Gallery: Gardens + NFTs

Building on the Gardens Overview post that @burrrata started, I wanted to share some specific ideas for DAO designs within the gardens pattern/family where slight modifications/variations/frontend changes would allow for an interesting application of the pattern. This post assumes some basic familiarity with the Gardens design pattern which is designed around open/permission-less communities, so if your unfamiliar check that post out first!

:art: Decentralized Curation and Digital Art

A traditional art gallery thrives by curating, promoting, and selling artwork. With the emergence of provably rare digital artwork in the form of NFTs, we can decentralized and digitize this business model in an interesting and fun way.

The basic idea is to have a site which displays and offers digital artwork for sale. It could look something like Jake Brukhman’s https://firstedition.xyz. If the gallery/DAO builds a brand as a curator, the art that gets added to the gallery will become worth more than it otherwise would and when it is resold the gallery/DAO will make a profit.

To do the curation in a decentralized fashion we can use the Gardens model with some slight adjustments, conviction voting will be modified so that each proposal is a proposed exchange between the DAO and the submitter of a piece of NFT artwork that will be added to the gallery. The submitter can set their price for the exchange, and upon execution the exchange will be made atomically. The “minimum” threshold ensures that there is a maximum rate at which new artwork can be added to the gallery, and forces members of the organization to be selective and scrutinize proposals. This will keep the quality of art high, and prevent the org from rapidly diluting the brand. Just like normal conviction proposals, if the requested amount is higher the proposal will require more conviction, so even a member of the organization with a lot of influence cannot raid the organizations treasury by submitting their own artwork.

Since NFT artwork is non fungible, and non-divisible there is no way for members to “rage quit” or otherwise have a direct claim against the full value of the assets held by the organization
 in order to ensure that participants in the organizations have a real claim on the value they are helping to create we need to ensure that NFTs are regularly sold at a fair price, and that the returns of those sales create value for the participants.

A fun and relatively simple way to approach this is to treat every piece of artwork as always for sale in the gallery at the same price–with the price decreasing over time and increasing with each sale. (There are likely other, potentially better, pricing strategies but rather than get into that let’s focus on this one for now). This pricing model is nice because it doesn’t require the curators to come to consensus on when, where, or how much to sell individual pieces of art for it creates a policy that regulates sales continuously and automatically.

It also creates an interesting engagement opportunity since its very likely that this algorithm with mis-price individual pieces of art, so people will be drawn to the gallery in order to find “good deals” directly
 this is really cool because it replicates the experience of people going to a gallery, rather than going to a massive art auction or retailer


Whenever an NFT is sold, the revenue will be used to buy the organizations tokens via the marketplace and then burning them. With a “buy fee” applied to the curve, the organization can set a percentage of revenue which goes into the organizations “purchase pool” and how much is effectively distributed to curators (token holders) by way of the marketplace’s bonding curve mechanism.

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:open_mouth: I like this idea
 I’m game! :sunglasses:

As previously shared with you I believe a move to the NFT / Crypto Art community would be very well received . I am in contact with Superrare / NFTfi / MOCA / Somnium Space Team. Please let me know if you want to share ideas and see where we can go.

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This would be cool, but with a buy back and make model instead of burning tokens

Love the idea hope it NFTs come to honey

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Supercool ideas. It reminds me a bit of the Token Curated Registry idea:

Essentially, a 1Hive gallery could use HNY as a staking mechanism for artistic curators to validate the quality of the collections and ‘rank’ them. Whether you would necessarily ‘punish’ stakers who are deemed less effective or just not reward them would be a community decision in line with the convenant.

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Code for TCR here: https://github.com/skmgoldin/tcr/blob/master/owners_manual.md

I love this idea! I have been getting more and more into NFT’s and I think a gallery would really bring a lot of good attention to the art of it

I definitely support this idea your wrote above - about nfts/ creating gallery which is future in crypto / gaming industry and etc 


I actually used to run a peer to peer street art trading website, co-organised a yearly street wide party and exhibition and ran a large homeless arts programme and know quite a few artists. I’m no expert on NFT’s though. I see Ivan on tech has been reporting problems with rarible selling knock offs. So it seems the venue itself may need to be seen to manage NFT providence centrally in a way. You need to know that the site never sells knock offs and acts as a guarantor of providence in some way. Also if this is to work it’s really important to get as big names as possible and having a regular offer and irregular exclusive timed offers. The way to make this really work is to allow the hive to chose which global artists they think deserve to be invited and then invite them all to make an NFT. For the really big names, they get to keep the lions share of the price (90%). Once you have actually got these big names on side, everything gets much easier from there. Start from the top and work down, not the other way around. If you need any help just shout. If you start with the nobody’s. The big guys won’t want to play ball. A lot of the effort is in finding exciting artists to play ball, incentivising finders will be wise. Dream big, play the big league.

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https://foundation.app/ is already on xdai . A port of opensea would be amazing for xdai adoption as well as for the Hive to make their own community galleries. Personally, I’m not entirely sure about needing the ‘big’ names, I think a well curated gallery would be much more valuable for getting people involved. For that, you can use HNY staking

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There are lots of ways to start, having a big vision end goal though isn’t a bad idea.

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Thanks for sharing. Looks like Foundation mints NFTs on xDAI!

There should be no issue having one more curator with support to HNY as staking I support this idea

Foundation already present