Some of the recent happenings in Tezos’ art spaces, talks of TEIA starting their own baker, and recent polls have brought to attention to the fact that there is a need for TEIA to either update, upgrade, or replace the current minting contract in order to stay relevant to the ecosystem’s changing needs.
@jagracar has mentioned several times over the years that TEIA is “ready” to swap out the contract “whenever we are ready”, but until recently (largely due to the market slowdown) there hasn’t been a push to do it, just yet. But at some point, it will have to be done - especially if the markets start to pick up again.
The biggest issue is that in its current state, TEIA volunteers are basically subsidizing HEN/TEIA mints by not charging anything - it doesn’t even cover the costs to pin the file itself, so it is a loss of resources and revenue on the part of the organization as a whole, per transaction. This problem gets worse the more popular the platform gets - so it needs to be addressed sooner than later.
This decision is likely to be controversial, since it represents the TEIA community to take its own steps towards its own independence and self-sustenance, a significant departure from the direction of the community up until now. We will have to put this to vote at some point, either way, but also make sure that the proposal itself is both realistic and is something that the community actually wants.
Personally, I’m in favor of TEIA focusing its activities around minting - by charging a small fee, perhaps set by the community itself. Maintaining the community we have here is very important - but I believe that the platform raising money that way is both realistic and plays to the strengths that TEIA already has.
But other ideas have been thrown around - we’d like to hear all of them then maybe narrow them down to a few that has that combination of doable and has people’s support.
This is not the first time we talked about this, btw - previous thread on this matter: