Why a JPEG is hard to sell
A share of a company is fungible: any share is any other share, so a price exists continuously and you can leave whenever you want. An artwork is the opposite. Each one is unique, which is the entire point aesthetically and a genuine problem financially.
The consequence shows up all over this gallery. Photography that we think is excellent has not traded in a month. Autoglyphs sits at a 69 ETH floor with no sales at all. Neither of those is a judgment on the work. It is what happens when every piece needs its own buyer, found one at a time.
The floor price papers over it. A floor is one number describing a set of objects that are not interchangeable, and it is only real for whoever is willing to sell today.
Four years of trying
We spent a long time on this problem from the collector’s side: give each NFT explicit backing, pair it with liquidity, and let the backing set a price nobody has to negotiate. The instinct was right and we never got it to hold together at scale.
So it is worth being honest that the two protocols below are doing a version of what we wanted to build, and doing it in public with real money.
TokenWorks
A development studio whose own line for itself is “a playground for onchain financialized ideas”. Two of their protocols are the reason NFTs have been discussed again in the last few weeks.
PunkStrategy · $PNKSTR
A token that buys the art, September 2025
A Uniswap v4 hook takes a fee on every trade of the token. The majority of that fee accumulates as ETH until the treasury can afford the cheapest CryptoPunk on the market, at which point the contract buys it automatically and relists it above cost. Profit from a sale buys back and burns the token.
The contract is renounced, so the loop runs without anyone steering it. What makes it interesting is not the token; it is that trading volume, which is normally pure noise, has been wired directly into buying and holding a specific body of work.
The honest cost is that the machine trades badly, in public, on a schedule. It never quotes two sides: it is a forced buyer whose treasury fills where everyone can watch, and the moment the threshold is crossed it must take whatever the cheapest Punk happens to be. It structurally buys what sellers most want to leave, at a moment the whole market saw coming, and pays the front-runner's spread for the privilege.
When Punks rise, the loop realises a profit, burns tokens and looks clever. That is beta dressed up as execution. In exactly those conditions, holding a Punk directly would have done better. Most of what the fee takes from the token's own trading volume ends up as income for Punk sellers and the people who front-run the treasury.
It was launched as an experimental art project, which is a more honest framing than most things wearing that phrase.
Fake World Assets · FWA
Backing per NFT, made into a market
This is the one that rhymes with what we tried to build. A depositor puts up an NFT and a quantity of ETH behind it, which the docs compare to one side of a Uniswap V2 pair. That backing does two jobs at once: it sets how likely the piece is to be drawn, and it funds an irrevocable standing bid, a promise from the depositor to buy the work back.
A purchaser pays a price derived from the pool and receives a randomly selected position, with Chainlink VRF supplying the randomness. They then choose: keep the work, keep it and relist it with their own backing, or sell it straight back into the standing bid.
The effect is a floor that is actually funded. Not a number on a chart, but ETH committed in advance by someone who has agreed to honour it.
It is also, of the two, the one that is a business. A spin pays a fee, so there is revenue; PunkStrategy has only a balance sheet and hope. A house selling variance needs traffic rather than alpha, and traffic is the easier thing to have.
The rake deserves reading closely. Sell the work back and you receive 85 percent of its backing (the default), and the fifteen you left behind is the protocol's to keep unless it chooses to share it. Keep the work and the depositor gets their backing returned minus a cut, while the premium you paid is pooled across every position rather than handed to the person whose piece you took. From either chair there is a band in the middle where nobody at the table wins. That band is the business.
For its first fifteen days a token emission paid both chairs to sit down anyway; the schedule was fifteen days by design. What the pool looks like without it is the honest test, and that test is running now.
The cost is that you do not choose what you get. It solves illiquidity by making the asset fungible enough to price, which is a real trade and not everyone will want it.
Where the incentives point
There is a wrinkle in that design worth writing down, and credit to @Rhynotic for putting it plainly first. Everything in FWA is denominated in ETH. Your share of the fees is your share of the pool's ETH, and the more ETH behind a piece, the less likely it is ever to be drawn.
Follow that to its end and the artwork stops mattering. The winning strategy is the cheapest eligible NFT you can find, used as a ticket, with as much ETH behind it as you can afford: yield on a work that will statistically never leave your position. The pool already leans that way: the heaviest backing tends to sit behind the cheapest work. A protocol built to fund a floor for art becomes, at the margin, an ETH deposit account wearing a gacha costume.
The damage is not only to fairness. What stays winnable is whatever nobody minds losing, so the prize pool drifts toward lemons and the spins get worse. A casino where the liquidity providers choose which prizes can be won is a casino that eats its own traffic: the decay in demand is built in, not merely cyclical.
The fix people are circling is to make the work itself do something: cap how much backing a piece can carry, or scale what the backing earns by what the piece is worth, so that earning more requires better work, or more of it. That would push demand outward into many collections instead of concentrating ETH behind the cheapest one. The hard part is the word worth. Someone has to say what a piece is worth, a floor on a thin collection can be walked upward by anyone motivated, and the honest version ends with the protocol keeping a curated list of collections and what each may carry.
That ending is not a prediction. FWA's allowlist is curated by its owner today: the docs describe a permissionless way in (burn enough of a certain NFT and a collection adds itself), but it launched switched off, the required burn set to zero. The protocol already keeps a curated list. It has just not said out loud that the list is the product.
Which is the detail we find most interesting. A protocol that points yield at a curated list is paying for taste. That is a job a gallery recognizes.
The exploit, and what it says about them
On 3 July 2026 someone took a CryptoPunk out of the pool for roughly $66,000 of ETH. Chainlink's randomness was not broken. The attacker changed the protocol's state in the window between the randomness being requested and the callback landing, so the selection resolved onto Punk #5450, the most valuable piece in the pool.
The response is the part worth noting. They put the protocol into withdraw-only so depositors could get their assets out, covered the owner's loss in full, and then rebuilt rather than patched.
The fix in the relaunched contract is a staging queue: a new deposit does not enter the selection tree immediately, but matures after a delay, and a callback can only be honoured inside a shorter window. The two are bound together in the setters, so any listing added after a request is provably invisible to that request's callback. The bug class is closed by arithmetic rather than by vigilance.
Their migration test goes further: it proves the core contract can be redeployed after a bug without touching the token, the hook or the Uniswap pool: the old one drains, the remainder moves across, the market continues. They designed for being wrong again.
Worth stating plainly
This is a page about mechanism design, not a recommendation. We do not hold a position in either protocol, nothing here is financial advice, and the design of both means depositors and holders can lose money. FWA’s own documentation says so directly.
In July 2026 an attacker front-ran the Chainlink callback that decides which NFT gets selected in FWA and walked away with a CryptoPunk. TokenWorks committed to covering the loss. That is roughly the best possible response to an exploit, and it is still a reminder that these are young contracts holding valuable objects.
Why a gallery cares
We are not going to add a liquidity pool to this site. But whether the best work in this medium can be owned by people who are not already wealthy, and sold by them without waiting a year for a buyer, decides what gets made next.
The interesting thing about both of these is that they treat the artwork as the thing to accumulate rather than the thing to extract from. That is closer to how a collection is built than to how a market usually behaves.