Do Art Blocks artists rely on external channels like Discord to sell, or solely on Art Blocks?

It depends. I think there's a lot of sides to this. There are brilliant artists that come on Art Blocks and do a drop and disappear, and their art is brilliant, so it maintains value. There's a lot of artists that come on Art Blocks, and they stick around, and those are both brilliant artists but maybe it's not one of those drops that blows people's minds, but it's just a wonderful algorithmic piece of art. A lot of these artists; they participate; they're involved daily in the community. Why? Because I think they're kind of excited to hang out there. For the most part, I'm excited to hang out in the community. Obviously as the creator, I also get yelled at a lot, get a lot of feedback, and so there's some aversion to it, but otherwise, the opportunity to get to interact with your collectors is something really special.

It works because of the nature of the 1 of 1 of X concept. 1 of 1 of X being that every output is unique out of an addition of X. The bigger the addition, the more people that get to participate in the dialogue about that addition and about that collection. What better place than Discord to be able to have those conversations, to be able to post images of your outputs and be like check mine out, look at this? 

We drive traffic to Art Blocks artists, especially new ones that don't have a reputation in the generative art or in the NFT space, because we do drops that are monitored by thousands of people, thousands of people keep up, and they may not know the artists, but they know that Art Block is doing one or two drops on Tuesday, one or two drops on Thursday, and one or two drops on Friday.

In that sense, I believe that a lot of artists benefit from just the audience that we have. We also have this differentiation between a curated and then a playground and a factory and piece, and the curated pieces do have that extra stamp of approval from Art Blocks  as utilizing generative technology to mint multiples of an addition in the best possible way that it could be done. There, I do believe that if an artist is new to the scene, they are significantly benefiting from Art Blocks, from our traffic and our audience. I would also venture to say that Art Blocks significantly benefits from the artists that achieve the curation status that come from the generative art or traditional art world that bring their own audience because those drops are more highly anticipated both by our community and by the community of people that follows that artist in general.