Editing Cryptograss

Cryptograss is a [[wikipedia:Decentralized_autonomous_organization|DAO]] focused on teaching the bluegrass community the skills and discipline required to build and deploy [[wikipedia:Decentralized_application|Decentralized Applications]] to publish their music and integrate it with the [[traditional music connectome]].

==History==
The first project which evolved into a cryptograss tool was [[Revealer]], which was started at the [[EthBarcelona 2023]] hackathon by [[Justin Holmes]], [[R.J. Partington III]], [[Kieran Prasch]], and [[Kuba Hejhal]].  The project was, at that time, designed specifically to release Holmes' debut bluegrass record, [[Vowel Sounds]], and won the [[Gnosis]] prize at the hackathon.

In the following weeks, the group launched chat forums on Discord and Matrix, and held several conference calls leading up the album release.  In addition to the hackathon winners, these calls were joined by [[Skyler Golden]], [[Jakub Vysoky]], and [[Jake Stargel]], the latter of whom coined the term 'cryptograss' during one of the calls.

The Revealer contract - the group's first mainnet contract - was deployed on September 1, 2023, as <small>0xa812137EFf2B368d0B2880A39B609fB60c426850</small> on the ethereum blockchain.  The contract required that 10 eth (at the time, about $38,000) be contributed in order for Vowel Sounds to be released.  This goal was accomplished in almost exactly 8 days.

Subsequently, the calls continued and attention turned toward creating other tools and making those tools available to other musicians.

==Current Toolchain==
All of the cryptograss tools are open source with either MIT, Apache, or GPL licenses.

* [[Revealer]] - the first cryptograss tool, Revealer can automatically release a record after a contribution goal is met.

* [[Chartifacts]] - a protocol for tokenizing the paper charts used at studio recording sessions, and making their metadata available to to other tools.

* [[PickiPedia]] - a wiki for both structured and unstructured knowledge about bluegrass, old time, and other traditional public domain music.  

* [[The Oracle of Bluegrass Bacon]] - (named after [https://www.oracleofbacon.org/ The Oracle of Bacon], which is in turn named after [[WikiPedia:Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon|The Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon]], which is turn is named after [[Wikipedia:Six degrees of separation|The Six Degrees of Separation]]) - a database and query tool for examining the connections between pickers, albums, and shows in [[the traditional music connectome]].

* [[Rabbithole Player]] - a music player designed to use Chartifacts and The Oracle of Bluegrass Bacon to allow listeners to follow "rabbit holes" of particular pickers, records, shows, instrument makers, and other recording metadata.

* [[Blue Railroad Train Squats]] - a series of NFTs which are manually awarded to people when they submit a video of themselves performing squats to [[Tony Rice]]'s recording of [[Blue Railroad Train]] from his 1979 [[Manzanita (Tony Rice Album)|Manzanita]] record.  This tool is designed to help people gain experience handling and transferring NFTs in a low-stakes environment, and to promote fitness and wellness in the bluegrass scene.

* [[Cryptograss Dice Protocol]] - a protocol to generate [[paper wallets]] using dice as a source of offline randomness.  Designed to facilitate conversation and community while generating paper wallets in an in-person environment.  The protocol was developed during the [[4masks]] sessions at [[Tunesmith Studios]], principally by Holmes, Golden, and [[Lisa Joy]].  It was then used to generate wallets held by many bluegrassers who have cryptograss.eth domain names, including [[Maddie Denton]], [[Harry Clark]], [[Cory Walker]], [[Jake Stargel]], and [[Vickie Vaughn]] (each of which can be found at <firstname><lastname>.cryptograss.eth). 

* [[Magent]] - an MCP Server and database for informing LLM agents about the history of bluegrass and the traditional music connectome in order to build bluegrass-related projects.  Magent has a history of several thousands messages back and forth with Justin Holmes, during which it has learned about cryptograss goals and tagged important messages for later recall.

* [https://github.com/cryptograss/arthel arthel] - named after Arthel "Doc" Watson, arthel is a codebase with facilities for building and deploying Revealer instances, Chartifacts, and other cryptograss artifacts.  arthel also has tools for end-to-end website builds, and is currently used to build justinholmes.com and cryptograss.live.

* [[maybelle]] - named after Maybelle Carter, maybelle is an integration and build server which updates all cryptograss-built projects with the latest chain data from Ethereum, Optimism, and Arbitrum.  maybelle has a public frontend showing the build status of cryptograss projects.

* [[hunter]] - named after Robert Hunter, hunter is a development server which includes containers for individual development environments, designed to be used for either learning or engineering by bluegrassers.  Each container includes an instance of Magent, an instance of VSCode Server, runtimes for cryptograss web projects, and SSH and HTTPS routing for authentication and web previews.

==Contributors==
Currently, the wallet which owns cryptograss.eth is custodied by [[Justin Holmes]].  API keys, deploy keys, authorized SSH keys for maybelle, and other authorization material is held jointly by Holmes, [[R.J. Partington III]], [[Skyler Golden]], and [[Jake Stargel]].  This group has frequently discussed tokenization of authority and increasing DAO infrastructure.  This topic is tentatively planned for in-person discussion at [[EthBoulder 2026]], where Holmes' band is tentatively scheduled to play.

The following people have contributed code to cryptograss codebases (in approximate order of contribution volume):

* [[Justin Holmes]]
* [[R.J. Partington III]]
* [[Skyler Golden]]
* [[Kieran Prasch]]
* [[Lisa Joy]]
* [[Kuba Hejhal]]
* [[Jake Stargel]]
* [[Jakub Vysoky]]