The Chains That Free Us
On 11/11/21, a curious thing happened. The domain name for HICETNUNC.XYZ was turned off… thus denying access to most creators and collectors there of NFTs (non-fungible tokens), some of whom rely heavily upon the site as a source of income.
HicEtNunc (or HEN) , Rarible, OpenSea, Foundation, and other platforms are places on the Internet where one can create art and sell or buy it. NFTs encompass more than just art, but they are a great obvious direct use case; creators get paid the majority of profits for their work and collectors have more assurance than from traditional art markets that any given piece is authentic, unique, making ownership difficult to dispute.
HEN was a platform which used TEZOS as its crypto currency. Minting (or creating) a work or art, and listing (making available for sale) a piece, were far less expensive to do when compared to ethereum-based platforms such as OpenSea or Rarible. The fees involved in ethereum systems have been very expensive recently, probably due to ethereum’s recent all-time-high dollar value and the investment demand that FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) attracts. HEN was growing rapidly because it was a much more affordable alternative.
The bubble popped yesterday because HEN depended heavily on a single software developer who had worked thanklessly to keep it all running. For reasons undisclosed, that key developer decided to disable the domain name for HEN. That action made the platform go dark.
Web sites stop functioning all the time but there are thousands of users who depended on HEN for their daily transactions. What was one of the largest communities in the NFT art space supposed to do?
Luckily, this developer had spent a great deal of effort making HEN into a site which could be run without him. Regardless of why he chose to stop contributing to HEN, the data was stored on the TEZOS blockchain, independent of HEN’s status. The code for the HEN website is open source as well. Therefore, all it took was several experienced developers to create a new domain (hicetnunc.art), obtain the source code, apply it to the new website, and turn on an existing indexer to display the NFTs, user profiles, and wallets to regular users – within hours of the original domain going down. In my lengthy IT software development career, I have never seen such a rapid recovery from an unexpected service disruption. I take a moment to recognize DNS.XYZ for stepping up and handling the emergency.
(Update: I want to point out that nothing has fixed the value of the HEN community in my mind more than listening to a live twitter conference while the new site was being activated.)
The reason for HEN’s speedy resurrection is due largely to the platform’s reliance on distributed databases. The TEZOS blockchain made this incredible save possible. Let that sink in a moment.
So now what? I want to quote @DargrimStark’s assessment:
…we are dealing with a significant moment in NFT history. It will now become clear to what extent our work is safe, and to what extent it will die with the death of the platform. I think the works themselves should be portable between platforms, regardless of which token they were cobbled together using. This is important, both for artists and investors.
(See @DargrimStark on twitter.com)
We now have a new yardstick to assess any given platform for our works of art: how resilient is it? The website for HEN is merely an ‘interface’… meaning, essentially, a viewer of the data. There are other viewers, such as HIC.AF. But nobody has time to chase down all the possible tools to handle our intellectual property. Part of the evaluation of a given platform should be its ease of use.
We haven’t begun to assess the full fallout from this event. I think we got very lucky, this time. It is a loud message to every NFT platform on the internet. Are you listening, Rarible, Foundation, OpenSea, SuperRare? We shall see.
(Downbeat has his fingers in several NFT platforms… you can follow him here and maybe even buy his art! by looking at his linktr.ee)