What is the gmDAO?
The gmDAO is a community of NFT collectors, artists & investors created on September 2021 using a fair token distribution. Broadly speaking, the DAO was formed based on the principles of etiquette and mutual respect, making our community a haven within a typically hostile environment. This ultimately resulted in an extremely passionate & engaged member base which we consider one of our biggest assets.
Structurally the DAO consists of 900 members, the majority active within the NFT sector, with backgrounds ranging from accredited investors to renowned generative artists. Our primary goal is to foster & encourage the development of the NFT space.
To gain entry to our community one must hold a gm. token, our native governance token with artwork designed by legendary gen artist Rich Poole. These tokens allow their owner to participate in the governance of the DAO, as well as granting additional benefits relating to ventures created by the DAO (more on this later).
The gm. tokens not only act as the membership pass to the DAO, but they also provide a revenue stream, with each transaction contributing 10% of the sale price directly to the treasury.
Additionally, in January 2022 we commissioned 30 1/1 gm. tokens designed by a number of artists. These function identically to our standard tokens, but have an additional perk: they guarantee an allowlist slot for smaller collection size, and give you an additional slot (2 total) for larger collections until December 31st of 2023.
To date, we have sold 11 of these tokens at auction which served as our bootstrapping event. This resulted in a total of 7 ETH of initial capital being added to the treasury, which allowed us to further our ambitions of bettering the NFT space by launching our first project: gm. studio.
What is the gm. studio?
gm. studio is a generative art platform built by artists, for artists (as well as quite a few devs). We are also the world’s first completely decentralized art platform. We’ve built the studio from the ground up using our experience with existing artistic platforms and the challenges they present to new artists, namely; extremely long application times & poor communication.
Additionally, our belief is that art should be inclusive & accessible to all, which is why we implemented two practices into our ethos which we understand will allow for equal opportunity for every applicant:
- A blind curation process
- Artists pay no fees upfront (the studio handles marketing, deployment & rendering costs)
We also believe that transparency is vital to gain the trust of both artists & community alike, and therefore wish to share our commission structure openly. We ask for 15% of primary sale revenue & 2.5% of secondary sale royalties.
Finally, as we are a gmDAO run project, we will also be looking to provide gm. token holders an allocation of every collection featured on the studio.
How it works
Our curation team currently consists of ~20 hand-picked individuals from within the gmDAO, who consist of artists, collectors & tech wizards. All of the panel are well versed in what a successful art collection looks like, with a number of them having works featured on established platforms.
Once a submission is received, it is presented to the panel “blindly”. That’s to say, only the art & technical information is presented and the artist will remain anonymous throughout. We felt like this was critical in order to let the art speak for itself without any personal bias being imparted towards a particular artist (both favourably & negatively).
Each panel member will provide their own feedback separately, before entering a discourse period with fellow panel members. Finally, a vote will be taken whether to accept or reject a submission. We aim to provide feedback to every submission within 2–3 working days upon receiving all required information.
In terms of drop frequency, our ambition is to launch between 1 to 2 collections per month, but expect some ramp up before we are able to operate at full capacity.
We are very much in the early stages of our development, so we will be regularly providing updates on new features and collections that will be coming to the studio, but we thank you all for the continued support & excitement that’s already been shown thus far.
If you would like to be featured on the studio, please apply via https://gmstudio.art/apply or contact us at apply@gmstudio.art
The studio was made possible by the hard work of many individual contributors from within the gmDAO, with little to no expectation of reward.
We are immensely proud of what we’ve been able to create in such a short space of time & will continue to build upon the gm. studio in the coming weeks & months.
