onchaingang

We were trying to make an onchain generative art project, but haven't finished it.

I've really been diving deep into generative art lately.

My feeling is that there are different degrees to which a token's value lives onchain and is thus immutable.

A self contained generative algorithm is in essence very pure. It is uniquely resilient to censorship, and relies on the intrinsic value of the underlying network itself.

It's very inline with the ethos of crypto.

We didn't have enough time to complete our main project, but we learned a lot in the process.

The project is an ERC721 compliant smart contract that allows the end user to mint an NFT.

Unlike most NFT's, where the actual art is stored on some centralized server, the onchaingang aimed to make a token that is entirely self-contained, and programatically builds a new piece of generative ascii art on mint.

Because storing the art on chain storage is prohibitively expensive, we instead opted to expose a draw algorithm and store each tokens seed. That way at any time, someone can query the token on the block chain (for free) to draw its contents using the stored seed.