Etch #339

The donut that started it all: CC0 awareness, building with anons (pseudons?) in the space, and more.

UMA was created by Sun-Min Kim & David Horvath, the same people who made Uglydolls and Bossy Bear. UMA was different though, UMA was an NFT, and UMA was released into the public domain. Quite early on at that. "No Copyright" we simply called it back then, before the term "CC0" caught on. This was before Nouns, before CrypToadz (or even Rekt Cats) or mfers. This was far before XCOPY went CC0. And there's a funny red line leading back to UMA each time one goes down the rabbit hole from a given CC0 project.

I believe it was Punk 4156's conversations with David that led them to release UMA into the wild. This later inspired Gremplin to release "Rekt Cats" into the public domain as well, the descriptions of the tokens read funnily similar. Nouns and whatnot followed. But I digress.

Punk 4156 held a contest on Twitter, it was basically "Create a business venture with UMA, I''ll fund you with 1 ETH and an UMA NFT", and "Fit your pitch into one Tweet". I pitched a paid iOS sticker app, for the Messages app & 4156 loved it. I got to choose from the 2 UMAs. UMA DOUBTS spoke to me.

I got paid as soon as 4156 declared which two pitches he selected. All I had shared was a willingness to do this, the confirmation that "Yes I've done something like this before, I'm capable" & my ETH address. Receiving both the ETH and the NFT soon after was thrilling.

Here was this pixelated monkey with a bandana sending me the equivalent of $4k & this 'UMA' without knowing much of anything about me... And somehow I was never more committed to getting something done and adhering to my word. Over the next few weeks, I seeked out and hired illustrators, put some cute expressive UMA derivatives by them together, bundled it all up in an app in which I made sure to mention all those who made it possible & sent it out to the official review process. I remember not being sure what to put in the "Copyright" field, working with "foreign" intellectual property was weird, and very intriguing.

Since then I've worked with more pixelated animals on the internet with funny names. I've shared payments for collaborative works on projects such as mobile games based on Nouns. I've tried to incentivize others to build on open IP by creating an UMA project which allows people to mint who commit to working on UMA, in whatever their way may be. I'm selling XCOPY inspired physical products online.

And it still feels weird. The open sandbox, and collaborating with people I will never meet or know the face of. And still it feels beautiful: The trust that strangers put into my word, and my commitment to not let that trust be a mistake. The moments of celebration, joy, praise & pride in one's accomplishments and those of others, of ours.

Oddly enough I see curiosity in UMA DOUBTS, and always have. CC0 doesn't make sense to me yet, and neither does most of this. Yet art is for those things we can't precisely express just with words, but only approximate. Maybe that's why this space is so full of it, driven by it, swimming in it.

So I find myself staring at UMA DOUBTS, who in turn stares at a donut. And somehow that makes me think "That's right.", without being able to express exactly why.