#313: Squiggle #9999 and Attestations
✍️ What are attestations and how can they enrich experiences?
Squiggle #9999
Last week, Erick Calderon (aka Snowfro) announced that it was time to mint Squiggle #9999, the last of the collection. The announcement was one of these moments in the generative art world:
TLDR on Squiggles, Art Blocks, and what makes #9999 unique:
Squiggles is the first collection launched on Art Blocks, a generative digital art platform. Both Squiggles and Art Blocks were founded by Snowfro.
As the Squiggles collection neared minting out, Snowfro paused the mint, reserving the remaining mints for community contributors and art institutions that have been distributed over the past year.
Squiggle #9999 will be minted and donated to LACMA (Los Angeles County Museum of Art) and includes a farewell smart contract to commemorate the final mint.
In order to ‘sign’ the farewell, participants have to send any amount of ETH to the smart contract, squigglefarewell.eth (0x9b917686DD68B68A780cB8Bf70aF46617A7b3f80). The contract will immediately send the ETH back, recording participation in the farewell.
Anyone can participate, and Squiggle holders who participate will have that designation recorded as well.
The farewell opened up this past Monday and will conclude on Monday, July 22.
More details on the process are here and in a Spaces here.
Signing the digital and physical yearbook
Participating in the farewell was quite simple for anyone who has participated in onchain activities in the past. You send any amount of ETH to the smart contract address, and the smart contract records the transaction and sends the same amount back (minus gas).
When wallets participate in the farewell, they’re recorded by the smart contract:
The whole experience reminded me of signing yearbooks during my school days. Yearbook signing when I grew up (is it still a thing? someone let me know lol) was an important social event as each school year came to a close. Classmates, friends, and frenemies all signed the yearbook with various messages ranging from essays to the timeless classic, HAGS (Have A Good Summer).
Signing a classmate’s yearbook signified that you were a part of their school year, whether you were a bestie who shared secrets with, only spoke once because you were in the same group project, or were a friend from another school. You signed because you had a part, no matter how large or small.
We see these types of interactions in other physical and digital ways as well:
Weddings - On my wedding day, guests signed our lookbook
Ecards - Great for distributed groups
Voting - For those in the US, we all know what this sticker is
Another variation of this is with election ink. When I grabbed lunch with my friends Devansh and Nidhi last week, I noticed they had a sharpie-like mark on their fingernails, which serves as a tactic to prevent double voting.
Interacting with Squiggle #9999’s smart contract has parallels to this experience, allowing attendees to take part in the event.
Interactions vs. Attestations
The examples I provided are primarily interactions. These are actions or events that took place.
You signed my yearbook. I signed my colleague’s Ecard wishing them the best on the next step of their professional journey. These events are inconsequential, but you can’t prove that you signed my yearbook unless you got your hands on my yearbook from 2012.
Voting takes it a step further, providing visual signals that an individual took part in their civil duty, with records stored securely (hopefully). However, stickers get lost, ink comes off after several weeks, and fingernails grow out after several months.
Attestations on the blockchain provide a way to validate that these interactions happened, in a secure and decentralized way. They (or other parties) could also add additional layers of recognition or commemoration.
As an example, Erick and the Art Blocks team could turn the Squiggle Farewell smart contract and all of the signing interactions into a digital art piece after Squiggle #9999 is minted. Then signers could mint the art piece to memorialize the moment as a supplement to the signing, or Squiggle holders who signed could be airdropped the art piece.
Don’t we already have ways to do this?
Yup! POAP (Proof of Attendance Protocol) is one of the established platforms and tools to show that ‘I was there’.
Other efforts such as EAS (Ethereum Attestation Service) are building the infrastructure to allow attestations to become more impactful in our daily lives.
I bring Squiggle #9999 up because of the unique way the attesting works, and also because there’s still a TBD component around what will happen after the Farewell smart contract closes.
Regardless, it’s a short-lived HAGS type of moment for Squiggles and Art Blocks, as the generative art movement has just begun.
Other Interesting Things
Jihoz, co-founder of Axie Infinity shared a Web3 gaming growth handbook. Lots of lessons in there.
EthCC (Ethereum Community Conference) was last week and there were a lot of takeaways. Some observations around creative activations and events and a marketer’s POV on the conference.
Want to get feedback on your idea? Hit me up. Thanks to everyone I’ve connected with so far, it’s been fun!
See you next week!