focused.art: A New Platform for Creators on Tezos

Josh Dechant, aka CodeCrafting, has been hard at work as a developer as a former developer at InterPop. He’s also one of the team members behind Crunchy.Network which recently deployed a new Tezos token tracker for DeFi assets on Tezos and is preparing a release of sliced.art, a new specialty purpose platform for fractionalizing NFTs on Tezos.

His latest project called focused.art will be a new creator-centric platform with a focus on catering to creators within the Tezos NFT space. The manifesto on fx(hash) details more of the rationale behind taking this particular route. That said, let’s learn a bit more about the project and some of CodeCrafting’s plans for it.

Meet CodeCrafting #

CodeCrafting is no stranger to the Tezos community as his contributions to the ecosystem stretch quite far. We sat down with him to chat more about focused.art and his plans for the new creator-centric platform for NFT artists.

For those who might not know, what exactly is focused.art?

Focused.art will be a creator-centric platform with a focus on creator sovereignty and interoperability. It will be something sort of like Manifold, though not exactly. But that is a decent reference point that many understand.

The heart and soul of the platform will be the FA2/FA2.1 NFT contract, which creators will originate and be the admin of. These contracts enable a high degree of freedom and control through fine-grained permissions and on-chain hooks/events. Everything else builds out on and around this. These permissions and on-chain hooks will enable a whole system of plug-and-play capabilities. The system will be completely open source, and anyone will be able to write “plugins” (as contracts) that take advantage of this. It will be something like an on-chain IFTTT for NFTs.

As a very simple example of this, you could write a plugin that turns an NFT into a Non-Transferrable Token, or what some call a Soul Bound Token. The plugin logic would be, if NFT is transferred, then reject the transfer. (Focused.art v1 will ship with this plugin among others).

This type of system will enable creators to do a lot of things that currently they would need a smart contract developer to do.

One of the major “plugins” we will be shipping in v1 is what is currently code-named a “mint recipe” contract. Mint recipes are simply Given Inputs and Mint B Tokens. Inputs can be a combination of things, and at a high level are currently planned to be token burns, holding tokens, transferring tokens, freezing/locking tokens, and tez. This will enable a wide variety of primary sales using interesting mechanics. You will be able to do multiples of each input type and combination.

Some other primary sales contracts we are planning for v1 are multi-unit auctions, blind mints, and random mints.

We also plan to have minting templates which will make it easier for creators to mint a bunch of tokens of similar types.

Tell us more about focused.art, what prompted you to begin working on that?

I have been interested in NFTs since I started working in Tezos. I was originally brought in to help create the NFT metadata standard we have. I have also spent much time over the past year and g to and working with artists. The idea of focused came about actually quite some time ago, probably about a year ago, so I’ve spent a lot of time since then gaining knowledge and understanding what creators want and where we can improve things for them.

You can read more in the focused.art Manifesto at https://www.fxhash.xyz/article/focused.art-manifesto

We’ve learned about sliced.art which is a platform for fractionalizing NFTs, what makes focused.art different from it?

Sliced is a specialty purpose marketplace to fractionalize nfts and buy and sell nft fractions. Its goal is to make very high-value NFTs accessible to everyone and create value for everyone holding slices (fractions), including the artist.

Focused is a creator-focused platform that will be focused on empowering creators.

So they’re quite different but not mutually exclusive. One of the creeds of Focused is Freedom, so creators can mint and then sell where they wish, and that would include slicing and selling on Sliced if that is what they want to do.

How did you come into contact with Tezos Commons about this project, and what was it like applying for your Tezos Commons Grant?

I have been in the ecosystem for a bit, so I am familiar with several people at Tezos Commons and their grant program. I knew I wanted to build this and I also knew I wanted it to be free to creators so I reached out to the Commons to see about getting a small grant to help kickstart the development. Applying was very easy, I had to lay out the development plan and some milestones or a sort of roadmap. They reviewed it and approved and here we are.

What’s next for you and your team? Do you have any other exciting projects in the works?

I have some collaborations with artists in the works, but I cannot say anything too specific just yet.

At Crunchy, we’re in the final testing of our token staking model, are working on adding trading history to our dex indexer, and are very close to releasing v1 of Sliced. We’re exploring some other interesting areas as well, but I can’t talk about that just yet.

Focused.art comes as an invaluable new platform to better connect creators within the Tezos NFT space and empower them. Tezos Commons is proud to award CodeCrafting this grant to continue the development of the platform and expand its features. With creator-focused platforms like this being developed, we can’t wait to see what creators will do with it and shape the already robust Tezos NFT space!