the infrastructure built for NFTs can be used for Pokémon cards. 'NFTs' does not have to mean random ahh 10k pfpNFT collections. Onchain Pokémon cards are NFTs too." — nobi

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SuperRare has long been a force in cryptoart. I have NFTs I collected there in January 2020 that I still hold and cherish to this day.

Yet amid the ongoing bear market, it's a good time for veteran projects to explore new approaches. For their part, SuperRare has begun leaning into networked art, beginning with Liquid Editions.

If you don't know what either of these things are, SuperRare's 124.eth wrote a good introduction last week, "A New Era of Networked Art."

In that post, he explained:

• SuperRare is aiming to "deepen the experience for the collectors who are already here, and [...] lower the cultural cost of entry for everyone else."
• For this, the team is leaning into networked art, which "treats the network as part of the canvas [...] where participation matters, meaning can change over time, and the audience is not only viewing but also shaping the social reality around the piece."
• SuperRare's first rollout here will be Liquid Editions, which "treat the onchain market state as a creative primitive. Not finance for its own sake or a wrapper to pump liquidity, but a new vocabulary for participation, circulation, and collective behavior with art at the center."

That explains the basics and the rationale of this vision. But we already know more about the technical details and the first drop, too.

Specifically, Liquid Editions will be generative artworks that use fungible ERC-20 tokens instead of NFTs as their vessels. The token's own market behavior, like trades and transfers, determines what the art looks like at any given moment.

In other words, there's no static image file underlying these tokens. Instead, a smart contract serving as an onchain renderer will read the live market state and paint the visual outputs from that.

The artwork is essentially a function of its own economic activity, recomputed continuously, always on.

And the good news is we don't have to wait for long to see Liquid Editions in action. The first launch using this primitive, slated for March 5th at noon ET, will be Value Discovery by ripe (whom you might recognize from their recent excellent To Be a Machine drop).

As SuperRare explained: "The project explores a profound parallel: how image processing discovers 'brightness' through error, and how markets discover 'price' through disagreement."

To make that theme concrete onchain, the plan for Thursday is that ripe will launch two liquidity pools, each with distinct fee tiers, for one token.

That fee disparity creates a persistent price spread between the two pools, and the onchain renderer reads that spread as its input to create a degraded, shifting dollar bill image.

Now, it's true we've already seen fungible art experiments before like DN-404 hybrid NFT + ERC-20 combos, fxhash Art Coins, Zora content coins, etc.

But in each of these cases, there's some element of abstraction or separation. DN-404 coins run in parallel to their NFT counterparts, Art Coins complement and evolve their collections, and content coins are tied to external media.

There's nothing wrong with any of these things. In fact, fxhash's Art Coins are quite innovative. But what I find interesting about Liquid Editions is that the coins are the thing.

They aren't counterparts, or divisible complements, or representative of anything outside of themselves. They are the art, or in the very least, an indivisible part of the art.

Whether it's NFTs or ERC-20s, I think ownable programmable art like this that is always generated in real-time and can always be interacted with and participated in represents a new medium in the art world and the future of art in the Ethereum ecosystem.

Plus, ripe is a superb onchain artist and a fine pick to usher in this new Liquid Editions era for SuperRare. Keep your eyes peeled for the drop on Thursday if you're curious.

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