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Hic Et Nunc Introduces Collaboration Feature Through Successful Hicathon

May 24, 2021

Hicathon And The Collaboration Feature 

The Hic Et Nunc (H=N) hackathon over the May 22-23rd weekend was a roaring success, with over 100 participants working on and delivering a number of features. One that was of particular interest to me is the Collaboration feature, where you essentially mint an OBJKT as several creators to get automatic revenue sharing.

The obvious use case is to be able to release an NFT for a group of collaborating artists. Just as the blockchain is trustless, so should the administration of such a release.

The sales and royalty ratios are set at the time of minting and will then follow the NFT as it’s sold and resold. Up to ten collaborators are possible, with a minimum of two (otherwise it’s just a regular mint).

Once the feature is live it’ll be accessed through a new menu item, Collaborations, where a collaboration smart contract is set up. The actual minter of the NFT will be this smart contract (KT1-address), which means it’s easy to spot a collaboration.

In addition, to open up for artist collaborations, like we for example saw with Maikeul and Daniella Attfields collab in Kalamint, this also opens up the whole space of third-party sellers who help an artist sell an NFT.

Essentially virtual galleries can now be established, where an artist mints editions to be sold with the help of an agent. A gallery can work with several artists and use their channels to promote the art, leading the buyer back to the H=N page to close the deal.

While this is a little clunky with this implementation, I’d prefer just to be able to send in a referral Tezos-address, this implementation actually even better suited for another space: Affiliate partnerships for digital products.

With H=N’s ability to basically mint any digital product, it can be used to publish novels, guides, audiobooks, courses, and more.

Affiliate marketing is a huge business, and being able to onboard a new partner by creating such a H=N collaboration is an easy and trustless way to create synergies between creators and marketers, or creators and other creators who rely on selling affiliate products to support their operation.

Once a product has been minted through H=N the contents of that product are available for anyone who can find the OBJKT page. So there’s not much DRM (Digital Rights Management) protection when using this method, but I don’t find that to be a major issue.

Pirates will always find a way to beat DRM and spread works to those who won’t pay up anyway. Besides, with an NFT you can create other incentives to own the actual NFT.

I’m extremely excited about this feature and where it’ll lead us. It just created an easy-to-use, permissionless infrastructure for a trustless and borderless economy for digital goods, something I’ve been waiting on since smart contracts first saw the light of day.

Map of all participants: https://www.hicathon.xyz/map

The Hicathon homepage: https://www.hicathon.xyz/