The marvelous case of unsigned_algorithms, the most ambitious NFT project on Cardano
The first and unique on-chain project of this blockchain, launched in May 2021 and sold out in two months, has only 145 items listed on Jpg.store. With an impressive 31K supply, the question is evident and mysterious. Where are all of them?
A guy keeping warm from his bitcoin servers
In 2013, the young student Alex Watanabe decided to build a bitcoin mining pool server in his room. The Satoshi cryptocurrency had reached one hundred dollars in value and that was enough to try again what Watanabe did months ago. This time with better machines. After buying 5K thousand dollars in computers, which let him build twelve GPUs dedicated to mining thousands of bitcoins, he managed to connect them to all electricity ports from the basement. It was November, at the beginning of those winters used to ravage Michigan, and Watanabe recalls how he got warm despise the cold entering from the windows all day and night, thanks to these 5K watts which were generated by these supercomputers.
“I could walk to that room in the morning,” he told in an interview, “in my underwear and just stand because of like 5 thousands watts of computers running was enough to keep me warm.”
Soon, however, Watanabe realized that all his expectations about decentralization and community empowerment on Bitcoin were just an illusion. The local artisan mining was going to disappear due to the implementation of supercomputers dedicated exclusively to this process, based most in China. He lost interest finally on it and sold his crypto and computers to get back to a normal life after getting a real job on Research & Development. He securely didn’t imagine at that moment that eight years later, in May 2021, would be the mind behind the most ambitious, visionary and beautiful NFT project on Cardano.
31,119, a perfect algorithmically number
Watanabe is an aesthetic builder above all. There is an anecdote that can resume his inner obsession. Before going to the university, he was learning all about photography. One day, his mom said to him why instead of taking pictures of buildings he dedicated that time to build them. “Oh, that is interesting,” he said to her. That savage idea, recalled until now by himself in interviews, is what I think can explain the origin of unsigned_algorithms. He spent his youth learning about aesthetics, culture, photography, colors, and at the same time, he was curious about the mechanisms behind them, all the processes and things required to depict them in real life. His background on Liberal Arts, and his development into architecture and programming later, are the natural explanation about why unsigned_algorithms is a visionary project with no comparison so far, created like an oasis in middle of a vast desert until almost one year. It’s the only project where art and science got together as a whole, consistent and well accomplished in all its angles, and only Spacebudz with its tech achievement minting developed by Berry Ales can be related to. Indeed, I consider both projects the Genesis of what is coming on NFTs into the next months and years on Cardano. First classes in its own category, the real Blue Chips of this blockchain. And the numbers and data are telling us this story.
Unsigned_algorithms took two months to sell out. The minting was made in three phases, at different tiers and prices. What new people from the community don’t know about this is that the minting was in middle of a deep bear phase. When unsigned was launched, you were able to watch people offering Spacebudz for 220 ADA on CNFT and Cardano Discords, the only way to buy them at that moment. But something special happened with this collection at the beginning, that the first 10K were sold out in one week. I remember some main OG collectors got very surprised when they learned this news even. But the real challenge was the remaining 20K supply, something Cardano creators had not done until that instance and community didn’t experience at all, less in the bearish situation we all were suffering for trading our NFTs.
Two months. That is a lot of time if we are talking about a minting phase for any project in any blockchain. But above all, a 31K supply for a blockchain with only 6K NFT holders looks like out of one’s mind. Why then Watanabe chose doing something so ambitious? The response is very documented and explained by the own Watanabe in some interviews. Unsigned_algorithms is a complex achievement, although he has resumed the project like a theory about the color. It’s like a giant blank with different block approaches based on three basic colors (red, green, blue) and all its possible variations. It’s important to take in consideration that is not only color itself, but also a geometry study around as Watanabe himself has said too. He got the 31K supply after filtering the 50 millions variations through the algorithm he created on Python.
50 millions variations filtered down to only 31K. He wrote the code, he did the art curation. Code and art playing together were something Watanabe was used to from his young age when he took and revealed pictures in a dark room. That is why I consider Watanabe the most skilled (crypto)artist on Cardano. His approach is ambitious like a Renaissance painter or sculptor, and at the same time, he has inherited the simplicity of Oriental art. Watanabe looks like trying to response a disturbing, striking question through unsigned_algorithms in a simple way. What if we were capable to watch the three basic colors interacting as nobody has tried until now? We know the color is a perception of human eye, or said other way, the manifestation of light. What Watanabe did at the end with this pioneer project is tighten light variations in all its forms using computational power, and then encapsulating the best manifestations in 31K blocks on the blockchain as blueprints. Each block is a universe itself, an artifact of nature, the best possible representation of the beauty of color.
The art blueprint is on the blockchain forever
Almost every NFT project on Cardano and Ethereum and Solana has a particular similitude about their NFTs. The artwork is linked to an object outside the blockchain ecosystem itself, which is IPFS. All images are hosted on this infrastructure, and if for any reason this platform got compromised to show them in real time, you will have a blockchain metadata pointing towards an object impossible to show its figure, colors and forms. It’s like being on Louvre Museum trying to watch Leonardo Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa and suddenly the painting just disappearing in front of our eyes. We can realize the frame is on there, the painting was really on there, but we can’t watch it anymore.
We know Watanabe got inspiration about unsigned_algorithms on Sol LeWitt art. This American artist created a guideline framework to depict his artworks on walls, so in every exhibition, people had to follow those instructions to recreate the murals. What is hosted on unsigned_algorithm code is almost the same process. We got the blueprint to depict the unsigned artwork in the blockchain itself, so if IPFS were unable to be online anymore, you could follow the instructions on Cardano metadata to depict the block artwork without any issue as the creator showed in this Youtube video. Watanabe has said that the art of unsigned is the code itself, and what we see is just a rendering. This trend is still not so popular and adapted by collectors yet, but we can watch some eth projects valued over 5K USD by floor piece as OnChain Monkeys.
What is interesting about this is the huge potential unsigned_algorithms gets once the on-chain art got popularity and massive adoption. In this case, we are talking about the first on-chain NFT project hosted really on Cardano. If code is art, and the future will be around NFTs, the only way you can own the artistic bones of a blockchain will be through this new method. As in the paintings from the Cave of Altamira, each unsigned will be the first manifestation of the on-chain artwork in Cardano history. People in the community is still unable to realize the magnitude of what this means, just thinking and playing around with the elements about floor and collectibles, without watching what is going on out-of-the-box. And this is occurring in part due to the singular situation of the project, a paradox which I didn’t see in any other NFT project until now.
The Unsigned Paradox
What if I tell you there is an NFT project whose 90% of top holders are not selling any of their supply for one year until now? What if I tell you one of them, with 3837 assets in his wallet, could have sold all for 2 millions of ADA and didn’t? We can have different answers for sure. That is the situation of unsigned_algorithms now. Part of this explanation could be based on the nature of its holders who minted them, some of them connoisseurs of how traditional art works, waiting patiently the moment when on-chain and unsigned got traction on the market, or when traditional art money will turn towards generative blockchain art. We are talking about hundred of millions of dollars. And 500 ADA floor is not what they are expecting clearly. The paradox here is that the project with the most supply in all NFT Cardano ecosystem has only 145 items listed on secondary and obviously nobody of the top players is selling. Will they? Nobody knows. I would say probably not even this year. All will depend how ADA performs on the market for sure.
This situation is similar which happened to Spacebudz at the beginning, with the advantage that collectibles were always a trend and more money has been flowing around it. But in the first months, even before CNFT marketplace appeared online, the holder number was at 1600ish, almost at the same proportion that is unsigned_algorithms now with almost 1500 holders. Even some Spacebudz top players were accumulating more assets during those winter bearish times. At the other hand, we only have a small proportion of holders with at least 1 unsigned in their wallets, just 2%, which means community is still not convinced about the gem since my perspective this project achieved forever on Cardano. So top holders not prone to sell cheap and community not convinced at all to buy unsigned at cheap prices.
Then, the same question about this paradox. How is this possible? I only have a simple response to this freezing time where no one is giving way. As Spacebudz, unsigned top holders know what they have gotten during May-July 21 and there is a deep conviction among them about the huge value these unsigned will accumulate over time. Will 1K Ada floor trigger the beginning of a new trend for this project? Maybe. Or probably not. Lot of things would have to take in place to this occurs. I recall an unsigned top holder saying “1 unsigned = 1 island.” That is the kind of conviction this project is facing at the time Watanabe prepares the launch of a new collection.
I sense that everything will change once Ada got more value on the market. Because if something is clear to me, is that the on-chain value of unsigned_algorithms is intrinsically associated to the blockchain value itself. It’s basic and evident. Once Ada gets 5–10 USD, and wealth attracts wealth, the first or second question crypto players will do to our community at that instant will be: “Which one is the first on-chain project here?”.
We only know one response. And it’s also beautiful.
