CARDANO CONKS
WELCOME to the DIGITAL FUNGALLERY
credit: artitsts Davey Levson and Oliver Jenkins
If you wish, Cardano Conks is a collection of fungal NFTs comprised of Reishi mushroom pore surfaces which have been hand-etched by novices and artists. The fungal canvases are grown by farmers at Mycopolitan, a small urban mushroom farm located in Philadelphia, USA. Conks are dropping here and there beginning in Fall 2021, pushing potential value to projects and ideas that resonate with Regenseed’s worldview. The public release will begin in Summer 2022.
What does it mean to pore etch?
The images you see on the white pores contain no ink. The ink-like markings you see are the result of an oxidation reaction that occurs when an etching implement bursts fungal cells as it moves along the surface. Etching implements used on a given conk might be an inkless fountain pen, awl, mollusc, finger, or lingzhi antler depending on what detail/textures the artists wishes to acheive. The living canvas is highly sensitive and contains some 3d features such as bumps and waves along with golden and deep red triterpinoid lacquers that the pore etcher must contend with and integrate into the piece. 3d relief can be actively acheived by applying pressure to the semi-soft fungal tissue.
Cardano Conks are digital, but each NFT has a corresponding physical asset- the actual dried Reishi conk. When the conks dry, the fungal ink is made permanent and the conk is stored in Mycopolitan’s Fungallery in Philadelphia, USA (location TBD). Each NFT tells a story, and the physical conk is a part of that story. At regenseed, we like to follow an “overplant then cull” methodology whenever applicable, and Cardano Conks is fertile ground for this successional strategy. You will see different kinds of things etched into these conks- people, ideas, projects, desires. When you dive into the metadata, perhaps the smart contract behind the image, you will see different kinds of connections that the NFT is set up to facilitate. Many of these digital conks will wither on the vine, many of the connections dreamt up will never be made. Things will be pruned, things will have excess fertility dumped on them. We trust the process. It’s up to the community to see who gets the royal jelly. We have dreams, but at the end of the day we’re trying to have a little extra fun on the mushroom farm.
Reishi: Powerful Medicine, Living Canvas
The process of growing reishi conks suitable for etching is a labor of love. Each conk is backed by our Proof of Mycelium algorithm. This is a proof-of-work style trust-building mechanism that differs a bit from proof-of-work algorithms like bitcoin mining. While bitcoin consumes energy to power specialized supercomputers to solve mathematical riddles, PoM uses farmers preparing substrate, incubating mycelium, birthing mycelial blocks, creating ideal growth environment for and caring for maturing reishi conks to provide conditions for optimal canvas growth.
Smart Contracts for functional Cardano Conks.
Why wait for full smart contract support? Because while a basic NFT is nifty, we at Regenseed.io think that an NFT that can play in the cardano playground has a bright future. We can’t wait to see what tools evolve in Cardano’s NFT ecosystem. We wanna play with all the tools. Ideally, we want multi-mint and multi-wallet support, we want diverse marlowe-back ends to copy and paste into the smart contracts, we want the sweetest GUI plugins coming out of Catalyst. We dream about a time when a decentralized NFT marketplace can attain so much buy in that NFTs need their own internal governance around things like future transaction fees, in order to do things like royalties but way weirder. We want our NFTs to have the chance to flow about and cycle through the ecosystem, bringing people together around regenerative ideas. We want to be free, including the freedom to play in regulated markets when we want to. We want to use Cardano Conks and other fNFTs to explore the full potential of this token economy, and hopefully serve those doing the work of reharmonizing with nature around the world.
“Good Night Lions Mane! Good Night Charles!” -from Hoskinson AMA 5/19/21. credit: artist, Patrick Salamon. credit: mushroosm, Reishi and Lions Mane.
Patrick Salamon putting the finishing touches on a particularly meaningful conk
centigrebe, tyler case, scallop shell on living canvas
Other fNFTs (it’s not all conks):
CHiCKEN of the WooDS (Fund6 Proposal)
A Foragers Duty (link when blog posts)