How Tezos’s biggest NFT marketplace was raised from the dead

Hic et Nunc means “Here and Now” in Latin. But on November 11, when non-fungible token (NFT) artist Katherina “Kate the Cursed” Jesek tried to log onto the popular Tezos-powered NFT marketplace, her heart sank. 

It appeared that now Hic et Nunc had become Dead and Gone. 

Jesek wasn’t able to access the website or any of the art she had minted using the platform. “I was like, ‘Oh shit, is everything gone?’” she says. 

She opened Twitter to see if it was happening to others. It appeared that any user who tried to access the HEN frontend to discover or purchase NFTs was seeing the dreaded frowny face of an inaccessible website.  

As it turns out, the founder of Hic et Nunc had decided to pull the plug on the website without telling anyone.

But since the marketplace itself is based on open-source smart contracts, all was not lost. What happened next illustrates how Web3 tools allowed a community to bring back a marketplace that was abandoned by its creator. 

A beloved platform

Hic et Nunc (HEN) was founded in March of 2021 by Rafael Lima, a Brazil-based artist who wanted to create a decentralized asset management protocol that could help artists manage and monetize their work for cheap. Lima built HEN on the proof-of-stake-powered Tezos blockchain, which kept minting costs — and the environmental footprint of each transaction — small relative to Ethereum.

Although HEN was popular within the Tezos community, you may not have heard of it because it never reached the grand size of other NFT marketplaces like OpenSea, Rarible and SuperRare. HEN brought in $15.42 million in monthly trade volume at its peak in September — volume that paled in comparison to the $2.72 billion that OpenSea brought in that same month. 

What HEN lacked in trading volume, however, it made up for in its dedicated user base, says Jesek.

“HEN in the early days was really, really cool because there wasn’t a lot of money but a lot of artists — and a lot of artists that understood that there wasn't a lot of money. We were all just partying and making art, basically,” she says. 

Jesek joined HEN a few weeks after its launch. She was attracted to the low-cost minting and more affordable NFTs relative to other platforms. At the time, Ethereum-based marketplaces cost more to use and didn’t lend themselves to widespread art collecting, she says. 

For example, Ethereum-based marketplaces like OpenSea often list 1/1 editions, meaning there’s only one very expensive NFT of that piece of art, says Jesek. On HEN, she saw that artists would commonly have numerous editions. With, say, 50/50 editions, 50 people could buy NFTs pointing to the same piece of art, making each edition more affordable. Thus, members of the community who didn’t have a lot of money to throw around could still collect a lot of art, she says. 

An art collector who goes by Omarino agrees. He says the HEN interface looked bare bones, like a Tumblr blog — another social media platform in which amateur and professional artists alike shared their work. “For as bad as the official Hic et Nunc frontend was, it was a differentiating factor — and it appealed to artists a lot,” he says. 

The plug pull 

But the Hic et Nunc frontend was under the control of a single person: Rafael Lima. 

In one of the few interviews he’s done, Lima told a Tezos-centered news publication that one of his main visions for HEN was to have a decentralized platform that facilitated the monetization of digital assets. From this vision, a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) for the HEN marketplace called HicetnuncDAO, or HDAO, was launched around February of 2021. 

Despite the existence of the DAO, the marketplace itself has remained fairly centralized, as Lima controlled the website’s frontend and aspects of the HEN marketplace’s smart contract. Omarino says that the HEN marketplace smart contract sends a small contract fee to Lima’s wallet for every transaction. 

On November 11, the community saw the extent of Lima's control over the marketplace when he pulled the official hicetnunc.xyz website so that no one could access their HEN NFTs or purchase others. He then changed the bio of the official hicetnunc2000 Twitter account to “discontinued.” 

Lima did not inform anyone about his actions, nor did he come out with a statement after the fact (or respond to an interview request). Some have suggested, however, that Lima grew frustrated with the culture of HEN not aligning with his original vision of an artist-centric collaborative marketplace, and so decided to step away from HEN altogether. 

Picking up the pieces

The abrupt nature of Lima’s actions caused the HEN community to panic and worry that their digital assets were lost. But as it turns out, everything was not, in fact, gone — and that’s thanks to the decentralized and open-source nature of HEN’s backend. 

HEN has three crucial decentralized parts in the backend: the minting contract, the marketplace smart contract and the NFT metadata storage. 

The first two are stored on the Tezos blockchain and couldn’t have been pulled even if Lima tried. But losing the metadata storage could have meant that the NFTs minted on HEN, which are called “OBJKTs" (pronounced like "objects"), pointed to nothing — like a certificate of ownership over a painting that burned in a house fire. 

This was why, when Jesek initially saw that the HEN website was down, she wondered whether the marketplace used a decentralized storage system like InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) to protect OBJKT metadata, and if Lima could have pulled the IPFS data the way he had pulled the frontend. 

Thankfully, she quickly found that the IPFS data was still there; the directions to access the information were available on Github. HEN users' images, audio, video or other metadata associated with their OBJKTs were safe. But to add an extra layer of protection, she pinned her OBJKT metadata on IPFS herself. 

“A lot more entities are in the process of repinning the same metadata on IPFS through multiple services — this way the information remains available and redundant,” says Omarino. “This is also very interesting because not even the metadata will rely on any specific IPFS node to remain online.”

After the community found that these three backend components to the HEN marketplace were intact, they got to work making new frontends. Within a few hours, multiple HEN mirrors were up and running and allowed users to once again see available artworks, connect their wallets and purchase OBJKTs. 

While users couldn’t swap OBJKTs between mirrors, Omarino notes, each individual mirror acted essentially as hicetnunc.xyz, the original HEN marketplace that Lima set up before he took it down. 

“It's pretty much life back to normal now,” Jesek says, adding that if a HEN artist wasn’t paying attention to Twitter on November 11 and 12, they probably wouldn’t have noticed anything amiss in their marketplace — other than the altered URL. 

HEN and DAO

Now the HEN marketplace is in the hands of its community, and the plan is to fully transition into a DAO. The new HEN marketplace frontend most people gravitate toward, “hicetnunc.art,” is controlled by a HEN community member called Manticor on the HEN Community Discord. 

One of the biggest challenges the community must tackle going forward is whether “Hic et Nunc” is Lima’s intellectual property, as that would force the community to rebrand. Lima also appears to still have control over the contract fee; he reduced it from 2.5% to 1% on November 13, and HEN developers appear to be in contact with Lima over wresting that control from him. 

Still, in the end, it’s fair to say that HEN has successfully moved on without him. The episode gets at what’s different about decentralized web services. “It’s a big deal that it wasn’t a big deal,” Omarino says.  

What happened with HEN could happen on another decentralized NFT marketplace like Zora, says Jesek. With centralized marketplaces like OpenSea, though, the community wouldn’t have been able to rebuild the way it had with HEN.

“This was like a field test of Web3,” Jesek says.