Chapter 3 — Worlds (2023)
Infrastructure for galleries to operate onchain
By the end of 2022, the environment surrounding NFTs had changed dramatically.
The speculative boom that fueled the marketplace era began to unwind, and a series of crises across the crypto industry—including the collapses of Terra, Luna, and FTX—accelerated the downturn.
The NFT market had grown rapidly, but it remained immature and tightly coupled to the broader liquidity cycles of crypto.
This raised a new question for the company:
What would a stable digital art ecosystem look like?
The Problem
The marketplace era had proven an important idea:
Digital art could exist as property native to the internet—owned, tracked, and transferred independently of any platform.
Artists could mint work onchain.
Collectors could own it directly.
Provenance could be tracked transparently over time.
But ownership alone did not create a functioning market.
As the market expanded, a long tail of work emerged with little cohesion. Collectors struggled to parse what mattered.
At the same time, demand began concentrating around more curated experiences.
Projects like Artblocks, Bright Moments, and Fellowship showed that collectors were gravitating toward environments where context, selection, and narrative were stronger.
Without this layer of structure, the broader market remained fragmented and difficult to navigate.
The Thesis
Much of the early NFT discourse was built around anti-establishment ideas:
- disintermediation
- removing gatekeepers
- bypassing institutions
But removing structure did not produce a durable market.
The next phase required coordination.
We were observing that collectors were gravitating toward curated experiences, and that certain actors (curators, collectives, and emerging galleries) were playing an increasingly important role in shaping demand.
This pattern was not new.
The traditional art world operates in a similar way. Galleries and curators shape taste, provide context, and help artists build long-term careers.
What we were seeing in the digital market mirrored this structure, reinforcing the idea that these roles were not optional—they were foundational.
The problem became how to bring these actors onchain:
- How could we incentivize curators to participate?
- How could galleries build sustainable businesses?
- How could new economic roles emerge around digital property?
What We Built
Worlds was our answer to this problem.
Worlds was designed as infrastructure for galleries and curators operating in a digital art ecosystem.
The product allowed participants to:
- establish a roster of represented artists
- curate exhibitions
- organize collections of works
- charge commissions on sales
Rather than a single platform curating artists, Worlds aimed to support an ecosystem of independent actors, each developing their own identity and reputation.
In this structure:
- artists retained ownership of their work as property native to the internet
- curators and galleries provided context, selection, and career development
- collectors engaged with art through trusted curatorial voices
For a brief moment, we saw early signals of this model working in pockets of the ecosystem.
Why This Made Sense
The importance of curation had already been demonstrated by the Foundation marketplace.
Taste and cultural context played a central role in its success.
At the same time, we were seeing demand cluster around curated experiences across the ecosystem.
Worlds extended that insight outward.
Instead of one platform acting as curator, the next stage of the ecosystem could be shaped by many curators operating independently.
What Happened
The idea was sound. The timing was not.
By 2023, the NFT ecosystem was still contracting:
- liquidity had dried up
- collectors were pulling back
- new businesses were hesitant to form
But more importantly, demand itself had not expanded.
The strongest signal came from galleries and curators themselves.
Their primary request was distribution.
This made the underlying constraint clear:
Demand was the bottleneck, not curation or tooling.
No amount of software could solve that problem.
The infrastructure for coordination arrived before the market itself had stabilized.
What We Learned
The problem was not the idea.
It was the timeline.
Digital art was unlikely to disappear.
But the formation of stable market participants—curators, collectors, and cultural nodes—unfolds over long time horizons.
These systems develop through reputation, relationships, and sustained demand.
For a venture-backed startup operating on a much shorter time horizon, this created a fundamental constraint.
The Transition
If markets alone were too unstable…
And coordination among participants would take too long to form…
Then the next question became unavoidable:
Where was the energy actually moving?
Increasingly, the answer pointed toward social participation.
Attention, identity, and interaction were becoming more central than individual artworks.
The focus shifted from markets…
to coordination…
to social.
This realization led to the next chapter:
Rodeo.