Botto’s Fourth Period

Botto’s 3rd period, Paradox, ended last week with the sale of Upturned Mirage Communing, and it’s time for the decentralized autonomous artist to make its next evolutionary step.

During its first year of life, the Genesis period, Botto produced hundreds of fragments weekly using a tailor-made implementation of the VQ-GAN+CLIP AI algorithm. The community of $BOTTO token holders picked a favorite out of the candidate fragments, and the chosen piece was minted and auctioned on SuperRare. Proceeds reverted to token holders through a buyback and burn mechanism that decreased $BOTTO supply, increasing its value. The art engine then incorporated voting behavior to train the AI and added a new set of weekly drafts to the voting pool for the community to decide. This initial system lasted 52 weeks and taught the community valuable lessons.

After the initial year, the community established a new set of parameters that have been the blueprint of the second period, Fragmentation, the third period, and Paradox, and that will guide the design of the fourth period, yet unnamed.

ART

Since the second period, Botto’s artistic phases were shortened from 52 to 12 weeks so that the project could keep up with the innovations in AI generative art.

Fragmentation and Paradox incorporated new AI algorithms into the art engine: VQGAN + CLIP would be complemented by Stable Diffusion.

Botto will add two more AI models for its fourth period: Stable Diffusion 2.0 (coexisting with the prior version, SD 1.5) and Kandinski. But, again, models compete, as Botto’s art engine learns from the community’s preferences and tweaks each model's ratio to produce the 350 weekly fragments.

ECONOMY

After the Genesis period, the DAO voted on a new, more direct revenue redistribution model. For most of its first year of life, the project used the sales revenue in ETH and used it to buy $BOTTO in the open market and burn it. However, during this first year, the community approved a proposal to save the revenue in ETH in the treasury and burn the equivalent in $BOTTO (skipping the buying part of the process) to replete the project with ETH.

For the Fragmentation period, and during Paradox too, the project implemented a different revenue distribution system: 50% of the profits in ETH were saved in the treasury, 25% were distributed to voters directly as Active Rewards (proportionately to the votes submitted), and 25% were committed to a Retroactive Rewards pool.

In this next period, the revenue model will be simplified, eliminating the Retroactive Rewards program and distributing all 50% of the revenue across voters.