Async Art

» see async.art as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

buyers of programmable digital art used async. that was not my crowd, and it was probably not most of yours either. the platform was a small experiment inside the larger nft cycle, founded in 2020 in san francisco by conlan rios as ceo with lisa liang and nathan clapp as co-founders. it raised two million dollars in seed funding in february 2021 with lemniscap leading.

the mechanic was the strange part. async pieces were not static jpegs. each piece had a master composite, which was the canonical 1-of-1 work, plus a set of layers underneath it. each layer was its own nft, owned by a different collector. when a layer-owner switched which variant of their layer was showing, the master image updated. the picture changed depending on who was doing what.

at peak the platform also added blueprints, a system that let artists author generative nfts without writing code. that put async closer to the art-blocks generative-collection genre during the 2021 peak, though always at lower volume than the bigger marketplaces.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what got buried with it ~

the wind-down post on 23 october 2023 was written by ceo conlan rios in the tone of someone tired. the space had shifted. the team was running into "less glamorous aspects of this world as motivations changed". async market would stop processing purchases at the end of 2023. no new submissions from the announcement date onward.

the assets themselves do not vanish. async nfts are pinned on ipfs and live on ethereum. the team said it might ship a simplified viewer to keep the pieces watchable. the marketplace shell is gone. the layer-and-master rendering logic that made the art interesting in the first place is the question mark.

~ the funny part ~

async was probably the closest the 2020-2023 nft cycle came to making a real argument for the technology. an artwork whose state was a function of separately-owned components, with the chain handling who owned which layer, was a thing you actually could not build in a non-blockchain database without inventing the same primitives. it was also a small niche that needed buyers who cared about the mechanic and not the speculation. the market never sorted those two audiences out.

then ftx collapsed in november 2022 and took most of the nft buyer base's confidence with it. async ran for another eleven months on the way down before pulling the plug.

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