Statues Forged From Ether
Over the New Years period I was stuck at home with Covid. It wasn’t a great time, but I decided to channel my anger and disappointment at missing the fun into working on a few project ideas I’ve had floating around for a while. (While you were out partying, I studied the code.) This article will discuss the only one I managed to finish, my new project Forged From Ether.
Ether as a Medium
Forged From Ether statues are designed to bring the idea of statues forged from valuable metals like bronze or gold to the blockchain. In the physical world, a statue forged from gold has both artistic value, based on its quality and provenance, as well as its material value — how much the gold would be worth if the statue were melted down.
Although NFTs have enabled scarcity of digital art, they lack this added connection with material value, as they do not have a material existence. Forged From Ether statues change this, by allowing artists to forge statues from ETH. As with a physical statue forged from gold, a Forged From Ether statue can be melted down by its owner, so they can reclaim the full value of the ETH that it was made from. However, as with a physical statue, this destroys the statue, and it can never be recovered.
To mirror the limitations of forging a statue from physical materials, the more material used in a Forged From Ether statue is (ie, the more blocks of Ether that are shown), the more ETH is required to forge the statue.
The Tech
The tech builds on Breifcase721, developed by Pringao Chevere, which allows NFTs to send and receive ETH as well as ERC721 tokens.
The implementation in Forged From Ether is much simpler, and doesn’t allow ETH to be added to or removed from statues, except when they are Forged or Melted respectively.
All Forged From Ether statues are ERC721 compliant NFTs on the Ethereum mainnet.
Scarcity
Token scarcity is achieved by two means: Firstly the material cost of forging from Ether enforces the same sort of natural scarcity that exists in the physical world. That is, it takes a lot of ETH to make a lot of statues, so even if that ETH can be reclaimed it should prevent too many statues from being forged.
On top of this, the smart contract will not allow two identical statues to be made. This means that when a statue is forged, they know their design can not be copied, and statue owners know that their statue is unique.
Design
Artists are given an interface to design their Forged From Ether statues. I added a few limitations, because I wanted the medium to reflect the tech that it’s built with. A big part was that I wanted the design data to be meaningfully stored on-chain, but I also wanted an aesthetic that meant all Forged From Ether statues would have some level of visual consistency.
Statues are represented as blocks of Ether which can be placed on a 16 x N grid. That is, it can only be 16 blocks wide, but can be as tall as you want. However, note that the ETH required for blocks above 16 increases exponentially. This, again, is a way of nudging towards aesthetic consistency without putting hard limits on what is possible.
Artists are also given the option to name their statues. The metadata of each statue contains the address of the artist who created it.
Melting
Statues, once forged, can be melted down by their current owner at any time. The owner received the ETH that the statue was made from, and the statue NFT is burnt. No statue using that design can ever be forged again.
Fees
When a statue is forged, a fee of 1% or 0.01 ETH (whichever is lower) is paid to the project creator (me) to cover development and maintenance costs. This means 0.01 ETH will only be paid for statues that are forged from more than 1 ETH, anything smaller will have a much smaller fee.
The reason for capping the fee at 0.01 ETH is so that if artists choose to explore the medium using large amounts of ETH, it doesn’t become too extractive. It took me the same amount of time and work to build this regardless of whether you want to make a statue from 0.001 ETH or 1000 ETH, so it only seemed fair.
I wanted to grant secondary royalties to whoever created a statue, and indeed ERC-2981 should in theory make this possible. However given the absolutely abysmal state of NFT secondary market royalties, this isn’t possible. Basically, we have the tech, but sites like Opensea have decided they’d rather not pay.
Forged From Ether
If you find this concept interesting, and fancy creating one of the first statues ever forged from a digital material, then I encourage you to forge your own!
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