The Roadmap Cometh

While we complete the necessary research for our longer term roadmap, we wanted to share an overview with our community that describes where we’re all headed as Accursed Shareholders.

Web2 vs Web3

The onset of the web2 era of user-generated content brought forth a revolution in creativity and opened up enormous opportunities for creatives to leverage their talent at scale. However, these opportunities came at a cost, as web2 provided us with a near-inescapable cadre of mediators and regulators; class-monitors and middlemen we never agreed to, determining who got paid what and what for, whilst keeping the lion’s share.

As members of this community are aware, through blockchain and the emerging governance systems built on it, web3 is now presenting creators with a new set of tools that should abolish web2 mandarins forever: smart contracts.

While this emancipating tool is already changing the financial lives of creators the world over, there are still glaring gaps in the toolkit. Without a blockchain engineer at hand, most artists are still at the mercy of the major platforms, which offer featureless NFT smart contracts.

The Living Art Platform

While NFTs in all their forms, from pixelated jpegs to full-length documentaries, are exploding in cultural relevance and value, there is one nascent trend that is certain to take over the space: dynamic NFTs. Art that responds and behaves. Art that changes with the world around it, in observance of whatever the artist desires to express. Art with agency, that lives.

This is the purpose of the next-generation cryptoart platform that Accursed Share is building. As with Curse NFT, with its Chainlink integration, every major Accursed Share production will include the development of a unique smart contract, which we will do more than merely release. Each of our smart contracts will have an accessible front-end so that any artist can leverage the innovations we’re creating. We will also be open sourcing these tools, after appropriate testing and an early access phase.

DAO + Token

Separate from Accursed Share, the production company, we will be creating a Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) designed primarily to govern the continued open source development of the aforesaid tools.

Members of the DAO can create proposals that augment open source projects and crowdsource further development or feature innovation, and put them to vote. Through this mechanism, the DAO will be able to manage donations, create projects to drive revenue, and more.

Because we believe artists should not just shape but also own the means of creation, we will be working on onboarding to ensure those who are less blockchain-oriented can plug-in and partake with ease.

DAO participation will be made accessible primarily through an upcoming governance token (details TBD). Holders of certain Accursed Share collection pieces will receive a bonus to their voting power.

We are currently working with advisors to determine the best long-term path, from a minimum viable release of the DAO to a full-fledged corporate and community governance protocol. We will start off with small governance actions and expand the functionality of the DAO over time.

Our Next Innovations

With every major production, we will work with a prominent artist (or artists), deploy the smart contract in an utterly innovative way, and craft a special and organic narrative for it. 

Our next production will be in collaboration with Julien Nguyen, who is exploring the power relations, tensions and conversions between analog and digital art. We are also working with The Avalanches on their first ever generative NFT series, involving new forms of music-making and a documentary film about the art of sampling. 

Last but not least, we are accepting applications for unique collaborations on the dynamic NFT platform beta, and for custom projects like the two above.

Platform Features

This is a general, high-level overview of the features we have already evaluated implementing. The list is not exhaustive, and we will release a more streamlined, finalized roadmap once our initial platform research, planning, and design has been completed.

Dynamic NFT (Platform Beta)

This platform will utilize layer 2 technologies to ensure extremely low gas fees, fast transactions, and compatibility with Ethereum and the erc-721 specification.

Using oracles (Chainlink) to create art that responds to external data

1. Select conditions under which respective layers are displayed
   1. When x occurs, then y behaves/displays accordingly; or, checking for additional data results in another layer of dynamic depth

For example:

1. Art that rotates through x number of frames, once every y days
2. Art that changes with the weather
3. Art that changes over time (ex. having 100 frames that change every 5 days), and then resets when sold for a higher price. 

Secondary Core Features

1. Auction house (all standard features, comparable to Opensea)
2. Customizable NFT gallery embed (display your NFT collection)
   1. Different style options
   2. Embed store, or embed auction
3. Patronage and fundraising mechanisms (like Patreon/Kickstarter)
4. Fractional art buying and group bids (similar to Partybid)
5. Managed NFT drop campaigns (customizable launch pages)
6. Selling art with HD frames (serialized)

Additional Smart Contract Functionality Under Evaluation

1. NFT burning to increase scarcity or change another NFT, by tweaking variables such as variety, originality or abundance
2. A second NFT, or every NFT in a collection, change when one is burned
3. Locking an NFT to a specific device or type of a device
4. Self-destructing NFTs, that self-destruct if they’re not traded for x days, or NFTs that unlock access to another NFT when they self-destruct
5. NFTs that hold music only the owner can hear
6. An NFT portal that imports art from other NFT platforms as a starting point from which to add more dynamism to the NFT

Art Governance

Staking and governance mechanisms that enable voting and other dynamic activities which impact the art itself (separate from platform governance).

1. To provide a staking mechanism that allows artists to sell fractions of a collection in the form of a token, allowing holders to vote on what can be done with the NFT art, piece by piece, or a collection as a whole (i.e., locking NFT displays for x days, burning them after x days, locking their price after x days)
2. Allowing coin holders to stake their coins in order to unlock certain incentives, such as NFT drops and access to auctions (this functionality will also include smart contract upgradability, so some art will be modifiable via governance decisions)

The Road Ahead

Accursed Share’s mission is to create a revolution in artistic sovereignty. To achieve it, we will implement a new means of creative production that can build upon itself without the interference of traditional bureaucracies or archaic value systems.