NEAR Without the Noise Episode 3: Plantary, Createbase, NFT’s and Decentralized Art

The most recent episode of NEAR Without the Noise dropped this past week, featuring Lenara and Mykle from a new crypto startup Plantary. Plantary offers a platform for artists and collectors to share in the management process of digital artwork. Beyond strictly financial incentives, Plantary incorporates gamified elements in the creation and harvesting of ‘digital art plants’ using AI-based algorithms. The specific topics covered on the episode went beyond Plantary, and also included the Createbase Guild, the decentralized Art marketplace, the revolution of NFT’s and key barriers of adoption when it comes to getting new players involved in the space. 

Point 1: Art is Ready for Crypto – But Lots of Thinking Remains. 

Towards the beginning of the discussion, Lead Plantary developer Mykle explained how the current structure of the Art industry has it well positioned for disruption by more decentralized and ‘artist first’ user models. As he explains about the traditional art industry: 

“All of your efforts to make your art public has gone to gatekeepers in the past. You look at really inspiring independent artists like a street artist that does what he wants when he wants. But a lot of artists are waiting to be published by someone else…But very frequently when you put out something you lose a lot of it. Decentralization has given sort of a new ground for publishers and artists to stand on in terms of the ability to say I am going to give this to the world but I am going to hang on to it.” 

At the same, however, it is clear that there remains much thinking and discovery in the movement to decentralize Art going forward: 

“Everybody is asking these questions about how to merge the physical art works with the digital art works, and those are some of the more complicated questions. But what the NFT space has been doing is kind of hunting that question for the future, and let’s see what we can do with art works that are purely digital. For a lot of artists it is going to be about deciding to what degree they want their work existing in the Digital Web3 world.” 

Point 2: Plantary is Gamified Art Creation and Collection for Arists and Collectors 

Lenara and Mykle both explained the importance of creating a platform that is not only focused on financial value: But also as an open and creative space for users, collectors, and artists to share in more creative and imaginative value creation. This is known as Plantary – a new project building on NEAR Protocol: 

“For right now what you can do on Plantary, is there are artists creating works that you can sort of – You go there, and it is all about growing and caring for plants really is the metaphor. You can mint a plant and that plant is really going to be a piece of art that is about a plant. You end up with this plant becoming part of your plant collection, and then as it is part of your collections, there are all sorts of things we are planning to do with its growth and aging. For the moment what you can do is harvest fruit off of it, and you pay a couple of tokens, and it gives you an associated work of art.” 

In parallel, Plantary is one of the first projects to also include Artificial Intelligence for generating Art as a part of it’s gamification: 

“The plant itself is uniquely created by an artist, several artists will create several versions of the portrait plant. The harvest will be mostly AI Generated. We Can get the AI to work much faster to have cheap and abundant harvest. They will still be unique and different from one another – but they will be uniquely mass produced by the AI.” 

Pont 3: Non-Fungible Tokens Are Getting Ready to Explode 

Lenara emphasized the rapid growth of NFT’s on NEAR Protocol specifically: With Mintbase and Createbase Guild, Non-Fungible Tokens are well positioned to explode in the coming months: 

“I see a lot of interest in NFTs. It is really, really, like a young time for NFT’s on NEAR. Mintbase is going to be the first platform to release a working app where anyone can go and mint NFT’s so it is completely open. You just go and login and connect your NEAR account and you can just start minting right away.” – Lenara

Mykle emphasized the importance of the NEAR – ETH bridge in facilitating this revolution: 

“It is going to be really interesting when collectors ownership of an NFT can flow back and forth between those two blockchains, that is going to break a lot of interest and certainly monetize some things and open up another interesting meta-area of artistic discussion, about meaning of ownership and the meaning of money, which is gain major things in the NFT art space. I am excited to see that happen – that is going to just increase the volume, awareness and interaction in the system. We are going to get just more good ideas than we already have as our user base grows, so I am looking forward to that.” – Mykle 

To get started in Createbase Guild check out the Guild Telegram: 

Point 4: The Move From Web2 to Web3 Has Begun and Is Poised to Accelerate

Speaking on the topic of the larger developer space, and the migration from Web2 to Web3, Mykle emphasized the importance of embracing the philosophical basis of decentralization, transparency, and open-access in Web3. He added though, that beyond such differences, the overall transition is relatively smooth, with NEAR being especially easy to build upon from a traditional software development background:

“I don’t think Web2 developers have that much to overcome. They just need to spend some time looking at the NEAR ecosystem, understanding where the gas comes in and where the gas goes out, and understand the tradeoffs of services and computation and the costs of that. But the rest of that is not SO different. I think that honestly, NEAR is just going to be a lot more approachable than Ethereum was. Everything is there to just say take your current concept of say what a client server web app is and this is where you plug the parts in over here. To me what is existing is the different types of web business – and the different economic structure – that you can fund things directly from user contributions so easily.” 

Conclusion: 

Plantary is the first of many NFT based projects on NEAR protocol that seek to build the internet of value, while also re-developing existing industries. In the context of decentralized art, collectors items and building Web3, Plantary is a first step in building a more open, transparent and equitable future: 

“In the coming years especially as Web3 grows and there are starting to be transactional contracts between blockchains and everything is plugged together in more of building blocks, it is just going to be a matter of establishing trustworthiness in these blockchains that they are real and that they will be here for a long time.”