The World is yours

When we started Foundation, there weren’t many opportunities for digital artists to make a living from their artwork. That needed to change. Our goal was to provide an onchain platform that brought value to digital art. We hand selected artists, who became our muses, and our platform quickly took off. We realized there was a term for that—curation—and we became known for it. It was the key to our collective success.

However, as we welcomed more and more creators, we missed the human connections that made us successful to begin with. Simultaneously, there was no way we could single-handedly parse through the entire catalog of digital art and determine the best works on our own. That’s what makes curation so powerful—intimate connections based on shared perspectives and trust. We needed to encode that level of intimacy into the software itself.

We set out to create a tool for curation and launched the first version of Worlds in January 2023. Since then, Worlds has evolved dramatically, now representing 40% of all sales on Foundation and generating $3.2 million in sales for over 2,000 artists.

Worlds has become something much more than we anticipated. In order to meet its full potential, worldbuilders need more ownership and control.

This is why we’re excited to share that Worlds is now its own smart contract, and in this new architecture, each world is represented as an NFT.

Worlds as a protocol

Worlds is now on a universal contract that houses all worlds, encompassing their history and functionality. This contract is designed to become a protocol, a shared resource that can be trusted across the ecosystem.

By changing the fundamental architecture of the Worlds smart contract, we’re giving more ownership to worldbuilders. Each world, minted on the contract as an NFT, now appears across web3: in your wallet, on OpenSea and Etherscan. As it accumulates transactions and events, your NFT becomes a record of your world’s curatorial history. This creates provenance, and provenance creates value.

Worlds as a protocol

Worlds as NFTs

This update also unlocks more design space for new features, the first few of which we’re thrilled to share today.

What’s new today

• Your world now appears as an NFT across the web3 ecosystem.

• You can specify a custom address to receive payments from your world, including a split contract address.

Coming soon

• Add team members with different permissions to help manage your world.

• Securely transfer your world to another wallet.

• Remove sellers from your World.

• Customize take rates and more.

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Your World will always exist—with or without us

On centralized platforms, your work is bound to the state of the platform, making your contributions vulnerable to platform changes that are out of your control. In web3, what you create should belong to you.

Ownership is not just a principle we care deeply about. It’s now built into the underlying technology of Worlds.

Mint this announcement.