Brands and sponsors
Sponsorship can fund an artist, a programme, access, and production. It cannot buy the history, a reward scheme, or any claim about value.
Sponsorship works here the way it works for a commissioned mural or a festival stage. You pay for the thing to exist and for people to reach it, and you are credited for that. What you cannot buy is the record, because nobody sells it and nobody holds it.
What your money can buy#
- An artist's time. Someone has to design the : what its mean, how long it stays open, what a moment is worth saying.
- Production. Screens, projection, invigilation, a room, a renderer, and a written account for people who cannot see the projection.
- Access. Every contribution costs a real Bitcoin network fee, and each live path holds 1,000 satoshis in its output while it is alive. A sponsor can cover both so that taking part is free at the point of use. That is the single most useful thing a sponsor can do.
- Reach. Getting people to turn up, and telling them honestly what they are joining.
- Documentation. The archive, the write-up, the text-only account. This is the accessibility work that budgets usually cut first.
What it cannot buy#
- The history. A world is not issued by anyone and is not held by anyone. There is nothing to acquire, nothing to license, and nothing to take down.
- Placement. The order of events is decided by which block confirms them. No amount of money puts a moment first.
- Removal. A confirmed cannot be edited or deleted, including one you dislike. Plan for that before you attach a name to a public world.
- A reward scheme. ChainBloom has no points, balances, drops, tiers, or any mechanism to give participants something for taking part. A campaign that implies one is describing software that does not exist.
- Any claim about value. Nothing here is a token, a collectible, or an asset, and there is no marketplace. A contribution has no price and no resale path.
- Numbers you can report in advance. There is no public index of confirmed worlds switched on today, so nobody can tell you how many worlds exist or how many people have taken part. What is running is the honest sheet to put in front of a client.
Where a sponsor's name can honestly appear#
Almost nowhere inside the record, and that is worth knowing before the brief is written.
The only free text a world contains is its title: at most 32 characters matching ^[A-Za-z0-9 ._:-]*$, chosen once when the world is created and never editable afterwards. Everything after that is numbers: a glyph, a palette, a motion, a magnitude. There is no logo field, no metadata slot, and nowhere to put a URL.
So the name lives where sponsors' names normally live: on the wall, in the programme, in the credit line, on the site, in the press release. If the artist chooses to put a partnership name in the world's title, that is an artistic decision made once and never revised.
A brief that survives contact with the work#
- Write the credit line and the wall text before the world is created, and have the artist approve both
- Fund participation costs directly rather than reimbursing people afterwards
- Agree in writing that the sponsor has no editorial control over confirmed events
- Strike every word about ownership, value, or rewards from every draft
- Name the person who answers when a participant asks what happened to their contribution
- Take the end date from the world's own duration, not from the media plan
What good looks like#
The sponsorship nobody argues about is the one where the money is visible in the work and invisible in the record: free participation, a well-made room, a proper archive, and a credit line that says plainly what was funded. The history stays readable long after the campaign ends, and it carries no logo. That is precisely why people trusted it enough to take part.
Next: read Artists and curators to see what the person you are funding actually has to decide.