Web3 Galaxy Brain 🌌🧠

Fabian:

Nicholas: Hey, welcome to Web3 Galaxy Brain. I'm Nicholas, and at the end of each week, I sit down for a casual Friday afternoon conversation with some of the brightest people building Web3. In this special Monday night episode, I'm joined by Tim Schell, Shahrouz, Fabian, and Chris Gattato to talk all about Dom Hoffman's Corruptions. The Corruptions crew explains the project's origin story from its original discovery on Context.app to their decision to band together and communicate as one with the mysterious figure on the other side of the collection. This conversation taught me a lot about the intriguing participatory performance art that sets Corruptions apart. Thanks for joining me for episode three of Web3 Galaxy Brain. I hope you enjoy the show. So today, we're going to talk all about Corruptions. I think the best place to start is at the beginning. What is it? How did it start? Tim Schell, do you want to take this?

Timshel: I vote for Shahrouz to start us off.

Shahruz: Oh, man, I was going to say I have to Tim Schell question it.

Timshel: I mean, I can. I can start. I'll start and then we can dive in. So what is Corruptions? Corruptions started November 19th, I think, from our on-chain lord, Dom Hoffman. Dom is founder of Loot, founder of Vine, founder of a number of other projects, Blitmap included. He launched Corruptions similar to his past launch. It's kind of just like a quiet blip. Hey, here's something new. I actually don't even think he tweeted anything. I think we all just found it. Does anyone remember how we found Corruptions? Where it even manifested from?

Scotato: Yeah, I think that's actually an interesting. part of the story is that he didn't tweet it. It was spotted in a context feed of, I think, him either minting the first Corruption or him pushing up the contract. And so people were just watching his wallet. So they saw that there was a new contract and then everyone, as soon as it was available to mint, everyone started minting these without even knowing what it was.

Timshel: That's such a late 2021 origin story.

Nicholas: Great. Caught it on a context feed.

Timshel: So it came out of the ether, right? Came through the ether. And what is it? At its heart, it's another on-chain, open NFT drop. It's art. It's performance art. It's become something a little bit larger around a decentralized community working together with the creator to build something together, to build this Corruptions project, but also the Corruptions ecosystem or Corruptions community out of it and around it. It's definitely invented a new model for creator community communication. I'm sure that's happened in the past, but I haven't seen it firsthand. I surely haven't been in such a fun version of it. And overall, to me, it feels like this metaphor for Web3. This just sort of like out of the ether is born a community. And through art, we see something true and we see something interesting and something that opens our eyes and opens our minds to something new. And I know I'm having a ton of fun with this. Maybe it's a little too pithy to say it, but the Corruptions community is just pure joy. It's pure joy around art and geekiness and Web3 magic all coming together. So through this NFT art project, we've all come together. We've discovered a way of communicating through the blockchain to Dom as the game master of this project. We're going to unpack that and get into that in a second. And it also really unlocked almost a technical movement. A lot of NFTs are flat JPEGs and a lot of NFTs are more about tokens that give you access to a Discord or community or just art for the sake of art, something beautiful or even generative art. There's obviously a movement around on-chain art. There's a movement around CCO. This Corruptions project really opened up, at least in my mind, the next chapter for on-chain generative collaborative art and that these Corruptions are dynamic. These Corruptions grow with the project and they grow not just with the project and with the contract and the chain. They also grow with the community. And so through the community's involvement and through the community's decisions and through the community's collective will, we've been influencing what these actual Corruptions become. So it's just been this beautiful sort of performance art dance between, again, creator and community. And you mentioned Mathcastle is another example of just sort of chapter and technical intervention for on-chain NFT art here. I think Corruptions, at least from what I've seen, this is only what a month ago now, but was the first sort of major project to say, yep, NFTs don't have to be flat. NFTs don't have to be set forever. NFTs can evolve and they can render dynamically and they can live and breathe and evolve with the community.

Nicholas: You said it reminds me of, I also met Manny from Manny Not Found. That's another project where his tattoo parlor to me was another one where I think this is the most compelling thing because people, you say it's like flat. It's so true. It's not just that it can change, but that the creation of the work is between the creator and the audience. In the case of the Manny's project, it was that you could upload JPEGs and tattoo your 3D model Manny and he would update the metadata. Not on-chain, but I feel like Dom has a talent for, to me, Loot in a way was like Etherscan contract interactions. Cool for a lot of people. Like kicking off the claim directly from Etherscan or Blipmaps, the way the data is stored on-chain. These are like art projects that are so interesting and beautiful that people feel compelled to learn a technical thing that they wouldn't have sought out otherwise. So Corruption seems to do that too.

Timshel: Yeah, I mean art as a vehicle for learning and a vehicle for meaning and a vehicle for technical advancement is just a perfect metaphor for Web3.

Nicholas: It's super cool. So yeah, does someone else want to jump in?

Timshel: Who wants to pick up the baton? So that's my intro on what is Corruption. Maybe Charu, do you want to hop in? I feel like you and Scatato popped in right with me at the beginning and started to play this dance out with Dom.

Shahruz: Yeah, sure. I actually think I might have found out about Corruption through the Manny Discord too. So, a big shout out for Manny. Yeah, I'm trying to recollect what even happened in the first few days. Like there was definitely a lot of speculation as to what was going on here. Tying back to that HTML account on Twitter, kind of explaining the mechanisms of the contract. And I think there was some question as to whether that account was run by Dom himself. But there was definitely a lot of mystery and speculation in the first few days. And then that messaging contract popped up a few days in where Dom, having not tweeted about it at all, deployed a new contract that he could send messages out from. And I think that's what spurred kind of the back and forth at that point.

Nicholas: Can I ask you a little nerdy question? What was the HTML Twitter account? I didn't quite catch that.

Shahruz: I think it's just Twitter.com slash HTML. I don't believe it had posted before, but basically right after Corruption came out, there's just one tweet on the account, November 12th, that says, here's what we know. Corruption's gained insight over time. Insight per day accelerates if the corruption is stabilized. Parentheses left alone. And decelerates if the corruption is destabilized. Parentheses moved. The corruption renderer appears to be upgradable. So he kind of just spelled out all the mechanics of the contract that were innovative. Yeah, so that was that account.

Nicholas: Is there a document that people should be following along with for understanding the history? Has anyone done a timeline? I saw the great video by Fabian's, the two-part video Twitter piece that got some of the history.

Scotato: I don't know if there's a document, but there's a great get up to speed channel in the Discord. that kind of steps through everything that's happened because so much was happening so fast that it was like impossible to stay on top of everything.

Timshel: For the first chapter, too, I put up a big Twitter thread. If you want to grab that and pin it, you could pin it to this Twitter spaces. It definitely doesn't get us fully up to speed because a lot of amazing stuff has happened in the past to like 48 hours, which we'll chat about here. But it gets us pretty far from the creation of what it is, some screenshots of it, the first communications across the portal, the first deviations, some twists and turns from there. So, yeah, maybe grab that tweet and you can pin it here.

Nicholas: OK, I'll do that.

Timshel: I want to pause to. sometimes it's fun to play with time here. So a lot of one of the motifs of corruptions is time and time loops and busting out of time loops and parallel time loops. And so I'm gonna play with time for a second. And before we get to like the heart of the story of what happened and what happened, what happened. I want to jump to something that was posted yesterday. This is just from somebody in the community. But I thought that this quote was like so freaking amazing. I had to read it out loud. So this is fast forwarding to the end of the story. But somebody said this. So Dom came into our discord yesterday. First time ever he jumped into the community discord, did an amazing AMA. Everybody is just like hearts racing and joy flowing. And somebody posted this at 4 p.m. yesterday. So I just want to say a huge thanks for dropping in and chatting, Dom. This has been one of the most intriguing and exciting moments of my adult life. So proud to be a part of this monumental moment in Web 3. I just had to call it out because I love that. Like what pure, just unadulterated joy.

Nicholas: I mean, it's one of the most exciting moments of my adult life.

Timshel: I love it. I don't know if this person's 20 or 50, but. You know who you are and so I'm so happy to see stuff like that. We can zoom back to the past. I just had to call that one out because I just felt like a special moment.

Nicholas: So cool.

Timshel: I can I can jam for a second. then maybe Fabian's you're definitely gonna pick this up. I can help with the precursor in the beginning of the chapter one. But let me just try to jam for everybody who hasn't been up to speed about what corruption really is and what's been happening here. So I started out by saying this is art. It's art that has evolved. And I said some metaphorical things about what it is and what it means. But concretely, it's art. And it's art that when it launched, it looked kind of like a portal. If you haven't seen it, you can find it in OpenSea and elsewhere. Kind of looks like a portal as a portal that's got these corrupted characters spreading through it. Plus some words, a word in the middle, a word hidden in the background. And then this concept of insight. And that, again, we mentioned. over time, insight grows and grows with time, slows down or decelerates when it's traded. As the insight grows, the art itself changes. And so the art starts to change a little bit from something that looks like a portal to maybe even something else. We've started to think of it as like maybe a shield or we're not really sure even what it is. But it looks kind of like a portal. And because it looked like a portal, when the messaging contract was dropped a couple of days later, or even the next day, and Dom, through that messaging contract, began to speak, it really reinforced this idea that, hey, this is corruption. Hey, this piece of art is a portal. And through that portal, the first thing that he said was, this is the visible hand. Posted an ether scan in a separate contract. He then posted a couple more things, some like clarifications about almost a bug that we had found in the contract. And then he posted something where he said, a gift. And the gift was an encoded block of code that was intended to help us refresh OpenSea so that we could see the dynamic stuff happening as it happened.

Nicholas: I remember when it was dropped, it was like a script passed as the data in a message, right?

Timshel: Yep, exactly. And so what happened there was we realized as a community, there's something going on here that starts, maybe it's not performance art yet, but there's something going on here where the nameless and faceless voice is speaking through the portal to us, clearly giving us a gift. So let's reply back. And we voted as a community, we jammed, it was I think Scott and Charuze and I thinking through like, what can we send back? And the thing we sent back, if you know the Dom verse, he loves the word sup. And so we wrote our own contract. His was called corruptions, ours is called reflection, the reflection messaging feed. And we said sup. And then along with sup, we similarly encoded a piece of art. And the piece of art that we encoded was a wilted rose. This actually, sorry, maybe I'm getting these out of order. It wasn't a wilted rose first, Charuze, huh? It was the reflection.

Shahruz: Yeah, I think Scott did a reflected corruption.

Timshel: The reflected corruption. Yeah.

Nicholas: Hold on, quick question. There's a website that can show this conversation, correct?

Timshel: Yes.

Nicholas: What's it called?

Timshel: That's what I was going to grab. There's two. I think the easier one for normal folks to look at is this link. I'm going to put it into our chat here. Corruptions-messaging.versell.app. There's a beautiful website also at corruptions.io. Yeah, corruptions.io that has a messaging feed. But the messaging feed on that site doesn't have a decoder feature, so it's kind of hard to tell what's going on. But yeah, if you go to corruptions.messaging.versell, you can go all the way back. Sorry for getting that order wrong. And so we talked as a community and said, what are we going to send back? We sent back this reflected corruption, like a mirror image, almost an introduction saying like, hey, we're here. And this beautifully encoded SVG. Scott, maybe you need to speak to this because this is your beautiful art. But we took a corruption, flipped it over and inverted it, and then encoded it as an SVG and sent it back across the chain as a way to say, hey, we're here. And we like to think about ourselves as the reflection on the other side of this portal, to which he responded back with the phrase, what do you think you're doing? What do you think you're doing? What do you think you're doing? 64 times, which was just amazing. We said seeking answers. We're seeking answers. He responded back, art. And then there's this whole back and forth, the whole discussion. And then at that point, we sent back this beautiful SVG encoded of a wilted rose, which is definitely a DOM motif. I'll pause. We can talk from there. But Scott, a lot of this was your brainchild and your art. Do you want to speak to the reflection and the rose?

Nicholas: Yeah, Scott, I have a question actually specifically. So DOM was sending messages to the contract's address. That's how he started the communication.

Scotato: So there was a second address created for him to send messages out on, which I believe Shahrouz spotted. And we actually, he didn't have that set up as a way for us to send messages back. So Shahrouz created another messaging contract for the community, which we were able to speak through. And I'm not sure how he found out about it. He's got ears and eyes everywhere, I guess.

Nicholas: But this is my big question. I'm curious in those first moments, how you went from, like anybody could have responded independently, right? But you decided to come together and respond thoughtfully as a group. I'm curious how that was happening on Discord, I guess.

Scotato: Yeah, I believe it was Shahrouz's idea that, you know, he recognized it as a messaging contract and that there's an opportunity for us to make our own contract to respond with.

Nicholas: Awesome. Okay. Sorry. So the reflection. So then you came up with the idea to send the first response, which is the reflection, right?

Scotato: Yeah. So his first few messages were kind of a little vague talking about some of the corruptions he sent out and some issues and stuff. And then he sent that gift, which was like the OpenSea refresher, because these NFTs change over time. And if you don't refresh on OpenSea, then you can't see that they've changed. So by that time, we were ready to send a message and we didn't want to just say a message. We thought we would give our own kind of gift. So our gift was like a piece of art back to him, which was this reflected corruption. So it's like flipped horizontally. And we changed one of the words out. There's 10 words that can be represented in these corruption NFTs. And so we added a new word called reflection. And part of that was like visually reflecting the image. And so Sup is, of course, associated with his other projects. He's got Sup the Company and SupDrive, his video game NFT that he's working on. And so after that, we were basically trying to figure out what this project was still at this point. And there were little clues scattered around. And one of the clues was in the contract. I believe it said something. It referenced Unfine Art. And I think it might still be pinned on Dom's Twitter page, but he lists some of his active projects and one of them is Unfine Art. So we understood this to be just kind of an art project of his. So once he clarified that it was an art project, that's when we decided to send art back to him. So we're trying to kind of like keep the art momentum going. And so on the Unfine Art Twitter feed, I think the only tweet was like this wilted rose emoji. So we kind of did like a blip map version of the wilted rose and sent it through the messaging channel. We base 64 encoded it just like we did with the SVG, but it was a PNG this time. And we didn't know what to expect at that point. So he responds with, so we say art and we send this wilted rose JPEG or PNG. And he says, are you sure? And we're all just like, what? And he followed up with a Y slash N. So he's trying to get us to confirm if this is art at this point. And this was kind of around the time that we, well, during all of this, we decided as a community that we were going to vote on these messages and try to speak like for everyone. And so the community voted that, yes, this was in fact art. And so we get another message shortly after that. He says, okay. And this kind of became like the first corruptions meme is that he started responding with these generic kind of like computer like responses. So okay became this like reaction meme that we now have in the community. And so I think during this time he might have uploaded some more contracts to kind of prepare for what was going to happen next. And I think we kind of had an idea roughly. I don't know, Sharuz, if you remember exactly what happened at this point, but his next message was when. So basically he had set up this new contract as like a sort of sub NFT drop where if you had a corruption, you could participate in this new drop. But he was going to let us decide when we would actually drop the or when we would like open the contract for minting basically. So I kind of got off on a little bit of a tangent there, but I'm following the corruptions messaging app to kind of remember everything that happened.

Nicholas: So this is what it's about, right? It's about like exploring the lore through the EtherScan transactions. And but then it's this combination of very like Inspector, like Sherlock Holmes kind of work on the blockchain, but at the same time, a very like human art conversation that you're having through that medium.

Timshel: Yeah, really. Just to jump in here to Scott, like everything you said, absolutely. And I'm even remembering the feelings of those like skin tingling moments of like, wait, self-discovery. And this is we are part of the players of this game. And maybe to put a meta comment on the whole track you just said, our early first week was almost just like trying to get our eyes open, trying to find a light switch in the corner of this room and just trying to figure out, like, are we even players here or are we just fucking around? Or like, are we actually players as part of this community? And like, maybe we're even part of this project. And because at the beginning, we don't even think we were, I remember not even realizing that we were part of the project. Not even realizing we were players in this project. And so a lot of this back and forth was us like, you know, what was that movie with the communication with the aliens and those pods? Oh, Arrival. Arrival. It's like us in Arrival, like testing words and testing concepts to be like, who are we? Not just who are you, but who are we? We get this project. We can see it on OpenSea. We can read the code. But the who are we was some of the most compelling back and forth. Like, are we part of this project? And yeah, that was so exciting to see the through the portal. You know, Dom is a game master, embracing the role of the community and and really playing into this performance art that there's physical art, digital art that's on the screen. But then there's also this concept of the performance art of the community saying we're making art, too. We're making reflections, too. We are participating. And so that arrives us to that point that Scott just called out that at some point, Dom said, you know, when do you want this next chapter of the game to launch? And that was a pretty pointed question of the community, like you vote. And so we actually did a whole vote to decide when to launch it. We had different days and times and dates. And we responded back with like an actual ABCD list for him. And that that itself was not the exciting part. But the exciting part of that moment was the validation that, yeah, this is a collaborative piece of media.

Nicholas: So, Scott, are you you're hanging out in the discord, you're making these decisions collectively and then sending transactions and everyone's watching them with anticipation as they wait to get processed? Or what's the vibe like?

Scotato: There was like the vibe, I would say, was just kind of confusion, like nobody was going on or what was going to happen. And I remember specifically being concerned that we were messing with this project. Like I had some ideas that I didn't really want to pursue, which actually we ended up doing later with the community NFT, because I was worried that like he's just doing this interesting thing and we're kind of messing with it by like putting putting stuff into the project that he didn't ask for. It turned out that it all worked out and things evolved together. But I don't think he planned for us to be involved in this way, but he completely ran with it as soon as we started like expressing interest and sending messages back through our contract.

Nicholas: It's kind of curious.

Fabian: It's kind of a curious question on like when when did the whole thing become this? on chain pen and paper role playing game? Right. Looking back through the messages, to me, it seems like at some point after the Wilted Rose Mint, we received these sort of ciphered messages where suddenly it was kind of like, oh, maybe this is a game.

Nicholas: Yeah, I agree with you. There was a shift in the vibe when the minting started. Before it seems much more mysterious and small in a way. And then exactly when the new minting shifted into a new gear.

Fabian: So at least in my perception, it was when after that mint, when the ciphered messages popped up, it was kind of like, oh, OK, this

Shahruz: could be

Fabian: like some sort of it could be really the first on chain pen and paper role playing game where Dom is the game master, we're the players and like all pen and paper role playing games. It's kind of like a sort of practice of decentralized storytelling. So the players always have some leeway in steering the story. And I think that that was about the moment when roughly after the Wilted Rose where I thought, OK, this could be a game. I don't know about you guys.

Timshel: Yeah. One of those moments that really cemented it was also a beautiful poetic moment of generosity from Dom, the game master. We did this Wilted Rose deviation and I think there's only what, 64 of them. Is that right? 64? And only 64. Not everyone got one. Later I was like, shit, we missed it. You know, a little bit of that FOMO vibe. And I don't think the intent here is FOMO at all. And one of the things that Dom then did is, well, one of the things we did is we responded back across the chain. We said we've received the perennials. We acknowledge. Thank you. He responded in his amazing way. OK. And then hours later, not even hours later, minutes later, he responded back and said 0x1 to address, meaning 0x1, which is the Wilted Rose that he deviated himself. So he deviated one of his own roses or one of his own corruptions into a rose. So he had one of these 64 that were this hot, awesome commodity. He said 0x1 to address, as in, send me an address. A gift. I want to send this rose to the community. I want to send this one of 64, almost original piece of art, the number one to you guys. And that was just a pure cementing of that. Yeah, this is a game. We're all playing this together. And like, what a beautiful moment of generosity. Also, that really, I think, helps set the vibes and the tone for what this corruptions community is, which is not the FOMO trader sniping vibe at all.

Nicholas: Yeah. When does this lead to a 10k PFP?

Timshel: It is about building together.

Nicholas: Where is the 10k PFP in the project? Is that the next contractor?

Timshel: We're all going to be wilted roses. It was so beautiful. So he sent it to this, he said 0x1 to address me. Well, shit, I guess we now need to start a DAO. We even have a channel inside of our Discord called, and now we're a DAO. As in, like, we didn't even realize we were going to be a DAO, but I guess Dom needs to send this rose to somewhere. So let's make a multi-sig. And it was just an awesome moment of him sort of steering us and blessing the idea of the community being half of the game, or maybe the community being the game.

Nicholas: It's so cool. I guess my mind is drawn to some of the technical questions. I'm glad you said Gnosis, because it's like, in a way, I haven't played any pen and paper games, or I've never played Dungeons and Dragons either, but my sense is that you want to, it's like a Twitter spaces almost, you want to guide it in a way where it's like a nice conversation for everyone, if you're the, like, whatever, dungeon master. So you want, like, but it is also an exercise in the same kind of social organization with the amount of trust that people are giving to multi-sig based DAOs on another part of Ethereum. And then you end up creating one. However, there's like, it's already a trusting, I feel like if there were people who were very like, is there toxicity? Like, it seems like there needs to be cooperation between the people who are working on your side and the artist on the other side.

Timshel: I mean, anyone can take this, I can just say we got pure positivity in this Discord so far, it's been so awesome to see. It's actually gone so far that we've got, we have an, maybe it's a Discord invention, I don't know, but we made a role called Active Players because we didn't want anyone to ever feel left out. We didn't want anyone to ever feel like, you know, something's happening and you missed an opportunity to mint or whatever. So everything we've been doing, we've been trying to adapt to, like, the human vibes. Obviously, we are also degen sometimes, but that's not what this is about at all. This is about like, let's come together and vote on something. Let's come together and brainstorm something. And so we created a role called Active Players. And anytime, even something small happens, we can ping Active Players without, you know, dropping that dreaded at everyone tag on Discord. And everyone's coming together and just talking about brainstorming ideas. We can get into some of them more, but it's been a really, really positive experience for a lot of us.

Nicholas: It's really the polar opposite of the roadmap. Like, there is no roadmap and we are going to make it together, friends. Like, I presume that the actions that you've taken have had large impacts on what's happened, right?

Timshel: Maybe, maybe, Shruz, do you want to tell us?

Nicholas: Yeah, I guess so. Maybe, Shruz, do you want to jump in?

Timshel: Dom did want to join. Yeah, maybe you can also talk about the AMA yesterday, too.

Shahruz: Yeah, I think Dom did mention that the bidirectional aspect was not initially his intent. But he's been working on things like A-Quest for loot. So I think he's had a lot of these kind of like mechanism ideas that he's been wanting to play around with. So in the AMA yesterday, for example, he mentioned that this is basically A-Quest Alpha in some ways. But I don't think it was his initial intent to have this actually turn into like an interactive co-op game with the community.

Nicholas: Interesting. OK, it was the Alpha for, I don't even know about this project he's doing for loot. Do you want to describe that briefly?

Shahruz: Yeah, it is at A-Quest. Like that's the URL. But it was Dom basically teasing an actual story for loot that he wants to build. There's some details on it. I don't want to misspeak for what it is or what it will be. But A-Quest is a website that people can go check out for that.

Nicholas: Do you have a sense of what the shared elements are? What makes Corruption's a kind of Alpha for it?

Shahruz: I think on-chain storytelling mechanics. So a lot of this like pen and paper stuff that we keep bringing up, like him being able to essentially tell a story over time with an active audience that are NFT holders. So it becomes more than art. It becomes like a ticket to the experience. That, I think, is part of it. There's also some like story structure stuff that he might be playing with. He's mentioned that deviations like these wilted roses, for example, are like an endgame state, meaning they're permanent and they do not allow you necessarily to participate more in ongoing corruption stuff. That's very cool.

Nicholas: Cool distinction.

Shahruz: Yeah, it's like if in a role-playing game where there's multiple endings, you know, each one of these NFTs essentially turns into one of those endings. So the NFTs function a little bit more like a bookmark in a choose your own adventure story or a safe state in like a video game.

Nicholas: It's interesting that traditional IP has this kind of usually like firewall between what is canonical and what is fan art. And this stuff seems to really cut at that. Like because given that it's all on chain, like someone could make a derivative of this project, I presume it's CC0 or similar. So you could make a derivative project that does allow you to continue the story from what was defined as an endpoint in the original lore canon. But then at the same time, the same people who are likely to do that are actually talking to the developer as it's happening. So I think that's very unusual.

Timshel: You know, I want to unpack that one for just a sec. I wish Dom was here. I should have asked him this during the AMA yesterday, too. But we were holding ourselves back, not knowing if this was CC0 or not. And actually, I'm not even sure I know.

Nicholas: Lude is technically not, does not have a license as far as I know.

Shahruz: Yeah, I don't think there's a license on this, but in the Discord AMA yesterday, he did encourage people to build derivatives and build whatever they wanted on top of it.

Timshel: Yes. Yeah. So that's I guess opens up a whole new level of this. The community has started to build some NFT stuff, and actually we're going to get to that in a second. But there's a whole brainstorm in the community right now about building game using these, what Shruz is calling bookmarks, using these like end states, these deviations, building some sort of actual game, like a playable card game or something. And I think we were like pumping the brakes a little bit, like, is this OK? Are we going to mess with this project too much if we go too wild? But I think just yesterday, and I would love Dom to re-encourage this, but just yesterday I got the blessing to say, yeah, go forth, go create crazy stuff here, especially from these end states. The end states within the game are sort of beginning states for creativity.

Nicholas: So cool. Yeah, Shruz, did you want to pick up from there? or Scott, we kind of cut you off.

Shahruz: No, I agree with everything Tim Schnell said. I also do want to just quickly say when he initially sent, because his first response back to our first message was the what do you think you're doing repeated 64 times. And then I think we responded with something like seeking answers and then he responded with art. At that point, I was very concerned that we were essentially like heckling him. It was not at all welcome. But it did. I think like we figured out a cadence that made sense. And then Dom, I think, kind of recalibrated what he wanted to do with it to some extent.

Nicholas: It's amazing because to me, to me, this aspect of it is like the most exciting part of Corruptions is the communication with Dom and the collaborative. But it sounds like it wasn't really part of the plan. I guess I'm curious what the, it doesn't really matter, but I'm curious what the A-Quest versus Corruptions, what was discovered in Corruptions, like what was the focus of the prototype in the first place to do on-chain, like upgradable on-chain metadata? Is that through multiple contracts?

Shahruz: Yeah. You mentioned the upgradable renderer being one of the innovations. I think the insight scores, the mechanism within the core NFT contract that basically looks at how long ago you last traded or transferred the NFT. And if you haven't traded it in a long time, your insight multiplier would increase faster. So essentially, there's a score that rewards people who hold onto the NFT for a longer time.

Nicholas: So you get more insight the longer you hold it without trading it. And the longer you hold it, it also is like a multiplier, not just a linear growth.

Shahruz: Exactly.

Nicholas: And so to me, that was like the first like, oh, shit, what's Corruptions? It's like, oh, there's insight. Don't fucking move it. Put it in the right wallet. Be careful. But then you can also save the insight. Is that right?

Shahruz: Save in what sense?

Nicholas: Oh, I thought there was a way that you could sort of make checkpoints, like who wants to be a millionaire? Like you could say, OK, I'm saving off this much insight and then I can move it and maybe I lose the multiplier, but I keep the insight. Maybe I don't understand the mechanism well enough.

Shahruz: Oh, I think that's just in the contract. He's got like a saved XP, like a storage block. That essentially is just the way that he's calculating the insight score on an ongoing basis. But there's no way to actually lock it in.

Nicholas: So as soon as you transfer, you lose all your insight.

Shahruz: No, it gets. it gets essentially locked. It gets rounded down to the nearest integer. And then your multiplier, like your rate of growth, your acceleration essentially gets reset back to zero. And then that starts building up again. Got it. But insight scores never go down and they never. they never get reset fully.

Nicholas: Do deviations have insight scores?

Shahruz: They do on-chain. Like there's a function that's exposed for those NFTs and those are still returning values, but they do not appear within the graphic at all.

Nicholas: So we've got corruptions, the original things, they can be deviated, which is to say updating their metadata to display a different image. I don't know if we even really got to that in this history part of it yet. But is that the core idea? And then reflections is a contract that you guys put out. Or maybe I don't understand the architecture well.

Shahruz: Yeah, there's a ton of contracts on this one. So even I get lost. There's the core corruptions contract, which manages the actual tokens themselves. Then there's a corruptions metadata contract, which is upgradable. So Dom shipped like five or six different versions of that, at least at this point, I think.

Nicholas: So he's pointing the NFT contract at a different metadata contract. Is that right?

Shahruz: Exactly. So the function within the core contract that will return the JSON, the metadata, as well as the visual SVG for it, is just a proxy. So he can change that address anytime he wants to essentially upgrade it.

Nicholas: So new metadata, drop a new contract, change what the main NFT contract is pointing at. And exactly. New metadata. Cool. And then the reflections was a contract that you put out?

Shahruz: Yes. I don't know. We might be skipping ahead a little bit in the timeline here.

Nicholas: Oh, sorry.

Shahruz: Tim Schall has a better sense of...

Timshel: No, I think we got it. Let's jam on it. So the deviations came out. There were eight X64 of them. Community minted them out. But there were some held back. Eight of them held back for the community wallet, held back inside the deviations contract that nobody could mint other than the community, which is, again, just another beautiful, poetic gift from Dom as a game master saying, hey, not only are you individually players, you're collectively one player. And for the player who's playing as a community, I'm going to make sure you got the rose. And I'm also going to make sure that you get access to these other deviations. But we realized for us to be able to deviate eight corruptions, we would need the ETH to be able to buy eight corruptions in the first place. And not only ETH to buy eight corruptions, the gas fees to deviate eight of them, which altogether was probably like six ETH or something like that. And we thought about like passing a hat around the Discord. Hey, everybody put in 0.05 ETH or something. But had a way cooler idea. And I don't know if this was Scott's idea or Shrew's or just through the ETH or it hit all of us. But we said, why don't we build our own Reflections NFT collection and charge for it? Almost as like a token of appreciation for the community. One hundred percent, a thousand percent of the fees went straight to the community wallet. There's no side fees to me or Shrew's or Scott or anybody. And with this Reflections contract, now anybody with a deviation. So anybody with what Shrew's beautifully called a bookmarks in the Choose Your Own Adventure. Anybody who has one of these sort of end state deviations still can go to the Reflections contract and take their deviation and use it as a mint pass to mint a reflection of their original corruption.

Nicholas: So it's kind of the first derivative NFT.

Timshel: Yeah. First derivative NFT. And that sentence is an insane sentence to say. Corruptions, deviations, reflections. It's clear in my head, but I could totally understand. if you're like, what are you talking about? But because you had this beautiful corruption that looked like a portal and then you deviated it and all of a sudden now it looks like a fortress or it looks like a rose or it looks like something else. You've kind of lost that original game you were playing. And so we had this idea of building a reflection of the original corruption, letting you mint a new NFT back to your wallet. that would similarly gain insight over time and similarly evolve over time and similarly change over time, just like your original corruption would have had you not deviated it. And so we launched this as a reflection art contract to Dom's project purely for the community and minted enough of them that we raised enough ETH to be able to buy eight corruptions to pay for the gas fees to deviate them. And so now the community wallet not only has that original rose, but also has all eight of the other deviations inside of it. Plus a small treasury that we're beginning to build, which will allow us some creative space to be able to do other stuff as a community, whether it's fund one off art stuff or whether it's do another derivative project.

Nicholas: This is incredibly cool. I think this inspires so many thoughts, but it reminds me a little bit of the attempt. There was like a failed proposal for Lüt to do something similar, like to apply a royalty or something to the contract to build a treasury to pay developers. But it's coming from this much more like, can we can we build a treasury like Nouns has? kind of vibe was my feeling. And this is coming from a totally different way. It's like we're engaging with the art. We need money to pay for gas. So it's it's you end up just making the derivative NFTs, which are also like something that someone who's deeply invested in the game would feel is like a legitimate thing. Maybe Scott, you could talk a little bit about how the artwork was created for the Reflections contract.

Scotato: Yeah. So it's kind of interesting. Like Tim Schell mentioned, we needed to raise funds just to deviate these remaining corruptions or finish off the deviations to progress the story. So it was kind of on us to to find a way to raise the funds. So back when we sent the very first message with the reflected corruption, an idea with that was to kind of like make our own community version. And we shelved it because we didn't want to mess with what he was doing. But now that we needed to raise funds, we kind of just resurrected that idea. So if you had so when you deviate a corruption, like they said, it turns into a piece of art. It stops evolving. And it's kind of disappointing if you only have one corruption and you kind of like have got a game over piece now and you're not really playing with everyone. So our idea was to take that game over piece or bookmark and convert it back into like an actual piece again. that's growing and evolving like the other pieces, like the other core corruption pieces. So what we did was we came up with 10 different words. There's 10 phrases in the corruptions like underworld. I don't remember all of them corruption. They're all 10 letter words and there's 10 of them. So we came up with 10 new words and we basically used the same corruptions metadata renderer contract. But we changed out the words and we put a little CSS to flip the image horizontally. And then the final change was that we swapped the background and foreground colors. So it looks like kind of a mirrored corruption and the colors are flipped. So it's much brighter and vibrant and they came out pretty great. And they actually refer to the original corruption that you deviated from. So it's insight level is what your actual corruption is like under the hood, which is kind of fun.

Nicholas: So it's like a real tour de force of like on-chain composability. I feel this is the part like for a while the meme about on-chain was permanence. But actually the meme about on-chain is composability. And so you're deploying contracts that are dependent on data in other contracts that's live, that depends on actions that are taken on that other contract. And you're generating the visual by applying techniques that make sense to an on-chain SVG in order to create a new on-chain SVG that is a derivative.

Scotato: Yeah. And this is if you've been following along with Dom's projects, you kind of see the evolution of what he's thinking. And Loot was the first like extendable NFT, I think, to many people. I'm sure there may have been others in the past, but that was kind of the big one that.

Nicholas: Loot is an L1. Loot really is like positioned as an L1, but in the guise of a very specific niche kind of NFT. Yeah. Do you know actually on the Loot lore, like was Loot something that he kind of did in the same way that Corruptions was to A-Quest? Was Loot the same thing to like Subdrive or something for like on-chain SVG image processing?

Scotato: What's sorry, what is?

Nicholas: I just mean like, was Dom just like playing around in his route to do Subdrive and then Loot came out of that? That was kind of. I had a one I felt. maybe that was the case. I don't know. Maybe Tim Schell knows.

Timshel: Yeah, I don't speak for Dom, but I can say that I can at least say that Loot has been in Dom's mind and his heart for a long time. And there's a lot of thought and a lot of intentionality and a lot of really careful detail in the Loot world. We probably should do a Twitter spaces on Loot to be honest. It's been quite a while since we did one. But yeah, I think Loot is its own universe. You're right.

Nicholas: You're right. Because the level of, we won't get into it too much, but the like having the data to be available for Genesis Adventurers to be created. It honestly shocked me that there was that much thought put into it. Just like, oh man, I was like, are you serious?

Timshel: If you want to have a sidebar on Loot for anybody else, go to loot.foundation and it's going to blow your mind.

Nicholas: All right. Awesome. We're going to do that after the show. Okay. So I guess Scott or Sharooz, you want to pick it up from there?

Scotato: I'll just finish off by saying, so I mentioned Loot because it kind of was this idea of like your NFC can have an API. And so this is like a new version of that now that actual visuals are changing too. And so we're all in this headspace, like us developers that are interested in smart contracts and interested in NFTs. We want to kind of push on what Dom's doing and not do something just really simple. We want to acknowledge what he's doing. So being able to use the original deviations to create our reflections and everything, it was really just like massive respect to Dom and everything he's done and showing that because he opened up these endpoints, we're able to build on it more just like everyone did with Loot. So it's been really fun.

Nicholas: Yeah. Awesome. I was saying it earlier in the year, but I think it got like one like, I was like, Dom is my favorite artist. Just like so good. Such a vibe through all the work he's doing.

Timshel: Yeah.

Scotato: And I think just like framing this as art, it's important to keep that in mind. And he keeps pushing out these deviations. They are like one of one artworks that he's doing. Well, not one of one. They can be 64 of each. And he even pushed it even further, which we'll get to in a minute, where he did a full on like full color art piece, which is really cool. So it's definitely art in code and in the traditional sense.

Nicholas: We've seen that kind of experimentation also like Blitmaps did. There was like a larger image, I think, that was minted at some point, like experimentation around derivatives around. the primary collection has been also a motif through a lot of his work.

Scotato: Yeah. And obviously, Blitmap was pure art and then like modified community, community modified art.

Nicholas: But even that one, it was a huge cast of people creating the originals. And then, of course, even more collector involvement in the minting of the subsequent of the children or siblings, siblings. Yeah, very cool.

Scotato: Yeah, I think there were 17 original Blitmap artists, maybe 16. And then they did 100 original works and then the community remixed the colors into 1700 Blitmap NFTs.

Nicholas: Yeah, it's so cool. So I don't know what's next in the story of Corruption. So where were we? We just got. so we did Reflections. The DAO has like discovered itself as existing and has a little bit of money in order to do, I guess, to do the deviations of the eight that it received. Was that the goal?

Timshel: Yeah, exactly.

Nicholas: Cool. OK.

Shahruz: We had to go buy them.

Nicholas: Oh, I had to go buy them. OK. OK. Yeah.

Shahruz: So the amount of ETH that we needed to raise was eight times whatever essentially the floor price at that point in time was. So I think we ultimately ended up spending like four, four and a half ETH on just buying undeviated corruptions from the floor on OpenSea. Once we had those in our gnosis, we then deviated each of them one at a time. So Dom and his contract basically had reserved these last eight just for the community multisig address to deviate.

Nicholas: And so how many Reflections are there total? I guess that requires math. What is it? It's the whole collection.

Timshel: I think there's 576. There's 64 times deviations. There's the original rows of 64 and then 64 times eight is 512.

Nicholas: So come on.

Timshel: So 576 of the deviations and then the Reflections are one to one map to those. They haven't all been minted. And if anybody wants a Reflection, grab a deviation and grab a Reflection. There's no real utility other than just the beauty of the art. Plus also popping some ETH into this community DAO and through the community DAO. We're all being creative and thinking and eventually probably going to build some more with it.

Nicholas: So cool.

Timshel: Let's take it forward, though. Maybe, Sharuz, you can talk us through. Like that was kind of the end of what he called the prologue. And then we began Chapter One. And if you remember now, this was like three weeks ago. But Chapter One started it over again. Do you remember? It was like this is the visible hand and then a gift again. And then we responded back with like a reflected sup, if I remember correctly. And then a whole. what do you think you're doing again? Maybe somebody else want to pick up that story or maybe even Fabian. I feel like that's probably when you hopped into and took such a leadership role in the community.

Fabian: I'm actually scrolling through the feed right now trying to put it back together. You know, one of the reasons I was I started doing these videos is mostly to document for myself the kind of trajectory of things.

Nicholas: So it helps to explain it, to piece it together, I'm sure.

Fabian: Yeah, totally. So we did. We did at some point get the perception that we were dealing with some sort of time loop in the story. Right. And and that was that was emphasized by this idea that a message that we received previously was sent again. And that was the whole sort of says what or what was it Tim Schell? This is the visible hand.

Timshel: Yeah, this is the visible hand. Yeah. And then he did the peculiar optimism, opportunism again, a gift again. He sent another gift. And then we took that to mean, all right, we're in another time loop, but something's a little different this time.

Nicholas: So cool.

Fabian: Exactly. Is that when the cipher first appeared?

Timshel: Yeah, I think so. Was it before? I think it was around then.

Nicholas: To me, it's like it's perfect.

Timshel: I don't think we can get into every step of the lore. Anybody who's super interested here can dive into that corruptions.io website and actually read through it and decipher these. And it's probably a 15 minute commitment to really click through them all. But there's a decipher button for each of these messages. And I was wrong in my comment half an hour ago. Corruptions.io has everything you'd ever need to make sense of these messages.

Nicholas: But I feel like actually like the fact that we can't quite remember the story of perfectly or it's like that's. that is the story like this activity of piecing it together. Are you mostly communicating by text on Discord or in voice chats? or how does the community come together?

Timshel: We've had some. it's mostly been text and asynchronous. And again, try not to make it sound like it feels FOMO. But we've had some amazing moments where when we send what feels like an important message through the portal, we'll do a live chat and we'll do a live voice call.

Nicholas: And I think that's fine.

Timshel: We'll get 30, 50, 100 people on there and we'll sign the message together. And there's even like a signing function on the contract that Sharooz built so we can all sort of raise our hands at the altar of the altar of the demon to say, hey, here we are. We're replying back through it. And it's us as a community.

Nicholas: Damn, that's a Sharooz.

Timshel: Is that a Merkle kind of thing?

Shahruz: No, it's literally just posting an event. So it gets logged in the EtherScan events. So the same way Dom's messaging contract didn't store any of the messages that he was posting, it was just in the call data that would get emitted as an event. We do the exact same thing. So we're not storing anything. It's just proxying it over to an event.

Nicholas: I wish the projects would just write it to the chain. Like I appreciate the 0xmons vibe or like the call data hacking. But I want that data to be. I want NFTs to visualize that text eventually, you know.

Shahruz: I'm with you. I think at some point we might, you know, just set up a Merkle route ourself and deploy it to a contract so it's usable by other stuff. I think in the spirit of wanting to not extend too far from what Dom was doing in our own response contracts, I think we kind of kept to similar mechanisms that he was using.

Nicholas: Yeah, of course. Of course. Yeah. I think about. I work on Juicebox and we do a similar thing where there's like a memo. When you make a donation to any Juicebox project, you can pass a piece of text. But it's only in call data. So it's cool. But it would be cool to also be able to like mint NFTs of all. the people who donated to ConstitutionDao can now have an NFT with the message that they sent. Hopefully on chain. But anyway, it's interesting to see the tech evolve. You know, it's changing every every time. So Fabians, we kind of interrupted you. What were you about to say?

Fabian: Well, no problem. If we were continuing the story, I think another thing that happened around that time was that like initially we knew we were we were talking to Dom on chain. Right. And then at some point we suddenly had the separation between S on the one hand, which we kind of labeled as good Dom and star. And we like we thought these are call signs or something like that. So we had star and S and star was usually kind of some sort of demon. Right. And so we would send. we would send messages asking something on the lines of how do we protect against like more harmful demons and things like that.

Nicholas: When you say demon, what do you mean? Like for people who haven't seen it at all?

Fabian: So at some point, like some metaphor popped up where I'm trying to find the message where we saw that for the first time.

Nicholas: But when you say demon, do you mean like a computer or like a mythological evil character?

Fabian: Well, that's a good question. Because in many ways, in many ways in this project, the word demon can take on both meanings, I think, because we did we we did have demons as a sort of computer metaphor. But later on, stuff gets really mystical and dives into Norse mystical lore.

Nicholas: And so he's kind of like a background process a little bit like he's doing other stuff and coming back to you with questions or prompts.

Fabian: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Do you guys remember when that separation happened between S and Star, which is obviously also the title of the project, right? So the project is called Corruption. And then in brackets, we have Star and S, which are these two call signs or as Dom later called them trajectories.

Scotato: I thought the S was when he did the strange apparatus and contract.

Fabian: Right.

Scotato: Which I'm still not even sure what.

Shahruz: Yeah, he launched a third like. so he did the initial messaging contract. We did our response one. And then a couple of weeks after that, he launched a new one called Strange Apparatus that contained a cipher. So all of the messages posted through that now also we had to decipher. I think Emmanuel, who was in here earlier, might still be around in the Twitter space, was the first one to crack that code. So we were able to decipher what it was that he was saying. And then it turned into sort of a discussion of. there are two demon characters and one of them we should trust and the other one we shouldn't trust. So I think that's where the distinction between the S and the asterisk kind of comes up is one of the characters is somebody trustworthy. The other one isn't.

Nicholas: Got it. Wow. Super interesting.

Timshel: I also want to call out that if this is super nerdy and exciting to you, dive into the Discord. There's a channel that's sort of get up to speed. It's got a lot more detail than we've covered today. There's a channel that we call what? What? Where you can ask any question you want and somebody will dive in and give you our best attempt at a response. And you can also dive into that corruptions.io website and really read through these messages and come up with your own conclusions.

Nicholas: I think what impresses...

Timshel: Even the folks who are closest to this are having trouble making sense of every little step along the way, despite being in the weeds.

Nicholas: That's what I find most impressive about you guys. You're willing to operate in near total darkness. And like it doesn't like most people, for me, for instance, I don't know more about this project. Of course, everyone's busy. But also because I think if there's no lighted pathway, no stairs, like the threads that all of you put out and the explainers, notion docs, whatever, these all allow more people to get into it. because I feel like it's sort of, I don't know, mentally or emotionally burdensome to be like in the dark on something and not sure. It's much easier if you know that there's a... You know, at worst, there's even like a stack exchange thing you can use or a Reddit that's going to tell you or a wire cutter will give you advice. But here there's... You guys don't even know what. some contracts that have been out for weeks, which is a long time relatively in this project. But you're still operating. You're still moving forward, making decisions. In a way, it's like a, I don't want to say microcosm in the sense that it's smaller, but it's an echo of what goes on in DAOs and Ethereum altogether, which is like a lot of people pretending like they know the right answer and just like trying cool stuff and trying to aim in the right trajectory, as you say. Yeah, it's...

Timshel: I like that a lot. It was validating to, I guess, validating to get the validation from Dom, the game master, that it was indeed a game that we were welcome. Like Scott said from the beginning, we're like, eyes closed. Are we playing a board game? Are we finger painting? Are we running a race? Are we playing Magic the Gathering? We're playing Dungeons and Dragons. We're playing Risk. What is this even? Where are we?

Nicholas: It's like the first...

Timshel: Now we know what the world kind of looks like. And now it's almost like the game of Myst from back in the day. You're like wandering around this landscape of riddles and puzzles and mysteries and just discovering it as you go.

Nicholas: But you also taught him that it was a game, it seems like. He wasn't totally into... The first creative act was making it something that was participatory. I mean, I guess he sent the initial messages, but it shifted into something... To me, this is the most brilliant thing. Like even the on-chain stuff, I love it, and I'm passionate about that subject, but that's not what makes this project most special to me. It is this relationship you've built across this divide.

Timshel: Well, awesome to hear you say that. I agree, but I also think that it's just the beauty of Dom's creativity that even if it was in his subconscious, I do think there is some intentionality here. And if I know anything about Dom, who I know pretty well now, but only through the craziness of the ether, it is that he is nothing except intentional. I'm excited for maybe round two of this Corruptions podcast to invite Dom on himself. I know he actually was bummed. he couldn't make it today. Today's his anniversary. Happy anniversary, Dom. Sorry that we had to do this call during your anniversary. I think he felt pretty bummed. But the AMA yesterday was just an outpouring of joy, like I read before, and support, enthusiasm, and just energy for all of us.

Nicholas: Fun fact. I don't know. I guess this is the anniversary maybe when they met or something, but when he was headed off to his wedding a month or two ago, whatever it was, he couldn't stop writing code and wrote on the plane or in the airport or something, wrote this vows contract where you could propose and marry another address on Ethereum. And Mike Damaris of Rainbow and I are married. And actually, it issued NFTs and I fractionalized one of them on fractional.art. So you can go on Uniswap and do your own research, of course, but you can purchase a tiny piece of love from the marriage of Mike Damaris and me.

Timshel: Amazing. I'll be the one to bring us back home.

Nicholas: Please, please.

Timshel: That's a good tangent. I think I want to hand the mic to Charu. I know I have to leave in a few minutes, but I don't want that to stop us. But the last couple steps of Chapter 1 were really powerful. It was a whole back and forth with a bunch of lore and a ton of rich, almost storytelling, narrative arc storytelling with characters and the first person and the third person and just whole story that really tied to the eight deviations words, those 10 letter words. But it culminated in the ascension of this god called Menes, the goddess of kingdoms. Charu or Fabian or anybody else, not me, do you want to talk us through Menes or means, however you say that phrase, M-E-N-E-S, and then the resulting sort of outcome and then maybe close it with Dom's AMASJ?

Shahruz: I think I might know the least about Menes, actually.

Timshel: Fabians, I feel like this is where you really took the baton. Maybe you should jam from here.

Shahruz: Yeah, yeah.

Fabian: So it was interesting. The whole Menes story emerged at some point, again, with the asterisk call sign, right? And I think that it started with a message, something along the lines of Hey there, in all caps. Hello, you seem like you know things. Can you help me? And we as a community decided that we're gonna try and help this demon and see where it would take us. And so we responded with what happened to you? How can we help you? We have much inside. So it's kind of like a jokey mirror of the way that this demon spoke to us. And eventually, it turned out that this demon was trying to remember something and was asking us to help it remember some fragments that came through a portal. And we ultimately interpreted that as we thought, okay, the fragments coming through a portal, maybe they mean the deviations. And so we tried to sort of puzzle together or decipher the order in which the deviations could have come through the portal. So we kind of like looked at these deviations as narrative playing cards that we might be able to put together into some sort of story or narrative. And that was a sort of really fun, fun sort of detour in the project, where Tim Schell pretty quickly put together a Google Doc, where everyone was sort of like sorting these deviation cards in a way that made sense to them. And like, you know, if we go through these deviations real quick, we had the wilted rose, which we later learned was a bit of an outlier. And we had like apotheosis, which is this sort of knight looking character with a sword, stronghold, fenestella, which looks like a church window, vivication, continuity, which has this sort of eight infinity symbol, automation, which no one really knows what it looks like, maybe a robot or something, sacrosanct, which looks like a tree. So they're all very rich in terms of narrative power. And so we tried to sort of piece these together into various stories. And some of these stories are just really, really cool. But I think the main overlap we had with respect to the stories we came up with was that it was some sort of history of how mankind created robots, and then robots. somehow, you know, it's like a sort of artificial intelligence type of Genesis story. And all right, what happened next, guys, help me out. We had a lot of back and forth with this demon, trying to help it remember. And it was quite obvious that the demon had a very specific idea of the order of things, right? So it helped us with messages like, yes, that's right. After building and perfecting their kingdoms, they next look to build and perfect life itself. Can you keep helping me? Which one comes next? And so we tried to sort of guess what could come next.

Nicholas: And which of the deviations comes next?

Fabian: Exactly.

Nicholas: Got it. Okay. So there's sort of like a choose your own adventure, where the artwork that you experienced in the last act of the story is now the set of choices for what comes next.

Fabian: Pretty much. Yeah. And so we did definitely confirm that this demon was looking to remember the order of deviations. And eventually, the demon revealed itself as being the goddess Menes, which we initially misread as Mene. So I think it was Matt from the discord who figured that Mene was the god of months. And then it was like, oh, my God. And the insight multiplier grows every 30 days on the blockchain. So this must be the goddess of months. And we figured it was actually Menes. And that's kind of like more goddess of kingdoms. And so through helping Menes remember the order of these deviations, we apparently helped her to break out of her sandbox.

Nicholas: Wow. So cool. Yeah.

Fabian: That was a cool step. And I guess that's when Dom enabled us to mint our first unique one-one deviation, right, which he called Ascensions.

Nicholas: What does Ascensions look like? What does it look like?

Fabian: Well, what does it look like? We had a lot of speculation around that and some crazy theories. But it does look like some sort of a female goddess standing in front of a portal, carrying a rose, and maybe the way you would carry a key.

Nicholas: What contract is this on? if people want to look it up on OpenSea or somewhere else?

Fabian: Yeah, it's in the community wallet. Um, maybe we could pin it.

Nicholas: Is there an ENS associated with that?

Shahruz: So it's reflection-s.es.

Nicholas: Cool. How convenient.

Fabian: Yeah, if you look in that wallet, you can see the one, one of one Menes. It's the sort of yellowy 0x1030 Menes goddess of kingdoms.

Nicholas: Cool. reflection-s.eth.

Shahruz: Yep.

Timshel: rainbow.me slash reflection-s.eth will take you there. You also see some community-created art, which is pretty amazing in there too. In fact, your art, Fabien's, huh?

Fabian: Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.

Timshel: Some cool soundscapes. So yeah, that got us to a place where we had this character, and almost a little bit higher fidelity character. Everything else so far has been this, uh, you know, sort of corrupted portal, or is it an aid, or is it a maze, or what are we looking at? The deviations got higher fidelity. The rows, obviously, you know, being really clear what that was. But you'll see here Menes, and maybe somebody should tweet an image of it, and you can pin it, or just go to the wallet and you'll find it. Maybe I'll do a straight up link to it here. I don't think I can pin, but yeah, if you want to pin this one, you can pin this. Yeah, direct link to it. Uh, yeah, it's a goddess with this beautiful yellow background, and we started to even play with some AI-generated higher fidelity stuff too. I don't think we fully figured out what her role is, or who she is, or how she'll play into the future chapters, but she brought us towards the end of the first chapter. There's definitely some other stuff that's happened since her, which then resulted in the end of the first chapter, and then Dom hopping on and doing this amazing AMA during the Discord, or in the Discord yesterday. Uh, but Fabians, or Sharoos, or Scott, do you remember any other moments between Menes and the end of chapter one?

Shahruz: I think the snapshot...

Fabian: Sorry, going short.

Shahruz: I think the snapshot was pretty fun.

Timshel: Oh, of course, yeah, talk us through that. That was a really cool moment.

Shahruz: One of the last messages that we got... How long ago was this? All right, so four days ago we got a message from Dom that ended with a simple question before we began, which do you believe in, fate or free will? At that point, we had not configured a snapshot. Everything that we'd been doing as a community was via Discord, and just like low fidelity, you know, toss an okay reaction onto this, and if we get up to a certain number, we'll take that as quorum and just send out whatever message. This one felt like it's a binary decision that feels somewhat important to the story. So we decided to have that be our first snapshot vote. We got suggestions from the Discord on how to structure the snapshot vote and what options to list out, whether it would just be fate or free will, or if we would expand into other types of things that we could respond with. We ended up having four options that were included in the snapshot vote. Option A being fate, option B being free will, option C being neither slash both, and option four being let the chain decide. Which would be us collectively as community deciding to deploy a smart contract that would briefly take control of our own messaging contract to make a decision between fate and free will based on the snapshot results randomly, send that message to the channel, and then revert control of the messaging contract back to the community wallet. So that ultimately is what ended up winning. We deployed a contract. The contract decided on free will, or no, sorry, decided on fate, even though that was the less likely option to win. And then that, I think, is what ultimately ended chapter one in the story.

Timshel: Though there was one last question at the very end of that. Maybe this is the beginning of chapter two. But the very end of that, after the community all voted, we worked together, had our biggest sort of community moment yet. I think we had a couple hundred people vote on the snapshot. We chose our answer, submitted it, boom, towards the end. And then through the chain, the demon or the game master said, choose your username. And that's now the open question. What is our username? We've been banging around ideas in the Discord. That's an open question right now. Said, please select your username. Chapter one, complete. Intermission. And so we've had a bunch of cool ideas, specific ideas, specific names. A lot of Greek god vibes. I've thrown some ideas out. Others have thrown some ideas out that each have their own sort of intentionality and metaphoricalness and poetry to them. But the one that seems so obvious now is somebody suggested, why don't we just take all the people who've tagged themselves as active players, which are hundreds, why don't we take their usernames on Discord, which are their actual usernames, why don't we throw that into a huge string and hash it and hash that huge string into a single username and come up with a huge block username. I don't know how long that would be. Just a hundred characters long or something. But it almost seems obvious now that that is our username. It's all of us together playing as one.

Nicholas: Wow, beautiful. I'm excited to see. So that's not the final plan. That's one of the cool options.

Timshel: That's one suggestion. I'm going to advocate for that. I had my own suggestion, but I love that suggestion that somebody made. It seems just too poetic to pass up.

Nicholas: Yeah, it's so great. It's so great.

Fabian: Another cool thing about choosing the username thing is that it signifies that this is only getting started, right? This was kind of like the boot sequence, so to say. And the fact that we now get to choose a username makes it clear. And I mean, Dom has confirmed that in the MA, that this is early, the game is continuing, and there's going to be further chapters to it.

Nicholas: Yeah, so can you tell me a little more about that? The AMA? That was just yesterday, right?

Fabian: Yeah, that was a great surprise. DM did a big write-up of it in our Discord channel.

Nicholas: What time of day was that? When did that drop? When did that happen? Or he joined the Discord like unexpectedly, right?

Fabian: Pretty much, yeah. Timshel, do you want to?

Timshel: Yeah, I mean, I think I almost want to leave this as a teaser to come join our Discord. But right as Chapter 1 ended and intermission happened, I think Dom essentially took off his Game Master hat, put on his Builder hat, and also his community member hat. And by community, I don't mean corruptions, just like this wider Web3 incredible community we've all built. And said, all right, I want to pop into the Discord. He hasn't been in the Discord at all, because I think he would have broken the fourth wall. And I want to participate and play along a bit and answer questions and say hi and say thank you and say you're welcome and everything in between. And so we hopped in, I don't know what it was, yesterday afternoon, or actually I think it was Saturday afternoon. Yeah, Saturday afternoon. And had a long multi-hour AMA, all asynchronous over text inside the Discord. There's a synthesis of it inside the Discord in the Get Up To Speed channel. And you can read it top to bottom as well.

Nicholas: It's very interesting that he's able to pull this off.

Timshel: There's a link right there that'll pop you to the top of it.

Nicholas: It seems like you shouldn't be able, because it's such a tenuous thing that you're not talking through all the other social media that you have in between you, but choosing to use the Ethereum medium to discuss with a character. It's like an intermission, and then the actors come out with their makeup off and are just hanging out a little bit, having drinks.

Timshel: Yeah, exactly. Well, hey, for a minute we thought we might have lost Dom fully to the chain. There was a minute we were asking, is Dom ever going to show up on Twitter again? True. Is this a social commentary on Twitter? And Dom will never tweet again, and he's only going to communicate it through Etherscan.

Nicholas: Oh my god, imagine the headlines.

Timshel: He's using Discord and Twitter.

Nicholas: So he's able to play the role of the actor. And I mean, builder, creator, dungeon master, but also actor. He's choosing the words.

Timshel: Yeah, it fits nicely in the Lute vibe too. I mean, he's clearly the spiritual leader of Lute and the creator of Lute, and everyone's looking to him for guidance. But he's done an amazing job saying, I'm part of the community. I'm a builder within this community, and I'm part of the community here too. Corruption's a little bit different, where I think it's a little clearer, like the roles we're each playing. But he just has an amazing job of keeping things light, keeping things real, and keeping it fun.

Nicholas: Yeah, it's great. It really is art. It really is. So, OK, so we've got the teaser for why people should go catch up on what the AMA was all about and the Getting Up To Speed channel. I wonder if there's any other topics you guys want to talk about that we haven't hit yet on Corruption. It's a super exciting project. Frankly, I feel this type of interaction is so new. I'm sure it's been done before or whatever, but just the way it's kicked off here is very exciting to watch happen. And I don't know, if people listening are probably something like me, and that they wish they had more time to jump into all of these projects at Domstead that are so deep, that have spawned these incredibly rich communities of people who are making it. Even Blitmap, I remember from back then, people made meaningful, lasting relationship connections in that Discord through the community that surrounded that project, which was already so participatory. So it's very cool to see this through line through all the work and to be able to have this super enriching, interesting discussion. Also, I do want to observe that one of the things that every Web 2 person lands in Web 3 and says, it's too complicated and we need to simplify it with an idiot-proof interface for iPhone. And they're right in some way, but also it's like these things that are the most compelling projects on the chain, or on any chain, but on the chain that I pay the most attention to, especially are the ones that are relatively high friction, like the kind of sleuthing work that you're being asked to do to participate and keep up with the conversation. It's a lifestyle almost. You need to throw yourself into it for each project that you really want to understand. And through that journey, you're making friends with people and getting crazy ideas, hearing crazy ideas that you wouldn't have come up with on your own if you were playing truly single player. So it feels like a very new game mode, a whole new, not derived, but inspired by prior game types, but taken to a whole new level and place through the use of the particular medium that it's being created on.

Timshel: I think it's also a microcosm of what's happening in Web 3 overall. Web 3 overall will go from low fidelity to high fidelity, and from chaos to order, and from discord to alignment. And I think that's happening in Corruptions as a project, it's happening within the Lootverse, and it's happening in Blipbap community as well. And so Dom, I don't know, he has a way of just seeing the larger metaphor here and making it fun in the micro, but also making it meaningful in the macro. And in some ways, it's also a meta commentary about everything that's going on as all of us move in from low fidelity to high fidelity with conviction along the way.

Nicholas: Yeah, definitely, Scott, what were you going to say?

Scotato: Yeah, I was just going to say that was all really well said. And there's kind of a parallel, and it's difficult to understand in many ways. But there's these analogies to the blockchain as being kind of like a restrained primitive computer. And Dom's kind of working within his restraints, and he's pushing the boundaries. And so you really have to be kind of nerdy and into the technology to be like, right there with them, like, learning about these technologies and seeing where they're going and what we can do with them. So I think that's kind of what pulls us in and keeps us engaged.

Nicholas: Yeah, totally. It seems like we're learning so much through all these projects. I'm curious, Shahrouz, have you learned something recently or that comes to mind from engaging with these projects?

Shahruz: I mean, absolutely. I don't know how to quantify that into like a takeaway or a single point. I'm still in the middle of processing what we're doing and figuring out how that factors into other projects. And what kind of what are these models are replicable and what makes it so interesting? I will say, I think one of the anxieties around how kind of inaccessible it is currently or how much of a sort of learning curve or an investment you have to make in terms of time to get acclimated, I think that will become easier over time. What we've been seeing is basically Dom throwing out just as many new mechanisms and new contracts as often as he is putting out more. And I think over time, these contracts, like the rate that he deploys new contracts will probably decrease and more of like a consistent structure will start to emerge, at which point it should be a lot easier for all these websites that are popping up to kind of like guide people through what's going on.

Nicholas: It's the classic thing where people don't want to get involved until there is structure that can help them get involved. But actually, the most insane time is when there is no structure, because once there's structure, there's some rhythm to it. You can sort of comprehend it. But the period you're in right now is like, what's going on? I don't even know.

Shahruz: It's very hard, even for people spending a lot of time in it to like orient ourselves on what's going on. Yeah.

Nicholas: Totally. So, Tim, I know you got to run. I don't know if the rest of you are interested in sticking around, taking questions from the audience. But this has been really great. Thank you so much for coming through and explaining corruptions. I hope we can do another part. Having Dom as a guest would be incredible. But even just hearing about the second sequence, I'm really excited.

Timshel: Absolutely. I'm going to hop off. You guys keep rolling here. Maybe this is the FOMO part of Web 3. I feel like I just want to be online 24-7. It's been so fun to make friends with everybody here. And yeah, I know Dom does want to join. Let's not get it all out on the table yet, because I know Dom is open to doing an AMA. I know Dom's excited to join. He popped into the Discord earlier and said, I really wish I could come, but I can't. So maybe a round two is in order. But I'm going to hop off. Thank you guys. Love you all. Plenty more to come. Take care.

Nicholas: See you, Tim.

Fabian: Take care.

Nicholas: Yeah, if you want to stick around, I'll start inviting folks up. And if there's any topics you want to cover that I haven't known to try to hit, please just jump out and say something.

Fabian: Just one thing. I think there's two things that really help making the community very special from day one. And one is what I would call Dom's capture. I think he put it in the initial contract, and it's also on the OpenSea page, where it says no utility, no roadmap, and absolutely no promises. And secondly, a genius move by Tim Schell was to create a separate channel for Ferdinand Price Talk immediately in the Discord. So many projects you see, most channels are just being spammed with Price Talk and you know, the sort of typical questions, when moon, what's the roadmap, etc. And sort of creating a safe space for these in a separate channel was, I feel, extremely valuable in setting us up the right way from the get-go.

Nicholas: Wise community management right off the bat. Yeah.

Fabian: Yeah.

Nicholas: That's the kind of wisdom you can only get from experience. I see Remnant is here. We were talking last night. How's it going?

remnynt: : Hey, going great. That was awesome. Thank you guys. How are y'all doing?

Nicholas: Doing good.

remnynt: : Yeah, I just wanted to point out how awesome I think the fate outcome was. I was on Team Fate, so I might be a little bit biased. But when I felt like, or when the options were decided, that the chain itself could decide, I knew fate would win. And I think that was actually really poetic, that even though it was kind of the underdog, that it pulled through. And I wrote a paper in philosophy in school about determinism versus free will. And I think I ended up somewhere thinking maybe quantum mechanics were a possible source of free will or something. Really just getting kind of cosmic with it. But I thought it was pretty fun that fate won out.

Shahruz: It was poetic.

Nicholas: So fate went out in a contentious vote.

Scotato: Yeah.

remnynt: : But there was four options. It was free will, fate, let the chain decide, and neither or both.

Nicholas: What is let the chain decide?

remnynt: : So I think, correct me if I'm wrong here, guys, but I think it could decide between fate or free will. And it was based on, it was weighted by how many votes went in to either of those.

Scotato: Yeah. So Charuz can explain this. But basically, so we were asked a question through the chain. And instead of just pulling the community and answering, we pulled the community and then fed those answers into a contract that Charuz wrote to where it would actually do a random number generator on chain and then send whatever message won.

Nicholas: Okay. I got it. Okay. So I pinned it to this conversation if people want to check out the fate option. So it definitely does seem like a poetic happening that the fate option would have been chosen by the chain.

remnynt: : Yeah, exactly.

Scotato: Yeah. And so that prompted like a yes, no option after our answer. But since our answer was yes, the only options were yes or yes. So we immediately answered back with yes to the question that he sent us.

Nicholas: Super cool. Wow. So Remnant, maybe it would be interesting for people to hear, like, how did you get involved? When did you start paying attention to this project?

remnynt: : Oh, yeah. So actually, on my legacy Twitter, I used to follow some people that were into art blocks and loot. Or they're into NFTs. And the projects as a normie before I got into any of this space was seeing them talk about art blocks and loot. And so to me, those were like the really big, cool projects. And so when I came into the space, I wanted to combine aspects of those two projects into my own contract. So I've always been following Dom and looked up to him as sort of like a creator that I had aspired to be.

Nicholas: So cool. So wow. Great. That's a compelling reason to get involved with an NFT project.

remnynt: : Yeah, absolutely. I missed a boat on loot. I didn't mint any free ones. But when I saw corruption drop, I missed the mint again. And I found out you can actually follow an address on the Etherscan site. Just so I wouldn't miss it. Again, I get the emails now. I woke up the next morning, jumped out of bed and bought two corruptions on secondary just to be a part.

Nicholas: I feel like Dom is trolling people who monitor his address at this point, though. It's like every day there's a new contract. It's tough.

remnynt: : Yeah.

Scotato: It's super hard to keep track of.

Nicholas: Yeah. You got to go check quickly. I guess, I mean, I'll be honest. I've stopped checking every single one. I presume the majority of what I've seen popping up for me has been metadata contract drops. Or I don't know what the variety of things that he's put out have been. Maybe one of you could expand on that.

Shahruz: Yeah, they've mainly been metadata updates, which update the SVG renderer or add support for a new deviation. So when he was doing these nine separate artwork drops that we could deviate to, like the wilted roses, each of those was a new contract. I think those tend to be the majority of them. And then he's posting, if you're following his transactions, too, and not just the contract deploys, anytime he's posting messages, we all get notified on those, too. And those tend to be a lot. He might have done 15 or 20 of those yesterday.

Nicholas: Whoa, that's a lot. That wasn't how he was doing the AMA, though. The AMA was right in the Discord. But do you guys have a bot or something that's posting these now?

Shahruz: We do, yeah. Very cool. So we've got a feed channel inside the Discord that gets auto updated with new messages as they come in.

Nicholas: So it's monitoring his wallet specific to corruptions, not everything that he does with his wallet.

Shahruz: The feed channel is actually pulling from a subgraph that we have set up for the messaging channels. And then there's actually a separate channel for contract deploys. And that is directly just monitoring his wallet through Ethers.js on the server and then posting updates to the channel anytime there's something new.

Nicholas: Crazy. I'm just imagining if Wizards of the Coast demanded that the audience create a subgraph in order to interact with the collection of cards. It's a very involved form of narrative. It's not even consumption. It's creation as well.

Shahruz: Yeah. Yeah. I think it is interesting that the tooling that we build kind of gives shape to what Dom will do as well to some extent. So that kind of, I don't know, like passive influence on the thing has been interesting to be a part of.

Nicholas: So if people wanted to get involved now, I know you can go jump into Discord. I guess you can also buy a corruption as a legitimate thing. How should people think about if they wanted to buy one the Insight score?

Shahruz: Honestly, I have no idea. Maybe Fabian or Scott or even Remnant can answer this a little bit better. But the Insight scores so far, I think the only difference between what they allowed you to do is one of the recent renderer upgrades. switched it into kind of this two column format where you would have your corruption's art, but then you would also have a list of words to the right of it. That only was unlocked for any corruption with an Insight score of 20 or higher. So I think that was the first instance of something essentially being gated by an Insight score. I don't think it's come up. Very cool.

Nicholas: So I was shocked to see these earlier today. So if people don't know, so a corruption looks like a playing card almost in terms of like form factor. And then now some of them have sort of shrunk down or there's now the same playing card size space to the right of it with this list of concepts. I was totally shocked to see this happen. I really didn't anticipate. I just loaded it up today and saw it. How long ago did this update come out? You're saying it automatically applies to any that have more than whatever. it was. amount of Insight?

Shahruz: Yeah, I think anything with 20 or higher, it automatically was applied to. I think this came out maybe like five or six days ago. Sometime last week.

Nicholas: So it didn't change the graphic of the corruption, but it added this piece to the right.

Shahruz: Actually, I think it might have actually changed the graphic a little bit. There was the introduction of a few more colors into each one.

Nicholas: Yeah, I see scattered little characters in another color. Which, had that ever happened before?

Shahruz: I don't believe so. Somebody else might know better than I do, though. No, that's new.

Nicholas: Very interesting. Yeah, go ahead. I

Fabian: will say if someone's looking to get a corruption now, it almost probably doesn't matter that much which one you're going to get because so much of the actual game is happening in the community and in the Discord as well and in the sort of speculation, but not speculation in the classical NFT sense, but rather in sort of speculating about, oh, what does this message mean? And or how should we respond? And so on.

Nicholas: Do people have a sense of what other? Well, like, do people know which corruption you have? Or do most people in the community have a corruption to start? And then second of all, do people who I guess it doesn't it's not required in any way, but do you know who your friends which corruptions they have?

Fabian: I actually don't. I'm not sure whether others are following it more, but I will say you need a corruption to really sort of engage in the Discord because the actual corruption channels are gated.

Nicholas: Got it. And it's a vote in snapshot governance.

Shahruz: Yeah.

Fabian: Yeah. I mean, like we will vote in the Discord for like quicker back and forth messaging, using like emojis and stuff like that. But for the bigger, more crucial decisions, we will do a snapshot.

Nicholas: Seems like a great divide you've got for which types of decisions have to be made, which way sort of organically grown out of the thing. It's interesting to see like a DAO forming that. I don't. I don't feel like there's any obligation that you as a community like pass a formal governance proposal for explaining how you're going to do these. You just sort of do it. It's it's it's it's not that level stakes, even if someday the NFTs in the vault end up being worth a lot of money. It's just not that kind of thing that you would have to be so formal about it. It's a different seems like a different type of DAO in a way. Yeah.

Shahruz: I also I mean, with Dom like sending us the initial wealthy grows deviation, that's token 81 for free and then allowing us to deviate the other eight on a you know, through a reservation. I think like a big function of the multi-seg and our collection there is to enable all corruption holders to be able to experience the full thing, you know, without feeling like they need to have a specific piece or a specific deviation. You know, because we have every single kind in our multi-seg, theoretically, that means that anybody who is in the corruption community should be able to experience anything that it comes up out of that because we we share those together.

Nicholas: That is very smart narrative design on the part of this project to allocate this much one of each story path to the community so that you can just participate in the community to explore the breadth of the universe. That seems very, very smart.

Scotato: Yeah.

Shahruz: And I think the vibe it kind of instills in the community is very different, too. It's not about the value of the things within. It's about us being able to share access to them.

Nicholas: Once you deviate a corruption, is that a permanent change to that corruption?

Shahruz: It is. Yeah.

Nicholas: OK. So there are. so you're making choices that are sort of irrevocable as an individual or as a DAO. But somehow the implications of these things, it's the insight gated. a graphics update is very cool. I think I wonder that's the first time and the only time so far that that's happened.

Shahruz: Believe so.

remnynt: : Yeah. One really interesting thing that came out of the AMA on Saturday is we were talking to Dom about tech and kind of talking about, you know, what it means to be on chain and SVG and HTML. And he was pointing out that he thinks this is kind of almost like a primitive starting point. And he's going to explore what I took it to mean, like different kinds of rendering style, using different texts, like upgrading it, maybe writing stuff in JavaScript. And I thought that was a really interesting. So I guess to say it's not the last graphical upgrade. we'll see in the corruption.

Nicholas: It's very cool. It feels like you're playing Fable or something, some like adventuring game RPG, where you start and you're sort of given the worst sword and the no sword and just your fists or something. And then once you have a little bit of experience, you level up a little bit, then you can get access to more power and which allows you to explore more of the universe. If anyone wants to come up and ask questions, feel free. Or if you are part of the community, we'd love to hear from you about your experience playing corruptions together. I don't know if any of the guys on the panel, if you have any subjects other than that you'd like to cover.

Shahruz: Can't think about anything myself.

Nicholas: You guys don't have a like a. there's not a weekly like Lute has a weekly community town hall or what's it called? Town Square. But corruptions doesn't have such a cadence yet, right?

Shahruz: Definitely not for calls. I think we've only done one like formal call that was kind of announced and scheduled at a time. Besides that, we've deployed a few contracts kind of just sharing our screens live in the channel. But yeah, definitely not nowhere near as kind of organized as Lute has become now.

Nicholas: Do you think there, do you see them as being very similar in terms of community organization or on two different paths?

Shahruz: I think very different because here there is one kind of core thing that we are all experiencing together, whereas Lute, it's all the individual projects that people are really interested in discussing. So I think that also is kind of what spurred this like bi-directional communication thing to actually continue and drive where the story goes. I think that happens because we're kind of dealing with a single creator on a single project. Lute's very different in that sense.

Nicholas: Do you think there are, are there any plans in the works for new projects like Reflections or that would come up when needed, when required by the game?

Shahruz: I think they'll come up when needed or required. We've sold, I think 95 Reflections have been minted so far out of the possible like 576. So if we do need to raise funds, there's definitely still a lot more that we could raise from the Reflections contract. Besides that, I don't think there's been anything formally discussed. I saw Fabian's unmuted though, might have something to add.

Fabian: Yeah, I mean we're thinking about sort of trying to set up a game around the deviations where the sort of core narrative idea is that these deviations were locked, they no longer gain insight, but they do want to sort of find a way to regain their insight. And that's very, very early stage, but I think it's kind of promising and it's also a fun way for like a lot of folks only have deviations. And even though they're intended as game over states in the official game, due to the decentralized nature of things, we in theory could sort of create a game around that as well. And they lend themselves to be used as sort of cards based on the way they look and based on what they inspire. Right, right. But that's very early stage.

Nicholas: Okay, so something else people could get involved in if they're interested. Actually, yeah, totally. I just realized thinking I was looking at one of the level 20 plus insight corruptions, and I realized if you transfer it, you restart, don't you? It is a new save game.

Shahruz: Not exactly. So your insight score will stay at what it is, but it will reset its growth rate.

Nicholas: Oh, right. Okay. So you'll keep the say visual updates, but you're the multiplier of how quickly you're gaining insight. It'll be like you're back at square one.

Shahruz: Exactly. Yeah. So if it's like a long race on a long track, your runner isn't necessarily moving back, but they've stopped and they have to start running again from zero.

Nicholas: Very interesting.

Fabian: It's a really interesting mechanic, right? Because in a way, if you assume that more insight is better, then it disincentivizes trading. It disincentivizes even moving it between your own wallets, which is kind of like a really neat, cool idea.

Nicholas: Yeah, that's it. Make sure to get it on the right wallet right away.

Shahruz: There is somebody who appears to be sort of painstakingly keeping their insight score low intentionally. If you click around in OpenSea through the insight filters, there's somebody who's got an insight score of nine, which is the lowest. And the second lowest is 18. So there's a pretty big gap. And this person, you can see in their activity history, is basically every day just transferring it back and forth between two wallets that they own.

Nicholas: No insight. Peace of mind.

Shahruz: Yeah.

Nicholas: Interesting. I could see that being meaningful. I could see that being an unplanned trigger for some new thing that the Game Master puts out, for sure.

Shahruz: Yeah, I'm sure he'll... I mean, it's possible that this person is kind of just trying to juice their own rarity for a flip down the line. But I am curious, how much does Dom incorporate emergent gameplay like this into community coordination that's required to advance a story in some way?

Nicholas: Do you get a sense that he's paying attention to what you're doing outside of what you communicate via the blockchain?

Shahruz: He did not join the Discord up until yesterday. And he said a few times that people are sending him screenshots from within the Discord. But yeah, I think he mentioned it ruins his own enjoyment to some extent, if you were to be more present.

Nicholas: Right, right, right. Makes sense. This firewall, this performative firewall is interesting. Malleable and can come in sometimes.

Shahruz: Yeah, I think the only times that he's kind of, you know, broken the fourth wall here are in between chapters. There was a point when he just said that that was the end of the prologue. And then that's when he tweeted about the project for the first time. And then yesterday when chapter one ended, or two days ago, I forget now. That's when he popped into the Discord to do an AMA. So basically between each kind of act break, he's kind of breaking the fourth wall and talking to the community more directly at those times.

Nicholas: I'm curious, Shahrouz, did you ever participate in anything like this before blockchains?

Shahruz: Not exactly. I think on the gaming side, it's definitely pretty unique. But I have been doing entertainment, interactive, entertainment driven by technology for a long time. There's a lot of mechanisms and patterns that I'm kind of seeing in new forms on the blockchain that Dom is experimenting with. And that's definitely what's kind of drawn me to loot and to corruptions.

Nicholas: Did you have some kind of interactive theater gaming background or more other kinds of games?

Shahruz: Not games at all, actually. One of the things that I worked on recently before getting into the Web3 stuff was there was a company called Super Deluxe, which is like an all comedy kind of internet content creation thing. We would do daily Facebook live streams that were fully interactive. And just like every day, it was some ridiculous new idea. So one example would be our office was right across the street from Pershing Square, which is this public park in Los Angeles downtown. So we would send out people to go with cardboard signs. So you could pay a protester through the Facebook live stream. And then we would scribble down whatever the message was that somebody had purchased and then have somebody protesting that thing on camera. So just a lot of real time interaction, stuff like that. But because we were doing a different format every day, there were just constantly kind of new mechanisms that we were playing with, new ways of kind of engaging an audience and seeing what gets them excited. So I think a lot of that experience is definitely informing like Web3 blockchain entertainment stuff for me, at least.

Nicholas: Scott, did you have prior experience with anything similar?

Scotato: No, definitely not. It's all a new experience, but it's super fun.

Nicholas: So were you, you're not like a Dungeons and Dragons kind of player or into Magic the Gathering or more? I don't even know pen and paper. I don't know what examples are of pen and paper games. Are they completely invented or someone will have to teach me?

Scotato: I have played a lot of Magic the Gathering, but that's more of like a one on one kind of format. Whereas this is more Dungeons and Dragons where there's like a game master. And then so there's like an imbalance in the play. Like there's one person on one side and then many on the other. So I haven't participated in too many formats like that.

Nicholas: Fabien, how about you? Do you have past experience in this kind of thing?

Fabian: Yeah, I spent my teenage years playing a lot of pen and paper role playing games with a bunch of friends. And the way the Corruptions Project developed totally reminds me of those days. And that's super exciting.

Nicholas: Can you tell me what's a traditional pen and paper game like? What's the experience like?

Fabian: So the core idea is that you have like some sort of game universe, right? Like Dungeons and Dragons, but there are different ones. You have like cyberpunk ones, like Shadowrun, stuff like that. And the way you play is that you have a game master that prepares a story. And there's like stories you can purchase and great game masters will make their own. And the players get to play a character and they have a character sheet and they have different stats, pretty much like in a computer role playing game. And then you play the game as a group with the game master taking the role, if you want to take this into a computer metaphor, the game master taking the role of the AI, so to say. And the sort of like rendering the world, describing the circumstances, driving the narrative. But of course, at the same time, the game master can't control everything and the players will go on little detours and they will do things that the game master didn't really anticipate. Like they will raid some dungeon that the game master said you never should go into that dungeon and so on. So it's kind of like there's a decentralized aspect to it that enables emerging narratives. And yeah, this is exactly what Corruptions reminds me of in many ways.

Nicholas: The game master sort of has to, is challenged to cope creatively with the belligerent players who are insisting on flirting with the barmaid or whatever, when it's not something they had intended to explore.

Fabian: Totally, totally. And like a great game master, like she'll be able to wing it, you know, and to improvise. And that's clearly what we've been seeing with Dom. So I think he'd be an absolutely outstanding pen and paper game master too.

Nicholas: Maybe he is. I wonder.

Fabian: Probably, yeah. I wouldn't be surprised.

Nicholas: Not at all. All right, guys, this has been a wonderful conversation. Thanks so much. Sharu, Scott, Fabian, Remnant, Tim, who had to leave a little bit earlier. This has been super educational. I've learned so much about Corruptions and I hope we can do another episode of this soon, maybe even with Dom. That would be wild. I need to study up.

Shahruz: Yeah, that was great.

Scotato: Thanks for having us.

Nicholas: Yeah, you're welcome. Great. Well, thank you all, everybody, and see you at the next episode.

Scotato: Have a good one. See you.

Fabian: Bye.

Nicholas: Bye.