‘Treasury’ by Suez Canal Republic

Fakewhale Circle in dialogue with Suez Canal Republic

Within Fakewhale’s ongoing research into practices that recalibrate the relation between digital art and contemporary art, we have been focusing on projects that enact complexity rather than merely describe it. We look for works that operate as living systems, where technology, governance, and public encounter form a single aesthetic field. This approach foregrounds pieces that generate questions through operation, presence, and accountability.

In this context we turn to Treasury by Suez Canal Republic. Treasury is a remote, solar-powered financial node that treats strategy as behavior, audit as public proof, and access as embodied proximity. It prototypes an institutional form where energy cycles, market signals, and local rituals cohere into one artwork.

Treasury operates as a complete stack that joins energy systems, market logic, and public ritual inside a single field instrument. The node runs off-grid on solar input through MPPT control with LiFePO4 storage, and it regulates activity by battery thresholds, sun windows, and forecast-aware duty cycles. They anchor execution to an ARM-based computer with a hardened, read-only root and a secure element that signs with Ed25519 and rotates session keys. Market access moves through a strategy engine that combines momentum, trend following, mean reversion, and cautious sniping with explicit budget control, slippage caps, simulation before send, and cancel on stall. Risk filters evaluate holder distribution, liquidity, LP locks, sell ability, contract age, volume, and volatility guards. In this configuration, trading reads as behavior that answers to climate, power, and locality rather than only to price.

They design the node as an encounter. Access is strictly proximal. Visitors pair over Bluetooth LE, read state and health, and receive the option to perform a one-time claim under caps tied to current balance ratios and time locks. Paper is first-class. The device prints a thermal receipt with header, short signature, and checksum, and it maintains an append-only ledger with QR or NFC export for delayed reconciliation. Comms favor locality with optional LoRa summaries and a satellite beacon for presence pings, while GNSS provides time and provenance with controlled jitter. The hardware lives in an aluminum enclosure with gasket and tamper reed, secured by a smart lock with local override, and it travels as a field-repairable backpack in the 9 to 12 kilogram range. Every part of the stack carries a license and an ethic. Hardware adopts CERN OHL S, firmware adopts GPL-3, and documentation and data adopt CC BY 4.0. The node refuses personal data collection and relies on pseudonymous proofs only. Audit becomes a public habit rather than a private service.

They stage speculation as a civic practice. Treasury sits inside a fragile bubble ecology where value emerges from small temporary crowds, meme pressure, and ambient sentiment. Strategy behaves as drift. The balance rises or contracts in step with energy cycles and social weather. Presence becomes the price of participation, and geography writes policy. The work produces a micro-commons that forms around schedules, cooldowns, retries, and care. Governance appears as readable parameters and community review with the possibility of forks. In this sense, Treasury acts as an institutional prototype that treats finance as environmental choreography and treats infrastructure as cultural form. The machine speculates on speculation, and the field becomes both venue and regulator.

By aligning conceptual speculation with material experimentation, they locate their practice at the intersection of artistic production, infrastructural design, and technocultural critique. To expand on these foundations, we engaged Suez Canal Republic in a series of questions that position Treasury within a deeper Dialog Flow, tracing the conceptual and technical dimensions that shape their work.

Fakewhale: Treasury synchronizes to daylight and battery health. How does an energy-first constraint determine market exposure, scheduling windows, and acceptable drawdowns across seasons and latitudes?

Suez Canal Republic: The first Treasury was designed to speak rarely. A hushed voice in the wind, not a market bell. Its energy draw was kept intentionally low, optimized for a few thoughtful operations rather than constant chatter. We calibrated it for longevity and restraint: a machine built not for speed but for survival. While it interfaces with traditional and DeFi markets, its gaze is slow, strategic, more like a vessel tuned to long cycles than a scalper chasing flashes.

Of course, it could remain always active. Backup packs, power relays, even fixed installations could keep it talking day and night. But that would make it less a treasure. The essence of Treasury lies in its dormancy and in its absence. It may be discovered, yes, but even when found, it might remain asleep. Or its balance may be empty, its reserves drawn down by others, the machine resting in a quiet state of preservation.

This is part of its choreography: speculation becomes ritual, and ritual embraces uncertainty. The sun might not charge it fully today. The claim may be locked. The node might be conserving the last trace of its energy like a ship sealed for winter. All of this conditions how and when it engages the market.

So: exposure is not continuous but earned. The constraint becomes invitation. Treasury is a device that demands patience. It listens to seasons. It trades when its internal rhythm aligns with the outer light. Risk, in this context, is embodied. Found only by those who walk the last mile. And even then, the chest may not open.

Fakewhale: Suez Canal Republic describe the engine as a public, reviewable stack that blends momentum, trend following, mean reversion, and cautious sniping. What constitutes a “successful drift” when performance also functions as an aesthetic outcome and a public demonstration?

Suez Canal Republic: A drift is successful when it produces a trace that reflects situational alignment rather than optimization. It doesn’t aim for absolute return but for composure under uncertainty. The engine acts only when conditions converge: signal consistency, liquidity depth, minimal slippage, battery margin. Movement is rare, deliberate, and tied to thresholds across market behavior and energy state.

Each strategy operates as a conditional filter. Momentum confirms direction. Reversion tests reversal thresholds. Sniping isolates opportunity under risk ceilings. When these layers align and a position is taken or exited within defined limits, the outcome is not just justified, it becomes expressive.

Performance here is enacted in time, in front of whoever is present. It leaves a curve, a log entry, a material receipt. These fragments define the drift. If they show clarity in timing, restraint in exposure, and consistency with broader environmental constraints, then the drift has achieved its role: not to outperform, but to reveal position under pressure.

Fakewhale: Access is strictly local. Bluetooth pairing reveals state and enables a one-time claim with conservative caps tied to balance and time locks. How did you calibrate generosity, scarcity, and deterrence to sustain a durable micro-commons around the node?

Suez Canal Republic: Each claim is limited in a way that protects the system’s core liquidity, ensuring the node can continue to operate and respond over time, regardless of how many visitors reach it or how often. This base layer is preserved to maintain access to markets, to hold open the possibility of future action, and to prevent the system from collapsing after a single interaction.

Beyond this threshold, the balance is exposed. Whoever finds the node and fulfills the conditions can claim almost everything else. There is no expectation of moderation or fairness. This is a treasure, not a distribution platform, and like most treasures it does not offer itself to everyone equally. Those who reach it can take what they find, and the value of the encounter lies in the fact that most will not.

The calibration is shaped by time delays, local presence, and the internal pacing of the device itself. There is no way to anticipate availability without physically approaching the node, and no method for accumulating claims over time or delegating access remotely. What appears in that moment (whether a full balance, an empty shell, or a sleeping state) is what you face.

Scarcity is not imposed through restriction, but through context. The node exists in space, it consumes energy, it pauses. The system is durable not because it prevents extraction, but because extraction is rare, unpredictable, and physically costly.

Fakewhale: The node issues thermal receipts and maintains an append-only ledger with deferred reconciliation via QR or NFC. Which forms of proof matter most for public trust, and how do you treat receipts and logs as part of the artwork’s material vocabulary?

Suez Canal Republic: Receipts and logs are not central as isolated proofs but become meaningful when they feed into a broader cartographic process. Each local interaction generates data that can expand the speculative map: a new point in time, a signal of activation, a small confirmation that someone reached the node and that the treasure was, at least once, real. These fragments accumulate and suggest movement, proximity, absence. They can become part of a delayed narrative, composed over months or seasons.

However, both receipts and logs are only accessible locally. They require physical presence. They remain unavailable to anyone who hasn’t been there. What matters more are the external sources that help build the actual map: satellite images, old or misaligned geotiffs, altered terrain scans, outdated street view perspectives. These are the surfaces on which the speculative narrative unfolds. They offer the distortions and gaps where the treasure might hide, and where its pattern might start to emerge.

Together, these layers form the counter-map. Not a system of proof, but of alignment. Not a catalogue of transactions, but a geography of intention. Logs and receipts leave clues, but the real work lies in assembling fragments, mistrusting accuracy, and using incomplete information to construct a believable route to something that may no longer be there.

Fakewhale: Treasury reads value within a bubble ecology shaped by small temporary crowds and collective emotion. How do you register social signals without identity capture, and how do risk filters negotiate liquidity, holder distribution, and exit conditions?

Suez Canal Republic: In the initial phase the engine prioritized signals that emerged from large holders and structured flows. It responded to whale insight, following the movements of capital that acted slowly, with weight and direction, often signaling long-term positioning. These signals offered continuity and clarity. The system could act with minimal energy, trusting that such patterns revealed a deliberate intention behind the asset’s movement. Risk filters were calibrated accordingly, focusing on liquidity depth, distribution among holders, historical stability, and the age of the contract.

This approach has shifted. Platforms like pump.fun generate completely different conditions. Value now emerges through velocity, exposure, emotional resonance, and timing. The crowd is no longer a traceable cluster of known players but an unstable field of gestures, noise, and temporary consensus. Signals appear briefly and collapse. Recognition happens in seconds. The system needs more energy to read these movements, and the opportunity window is narrow. Assets become visible only for a short time, and their lifespan may expire before a full cycle completes.

Filters have adapted. They now prioritize responsiveness to sudden volume changes, distribution fragmentation, and early saturation signs. Identity is never captured or processed. What matters is the behavior of the asset as a field effect, not the profile of its participants. Entry and exit are governed by thresholds that favor collective attention over individual strategy.

This shift increases entropy. It demands more from the engine, more from the energy budget, more from the logic of engagement. But it opens new lines of contact between the machine and the speculative crowd. The node no longer follows large intentions across time. It listens for collisions, friction, noise, and sudden alignment. The ecology has become thinner, faster, and more expressive. It is still an ongoing system. Pump is evolving, and we are still studying how to respond to its dynamics with strategies that remain coherent, legible, and materially sustainable over time.

Fakewhale: The hardware relies on an aluminum enclosure, tamper reeds, a smart lock, and a field-repairable backpack kit. How do you design for vandalism, climate stress, and maintenance cycles while keeping openness and repairability central?

Suez Canal Republic: The node is designed to be placed in open space without supervision. This means it must resist not just technical failure, but weather, contact, pressure, and inattention. The aluminum enclosure protects against water, dust, and impact. The structure is sealed but not hidden. It is meant to be seen, touched, and in some cases handled, but never opened without reason. Tamper sensors register intrusions and trigger internal shutdowns or system locks when integrity is compromised. The smart lock reinforces this logic, allowing controlled access only when maintenance is necessary and authorized.

Environmental resistance is not an aesthetic layer but a functional precondition. The node must remain stable in extreme heat, humidity, wind, and temperature shift. Its components are selected to tolerate those variations without internal damage or signal loss. Ventilation is passive. Surface temperature is regulated by position and material. Batteries are chosen for thermal resilience and safe discharge.

At the same time, the entire system can be repaired on site. Each part is modular and replaceable using a small toolkit. The layout is compact but not closed. Nothing is glued or fused beyond recovery. If a battery fails, it can be swapped. If the printer jams, it can be cleared. The hardware reflects a balance between autonomy and intervention. It must function alone, but not forever.

This is not a closed device. It is not meant to disappear into infrastructure. Its presence must remain visible, interruptive, and accessible to those who understand its construction. The system remains open at the level of logic and form. It survives not by being unreachable, but by being maintainable under pressure and in public.

Fakewhale: Suez Canal Republic declare an ethics and license stack across hardware, firmware, and documentation. How do open licenses shape governance, forking cultures, and the possibility of a distributed fleet operated by communities in different territories?

Suez Canal Republic: The code will be made open source once testing is complete, especially the strategies linked to systems like pump.fun. The current version is still unstable. Publishing it now would only solidify temporary choices. Once the structure proves reliable, it will be released in full.

At that point, anyone will be able to replicate the node. Each deployment will be autonomous. Some will share access, others will hide it. Some will place it in visible civic space, others will embed it near infrastructures that do not announce themselves.

This possibility is central. Many remote zones are no longer neutral. Their isolation no longer protects them. Technology has made them governable. Surveillance towers, orbital relays, undersea networks, and satellite fields operate continuously in these spaces, often under the cover of old treaties of cooperation that no longer hold. Deserts, poles, international waters are tightly managed by overlapping jurisdictions, automated systems, and layered geopolitical intent.

Placing a node in these zones means inserting a device that does not belong. It does not support extraction or surveillance. It does not report. It stays silent unless approached. Its presence marks a different use of space. Not sovereign, not insurgent, just incompatible.

The open release of the system is not meant to unify these deployments. It simply gives others the ability to act, to place, to decide how value should appear in territories shaped by control. What they build will not be part of a network. It will be part of a map.

Fakewhale: What kinds of rituals have formed around the node in the field, and how have these practices revised your view of speculation as a civic act rather than a purely private calculus?

Suez Canal Republic: When you move through remote territories, you prepare for the unknown. The path is physical, exposed, shaped by variables you cannot control. The boundary between technique and superstition is narrow. You check your battery, your signal, your tools, and still you rely on something else: a sense of timing, a feature in the terrain, a trace in a low-resolution map. The important thing is to be ready. The moment is not negotiable.

Some people encounter the node by accident. They activate it without knowing what it is, or pass close without noticing. Others search for it deliberately. For them, the act becomes an orientation task, a speculative pursuit shaped by distance, fatigue, and shifting information. They follow stars, shadows, ridges, and instinct. The journey becomes part of the claim.

These places are not empty. They are surveilled, charted, regulated by infrastructures that rarely declare themselves. Towers, relays, orbital paths, encrypted flows. The treaties that once promised neutrality no longer apply. Technology has made these zones governable. Access is tolerated. Presence is recorded.

The search for the treasure produces its own form of market desire. At times this turns into fixation, rivalry, even obsession. But that impulse can be overrun by necessity. In certain conditions, survival takes priority. The logic of speculation collapses into more basic needs: water, light, shelter, exit.

This creates a tension that is never resolved. If two people meet, both searching, they might help each other. Or not. There is no rule. The environment does not decide. Each chooses what to share, what to withhold. Remoteness sharpens the ambiguity.

In these conditions, speculation stops being financial. It becomes a test of navigation, endurance, and presence. The node does not promise value. It does not guide. It waits. The ritual does not follow any structure. It appears through movement, decision, and exposure. You either reach it, or you do not.

The theoretical reflections developed by Suez Canal Republic, first presented at the OxBAT Conference in Oxford (2022) and later expanded through their field research, form the intellectual foundation from which Treasury emerged. Summarised and reframed here through a curatorial lens, these ideas describe the blockchain not as a technology of liberation but as an evolving architecture of control, an infrastructure capable of merging financial automation, biopolitical regulation, and distributed governance within the same operational field.

The trajectory they outline moves from the euphoria of the NFT boom to the silent consolidation of power by institutional actors. What began as an experiment in decentralisation has evolved into a planetary apparatus of capital accumulation, state surveillance, and speculative governance. Within this context, Treasury acts as a counter-infrastructure: a minimal, self-contained system that performs resistance through locality, scarcity, and exposure.

Rather than functioning as a financial prototype, Treasury becomes an allegory of infrastructure itself. It reflects how blockchain systems, once imagined as open networks, now operate as vectors of regulation, liquidity, and geopolitical command. The work introduces a paradoxical economy in which access is physical, energy replaces trust, and every transaction becomes a public gesture. The node does not simulate decentralisation; it reinstates it through the material friction of presence, distance, and light.

By situating speculation within climate and geography, Suez Canal Republic reformulate the conditions of digital participation. The node’s energy cycles mirror global patterns of extraction and dependency, while its open-source ethic reclaims transparency as a civic form. In this way, Treasury converts the logic of blockchain accumulation into a practice of attention, transforming audit into ritual and infrastructure into an aesthetic of accountability.

The same forces that shaped post-pandemic financialisation, including institutional entry, algorithmic dominance, and the militarisation of liquidity, now echo within this compact device. Treasury responds by slowing them down. It listens to power through weather, measures speculation through sunlight, and transforms the global architecture of finance into a field instrument for local speculation.

As institutions continue to absorb the language of decentralisation, Treasury reminds us that the political space of art lies not in scale but in the capacity to reorganise systems of relation. It stands as both artifact and proposition, a prototype for civic speculation and a living proof that infrastructure itself can still behave as an artwork.

Formulated as an expansion of the research that underpins Treasury, this appendix maps the geopolitical and institutional conditions that define the blockchain era. It traces how a network once conceived as a distributed system of freedom has gradually evolved into a vertically integrated structure of control.

From the pandemic years of 2020–2021, when NFTs and metaverse economies promised a new digital ownership, to the structural collapse that followed, blockchain infrastructures have consolidated around state and corporate power. The implosion of FTX and the Ethereum Merge exposed how decentralisation had already shifted toward regulation and institutional governance. By 2024, Bitcoin ETFs, MiCA-compliant stablecoins, and central bank digital currencies connected blockchain mechanisms directly to global finance.

In parallel, blockchain infrastructures entered the domains of conflict and surveillance. In Ukraine, crypto donations sustained civilian resistance, while in sanctioned territories such as Iran and Venezuela, digital assets maintained liquidity beyond embargoes. Across these contexts, the blockchain revealed itself as both currency of war and tool of speculation, demonstrating how every protocol of liberation can be repurposed as a protocol of control.

This dual nature defines the new topology of digital power. As liquidity and computation merge, blockchains act as instruments of governance as much as of autonomy. The decentralised dream has become a distributed hierarchy where code, capital, and territory overlap.

Within this landscape, Treasury operates as a counter-gesture. It is not a manifesto in text but a living system that resists acceleration through its own design. Its energy-first protocol turns scarcity into ethics and proximity into law. The node demands patience, sunlight, and presence, withdrawing from algorithmic speed to reintroduce civic time into speculation.

In this sense, Treasury does not oppose the blockchain paradigm; it reframes it. It mirrors its contradictions through material form, transforming a global infrastructure of control into a micro-institution of attention, transparency, and care.

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