In our second AMA (Ask Me Anything) of the year, we spoke with @Jebzie from XShrooms and @Yolk from Clever Gallery to dive deeper into their NFT projects and why they chose to build on the XRP Ledger.
Check out the AMA below if you weren’t able to participate and be sure to catch the next one at xrpldevs.com!
BiasGoose: Hello Developers, Projects and Students! Join me in welcoming our two AMA guests today!
@yolk from clever gallery and @Jebzie from xshrooms!!
Please introduce yourselves to the community and your projects.
Jebzie: Hi! I’m Jebzie, an artist based out of Florida. I have been doing gig posters for several jam bands throughout the years and found a love with ledger and blockchain technology while doing so. With that I wanted to create a genesis pfp project that I can form a community around and start building into web3. xShrooms is a generative art project with 1/1s that will be redeemable upon XLS-20 with ownership on the XRPL. This is all with the amazing help of yolk and minting with Clever Gallery.
Yolk: Hi all, my name is Joseph Chiocchi aka "Yolk".
I'm a generative artist currently working on Clever Gallery
I've been aware of crypto since 2010 and saw early on that BTC wasn't equitable, being unable to mine any BTC with my Pentium 4 that I built from spare parts and emerged world with gentoo compiling in all optimizations.
BiasGoose: Amazing! Can you tell us what sparked the idea to start your projects? And why did you choose the XRPL for them?
Jebzie: The idea came from seeing the endless capabilities that NFTs can hold. This is tremendous for an artist, especially for a lot of my art being digital as well. I find it a true change in the times and even has so much capabilities outside the art aspect as well. I saw the craze on the Ethereum blockchain, however, I am not a fan of how it is operated. For one, there are a lot of security issues and layer 2 solutions that tend to get exploited a lot. I find the XRPL with XLS-20 an amazing place to start building the next step in my art career as it comes with low fees, scalability, super fast, and a big thing is that it is environmentally friendly. Other chains tend to run super expensive or even go down, and that’s just something I’m not going to rush my art on.
The inspiration behind xShrooms is from the earlier video games and bringing that into my clean style. I find the pfp type project an amazing way to build a solid foundation into web3. Adding fun characteristics to a mushroom was something I haven’t seen done and I like to try to be unique with my art as well.
BiasGoose: That's great to hear Jebzie. It's cool to see how artists like you can build on the XRPL and potentially really take advantage of XLS-20 if it passes. I am definitely excited for this amendment as I think it would encourage a lot of other artists to build!
Yolk: Clever Gallery is a culmination of ideas I've been playing with since 2010. Obsessed with digital scarcity, the rare source, having it in your collection. Having it on media that wouldn't degrade.
The first big part of this was in 2012 with 0p3nr3p0 which I architected and built the backend for during http://gli.tc/h festival.
This gallery was shown around the world and let anyone spin up a show to accept entries where the artist would submit their URL. It used couchDB which literally stores the metadata with the binary blobs. It also comes with federation out of the box.
I'm happy with 0p3nr3p0 in that we figured out that we just needed a URL to display the work for people to show it off; to let anyone, anywhere join into the show going on like in Italy or London.
What drew me to the XRPL was originally after I left a remittance startup, where I knew by reducing friction we'd be able to pass on the savings to the customers who were usually migrant workers sending money back home to their families. Instead, the lower friction just increased the startup's profits and customers didn't benefit, managers also believed engineers are cogs.
Instead, I knew crypto solved a lot of issues related to how financial operations are traditionally done. I was told about XRP from a friend and realized it was this other thing I knew about before called OpenCoin, but they changed the name. I did some more research and learned about the Internet of Value being important to the core XRPL ethos... for me I knew art is valuable, by default just passing a token with a uri is solving the huge provenance issue in art.
BiasGoose: It's cool to learn your background Yolk, and it really makes sense with the project you are building now with Clever Gallery.
I know both of your projects are aimed at benefiting the community around you. Can you talk about that? I know you both did shroom.cash for example, so feel free to explain what that is. And yolk please share what the fee structure (if any 👀 ) of clever gallery is, compared to other NFT marketplaces too.
Jebzie: Yeah, at the end of the the community is what’s going to be holding the art so I would like to do as much as I can as the artist to bring everyone together with that whether it’s maybe knowledge or just good vibes.
Shroom cash was an idea I came to Yolk with where I can help support the XRP Ledger while also giving back to the community. We have a lot of projects just pushing out tokens and using that to go into unnecessary marketing. The idea behind this was to give back to the Ledger that is allowing me to build my project on.
Pretty much we set up a page where you can gift 125/250 XRP for 1/2 xShroom NFTs. These would be able to be redeemed via XLS-20. Once the amount hit 25k XRP, as a community, myself and Yolk donated that right over to Wietse Wind at XRPL Labs for a Full History Node. I very much appreciate what they do over at XRPL Labs and as we continue to grow the XRPL these are the powerful things a community can do.
The best incentive is no incentive and I’m trying to play my role to give back with that.
Yolk was truly amazing and was all about it right away. He helped develop the page to have a request via XUMM, super seamless interaction and the community responded super well. We hit a full history node 25k XRP in about 7 hours on a casual Tuesday!!
This is not possible on other ledgers nor would devs be that willing.
Yolk: Clever Gallery will be 100% open source, the backend is python and the frontend is decoupled and interfaces through graphql.
The fee structure for clever.gallery isn't a secret -- we're currently offering partner projects lifetime 0% commission to CG on any sales through https://clever.gallery/.
We make money on selling art and surfacing what we think you'll like as well from anything on the XRPL. With clever.gallery essentially being an XRPL explorer, we curate certain collections or minters which can correlate to being "verified"; partners are definitely curated.
I adamantly believe the XLS-20 standard is the MVP of NFT and is the only acceptable tokens for 1:1 artists who are already engaged with green tech and have begrudgingly been making their experimental selves into NFTs.
BiasGoose: I love what you guys did with shrooms.cash! Really showed a strong signal on what you are about in this community.
A couple questions from the community! Jebzie, can you give us any hints on future projects? For @yolk what does the ideal NFT space look like to you?
Jebzie: Yea it really shows that the community is willing to support the Ledger for the love of art.
Yolk: Yes it's very uncommon for this fee structure. CG will be the largest single GALLERY (sometimes acts as a marketplace 😉) offering zero commission sales (based on a number of partner projects. There's currently only notlarvalabs.com which offers 0 commission to two projects).
We also don’t use a marketplace token, just XRP.
BTW we were just informed this morning by XRPL Labs that the FH node has done Terabytes of traffic for the network already.
BiasGoose: https://twitter.com/XRPLLabs/status/1521499683922849792
Jebzie: Future project hint: 🌊🦕
This one I’ve been working on in the backend. Won’t be released till XLS-20. Mostly everything I plan to do in the future I will tie to NFTs.
I’ve been doing gig posters for many jam bands like Twiddle, lespecial, Midnight North (grandson of Phil Lesh from the Grateful Dead). I would absolutely love to tie an NFT to the tour poster as well.
I have many, many ideas as my mind constantly flows hence Lava.Labs like a lava lamp. However I’m not trying to release a crap ton until XLS-20 comes out so I don’t spread out too much like peanut butter.
Some future projects off of xShrooms I do plan to do things like “xShrooms Px” a pixel based collection. Also “xShrooms 3D” which is inspired by the humanoids style.
I am also really hoping XLS-20 is out before International fight week soon as I would love to do a “secret” drop to xShrooms hodlers during that. wink wink
Yolk: Sorry I noticed my question late..
The ideal NFT space for me is infinite possibilities in infinite combinations.
Lacking that I'll take an infinite scroll of media that is rendered better than my eyes can see, my ears can hear.
BiasGoose: Just a couple more rounds of questions! @yolk what has been the most challenging tech aspect of building your project? Any advice to those playing around on the NFT-devnet?
@Jebzie Do you have anything to share coming up for xshrooms? And what other XRPL projects do you have your eyes on? 👀
Jebzie: For xShrooms keep an eye out for more previewed Mythics and DNA that has been added to the collection. We also just partnered with Monkee Monkee for xShroom hodlers to redeem a Shroom Blaster via their game adventure game. The artwork of the Shroom Blaster is designed and ready to be revealed to the public. Once we do have an official like 2 week timeline for XLS-20 too I will put everything out about xShrooms being cc0 which I think is huge for these NFT projects to have in this space.
In my opinion, my favorite projects I’ve been eyeing are Monkee Monkee, PARC, Combat Kanga, Junkies, xPepe, Yoniverse, xChibi to name a few. Myself being an artist, I look at projects from the art to start then work off that, and all these I am a big fan of as well as what they have contributed to the Ledger.
Yolk: The most challenging tech aspect of building the project for me was settling on not starting from scratch; less tech-heavy, more "how do i try to run a bazaar against all these cathedrals" is probably the biggest hurdle.
The public devnet release came with some good documentation and an example project that’s dead simple to use (if you know how to webdev, I think you'll be able to mint a token using NFTokenTester on nft-devnet).
If I can build on the shoulders of giants, why would I start on the ground?
This is kinda generalized, but most of the time I feel like independent engineers [are] very keen on their craft, will get lost in the details and will have tight feedback loops with themselves, possibly recoding entire features and making compromises that only they know.
I don't want to be that way with the project being open sourced; I also know I'm pretty close to the chest with where clever.gallery is.
As with some things, it turns out things fall into place. The framework I'm auditing to fork recently open-sourced their OIDC connector, I guess a day or so after XUMM made the OAuth a public beta (maybe that was made public a lot sooner).
Point is, with the last example is that it saved me weeks of coding my own oauth proxy to just plug two things together in a few hours
BiasGoose: To close out this AMA, which has been amazing to host, just a couple of the most anticipated questions for each and then please share any message you would like with the community.
@Jebzie share with us your hair treatment routine.
@yolk how do you normally like your eggs?
Thank you so much to you both and keep on building. I watch your projects closely and can say I am a fan. And I think this AMA was clearly a hit.
Yolk: I like poached and sunny-side. I'd prefer sunny-side when it's not an eggs benedict.
Jebzie: Lol, I practically don’t do much to it. I use the cheap shampoos and conditioners like Suave. Actually I've been using Pantene Pro V. No need for all that extra crap, your body produces natural oils, just brush your hair enough and spread that ish out haha.
Thanks goose for hosting this and bringing yolk and I for the AMA! Looking forward to growing in this community with the next step with my art career. There isn’t another one I’d rather do it with! 😚🤟🍄 Appreciate my mods, the community and all the future spores to come, we can continue to grow like mycelium and do powerful things with art to not only help support others, but the world 🖼✨
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