hic et nunc

The present decentralized application allows its users to manage decentralized digital assets, serving as a public smart contract infrastructure on Tezos Blockchain.

IPFS OBJKTs can be minted and traded by permissionless means. such experiment was designed intending to imagine alternative crypto economies.

We’re concerned about your security and autonomy. please verify the seller’s information while making transactions.

Hic et Nunc Art

The creator of the NFT platform Hic Et Nunc, sought to give real-world applications to the ideals of early crypto enthusiasts. He was particularly interested in:

  • Blockchain’s potential to be uncensorable and transparent.
  • The possibility of applying these qualities of blockchain to governance experiments.
  • The use of liminal spaces to encourage experimentation in art.
  • The development of self-sustaining creative economies.
  • The implementation of Web 3.0 platforms to give users full ownership of their data.

He saw in these ideals an opportunity to create a platform where artists from all over the world could connect and share their work without censorship. He was drawn to Tezos as the blockchain for his platform because of its lower cost of entry, which made it accessible to a wider range of artists. His choice of Tezos also reflected his interest in liminality. Creator’s focus on user freedom is evident in his decision not to collect or store any user data. All information on the platform, including artwork files, is stored on the publicly accessible IPFS network. This commitment to decentralization also extends to the platform’s governance, which was intended to be managed by a DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organization). However, a fully functioning DAO has not yet been implemented.

Hicetnunc.art: the story

Hicetnunc is an NFT buy-sell platform on the Tezos blockchain. It enables artists to publish their works, and collectors to buy them. From its launch in spring 2021, Hicetnunc has been a great success. Within a few months, it became the most popular NFT platform on Tezos, and entered the top 10 NFT platforms across all blockchains.

Everything seemed to be going smoothly, with creative people offering their works and collectors buying them, but on the morning of November 12, 2021, everything came to a halt. The site was no longer accessible, and the Hicetnunc Twitter account simply read: “Discontinued”. Hicetnunc was dead.

That morning, many of the site’s users broke into a cold sweat, but Hicetnunc’s closure wasn’t really a problem.

What you need to understand is that the Hicetnunc site was merely an interface for interacting with the data stored on the Tezos blockchain. It’s a bit like if you had a blog, and your ISP went bankrupt: all you had to do was change your ISP to regain access to your blog. If a centralized site like Instagram closed down, it would be completely different – you’d lose everything – but in this case, if the site closes down, it’s simply the interface that disappears. The data is still there. All you have to do is change the interface, and everything continues as before.

By logging on to objkt.com, for example – a competing platform to Hicetnunc – you can retrieve your creations, the history of your transactions, or even propose new NFTs. If you make new sales, you continue to pocket money, because transactions do not depend on the platform you use, but are managed by the blockchain.

As the Hicetnunc site was open source, as soon as its closure was announced, it was taken over by other developers who quickly brought it back online. Less than 12 hours after Hicetnunc’s closure, the site rose from the ashes. Only the site address changed (hicetnunc.xyz became hicetnunc.art), and everything else continued as before.