Canyonlands, Code Is Law, and the rise of the Walengrad
In this Creator Spotlight, Justin Blends interviews Canyonlands — one of the earliest and most strikingly unique creators on Asteroid Protocol. Learn about Canyonland’s collections, why he likes inscriptions over NFTs, how he discovered Asteroids and more. A full transcript of the original YouTube interview appears below.
Justin: Our guest for today is the creator of Canyonlands, which is a very unique, very early collection on Asteroid Protocol. How’s it going?
Canyonlands: Everything’s going well.
Justin: For those of us who have been super early to the protocol, we are definitely familiar
with your work, and I’ve got some burning questions, because I personally have been a huge fan of this work and a huge supporter from the beginning. So from the very top, let’s just talk about who created Canyonlands and let us know of any type of collaborations that you’ve got going on.
Canyonlands: Yeah sure. Well, I suppose Canyonlands was a name for the music project that I kicked off. I’ve been doing music for quite some time and going through the pandemic I really got back into music in a big way. I had this name for quite some time so I started putting stuff on SoundCloud, Bandcamp, things like that. So initially it was just a music project, but I’d always loved doing little films and little videos for the music that I do. I got a YouTube channel and was doing a few things way way back with the limited set of tools we had around then. I suppose it was always in my mind to do something visual with the music. I really wanted that to be a strong element, because I think even more than music, I’m much more inspired by film and photography. That’s probably my biggest inspiration for music. So I really wanted to connect those two things and I’ve been thinking about how I can promote the music through things like Bandcamp or SoundCloud, and you kind of fall into a bit of a black hole. It’s really difficult. You’re trying to go through people who you know… are gatekeepers. And it’s really tricky to promote. And I didn’t want to be spending loads of money on people who are promising you that they’re going to advertise or get your music out there, and you never hear from them again.
I had it in my mind that NFTs were where everything is probably going to be going for media, so I’d been looking at a few protocols and trying to get my head around them. I suppose it also intersected with my love of crypto. So I was really interested in NFTs and explored a few platforms like OpenSea on Ethereum. I wasn’t really connecting with that at all. I had a look at Stargaze (early on), but it had quite a high barrier to entry. I think you still needed to do a bit of code. And the terminology, it wasn’t very friendly, and the UX wasn’t friendly at all. I found it really, really tricky, and you know being a creator yourself, you just want tools to be really easy so you can just get on and put your stuff out there.
If something’s frustrating you, you just want to turn off from it. And that was my experience up until late with NFTs and the protocols that were about. So it was still on my mind, though, (and I was) very much watching a lot of the media on NFTs and how people were using them to promote music and how people were using it not just to promote, but obviously to sell things directly to people. And it was just like, “well if only there was something out there that was really, really easy to use.” And obviously being big into Cosmos, it’s around Christmas time that I think Asteroids dropped… January… yeah so it was January, and it dropped and I was like “okay this is interesting. This looks kind of cool, and I had a little play around with it, and it was just so easy to use.
You know, I’ve got no real technical background in terms of programming or anything like that, and it was just a pleasure. I created a CFT-20, just as an experiment to mess about and see what I could do, and it sparked some imagination, you know what I could potentially do with it. And then uploading some of the images that I’d been experimenting with over the course of the last months, just messing about, you know, creating images to go with the music that I’ve been doing. Uploading that was just so simple. It was incredible. It was like, “Right. Okay. This is something I can really get my teeth into. This is something that works. It’s easy.”
And at that point, right at the start of January, I didn’t really know where the platform was going (or where) the protocol was going to be going. I think they were (hinting) that there was going to be a marketplace, but there was nothing definite at that point. But once that marketplace was instantiated, that was like, “Right. This is how you do it. This is how I’m going to really marry up the images that I’ve had in my head with the music and really try and promote what I’m doing as an artist to other people. And it was a really cool experiment.
So going back to collaborations, you know I don’t want to oversell the point, but it was a really good experience. One of the rare good experiences that I’ve had using a crypto app, because you know what it’s like. You use MetaMask and some of the protocols and you just end
up in frustration you know. You’re just like, “Oh my God, what am I doing? And why am I getting rugged by the fees?” And pulling your hair out. I’ve had that so many times over the course of my crypto history. And there was none of that. There was none of that frustration. Fees were cheap. It was really simple to use going through Keplr Wallet, and I was just like, “This is so easy.”
Anyway, going back to collaborations, you might know a creator who’s on Asteroid as well. She goes by H36 or Hidden36. So we met on Twitter. Actually, I’ve been putting some music out on another Twitter account that I had that was more focused on music and less crypto-oriented, and we just got to chatting, and I clicked on a link that she had that took me to her Bandcamp, and I listened to some of her tracks, and I was genuinely blown away.
There was one track, Thursday, that was just like, “Oh my God. This is amazing.” And if you’ve heard any of her stuff, her voice is incredible. It’s quite ethereal and very very good… I don’t know if you know Warp Records. It’s a mix between a bit more of a chilled out Aphex Twin mixed with Boards of Canada. And I was just like, “Wow. This is amazing.” So we started collaborating. We got a track that I laid down all the music for. She sort wrote the lyrics and vocals, and we just hit it off and we got about five or six tracks together.
Over this period of time, I’ve been saying, if we want to promote this stuff, I’m pretty sure NFTs are the way to go. And H had no knowledge of crypto to my understanding. She should correct me or get angry at me if I’ve got that wrong, but I don’t think she had any knowledge really of the crypto world and NFTs (and was) probably a little bit skeptical. But I got her over to start using Asteroid, and you’ve got to remember, H had not used any of this stuff before, so (she was) a real crypto newbie, and she took to it like a duck to water. For somebody who never used crypto before to come onto that platform and be able to do that, I thought that was amazing. That shows how good I think Asteroid got the UX right, because I think if it was Stargaze — and it’s not to denigrate Stargaze at all — but I think that there’s a slightly higher barrier to entry to be able to use that. And I don’t think it’s as creator-friendly, especially for creators that don’t necessarily come from a crypto-native background.
So yeah, she started to then do her own collections, and you know if you get to know her, she’s an amazing artist. She’s a photographer and she does jewelry and things like that. And so for her, it really just sparked her imagination, and she’s done loads of collections and some really good ones. But we’re both very interested in the music and the video side of it, and that’s the main collaboration that I’ve got at the moment. And that’s kind of my summary of my journey into Asteroid. But I just want to give a shout out to the devs, because they’ve done such a good job and you know, it’s just amazing. Really amazing.
Justin: Truly. I agree. You know, I said this early as well to the devs, and this is for a lot of different platforms. All we can do really is thank them and use the platforms. They’ve done a lot, so a lot of respect to these guys and girls out here building stuff for us creators to enjoy. And for us to actually be able to go ahead and share our creations with other people, I mean what more could you really ask for. The protocol is totally code free. So you mentioned a lot, and when it comes to NFTs and you mentioned Stargaze — and, of course, it’s not about Stargaze — it’s just about any and pretty much every other NFT marketplace and launchpad service, you have to know maybe some coding, there’s a lot more in-depth knowledge you may need, but with inscriptions, it’s pretty much like all the work is done for you. So I’m super big on inscriptions. I can’t even hide it.
Let’s continue on. Thanks for diving in, because you definitely touched on a lot of subjects that I wanted to ask about. But your introduction was comprehensive, but yet it was still simple, and I feel like a lot of people will resonate with this experience and probably have an identical experience compared to what you had using Asteroid Protocol for the first time, because it is just so simple to use. So I’m curious to know if you can let me know what you find unique about the experience of inscribing art and tokens and deploying tokens on Asteroid on Cosmos Hub and of course using Asteroid Protocol now. I know you’ve already mentioned a lot, but I just want to see if there’s anything else in there that you could sneak out.
Canyonlands: Yeah sure. I mean, I suppose the thing that captured my attention first of all is you look at Asteroid, and it looks cool. The design of it looks cool. I think that’s something they really nailed well. Whoever does the artwork for them, I’m a little bit jealous of the bastard. Sorry, I swore, but I’m a little bit jealous of them, because you know the whole look of it is great, and that captured my attention. It looks like somebody who’s got a really aesthetic sort of eye and wants to connect with creators. I look at other protocols, and they just don’t have that, so that captured my attention. But in terms of what I get out of inscribing, I think there’s something really direct about your relationship with the people that are buying your artwork and other creators. So there’s something that feels like a very sort of one-to-one relationship that you have with people. You can see who bought your stuff and you can connect with them on their social media and build up a relationship with these people. It’s nice to support other artists as well. So there’s this little community that grows, which is something I really, really like. That’s really appealing to me. And the other thing I suppose is this constant innovation. It’s like Asteroid is constantly evolving and that’s really exciting as a creator. One week, the interface sort of looks fairly familiar. You’ve gotten used to it, and then all of a sudden they’ve introduced these new features and you’re experimenting with them and using them, and that’s really cool. As they’re rolling these features out, it really fires the imagination and what you could do with it. For me, it’s a really exciting process. I absolutely love it. It’s weird, because I’ve not used something like this.
I’ve used Bandcamp, but I don’t love Bandcamp. You know, I go on it. I put my stuff on there, but I don’t have a relationship with that platform. There’s nothing there where there’s kind of like an emotional pull. The first thing when I wake up in the morning, I’ll check Asteroid Protocol. It’s one of the things I do. I’ll check to see who’s inscribed. I’ll check to see what’s on there, and if I sold anything. And it’s exciting. I don’t do that with like SoundCloud or Bandcamp. It doesn’t foster that sense of relationship, which is an odd thing, you know. It’s an odd thing to feel something for a platform.
Justin: Well look, I’m right there with you. The platform definitely is geared towards collectors and creators. And I want to ask you, you touched on it enough, but I’m super curious to actually know maybe more specifically when you first got active in collecting and then eventually creating on-chain art.
Canyonlands: Yeah. Okay, so I suppose it goes back to when I got into crypto. You know, it’s obviously in the pandemic. We were all bored out of our minds. And lots of other emotions were going on. So I started getting into crypto. I was stupid enough to buy XRP and then pretty soon I thought, right, I need to look at this properly and really get my head around it. Then, I stumbled into Cosmos after watching a few videos on their central thesis about the interchain. And it just made so much sense to me… with horizontal scaling. It’s what happens in nature you know. It’s not vertically scaling. You don’t vertically scale in nature. If you want to make something sustainable, it just made sense. So sticking with Cosmos, I started to have a look on platforms or protocols like Stargaze. But they were NFTs, and I think that distinction that you made earlier between inscriptions and NFTs is important, because I didn’t know the difference between NFTs and inscriptions before Asteroid came along. I really wasn’t really big into Bitcoin, so the Ordinal thing passed me by. So yeah, going back, I was looking at Stargaze and looking at these other platforms and thinking, yeah there’s some cool art I quite like. That’s cool, but what really changed is there’s this high barrier to get my music on here. I’ve got to do some coding, and I have no idea (how). And even the terminology that people were using was really confusing, like “Let’s mint this out.” I hear these terms like, “Have you minted out these NFTs?” But I was thinking when you create something that isn’t minting, and nobody was explaining these terms and I was getting really confused. So it’s a bit of a minefield. And I was thinking it’s just too much at the moment. This stuff really needs to be simplified before it really takes off, because at the moment, I just can’t get my head around it. So I kind of backed off.
And then AI really started taking off. Stable Diffusion, I got into that, because I’ve been doing photography. Living in London, I was going around taking photos of Brutalist buildings, and there’s plenty of them in London. You get some crappy sort of highrises, but I find those stark, ruthless, landscapes quite interesting. So I’d had a collection of photos and I was thinking about uploading them to NFT platforms. But then, Stable Diffusion kicked off, and I messed around with some of that, because I wanted some artwork for my music. Then, it really started to crystallize in my mind. Some of this stuff is really interesting. Some of what you can do on these AI programs are actually really, really interesting. And these could be standalone things in their own right. You wouldn’t need to necessarily marry them up to music. I could probably find a way to put them on a protocol and sell them. So it was really the advent of the AI-generated (platforms) like Stable Diffusion and later Leonardo AI, and then to mix that in with a really, really easy platform to use like Asteroid. Once those two things sort of married, that was it. It was like right, I can experiment to my heart’s content now and really mess around. This is like a sandbox. Then, it just took off from there.
Justin: So it looks like to me one of the major things would be the idea that we’ve got these inscriptions, this inscription software or protocol, that is essentially code-free and making more permanent assets on-chain than NFTs. But even simplifying it further, so it sounds like a lot of wins all kind of bundled together for the users. It’s super easy to use. I was blown away with inscriptions to be honest on the Bitcoin side, so seeing them come to the Cosmos ecosystem, which was perfectly in line with what I was seeing on Bitcoin. I just felt like there was so much potential here. I had to dive in headfirst.
So before I get to my next question, I want to bring this to everybody’s attention that you are one of the earliest creators on Asteroid Protocol, right? There may be some that are clearly before you, but when it comes to actual full collections, you are probably in the first few to create an actual collection. I do want to ask though if there’s anything else in there as well why inscriptions and maybe why not NFTs? Or somewhere in there, can you speak on physical art as well?
Canyonlands: Yeah. So it would just be reiterating the points I’ve already made. I think first of all, inscriptions — and specifically on the Asteroid Protocol — there’s no code. I don’t have the overhead of having to think about “How am I going to have to upload this collection?” And do any further work as a creator. I can just put it on there and I don’t have to worry about having to learn an extra new skill, which as a creator, that’s what you want. You don’t want things in your way that frustrate you. As soon as you get that emotion — and I think this is something that a lot of devs probably find difficult to connect with, because they’re devs and they’ve been doing coding for so long: what might be simple to them is like a completely new language to somebody who’s not had experience with that before — and so that barrier to entry, as soon as you create that emotion of frustration in somebody, you’ve lost them. I think a lot of devs on other platforms and protocols don’t really understand that. I think you know, again without wanting to blow Asteroid’s trumpet too much, you know they got that really right. There’s no frustration. It’s just been a pleasure. So that’s the main thing.
The other thing I suppose is the idea that inscriptions are permanent as well. You know they’re written onto the blockchain. They’re not being siloed off into some shadowy sort of realm and could be deleted at any point. I like that they’re immutable and they’re there for as long as a platform (exists). I think that’s really cool, because even if you make a mistake and you upload something, it’s like a creative diary. You can see the things that worked and didn’t work.
For the Code is Law collection, the main project that I’m doing, I launched that first series, and I was a little bit still a novice using some of the tools. It wasn’t quite right, and it wasn’t sitting right with me. It’s the look of it, the feel of it, it’s not quite there. So I thought rather than put out a substandard product, I thought I need to rethink this and go back. And even though it’s immutable and that series one collection is still going to be on Cosmos, I put it off into the trash, that (burn) address that you can send it to. It’s still there, but I kind of like that. I like the fact that there’s that sort of a diary you know. And if I want to, I can see the development or evolution of the work. So yeah, I think that’s another really, really cool thing about inscriptions over NFTs. There’s an immutability, and it really does align with that decentralized ethos, whereas I think NFTs (you don’t know) where they’re going when you’re putting them on OpenSea. You don’t know where they’re stored and who’s got access to that storage and what happens to it. It’s kind of all a little bit murky. So I really like that as well.
Justin: Right. Yep. Got it. So where can people find out more about Canyonlands and your creations? Of course I’ve been sharing your collections on Asteroid Protocol and of course X and YouTube, so if there’s anything you want to mention, let us know. I want to know more about the Code is Law collection, too. I do know that there are several installments to the collection, and there’s music as well. Perhaps you can kind of wrap it up, and let us know again where to find you and perhaps how Code Is Law works for the people who are super new and for those of us who aren’t just collecting. We’ve got Code Is Law, which is like an access code, but then we’ve also got Series 1 through Series 8 or 9. Could you just give us an idea of what that’s about?
Canyonlands: Thank you. Yeah, so I suppose again, it’s an evolution. Really it started off as the QR codes, and I wanted to do something with them, but I wasn’t too sure what they were going to open access to. And at that point, I hadn’t really formulated in my mind what it was going to give access to. Then, I suppose I started to think about this as a story, which is what Code Is Law is about. Essentially, it’s about this city-state called Walengrad, and Walengrad is named after Walden Two, which is a book by BF Skinner. Skinner was a very famous behavioral psychologist in the 60s and 70s. He wrote this Utopian fiction based on behaviorism and Code is Law are condensed thoughts on everything that happened around the pandemic and after the pandemic. So there’s a lot of stuff about dystopia in there and control, and all of those things. So it’s got flavors of obviously things like 1984 and A Brave New World and stuff like that. I wanted it to be very visually strong and there are also elements that are AI-based running through it as well. So the series evolved out of this idea, and I thought, okay, I could create eight parts to the series. That would probably be enough to help me develop the ideas that I’ve got. So with the access codes, eventually I’ll get a roadmap going, because as AI is getting more and more powerful, the tools are getting more powerful. And there’s definitely going to be an opportunity to use these characters that I’m developing and creating within this world. I imagine developing videos, whether it’s short vignettes or longer form, and the hope is to have people contributing to that as well. So they could take some characters and develop their own videos off of it and things like that. So with the access codes, eventually I want to get a website, and the access codes would give you access to parts of the world. That’s a high-level idea that I’ve got. I think it’s going to take some time to execute all of that, because at the moment, I’m still going through the narrative and the story and working that out. I’m hoping to finish Series 2 probably over the next three to four weeks.
The other collections have all got some kind of relationship to Code Is Law as well, so with the structure which is data graphics art, they make an appearance within Code Is Law… (With Canyonlands), those characters also were used as templates for a lot of the characters in Code Is Law, so every collection that I’ve got, apart from the music, they all tie into Code Is Law in some way. All I’d like to say to people is that there is a strong idea about where this is going and I’m here for the long haul and really want to make something multimedia. There’s a soundtrack that’s being worked on for it and the ideas that I’ve got I think are quite interesting. For the series, I want to do a competition where people can create their own piece of music to go along with the soundtrack. And there’s lots of ideas that I’ve got. The message is that it’s going to be a significant undertaking for me, but I’m here for the long haul and I really want to add value to the community or for the community, and anybody who buys in, I think it’s potentially like IP to some kind of multimedia universe. Hopefully, that can take off.
Justin: There’s a lot of good ideas and I definitely think that what you’re creating is something kind of cinematic. It has some vibe of cinema to it. There’s no question about it… A lot of us are looking forward to the launchpad, and I definitely have a feeling that you are as well.
Canyonlands: Yeah. Definitely.
Justin: Nice. So what I want to do is encourage everybody to join the Creators Telegram group. We can do things like this… arrange times to speak, you can meet other creators and drop your ideas directly to the developers. You’ll have more of a clear line of communication with developers and creators of the platform… We can also get you guys on a Creator Spotlight. So in closing, everyone absolutely check Asteroid Protocol on YouTube, check us out on X, and of course use Asteroid Protocol to check out some of these cool collections. And thank you so much to our guest today representing Canyonlands, and of course Code is Law and much more to come I’m sure in the future.
Canyonlands: Brilliant. Thanks so much, Justin. This has been brilliant.
Justin: You’re absolutely welcome. All the best to you.
Check out Canyonland’s 14 collections on Asteroid Protocol now!
☄️
Ready to build on Asteroids? Check out this list of ideas we’d love to see built. Then, join us in the Asteroid Protocol Dev Chat on Telegram. Explore the Asteroid marketplace and inscription tools online at asteroidprotocol.io now!
Please remember Asteroid Protocol is open source, unaudited, and radically experimental ☄️ Use it at your own risk and remember CFT-20s and Asteroid NFTs are experiments, NOT investments!
