More Hands Welcome

How does a figure usually end up in your hands?

If it comes from a big brand, a team designs its shape and features and makes a prototype. Then a factory takes over. Machines and workers on the line produce it and check it. It gets packed, stored, and finally sent to a shop, or to your door.

If it comes from a small studio, time and money are tight. It is usually cast in small batches and painted by hand, one at a time.

There is also a third way: an independent artist creates the character, and a larger toy company handles production, quality checks, packaging, and shipping.

Each of these works well in its own way. But most of them share one thing: they are closed. From design to production, everything happens inside one team, or one contract.

There is a good reason for that. Keeping things closed protects quality, and it protects the people who create.

But if you want more people to take part, it gets harder. How do you open the door to others and still protect every creator?

We do not have the full answer yet. But we want to try.

Over the past few years, a lot has quietly changed.

Almost anything you want to learn is online. With AI, one person can do more and more alone. Just ask, and the steps are right there. With a 3D printer, you can make a prototype at home, or a tool that fits your hand just right.

People no longer need to sit in the same office to work together.

Each new wave of technology brings the same question: will people be replaced?

Maybe there is another way to look at it. What if technology could help bring out more of the most precious, most human parts of us? Like creativity. Like feeling.

So could making a figure work differently, too?

You make an arm in one city. Someone else makes a joint in another. People who have never met, following the same standard, build something new, one generation after another.

Like the whole world building with the same set of blocks.

Let us start with openness.

A Nervape 3x comes apart into a body, two arms, and two legs. Each person can work on just the part they are best at. If you love mechanics, you can work on the joints and sleeves. If you understand movement and structure, you can design new arms and legs. If your head is full of wild ideas, you can give the body and limbs a look no one else would think of.

Once it comes apart, the pieces still need to fit back together. The standard for the sleeves in 3x's arms and legs is open source. As long as a part follows it, anyone's arms and legs can attach to a Nervape body. It works the other way, too: if someone designs a new body, other people's arms and legs will fit on it.

People in different corners of the world, at different times, from completely different backgrounds, all connect through the same standard.

Now, protection.

Being open does not mean losing track of who made what. The body and each limb of Nervape 3x carry a chip, and the records on the blockchain can only be added to, never changed. Whose hands made each part is written down and kept.

For now, these chips only record the parts we make ourselves. We plan to open this up. For example, creators could get materials from us, chips included, and we would write the record inside, so the parts they make get a birth certificate of their own.

We have taken the first step. More than twenty artists have picked up a Nervape 3x. So far, they have only worked on the surface: painting it, changing its colors, imagining it in new ways. Their pieces have been shown in exhibitions and taken home by collectors.

Leaving a figure blank for people to paint is nothing new. We want to go further: not just the surface, but the body itself, made by many different hands.

We often picture scenes like these:

In a garage somewhere, an independent artist has become the go-to designer of Nervape arms.

A 3D-printing studio keeps improving the sleeve, one version after another.

Someone who has never made a figure before prints a new arm for their ape at home, for the first time.

They may never meet. But the parts they make will fit together.

That day may still be a while away. But Nervape has been getting ready for it since the day it was born:

It comes apart. It fits together. And it remembers every hand.