What are the primary use cases for Art Blocks' generative NFTs, beyond buy and hold and resell, and are there any utilitarian use cases?

The utility of the NFTs on Art Blocks is to be a work of art that you hang on your wall. That's our priority. 

What's beautiful about NFTs in the ecosystem is that everything's a building block, and everything's interoperable. If people want to assign utility to the NFT after the fact, they can. 

A perfect example of that is a DAO that requires you to own a certain NFT to join. That can be an Art Blocks NFT. There's a DAO called SquiggleDAO that anybody that owns a Squiggle could enter the Discord and participate. We are truly focused on creating art and distributing art to potentially a new group of buyers that may not have been interested in art. If those buyers are interested in it because it looks freaking cool on their screen or on their wall, awesome. If they're interested in it because it's going to enable them to go do something useful with it, awesome.

We ultimately just want people to enjoy the individuality of each mint that comes of a minter. Because of that, Art Blocks has rules in place that do not allow an artist to advertise their drop as a utility. 

We have a drop that happened the other day, and it's these little eight-bit characters, and it was not advertised as being characters for a game. People came to conclusions about it. That wasn't part of the marketing or part of the narrative, but as soon as it was over, the artist was like, "Okay, now I'm going to make a video game out of these things." This artist is so prolific and so great, and I'm pretty sure he's going to do it, but who knows if they do it. In the end, this space is full of promises generally, and it's hard to hold anyone accountable, but the fact that he didn't announce the game until after the drop holds us a little bit less accountable for whether he makes the game or not.

That anecdote right there is exactly why we want to make sure that we do not allow anybody to present the generation of an NFT as a utility. That said, we have this entire other enterprise version of our project. It's called Powered by Art Blocks, which enables people to use all of our technology, almost like a white label version of Art Blocks. They use the backend technology and soon to be also the front-end technology to generate their own artworks and generate their own pieces. And there's no rules. There are DAOs that are going to be built powered by Art Blocks iterations. There's something nice about if I have a concert and I'm going to give away 100 tickets or sell 100 tickets, there's something nice about the fact that each of those tickets is created by the musician, and they're all unique.

Some people don't care; they're just going to throw them away. Some people are going to cherish the fact that they have 101 of that. One thing is you have fungibility and utility. You can create utility with something as simple as creating an ERC-20 token, and everybody’s utility is based on full numbers and fractions of that token. If you have one token, you have one vote. If you have 0.5 tokens, you have 0.5 votes. 

Or, you can create that utility within NFT, and I think where Art Blocks adds a personalization layer is that each one of those NFTs can have its own function or value in the greater ecosystem. You'll see some really fun powered-by-Art-Blocks applications that are actually going to utilize and advertise that in a way that does not feel conflicting with what we're presenting on Art Blocks proper, which is just the best art from the best artists side by side, with each other.