We Made a Watch for the Metaverse
Meet CYPHER_WATCH — the NFT wearable aspiring to be as weird and wonderful as the blockchain universe it lives in
Every so often, I order little things from random corners of the Internet, not because I need them right then and there, but because I have a certain feeling that, one day, I might build something with them.
I don’t remember how I first came across Travis Lin’s DSTIKE. They produce a unique assortment of gadgets to delight any hacker’s heart. Some of those made it into my shopping cart, and a package soon arrived from China. I promptly put it in a corner of my workshop and out of my mind.
The little black box had been collecting dust for over a year when I found myself exploring an entirely different corner of the Internet, one where engineering and artistic creation were coming together in a whole new way.
Crypto is as much about people as it is about numbers
I had been following the cryptocurrency space from the sidelines over the years, without so much as a basic understanding of how a blockchain works and what one is good for. I was aware of Bitcoin as a store of value equivalent to billions of dollars and Ethereum’s ecosystem of decentralized applications from games to social media to art. It became increasingly obvious that something new and profound was happening here.
Kateryna Romanova and I had just established Inevitable Futures as a home for our projects and ideas. We’re into art, design, technology, and speculating about the future. As part of this, we decided to finally educate ourselves about the blockchain world. Khan Academy has a concise lesson on the fundamentals, other online courses give a good overview of the wider landscape, and even the famous original whitepaper is surprisingly accessible. I didn’t frame and hang it on my wall, but I’m beginning to understand people who do. It’s an extraordinarily elegant combination of ideas, uniting cryptographic signatures, hash functions, and proof-of-work to manufacture trust out of consensus. Crypto is as much about people as it is about numbers.
A wider audience became aware of NFTs earlier this year, when the artist Mike Winkelmann, a.k.a. Beeple, made headlines by auctioning off one such non-fungible token for 69 million dollars. But NFTs have a much longer and richer history, going back to earlier projects like Cryptopunks, which play to the strengths of this new artistic medium.
Technically, NFTs are ERC-721 smart contracts on the Ethereum blockchain. You either already knew that or it doesn’t tell you anything at all. More importantly, NFTs have now transcended into a vibrant global community, which is injecting new agency into the creator economy. You should watch Kayvon Tehranian’s TED talk for a much more eloquent explanation.
CYPHER_WATCH is a brutalist wearable device built to manifest NFTs in the physical world
NFTs have this peculiar state of being. They are abstract assets living in a purely virtual space, yet people can’t directly plug into the Metaverse (for now), and so we fall back to connecting indirectly. Every time an NFT collector admires their works of art, it happens through some kind of mundane physical device. Usually, that’s a computer with a web browser pointed at a platform like OpenSea or a wallet app like Rainbow on your phone. Some people also choose to exhibit their NFTs in virtual worlds like Cryptovoxels.
I happen to like simple devices that embrace their constraints and are dedicated to doing one thing well. When Kat and I were pondering ideas for dedicated NFT hardware, I soon remembered the little black box I had ordered and then put away. Inside was a developer kit for something you could almost call a smartwatch: a minimal computer with a small battery, a square display, and a wristband. It would become the scaffolding for CYPHER_WATCH, the brutalist wearable device built to manifest NFTs in the physical world.
It’s a play on the concept of a luxury watch, with the crucial twist that the value resides not in the tangible object itself, but instead in the cryptographic routines and consensus mechanism of the public ledger. CYPHER_WATCH looks like a piece of hardware, but under the hood it is a distributed software platform that allows you to link an Ethereum wallet and display NFTs on this dedicated and appropriately cyberpunk contraption.
The physical object itself is almost disposable, only loosely tied to the token, which is storing the true value on the blockchain. Should your watch be destroyed, neither artwork nor ownership are affected one bit. Wallet and NFT can be linked to a new watch, which will display the same artwork — not a perfect copy of it, but literally the same piece of art.
The appearance of CYPHER_WATCH mirrors the techno-futuristic nature of the concepts behind it. We took inspiration from the worlds built for movies like Blade Runner, matching the dystopian look with black exposed circuit boards and the neon glow of colorful animations. The DSTIKE components, after a few modifications, were a perfect match.
50% of the proceeds are preprogrammed to go to our artist friends at eBoy
CYPHER_WATCH is not a mass-market product. It felt appropriate to experiment with new forms of creation, discovery, and trade. The first few units will be given away to the owners of a special series of NFTs created by eBoy exclusively for this project. We partnered with the “godfathers of pixel” to create a special series of animated NFTs, all unique pixelated gems that sparkle in the ether.
The serial numbers #0001 through #0006 are now minted on Foundation, with more drops to follow. Think of these CYPHER_WATCH NFTs as vouchers, which — once acquired — automatically assign you the GEM NFT and trigger a physical watch shipment to an address of your choosing. We are using Foundation’s split feature, with 50% of the proceeds preprogrammed to go to our artist friends at eBoy.
From the moment of winning a CYPHER_WATCH at auction, the future of the associated tokens is up to the new owner. Would you keep them in your collection or put them up for auction again? Would you preserve the connection or separate the virtual from the physical? The watch could be linked to an entirely different NFT or continue to travel with the virtual ownership.
We have plans for more NFT drops from eBoy’s GEM series, followed by partnerships with other artists. The watch itself is equally meant to evolve continuously. You can connect with us and get the latest updates about CYPHER_WATCH by following Inevitable Futures on Foundation, Twitter, and Instagram!
A piece of art in itself, the project is deliberately over-the-top, yet entirely serious because it actually works and because we genuinely believe that something extraordinary is happening with crypto and with NFTs.
The whole project was also a lot of fun to build! This is the part where we get deeper into the tech. If that’s your kind of thing, do read on.
I’ve been a long-time fan of the ESP32 SoC. Its low-power mode was critical to previous builds of mine. This time, however, things would get a little more involved. The ESP32 is, after all, a microcontroller with two CPU cores but without an operating system and with rather limited memory. I wanted to make it do things like animate GIFs on a TFT display while simultaneously playing back audio or downloading data wirelessly.
On top of that, I wasn’t just building a one-off for myself and anyone able to modify the code to their needs. This device would have to be reliable and intuitive enough to be used by any NFT collector. There would need to be an easy-to-use setup experience and over-the-air firmware updates to patch things remotely. I landed on a basic client-server architecture to make all of this work.
The client is written in C++ and I finally made the switch to the PlatformIO embedded toolchain, which is a much cleaner build and configuration story compared to other Arduino solutions. The watch establishes an HTTPS connection to the server over Wifi for downloading updates, still or animated images, and sometimes audio. There’s an LED to signal status to the user and the all-important display, which needs to render progress bars, QR codes, and finally the artwork itself. The client is also packing a small web server for the initial setup, including a minified CSS framework to make it look nice. Audio is converted to PWM signals for the piezo buzzer, resulting in the most rudimentary of sound playbacks.
The server uses Python on Google Cloud Platform and looks deceptively like an App Engine application while actually using Cloud Run, which turned out to be most economical and performant for low-volume usage. This code takes care of providing the settings UI, converting data to fit the minimal memory of the client, and interfacing with the Ethereum blockchain to locate assets and verify ownership. I’m using the OpenSea API to look up metadata about NFTs and the MetaMask API to link wallets and authenticate changes with cryptographic signatures.
I considered ways to make the whole system much more native to the blockchain. If there’s enough interest in the project to justify the effort, I could imagine the watch interacting with smart contracts directly instead of going through my server. (In fact, I already have the Solidity code written…) A more ambitious but enticing direction would be a decentralized system that scales with open-source software and hardware while supporting server costs through on-chain payments. Maybe the whole project should even be run as a DAO?
For now, I’ve been focusing on assembling the first few watches, making sure that client and server are working properly for the handful of test users. We’ve had some manuals printed, and the first three boxes are all packed and ready to ship out.
Update: The first watches have found a collector and are now on their way!
Update 2: We’re in a gallery! Come see the watches at High Line Nine in NYC.
