Right of Way, 2026
Generative image, 2048 × 2048
Red against a flat blue sky, and a canopy already full of air. She has not left the ground yet and has no further say in what happens next. The picture is the half-second in which a decision stops being hers.
Right of Way
At a French auction the hammer falls, the lot is sold, and a representative of the State may then stand up and say préemption. The State takes the work at the price the room just agreed. The seller is unaffected. The buyer keeps their money and loses the picture.
The right
No pool is configured, so there are no prices here. Everything below describes contracts that exist and are tested against mainnet state.
What was built
The same right, on a pool
A pre-emptor posts a mandate with real money behind it: a ceiling per copy, a number of copies, and a date it lapses. When somebody buys inside those terms, the copies go to the pre-emptor and the buyer is credited every wei they paid, in the same transaction that sold them.
Nothing is asked of the buyer and nothing can be refused by them. There is no window in which they hold the work, so there is no moment at which they can decline, move it, or be asked to sign anything.
The hook that makes this possible does almost nothing. It reads what the buyer paid, at the one instant that number exists, and passes it to the strongbox. It holds no money, keeps no state, and its address ends in a zero, so a trade could not pay it even if it tried.
One purchase, measured
The buyer paid, and did not get the picture
Price the room discovered
Ξ1.023
Copies the buyer kept
0
Refunded, same block
Ξ1.023
Run against the real Uniswap PoolManager on a fork of Ethereum mainnet. The buyer is whole to the wei and out one work; the museum holds the copy at a price it did not have to negotiate. The test is in the repository and re-runs on demand.
The terms
A right that cannot pay is not a right
The money is posted first
A mandate has to be funded to its own ceiling before it is live. Anything else is a threat rather than a right, and the buyer it fails on has already lost their trade by the time anyone finds out.
It is finite and it lapses
A ceiling per copy, a count, and a date. It spends down as it is used and stops when it is empty. The pre-emptor can stand down at any time and take the money back, which is also true in the saleroom.
A lot is taken whole
Buy three copies with a mandate covering two, and nothing happens. Pre-emption applies to a lot the way the hammer does, and splitting one would be inventing a mechanism rather than implementing this one.
What it costs
A collector can lose the work they just bought
That is not an edge case. It is the mechanism, and it is the reason collectors have argued about pre-emption for two hundred years. Anybody buying into a pool with a live mandate should know it is there, which is why the mandate is public, funded, and readable before you trade rather than discovered afterwards.
The second standing objection is equally true here: the pre-emptor free-rides on price discovery. They did not have to bid, or compete, or reveal what they thought the work was worth. Somebody else did that work and the museum paid their number.
There is also an escape, and it stays. A purchase left inside the PoolManager as a claim rather than taken as copies never passes through the strongbox, so no right can reach it. Uniswap v4 mints a freely transferable twin of any pooled token by construction, and no rule written here can see it. In practice that is the difference between a collector, who takes the work, and a desk, which does not.
Nothing here is deployed to a public network. The contracts exist and the figures above came from tests against mainnet state. 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 one that charges for selling too soon is at fresh to market, the share that follows a recommendation is at the curator's share, and the reasoning behind all of them is at the art of code.