The Quest of Evolution Unveils the World’s First “Collaborative Crypto Novel” NFT Collection

The Quest of Evolution, a decentralized artist collective, is launching a new collection of non-fungible tokens (NFT) called The Oracle’s Verse. The collection, now available on OpenSea, is offered as the world’s first “crypto novel.” The Oracle’s Verse includes six multimedia NFTs that allow their owners to contribute to the underlying story, 200 words at a time.

The Oracle’s Verse: A Unique Collaborative Crypto Novel

The Oracle’s Verse-lore follows the journey of six characters traversing the memories of the collection owners, gathering more information inspired by the underlying art, which includes music, images and text. Each new owner can continue the narrative as they see fit, allowing the story to grow forever.

NFTs are used to build the story and ensure that each entry is unique. Every time someone buys one of these NFTs, they get access to the collection’s website, where they can add another 200 words to the story. Once the NFT is sold, each new owner can continue the process and add their own input.

All text is stored on the blockchain, as each new chip writes directly to the underlying smart contracts. This marks an interesting spin on the concept since artistic NFTs are typically static, pointing to an immutable image or other type of media file stored on the Interplanetary File System, or IPFS. This network, which is not technically a blockchain, makes it possible to store any type of file “forever”, without anyone being able to change it.

With Oracle’s Verse, since the object of the NFT is text, it can easily be written directly to the smart contract. The record of the stories will also be forever “engraved” in the chain, and no one will be able to change what has already been written.

Decentralized royalties

An interesting aspect is that here there is an incentive to be “serious” with what you put into the world. Each contributor to one of the crypto novels will receive a portion of the so-called Global Royalty Pool. This pool collects funds from NFT sales royalties, and if a novel’s intellectual property (IP) is licensed or sold to third parties to create movies, games, videos or other forms of merchandising, contributors can also benefit. A point worth mentioning is that 80% of the funds will still go to the DAO for the project, not the NFT holders.

Intellectual property rights in NFTs is a hotly debated topic. Most of the time, buying an NFT does not give you rights to the IP of the underlying art, and at most you will get a limited license for non-commercial use. Here, Quest of Evolution tries to partially decentralize the IP so that everyone can benefit from the royalties. The actual rights are still held by the company behind the project, although they claim this is purely for convenience, as it would otherwise be impossible to track individual contributions.

The Oracle’s Verse is certainly quite innovative in the space. It would be difficult to organize something like this without having NFTs as reliable proof of ownership and value. Ultimately, the success of this collection is in the hands of the NFT owners. If it goes well, it could be the first crowdsourced novel whose contributors are actually rewarded for it.

The project says that The Oracle’s Verse is just the beginning of a series of crypto novels. They already have plans to follow up with more individualized collections developed by well-known experts and artists. For example, a collection of scientific essays written by the philosopher and scientist T. Dylan Daniel (also known as Epic Dylan) is being auctioned on OpenSea, the first of which was published on May 1.

Another upcoming work is a crime novel made in collaboration with the renowned author Joseph Nassise and the musician Zep. Nassise is a New York Times and USA Today bestselling author who published over 60 titles, while Zep is known for his catchy hip-hop songs and video shorts that caught the attention of artists such as Limp Bizkit.

The Quest of Evolution, the collective behind The Oracle’s Verse, is developing a multi-chain platform to launch evolving NFT collections across various EVM networks, such as Ethereum (ETH-USD), Polygon (MATIC USD), Moonbeam, Optimism and Arbitrum. It has a governance token called QEV, which is currently used as an incentive mechanism.

For example, buyers of The Oracle’s Verse NFTs who contribute to the story will receive an additional 200 QEV tokens (the token has not yet been launched). The plan is for the holders of the token to receive the majority of the royalty income from the art generated by the collective.

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