Hey everyone, I've been meaning to share some updates about fxhash with you for many weeks, but have struggled immensely to do so. A little while ago, as we were trying to secure a loan to keep fxhash going, we received pretty bad news. As some of you were aware, fxhash was under compliance review by the French tax authorities; it was a lengthy and draining process that lasted more than 2 years. At the end of it, despite our goodwill and the lack of regulation applicable to our case, we were fined ~€500k. This would consume almost all of the loan, essentially putting a nail in the fxhash coffin. This really took a toll on me, as things were already pretty depressing future-wise. I had been operating the company (arguably poorly) almost alone, handling admin stuff / trying to secure some money. This news essentially voided all these efforts and meant there was no future for the business anymore. At that point I sort of dissociated from this situation, as I had reached my limits in terms of handling this business. I took some time off April/September to work on myself, my art, and try to figure out what to do next. Taking this time off didn't really come from an active decision, but rather from a need to understand what to do next. As many of you saw, I was becoming less and less present online as I had very little energy left for that. I needed to focus back on myself. During this time, cosi announced the closure of the project. It was hard to watch silently from the sidelines, but I was eventually grateful that he had the composure to inform you folks about the state of things. I wanted to respond publicly to many of you, but I felt like I couldn't just come out of the shadows at such a time without at least offering a few explanations, which somehow felt like an impossible task to me. I also know fxhash meant a lot to many of you. People put their art, their time, and their trust into this project, and formed friendships along the way. Its closure is a loss for many people beyond those of us who worked on it. I'm sorry my silence left you with so few answers from me during that time. I'm deeply grateful for everything you brought to fxhash over the years, and sad that we couldn't keep it going. So here we are now. The business is insolvent. I'll declare bankruptcy in the near future and see how we can pay some of those debts back with the few assets left. As for the future of the project itself, I'm not sure. I took some steps to secure IPFS content on a low-cost dedicated instance in case this happened, as a safety mechanism. But eventually, if we want the art to survive over time, the community will have to organize itself around preservation. I've seen a few initiatives already; hopefully this keeps going for the sake of the art. I think there's a bit of work left on my end to ensure the community can properly take over hosting & distribution of the assets. I'll look into that in the following weeks. On my end I've been working on art again and it feels great. It hadn't felt great for a long time. I would love to find energy and ideas again to contribute positively to the cryptoart space, but it's gonna take a bit of time to get there. In the meantime, I'm very grateful to those who reached out to offer help/a shoulder to lean on. I hope we can keep these friendships going throughout life.

Sequence of a few interesting seeds

Dump of alternate sim conditions outputs, state transitions

State transitions: life emerges

One of the pros of working with AI as a coding assistant in an artistic context is the ability to quickly build tools to explore specific aspects of the artwork. In this case, I needed to craft a simple algorithm to generate palettes of 10 colors. In less than a day, I was able to extensively explore 5-6 algorithms within the constraints of my project, by building various tools for visualisation. This used to take much more time, or be of a lesser quality due to a lack of time. You can see here different algorithms at the top in a narrowed parametric space, and 1 algorithm mapped to the whole space (3 values between 0 and 1) below. Makes it super easy to chose the right fit at a glance.

The more complexe a project is, the harder it is to make it easy to understand for the audience. It is also of the most importance prototype of an explorer for my next project, coming soon

Viscosity f2 c = C.xy / R.y*4+R, s = flr(c), i; @(9) c+=cos(++i * c.yx + .1/(s-c) + T) / i O = exp(-3*abs(sin(c.y+f4(,.4,.2,))))

Statement about the future of fxhash Hey fx community, As you are aware, these times have been hard for platforms on NFT markets, and we're no exception. We recently had to scale down the team and have been working on scaling down our infrastructure. At this point in time, no one in the team is getting paid, there's myself and a handful of volunteers, as we're essentially running out of cash. I can understand why many platforms stopped trying, building this kind of product is draining you to the bone. That being said, I am committed to getting us through this rough patch as I still deeply believe in such a tool existing for artists, but it's clear that the current model is not working. I've been thinking a lot about the future of fxhash, if any, and it came clear to me that the platform drifted from its initial goal of serving artists primarily along its journey. I think at the root of the problem is that a tool serving artists should be fully owned by its users, and not operated by a small team of people, regardless of how benevolent might their intentions be. While it's always been a long-term goal of ours to fully decentralize the protocol at some point, now seem to be the only opportunity we'll have at it. It only seems like a tangible path towards the future in case the company could not keep supporting the product. We're close to securing some money as a loan / investment, targeting end of June. Once we get this cash, it's clear that we will need to immediately change our trajectory. The plan - reduce operational costs to a minimum - 4k$/mo in services -> will require 1-3 months of work - 8k$/mo in employment -> reemploy a very small and focused team - 2 devs - 2-3 part-time members for helping across the board (admin, marketing, artist liaison, community, etc...) - transition towards decentralization - implement a DAO - open-source everything - figure out pipelines to slowly decentralize decision-making and ownership, from governance towards implementation - open books: company financials for everyone to see - first order of business to solve together: financial sustainability, targeting profitability - consolidate the core product through governance - chains supported - features available - etc... This is the very last time we'll be able to raise cash in our current state, so essentially this will be our last shot at finding a way to build a sustainable long-lasting ecosystem. But I deeply think that the only way to do so will be collectively. It's essential that we reduce operational costs to a minimum until we figure out a sustainable path in the future. The bridge till June It's unclear whether we will be able to keep all the services running until we get cash. We took all the steps that we can and informed our providers, but their policies are understandably strict, I'll keep you updated about this.

Feels great to work on art again

Synthetic ecosystems that autonomously and continuously evolve in silico 👾 An Alifer dream we pursue with Flow-Lenia ! If you are interested in complex systems with (1) emergent creatures and (2) intrinsic evolutionary dynamics, go check our new paper ! A 🧵

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Aluan Wang believes "all we really have left is process." He built inkField to capture the act of painting itself. It is a live system where you can draw, record your gestures, and watch the ink breathe. It is live for you to touch. ↓ ↓ ↓