art, proofs

charm.farm is an art collective implemented as a distributed autonomous organization. It was launched on the Ethereum mainnet and structured as a conventional DAO, but its purpose was not primarily financial or governance-driven. The DAO was a scaffold—useful mainly as a coordination and modification layer for a broader experiment.

The core question behind charm.farm was how digital art objects establish identity, ownership, and continuity. Rather than treating NFTs or blockchains as the default solution, the project explored whether those properties could exist independently of any chain at all.

One outcome of that exploration was a proposed standard for self-contained HTML artworks. Each file embeds a JSON Web Token in its metadata that makes specific claims: authorship, ownership, and provenance. The document’s structure is hashable, producing a stable content address. Ownership is asserted not by a ledger, but by the ability to cryptographically prove that the public key named in the document belongs to you. The file carries its own identity.

In this model, blockchains become optional. They can be used to coordinate standards, signal consensus, or record decisions—but the artwork itself remains portable, inspectable, and complete. It can be emailed, archived, copied, or hosted anywhere without losing coherence.

The charm.farm DAO governs these structures and standards rather than individual works. Proposals modify formats, protocols, and assumptions about what an artwork can claim and how those claims are verified. Governance is handled through an Aragon-based DAO interface, but participation is deliberately lightweight and slow, favoring clarity over throughput.

As a portfolio piece, charm.farm represents an attempt to separate art objects from infrastructure, and to ask which parts of contemporary crypto practice are essential—and which are simply convenient defaults.