So much more than a festival
HNFTFest is an initiative by The DADA Collective that brings together our diverse historical NFT community to celebrate, share, explore, and shine a light on the pioneering people and projects that make up the emerging story of non-fungible digital ownership.
We believe that as a community, we are all responsible for stewarding the history of NFTs, a multidimensional prism that includes technology, art, and innovation, and has enormous social, artistic, historic, and cultural significance.
The cultural history of NFTs is stored in our collective memory, yet our understanding of this space has been limited to information about transactions. While the blockchain provides an unchangeable and immutable timestamp, it only captures the factual information exchanged between two parties during transactions, leaving out the complex and multi-dimensional space in which individuals, their actions and their stories interconnect, and every one of them influences our collective history.
HNFTFest aims to illuminate the unseen connections and stories that drive the community forward. By exploring the circumstances and triggers that spawned the platforms, innovations and creative experiments, as well as the people — creators, builders, thinkers and innovators — who have shaped the NFT space, we can map out its multiple layers and truly understand its cultural impact. Only by making these relations visible can we appreciate the role they play in inspiring future innovation.
Our Values
HNFTFest is much more than a festival. It is a not-for-profit organization established by DADA as a series of initiatives that aim to broaden and disseminate the Festival’s mission to preserve and elucidate the history of NFTs.
Conversation and Collaboration
As we demonstrated leading up to and during the First HNFTFest, the Festival means to foster open, respectful conversation and generous collaboration among the members of the historic NFT community.
Creating Collective Wealth
DADA’s Invisible Economy is about collective value creation. It’s about contributing freely and giving back to the community, trusting that once value is created we can find ways for every contributor to receive back without extraction, while continuing to build collective cultural, material, and symbolic wealth.
With this in mind, we organized the First HNFTFest to provide a very special experience for everyone involved, free of any strings attached. The festival was financed almost in full by The DADA Collective’s Fund.
We are currently working on several projects aimed at ensuring HNFTFest’s long-term sustainability, and expanding the reach of the wealth of knowledge it generated last year.
Radically Open Research in a Permissionless World
We believe in the decentralized and permissionless ethos of Web3. The Festival’s purpose is to celebrate, share, explore, and acknowledge the people and projects that make up the history of NFTs.
However, the metaverse still abides by outdated copyright laws that make it impossible for the Festival to present historic art and projects without explicit permission from its creators. It is not possible for us to reach many of the early projects. Without their permission, we would need to remove them from these initiatives. These kinds of policies effectively erase hard to reach or defunct projects from early NFT history. We don’t want this to happen. The HNFTFest aims to acknowledge all the historic projects that contributed to the evolution of NFTs, including those very early pioneers that are now in the shadows and that deserve to be part of our ongoing history.
Initiatives in Progress
- HNFTFest
- HNFTFest Virtual Retrospective
- HNFTFest Historic Timeline
- Collective Memory Mesh
- Historic NFT Book
Up until now, The DADA Collective Fund has been the main source of funding for the Festival, and none of the members of DADA who have worked on its initiatives expect any compensation for their efforts. The Festival has been our gift to the community. Going forward, we aim to make the Festival more decentralized and self-sustaining so that it is not solely reliant on DADA’s support. We are grateful to the many people from the HNFT community who have generously contributed their time and their knowledge. Our goal is to involve more members of the Historic NFT community in the stewardship and organization of the Festival’s initiatives.
We hope you join the HNFTFest in continuing and cementing the legacy of the art, the innovations, and the people in the historic NFT community.
Get Involved
Follow us on Twitter at @hnftfest or drop us a line at info@hnftfest.community
Listen in to our Twitter Spaces on the topic.
