Cryptograss
Cryptograss is a DAO focused on teaching the bluegrass community the skills and discipline required to build and deploy 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 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.
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 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.
- 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.
- Cryptograss Dice Protocol - a protocol to generate [[paper wallets] using dice. 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 engineers to use. Each containers 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):
