The Long Game, 2026
Generative image, 2048 × 2048
A links course, a sofa cut from the body of a saloon car, and a man in orange who is not carrying his own bag. The only figure actually working is bent double at the edge of the frame with his back to us, which is where that figure usually is.
The Long Game
Every market prices what a work is worth. The saleroom has always also priced how long you kept it.
An edition where selling costs 15% on the day you buy it and nothing 3 years later. The charge falls a little every day in between, and nobody administers it.
| Held for | Selling costs (intended) |
|---|---|
| The day you bought it | 15% |
| A month | 14.59% |
| Six months | 12.51% |
| A year | 10% |
| Two years | 5% |
| Three years | Nothing |
The schedule this contract is built to enforce. No pool is deployed, so these are the numbers it would be given, not numbers read from a chain.
Why this exists
The trade has always priced this. It just never wrote it down
A work that has hung in one collection for thirty years is described as fresh to market and carries a premium. A work that came through the room eighteen months ago is burned, and takes a discount. Every specialist knows this and none of them can tell you the number.
It happens in a whisper, months after the fact, folded into an estimate, and the discount is collected by nobody in particular. The seller pays it either way. They simply never see it written down.
This is the same discount, applied at the moment of sale, in public, on a straight line anybody can read in advance. It is not a new idea about art. It is an old idea about art that could not be enforced until a pool could run code.
It is also the opposite of what everyone else has been building. Every attempt we studied tried to make pictures easier to sell, and the ones that failed most expensively failed because the money underneath them never wanted the picture. This charges for haste instead of subsidising it.
What it does to a sale
The same sale, three years apart
Run against the real Uniswap PoolManager on a fork of Ethereum mainnet: one copy, one pool, one price, sold twice from identical starting states.
Sold the day it was bought
Ξ0.836
Sold three years later
Ξ0.980
The difference is the taper and nothing else: same curve, same liquidity, same size. The test that produces those two figures is in the repository and runs against mainnet state, so it can be re-run by anyone who doubts them.
How it is enforced
Three rules, and none of them is a promise
The clock restarts when it sells
Fresh to market has never meant time since the work was made. It means time since it last changed hands, so that is what is counted. Moving copies to a second wallet restarts them too, which means splitting a position can only ever cost you and there is nothing to arrange.
Newest out first
A sale is drawn from the copies bought most recently. Without that rule, anyone sitting on aged inventory could trade in and out all week against their own seasoning and never pay, which is precisely the behaviour the charge exists for.
We name the fee and cannot receive it
The charge is paid to whoever is holding the other side of the trade, which here is the artist. The contract that decides the number sits at an address ending …0, and that last character is what decides whether a hook may be paid by a trade. Ours is a zero.
What it costs
It makes the work harder to sell, on purpose
That is the mechanism, so it is also the bill. A collector who needs to be out this month pays for the privilege, and the amount is knowable before they buy rather than discovered afterwards. We would rather publish it than let it be found in an estimate.
A sale also has to be routed a particular way: the copies have to reach the pool before the swap is called, because that is how their age is established without asking anybody to be trusted about it. Buying is unaffected and routes from anywhere. Selling through a venue that will not settle first will be refused, plainly, rather than quietly charged the wrong number.
And a work that changes hands privately restarts its clock, which is correct but unkind in one case: moving a collection to a new wallet, or passing it to an heir, looks exactly like a sale to a contract that cannot tell the difference.
Nothing here is deployed to a public network. The contracts exist, the tests run against mainnet state, and the pool the numbers above came from was a fork. Until somebody can trade it, this is a mechanism and not a market.
The edition that prices copies as they sell is at editions, the guarantee on a single work is at consign, and the reasoning behind all three is at the art of code.