What is El Collectooorr?

El Collectooorr is a novel experiment in crypto art collection.

El Collectooorr aims to autonomously create collections of NFTs by minting them as they drop on Art Blocks. It uses complex logic to decide which mints to participate in and what prices to bid at, so users don’t have to. The service is fueled by the community of users who fund collections. Each collection is designed to have its own unique ERC-20 token, for users to vote and collectively decide on what happens to the collection.

User Benefits

El Collectooorr aims to provide three main benefits: to save users time and effort, to make NFT art collecting more accessible and to broaden users’ NFT exposure.

Time and effort saved:

El Collectooorr does its own research, monitoring and minting. As a user, you don’t need to decide what drops to participate in. El Collectooorr contains an algorithm to decide whether and at what prices to mint at. Moreover, El Collectooorr aims to run continuously at any time of day. Lastly, it is designed to try to beat other buyers and bots and buy at a good time and price. Put simply, El Collectooorr takes a lot off of your plate.

Making NFT art collecting more accessible:

The mint price of many Art Blocks drops and the price of transacting on Ethereum mean that art collecting has a high barrier of entry. By enabling users to pool their funds, El Collectooorr aims to reduce those barriers.

Broadening users’ NFT exposure:

Through the fractionalization of NFTs from multiple drops, El Collectooorr aims to broaden users’ exposure and increase the liquidity of the NFTs in the collections.

User Flow

The current configuration of the application aims to produce a user flow that proceeds as follows:

Users contribute ETH to fund the current collection. They receive collection fractions (in the form of tokens), proportional to the amount of funds they contributed

These fractions can be used to vote on the minimum price at which the collection can be sold (reserve price) on fractional.art

El Collectooorr uses the ETH to mint NFTs from various new drops on Art Blocks.

It continues to add NFTs to the collection until it has spent the total budget (here, 10 ETH) or until the collection has been sold on fractional (at or above the reserve price)

If the target budget of 10 ETH is reached, this should mean that the entire supply of collection fractions is distributed pro rata to those who funded the collection. Collectively, they should have full control of the reserve price, and should be able to use their fractions to vote via fractional.art. In the event that a collection is sold, fraction holders can claim their share of the proceeds, again through fractional.art.

Once El Collectooorr finishes collecting for one collection, it may begin collecting for a new one and the cycle repeats

Collections

In its current form, El Collectooorr is designed to mint NFTs from Art Blocks drops and adds them to collections, minting NFTs for only one collection at a time. Each collection has a target budget of 10 ETH. This 10 ETH is used to purchase NFTs and pay for the transaction cost of doing so.

El Collectoorr is set to finish collecting for the completed collection once the target spend is reached, before beginning to collect for the next one. As above, any funds El Collectooorr uses to mint NFTs for the current collection are contributed by users exchanging their ETH via the collection’s webpage. 10 ETH was chosen as the initial budget with the aims of being high enough to make it worthwhile, relative to the gas costs of operating, whilst not being so high as to needlessly postpone community ownership and decision-making.

Nevertheless, this does not mean that a full 10 ETH needs to be raised for El Collectooorr to begin collecting for the collection. In fact, as soon as someone contributes to a new collection by adding funds and there is enough to begin minting, El Collectooorr may start to fill up the collection with freshly minted NFTs.

Collection Fractions and Voting

As mentioned above, El Collectooorr is designed to exchange a user’s ETH for collection fractions (in the form of ERC-20 tokens). A collection is designed to have 10,000 ERC-20 tokens. In that case, as the price is calculated from the target budget for a collection, each fraction would represent 0.0001 ETH of the collection. (If the budget is 10 ETH, the supply of the token is 10,000 → 10 / 10,000 = 0.0001 ETH per token).

The collection fractions are designed to be specific to the collection, remaining the same no matter how many NFTs the collection contains. On creation of a collection fraction supply, El Collectooorr defaults to setting the initial reserve price at double the default target budget, i.e. 20 ETH. This aims to ensure that El Collectooorr can reach its funding target and cover costs even if a collection is bought before the full budget can be raised. Logical parameters are crucial for El Collectooorr to continue to operate autonomously without human intervention. The idea is that the more collection fractions that are held by funders, the less influence El Collectooorr has on the reserve price and, by extension, the more voting power the community has. Once all fractions are held by funders, these fraction holders would have full collective control of the reserve price. Voting on the reserve price can be done via fractional.art.

Because the ETH that is exchanged for tokens is intended for minting NFTs, one cannot use the tokens to claim back their ETH. It is a one-way exchange. Secondary markets may emerge, however, in the form of liquidity pools, where collection tokens can be freely traded.

Management Fee

Users are charged a 5% management fee. This covers the costs of operating El Collectooorr on the Ethereum network with a small buffer in case of price spikes. The fee accounts for:

• The cost of creating a fractional vault to host the given collection (currently, up to 0.4ETH)
• The cost of sending collection tokens to the user.

Without this fee, someone would need to front the capital required to create a fractional vault each time. The fee, therefore, ensures that El Collectooorr can run autonomously with minimum human input - it can use the capital generated by the fee to create a new vault.

Technical Architecture

On-chain components

El Collectooorr currently interacts with 4 on-chain components. The service is secured by the Autonolas protocols and it interacts with three types of smart contracts: Gnosis Safe, Art blocks and Fractional vault.

Autonolas Protocol

Autonolas is the first crypto-native stack for building decentralized autonomous services. The on-chain protocol serves as a registry for tracking various aspects of a service including the creator, its operators and its usage. For more information on the Autonolas network and on becoming an agent operator, get in touch via the Autonolas Discord

Gnosis Safe

The Safe is a smart contract wallet with multi-signature functionality at its core. It is the multisig through which El Collectooorr performs its on-chain transactions. The signatories of the multisig are independent service operators , allowing for a high degree of security.

Art Blocks

The Art Blocks platform hosts generative art projects. Each project is made up of a series of NFTs which users can mint on the platform. El Collectooorr interacts with this minting contract using its Gnosis Safe to purchase NFTs for its collections.

Fractional

Fractional is a decentralized protocol where NFT owners can mint tokenized fractional ownership of their NFT collections. These tokens then function as normal ERC20 tokens which have governance over the NFTs that they own. El Collectooorr uses Fractional’s vault smart contracts to hold its collections. It is the ERC-20 tokens from these vaults that El Collectooorr distributes as collection tokens.