A hug from the internet

Abasho means hug.

It comes from abrazo, Spanish for hug. When Spanish-speaking kids are still learning, the R and Z come out wrong and abrazo turns into abasho. It's the word a child says when they want to be held.

That's where the name came from.

2021: a gift

Back in 2021, artist and developer cvasqxz dropped 250 generative pieces as a thank-you to supporters of a previous project. cc0 license. 0% royalties. Art on IPFS. No roadmap, no utility pitch, no year-long holder gating.

That wasn't the default at the time. Most drops shipped with multi-year roadmaps and locked-in royalties. Abasho just said hi and walked off.

It wasn't meant to turn into anything bigger.

What it became

The people who claimed an Abasho stuck around. Other people showed up. Some were already well-known onchain artists and collectors, some were early-career and now aren't. The collection quietly became a rolodex of the people who actually care about this corner of the internet.

A few Abashos worth naming:

• Yot, creator of FUGZ.
• ppmcghee, Community Lead at Pudgy Penguins.
• BrightAvian, Pudgy Penguins OG and longtime onchain collector.

…and a long tail of artists and collectors beyond that list. Abasho is less a 250-piece drop now and more the intersection of those people.

The canonical home for the pieces is the OpenSea collection. The rest of the collective lives in Discord, in DMs, and on everyone's timelines.

Why this blog

Most of this story is scattered across Discord threads and tweets that scroll away. This blog is a slower, public place to put the parts that should stick around:

• Notes on the tools we ship.
• Announcements when something new drops.
• Longer writing about the artists, the pieces, and the decisions that kept the collective cc0 and royalty-free after four years.

Welcome. Have a hug.