Project Summary

Botto is a decentralized autonomous artist governed by a community of stewards. Botto creates 350 art pieces a week and presents them to the community. These weekly art pieces are considered a 'round', whereby individual art pieces are denoted as 'fragments'.

The community (BottoDAO) votes on these fragments. Votes represent individual preferences on what a participant considers to be aesthetically pleasing art. Collectively, votes are used as feedback for Botto's generative algorithm - guiding what direction Botto should take its next round of art pieces. Over time, Botto shall create art influenced and governed by the community.

Once a week, Botto will mint a fragment as a final artwork and put to auction on SuperRare. Half of the sales proceeds are returned to the community for their labor. While the auction takes place, Botto produces a new round comprising of fragments, so that the cycle can continue.

The first art piece was minted on the 22nd of October, 2021 on SuperRare. On October 14, 2022 Botto completed its 52nd piece and concluded its Genesis Period.

Botto has now shifted to 13 week Periods. Each Period the DAO votes on themes presented by Botto to guide Period, as well as votes on generative models to add based on the progress of the technology. Botto started with only VQGAN + CLIP as its core generation model, and has since added open source diffusion models like Stable Diffusion and Kandinsky.

Specifics on how Botto works, how to participate, collections, and more, can be found throughout these docs.

Key Dates

• New voting rounds begin every Tuesday, 20:00 UTC / 16:00 EDT / 13:00 PDT

• Leaderboard boosting opens up for final 24hrs every Monday, 20:00 UTC / 16:00 EDT / 13:00 PDT

• Voting rounds end every Tuesday, 20:00 UTC / 16:00 EDT / 13:00 PDT

• New art fragments are added to the voting pool every Tuesday, 20:00 UTC / 16:00 EDT / 13:00 PDT

• Auctions are scheduled to begin every Wednesday, 20:00 UTC / 16:00 EDT / 13:00 PDT

• Auctions are scheduled to end every Friday, 20:00 UTC / 16:00 EDT / 13:00 PDT

• Reward distributions are made on the Monday following each auction

• On the 13th week of each Period, Botto will select its own work to mint based, and so there is a break in voting that week

This documentation makes every attempt to be an accurate, comprehensive guide to Botto.

Please join the community Discord if you seek clarifications and/or have questions. Feedback helps this project improve!

The DAO periodically updates the parameters of the project and these docs are subsequently updated. To see past changes, you can see our snapshot page for proposals that have passed.

To quickly know more about Botto and how the DAO operates, refer to this set of five Botto 101 articles published to the DAO Portal.