Why pricing
protects the wall.
The pricing isn't just about revenue. It's the primary mechanism that keeps this a meaningful cultural artifact rather than a spam board.
An open free canvas would be overrun within hours — coordinated brand takeovers, offensive content, bad actors flooding the board to disrupt. Pricing creates intentional friction. Every buyer has to decide their space is worth the cost, which means they think about what they put there.
The minimum spend of $50 USD is low enough to be accessible to a solo developer, but high enough to stop casual abuse. The centre costs $2,750 USD for 500 pixels — which is exactly the point. The most prominent space on a historically significant artwork should require genuine commitment.
No free placements.
No exceptions.
Every pixel on this canvas was purchased. There are no reserved zones for sponsors, no free placements for partners, no backdoor allocations. The creator does not get free space. If it's on the wall, someone chose it and paid for it.
Content
review.
Every purchase is reviewed before going live on the canvas. Hate speech, illegal content, and coordinated abuse are rejected with a full refund. The review window is 24 hours. Most placements go live immediately. The permanent record only contains work that was intentional.
One canvas.
Forever.
There will be no First Ask 2, no second canvas, no sequel once this one fills. The scarcity is real. When the 1,440,000 pixels are claimed, the canvas closes, the final image is minted, and the record is permanent. Nothing gets added after that.
Payment
security.
Card payments are processed by Stripe — PCI DSS compliant, no card data touches our servers. Crypto payments are processed wallet-to-wallet with no intermediary holding funds. All transactions are final once a placement is confirmed and the content review is passed.
Your coordinates
are locked.
Once a placement is confirmed, those coordinates are written to the database and to the on-chain record. They cannot be moved, overwritten, or sold to someone else. The canvas is rendered in real time from the permanent record — your position is yours from the moment of purchase.
Complete
transparency.
The economics of First Ask are straightforward. Pixels are sold. The revenue funds three things: the physical exhibition, the permanent digital archive, and the creator who conceived and built the work. Every dollar is accounted for and the on-chain record makes the transaction history permanently verifiable.
What we won't do is publish a percentage breakdown. Not because there's anything to hide — but because a spreadsheet on a webpage invites the wrong conversation. The right question isn't how the money is split. It's whether the project is real, whether the record is permanent, and whether your coordinates will still be there in a hundred years.
The answer to all three is yes.
A meaningful portion of every purchase funds the cost of producing and installing the completed canvas in a physical cultural context. Every buyer is a co-funder of the exhibition — not a passenger. When it goes up, you helped put it there.
The completed work is stored on Arweave — permanent, decentralised, not dependent on any company staying alive. Physical archival prints are produced. The documentation exists in multiple forms so the record survives regardless of what happens to any single platform.
Infrastructure, development, content moderation, legal, and keeping the digital canvas live and interactive permanently. The pixel count updates in real time. The hover identification works forever. That requires ongoing stewardship.
First Ask was conceived and built by one person. Art has always had a creator who was compensated — from the painters of La Lindosa to every artist who ever sold a work. This is no different. The creator is the originating artist and is compensated as such.
The honest
position.
This is not a DAO. It is not community-owned. It is not a charity. It is a cultural project made by a person, with transparent intent, asking you to be part of something permanent and significant.
The fact that it needs to succeed financially doesn't make it less meaningful. It makes it more honest. The La Lindosa painters didn't paint for free either — they used resources, time, and effort that had real cost. The impulse to leave a mark has never been separate from the reality of survival.
What you can verify: every placement is on-chain. Every transaction is traceable. The record is permanent. The work is real.
Where it
goes real.
The instinct to put this on a Times Square billboard is understandable — scale, visibility, cultural cachet. But Times Square is an advertising environment. Everything on those screens is a product to be sold.
First Ask is not a product. It's a record. And records belong in places that treat them as such.
The exhibition strategy prioritises cultural institutions and art contexts over commercial display locations. The completed canvas should be seen in places where people go to look at things that matter — not places where people look while waiting for the light to change.
& biennials
Major art museums, international biennials (Venice, Basel, Frieze), and cultural centres. These contexts frame the work correctly — as a significant artifact of the AI era, not a tech company's marketing campaign.
permanent installations
A permanent installation in a significant building — an airport, a civic centre, a university — carries different weight than a rotating billboard slot. Permanent is the word. This work is about permanence.
digital displays
Times Square, Piccadilly Circus, prominent LED installations in Dubai and Hong Kong. High visibility, broad reach. The risk is the context — these are advertising environments. Could work as a secondary display after the primary art context is established.
not yet confirmed
No display location has been formally secured at time of launch. The exhibition fund exists to make this happen. Part of the project's mandate is to pursue the right venue — one that treats this as art, not advertising. Buyers are co-funding that pursuit.
What you
actually own.
You are not buying an NFT. You are not buying a token. You are not buying a membership or access to a Discord.
You are buying a permanent, verifiable position in a historically significant artwork. Your x,y coordinates on this canvas will be recorded on Ethereum and stored on Arweave. That record cannot be edited, backdated, or removed. It will outlast this website, this company, and very likely anyone reading this.
Your coordinates are yours. Your design is yours. Your name is in the record. That is the thing of value. Not a token price. Not a floor. The provenance itself.
Like all significant works, the completed canvas will have value determined by history and by the market. We won't speculate about what that means. We will say: the record is permanent, the work is real, and you were here.