Cryptograss

Cryptograss is a Will-One-Day-Be-A-DAO focused on building pro-human (as distinct from anti-AI) tools for release, distribution, publication, and monetization of straight-to-public-domain music.

All Cryptograss tech is open source and written by musicians and serious music fans - none of the work is outsourced to engineering firms.

Cryptograsss Toolchain

• Revealer - the first cryptograss tool, Revealer can automatically release a record or other project after a contribution goal is met onchain.

• 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 The Oracle of Bacon, which is in turn named after The Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, which is turn is named after The Six Degrees of Separation) - a database and query tool for examining the connections between pickers, albums, and shows in the traditional music connectome.

• Set Stones / Ticket Stubs - the primary live show merch, these are mintable only by show attendees and are displayed throughout the Cryptograss ecosystem anywhere the show is used as a vector to connect musicians or songs.

• 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 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.

• 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.

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.^[unverified]

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.^[unverified]

The Revealer contract - the group's first mainnet contract - was deployed on September 1, 2023, as 0xa812137EFf2B368d0B2880A39B609fB60c426850 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.^[unverified]

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

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. Further DAO-ization is ahead.

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