Reno to digitize Burning Man ‘Space Whale’ as NFT on Tezos blockchain

Reno, the closest major city to the famous art festival Burning Man, is developing its own decentralized autonomous organization, or DAO, and a token in partnership with TQ Tezos, a tech firm building Tezos-based solutions. 

Mayor Hillary Schieve announced the city’s plans to create the Reno DAO in a Thursday Tez Talks podcast hosted by the Tezos Commons Foundation.

The city will build its Reno DAO and Reno Coin on top of the Tezos blockchain network in order to monetize art objects and pieces as well as further explore the potential benefits of blockchain and crypto to solve some of its biggest pain points, Schieve said.

As part of the plan, the city also plans to digitize Burning Man artwork in the form of non-fungible tokens, or NFTs. According to Schieve, the city of Reno will create its first NFT for Burning Man’s Space Whale sculpture, a major festival artwork located in Reno. The mayor said that turning the artwork into an NFT would help the city monetize and support local art and serve as a starting point for the mainstream adoption of crypto:

“It’s gonna take a long time to adopt, we know that […] But eventually, this will end up being mainstream, where citizens will get it, and I think you also have to walk before you can run. There are really easy ways to get my community to start using cryptocurrency to pay for things like sewer payments.”

Theodore Clapp, a local undergrad researcher involved in the initial design of the Reno DAO, chose the Tezos ecosystem for building the project. Clapp explained that he found Tezos the best fit for the DAO in terms of its resources and frameworks. “So I eventually decided on Tezos,” the researcher said, elaborating:

“I’m not biased, I’m not like a Tezos maximalist or anything. I just went to CoinMarketCap and went down the list investigating the different blockchains and the technologies that were available, to actually develop a DAO, because I was trying to find the best platform for scalability, fees, long-term sustainability.”