Reserve, 2026
Generative image, 2048 × 2048
A car photographed against nothing at all, the way an asset is photographed rather than the way an object is. No road, no horizon, no weather, no reason to have stopped here. It is the only work in the series with nothing in the frame to want except the thing being sold.
The house bid
Everyone else puts the backing in a vault and asks you to believe it will still be there. This puts it in the market, at a price, where it cannot be taken out by anybody, including us.
A dealer who believes in an artist buys their work at auction to stop the market breaking. It is a century old and universally practised, and nobody writes it down.
The support
No pool is configured, so there is no depth to report. Everything below describes contracts that exist and are tested against mainnet state.
Why not a vault
A withdraw function is the whole problem
The usual design holds a reserve in a treasury and promises to defend a price with it. Every treasury has a withdraw function and something with a key behind it, so what is being offered is a promise about future behaviour. Most of them then deploy the reserve for yield, which means the collateral behind the guarantee is itself at risk, and a guarantee whose collateral is at risk is not a guarantee.
Money posted into a Uniswap position under a reserved salt has no withdraw function, because the hook refuses the call. Not for us, not for the artist, not for the person who posted it. There is no key, so there is nothing to be trusted with.
It also cannot be lent against, farmed, rehypothecated or counted twice, for the same reason: nobody custodies it. That is a much smaller promise than guaranteed value, and it is the only one that survives being written down.
How it works
One rule, and it has no branches
The salt is the commitment
Liquidity posted under one reserved label can never be removed. The hook reverts and there is no condition in it. The label is public, so support is permissionless: a collector who wants to put money under an artist posts it the same way the gallery does and is bound identically.
Ordinary makers are not trapped
The freeze is scoped to that label, not to the pool. Anyone else can provide and withdraw liquidity normally. A market whose only bid is the support is the situation the support exists to avoid.
The size is the disclosure
How much is left is read from the position, not from a treasury balance. A treasury balance is a fact about a wallet. This is a fact about a bid, and it is the only figure that decides whether any of this means anything today.
What it costs
This is price support, and that is what to call it
In securities markets, buying your own asset to hold a price up is a crime with a name. In the art trade it is Tuesday, and it is how most artists' markets have been held together for a hundred years. We are not going to pretend the second fact cancels the first. Anybody looking at this should understand they are looking at a market that is being supported, and by whom, and with how much.
The capital is locked permanently. Not for a term, not until a vote, not until conditions improve: the money is gone from the artist for good, and its only future is to buy back their own work. That is a real cost which a vault quietly avoids by keeping the door open.
It does nothing above the support price, which is where a work's value actually lives. And it invites people to sell into the artist's own money, which is the mechanism working rather than failing.
The deepest objection, which we would rather print than answer: a permanent published bid hands the market a number to anchor on that has nothing to do with the work. Everything else in this series argues that judgement is the job. This is the one mechanism that quietly offers to stand in for it.
The version of this that a person writes on a single work, for a fee and a term, is at consign, and it is the one we would recommend first. The edition is priced by the bidding at the waitlist, and the reasoning behind all of it, including what went wrong for everybody who tried this before, is at the art of code.