The Museum of Crypto Art (MOCA) will raise money through sales of cryptocurrency tokens to help the budding community of cryptocurrency artists, including those who have embraced nonfungible tokens (NFTs).
The museum is virtual art gallery, and it first opened in April 2020. It is dedicated to the preservation of the foundational moments and artifacts for a decentralized community. The museum is announcing it will sell a $MOCA cryptocurrency token (live today) to those who want to be the owners and curators of the museum. It will also reward $MOCA tokens to those in the art community and will eventually evolve from one curator to a quasi decentralized autonomous organization, or DAO.
Today, MOCA is debuting its website, which showcases for the first time publicly the Genesis Collection of crypto art that anyone can log on and see for themselves which popular pieces have been included and collected in a central location. The $MOCA token has debuted for people to buy. The team is publishing a description of its MOCA Economic Model that explains how the museum funds itself, and it is also posting a piece on the $MOCA token and how it works and the different ways to get it.
It will engage with digital art that represents web 3.0 culture and values. The museum said it will incubate artistic expression between artists, technology, and blockchain. And it will invite other collectors and crypto institutions to contribute to and experiment with MOCA. Crypto artists create crypto art that is minted into an NFT, which allows it to be authenticated on the blockchain, the secure and transparent digital ledger technology. I suppose we need someone to tell us what NFT art is really all about.
Colborn Bell is cofounder and museum director. As one of the largest collectors in the crypto art space, he worked with his team to curate and seed the Genesis Collection with 160 artworks from 160 artists. Other collectors will be invited to fill in the Collection, pending a thorough vetting process. In the future, as they develop the technology, contributions to the Permanent Collection will be voted on and approved by $MOCA token holders. Bell worked with Pablo Rodriguez-Fraile on the project, and the museum was designed by Desiree Casoni. Update: The museum said that Bell parted ways with Rodriguez-Fraile early on, and the design was actually by an artist who goes by Untitled,xyz.
The museum held a private pre-sale with accredited non-U.S. investors to fund the foundation. The nonprofit foundation called the Museum of Crypto Art will preserve the legacy of crypto artists and serve as an innovation lab for pushing the boundaries of NFTs.
The Museum of Crypto Art is creating a community collection by exchanging artwork for $MOCA (the token). The Foundation is seeding the Genesis Collection from artists who have already been compensated for their work (through $MOCA tokens). This Genesis Collection will never be sold.
Additional artists and collectors can contribute their work to MOCA in exchange for $MOCA tokens. Initial curation will be done by a seven-person Artist’s Council and a seven-person Collector’s Council.
In time, they will develop the technology to transition this responsibility to their token holders who will vote on future curation and additions to the museum.
In its manifesto, the museum posed a couple of questions: What is art? and Who decides?
The MOCA Genesis Collection is a time capsule for the that includes the earliest etchings on the blockchain, and will come to be regarded as the digital cave paintings of our transhumanist narrative, the museum said. The museum will give out a fixed amount of tokens to artists who were members of OpenSea before December 2020.
The Permanent Collection will be open to submissions from all artists and collectors. Exchanging art for $MOCA provides artists and collectors liquidity, as well as a voice in the trajectory of MOCA.