What is JPG? 📸
JPG is a platform that empowers tastemakers in the NFT space, enabling the building of community-curated discovery resources. The three core offerings include:
-
JPG Canons — A cultural effort + curatorial protocol for organizing collectively-managed NFT lists, aimed at mapping out the cultural landscape of NFTs (https://jpg.space/canons)
-
Exhibitions — A curatorial platform for creating personal NFT exhibitions (https://jpg.space/exhibitions)
-
JPG.EXE — An art studio focused on helping artists realize drops that push the boundaries of blockchain-based art (https://bit.ly/JPG-EXE)
Below, we’ll cover the basics of creating exhibitions on JPG and the basics of participating in the JPG Canons.
How to create an exhibition on JPG 📸
With Exhibitions, you can create galleries of NFTs according to any theme you wish. You don’t have to own the NFTs to curate them into an exhibition, but currently only Ethereum-based NFTs are supported on the platform. As for how to organize your exhibitions, you’re limited only by your imagination. To give you an idea of the wide possibilities here, some examples of exhibitions we’ve seen before include:
-
Enter the Finiverse by Sam Spike — An exploration of six aesthetic themes found across the 10 finiliar families.
-
Red Flags by Maria Paula — A selection of NFTs focused on lambasting the fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried.
-
On Death Considered as Temporary by WMP — An overview of three NFT projects that engaged with the notion of “redemption” in unique ways.
To create your first exhibition, you first need to press the “Connect Wallet” button on jpg.space (MetaMask, Coinbase Wallet, and WalletConnect currently supported) and approve the ensuing “Sign-In” transaction.
At this point, you’d be signed in and ready to start creating an exhibition. Before diving in, though, we recommend going to the “Settings” portion of your JPG dashboard to set up your profile with a PFP, banner, and bio to make your galleries more discoverable going forward.
Once your profile is set up, press the red “Create Exhibition” button in the upper right side of the jpg.space platform to begin making an exhibition. Doing so will bring you to an editor interface that looks like this:
Start by inputting a title, even if it’s tentative, as this will allow you to start saving the exhibition as a draft in case you want to work on it over more than just one sitting.
Next, you’ll want to start adding NFTs to the exhibition so that you can organize them with the editor system later. To do this, press the “+ Add NFTs” button on the left side of the interface, which will bring you to a new interface that looks like this:
While you can import NFTs you own via the “Wallet” tab and NFTs you’ve bookmarked from other JPG Exhibitions via “Right Clicks,” the easiest and most popular way to add NFTs to your draft is use the “Import” tab to input URLs to the specific NFTs you want.
For instance, if I wanted to start by adding the first Blitmap ever created, I could paste opensea.io/assets/ethereum/0x8d04a8c79ceb0889bdd12acdf3fa9d207ed3ff63/0 into the import bar and then press the red “+” button to complete the addition.
Right now, links from OpenSea, Zora, LooksRare, and Rainbow are supported. Any NFTs added can be seen and scrolled through back on the left side of the main exhibition editor interface. To then place NFTs into your gallery, the main way is to manually drag your desired piece over from the left side of the page into one of the open NFT slots, like so:
A default row will start with three open NFT slots, but you can delete slots as you please (a “trashcan” icon will appear when you hover over a slot with your mouse), e.g. if you only want one or two NFTs on a row, or you can add up to five slots per row (a “+” icon will appear if you hover over the space between NFT slots).
You can continue adding rows to your exhibition by pressing the gray “+” button at the bottom of your current row, at which point the interface will ask whether you want to add another row or another text section. There’s also the “Add Page” option if you want to organize your curations across multiple pages. Rotate through these options as needed to finish drafting your exhibition.
Keep in mind that the “Curation Presets” tab on the left side of the editor also gives you the option to automatically input your added NFTs into one of two formats: AutoGrid (which will use all your additions to populate a three-column grid) and Slideshow (which will create a new page for every NFT you’ve added).
Finish things up by using the “Tags” tab to adding applicable tags, e.g. “On-chain” or “Educational,” in order to enhance your exhibition’s discoverability. Then use the “👁” button in the top right of the editor to preview what your exhibition would look like if published at that moment.
Use this opportunity to make any last minute changes or fixes that you want, and then when everything’s ready press “Publish and View” to launch your exhibition. Tag us on Twitter or drop into the JPG Discord with the link so we can check out your new curations!
How to participate in JPG Canons 📜
Beyond the underlying protocol infrastructure, JPG Canons are community-created and community-governed lists of NFTs that are designed to index a new contextual data layer for the NFT ecosystem.
These lists map out relational networks and improve discovery, context, and searchability around NFTs. Examples of ones live include:
Starting with the Canonicon
To participate in proposing and voting on new additions to JPG Canons, you must first mint a free Canonicon NFT. This NFT acts as your ticket to the Canons and helps mitigate these NFT lists from being overloaded with spam.
Additionally, the Canonicon is dynamic and tracks your accrued JXPG points, which are points you earn for proposing and voting in the Canons. The more JXPG points you have, the more voting power you’ll have, plus you can unlock more visual layers to customize your Canonicon NFT’s appearance with.
To get allowlisted to mint your free (minus gas) Canonicon, head to the JPG Discord and verify your wallet of choice through Guild in the “🧿roles-and-verification” channel. This will get you on the allowlist, which we open up in batches every 3-7 days. Once we open your batch, you will be able to mint your Canonicon from https://jpg.space/nft.
Proposing to the Canons
Once you have a Canonicon, you can start making proposals to the JPG Canons. Click on your Canon of choice, e.g. the Onchain Canon, to get started.
On the ensuing page, you will see an overview and the proposed voting criteria of the Canon in question. Each one of these lists is kicked off with three inclusion proposals, which you can find under the “Canons” tab like so:
On this page you will also find the “Voting Cycle” info. This info displays how much time is left in the current cycle, during which it’s possible to vote “For” or “Against” the community-proposed projects currently under consideration in the “Active” tab.
We’ll touch more on the basics of voting in the Canons shortly, but first let’s finish explaining how to propose a project to be added to a Canon. To proceed here press the “+ Submit NFT” button on the upper right side of the page, and then press the “+ Add collection” button on the ensuing page (1/1s aren’t yet supported, but support is in the works).
Doing so will take you to a search bar interface where you can input the name of the collection you’re interested in proposing. Once you find the collection you want, press the red “+” button next to its name; watch out for multiple deployments or copy collections!
On the next page, you’ll be given the opportunity to provide a comment on why the collection you’re proposing should be voted into the Canon in question, which others will be able to review and consider when they go to vote themselves. Add your explanation, press “Submit Add Proposal,” and then sign the ensuing transaction to complete your proposal.
Congratulations! You’ve now contributed to the Canons. Your proposal will appear under the “Pending” tab back on the main Canon page, and it will be able to be voted on in the “Active” tab once the next voting cycle begins. One cycle = one week.
Voting in the Canons
Go to the “Active” tab in your Canon of choice. The newest, most recent Canon will generally have the most options available to vote on, so keep that in mind. On the right side of the “Active” dashboard, you will see “For,” “Against,” and “Spam” (which is reserved for low-quality/bad faith proposals) voting options.
At this point, you can go down the line and start selecting your voting options for the proposed collections. If you click on an individual collection, you’ll be taken to the associated proposal page where you can review the proposer’s comments and consider them in your decisions.
If you’d like to ask a question or add to the conversation, you can scroll down the proposal page to the “Discussion” section where you can add comments of your own.
Once you’ve made all your vote selections, finish up by pressing the “Sign Votes” button in the upper right side of the page. This will prompt your wallet to complete a signature, and after this is done your Canon votes will be in!
Let’s JPG together
JPG builds cultural infrastructure and fosters critical cultural discussions for the NFT ecosystem. JPG Exhibitions are a free way to curate and organize NFTs as you see fit, and JPG Canons are a free resource for collectively mapping out the cultural landscape of NFTs. In kind, the JPG Discord has become a hub for some of the deepest conversations happening around NFTs right now, so please feel free to join us there any time to ask questions about JPG’s offerings, provide feedback, join the discussions around the Canons, share your art, share your exhibitions, and beyond — we’d love to have you!