After months of building, we feel super excited to be finally launching MARS. The NFTs are beautiful pieces of nature, coming with unique traits and further utility, like naming and art showcasing. Minting MARS as your personal parcel on Mars allows you to exhibit your digital art on the surface of the red planet.
Our core team consists of spaceP, Rov3r and spacemorty — three crypto-natives with a more than healthy amount of space enthusiasm. We collaborated for quite some years on different crypto projects. Finally, 4 months ago, we took the leap to start developing Mars26 with the vision to fuel excitement about the red planet and deep space exploration. Together with H.G. Wells and a few other people that helped along the way.
Now let’s give you the tl;dr before diving into our story:
- Our Mars NFTs are the highest resolution, natural color Mars images with global coverage to date, developed from NASA and ESA sources
- The art lives on our open source map, for everybody to build on and explore
- The art unlocks: Land. Art. Origin. Rarity. M26.
- We are committed to continue building, by time-locking our own NFTs for 12 months
- Community grants incentivize future building
- Supporting the India Crypto relief fund
We think of nature as art, and art as keys.
Nature as art
And beautiful nature demands to be explored. Which is why we built art to gaze at but also to zoom in, to travel and experience.
As it turns out, current Mars maps don’t actually use the best available images: Google’s Mars map uses low resolution images taken in the 70’s, and NASA’s site only lets you frankenstein a mosaic of maps of multiple resolutions of non-matching colors.
That’s why we started building Mars26 as a futureproof, Mars-worthy map with the most detailed, highest resolution images (and then open sourced it).
You can learn more about our process building the map here. And buying one of our Mars NFTs you will get the how-to and actual script to re-create the photographs and fiddle with the nobs (see below).
Art as keys
Sounds great. So what about the NFTs?
By building Mars26 NFTs (MARS) we are taking the next step. We are adding the keys to unlock the beauty of Mars’ nature, and also…:
Land. Each NFT represents a unique 2-by-2 degree surface area of the red planet. MARS owners are able to showcase their art and NFTs on their parcel, or others that permit.
Art. Nature is beautiful. Owning MARS means having unrestricted, permanent access to the high-res Mars image we developed from different sets of photographs taken by NASA and ESA orbiters into one consistent layer of high-res Mars imagery, an updated version of the image layer you see on our Mars26 map.
Origin. True ownership is being able to modify and rebuild from scratch. This is why owning MARS unlocks the guide and script to rebuild your own, unique Mars images from source files. Be warned, you need a strong computer, patience and a large hard drive!
Rarity. Each token also comes with a unique set of traits describing natural features like craters, sc-ifi features like popular places from literature and over 60 more feature categories, unique to the respective area. Check out the complete collection including all the features in our gallery!
M26. The M26 ERC20 token which lets you change the name of your parcel. And might enable even more in the future 👀
3 MARS Phases
Sounds like fantasy, am I dreaming?
MARS is very real. Let us show you our current progress and what we are building the coming weeks and months!
In total, there will be three phases. Before the auction, during the auction and from reveal to all eternity.
Since the auction hasn’t started, real ownership doesn’t exist yet. In this first phase, we are showcasing what’s technically possible on our Mars map: We are continuing our scavenger hunts, building art exhibitions on the Martian surface, and might just add a tiny bit of 3D art mayhem.
Once the auction has begun, and before the reveal (more to that below), is when the real fun begins. Buying an NFT verifies yourself as a real MARTIAN and enables you to use Mars as an exhibition layer for your other digital artworks. Non-MARTIANS can’t. (Booo, non-Martians!)
With the end of the reveal phase we enter the third and final stage. The pre-ownership sandbox is wiped and Mars is handed over to its decentralized NFT owners.
This is when we are introducing the web3 layer: Showcase your own NFTs on your MARS parcel and any parcel that whitelists you.
Proving to be long-term committed we locked our 500 team NFTs for 12 months. Along with hopefully many new fans, we will be continuing to make Mars exciting according to our vision, and we will keep building according our roadmap:
- Community grants. Events, exhibitions and collaboration with other NFT projects
- Development grants. Support in smart contract layer, geoserver development and building mini games (eg. Imagine coloring the whole planet as one big painting in space)
- Parcel trading. Would you like one with rare traits, or swap a few neighboring areas with other Martians?
- Parcel economics. Invite others to exhibit on your parcel or let them stake or pay M26 tokens, for you to earn crypto with your Martian soil
- Map updates: More feature layer such as the once featured in the NFTs, more image layers such as blue Mars
Do let us know your questions and suggestions on our Discord here.
MARS auction — Get your piece of humanity’s backup planet
Sounds great, when does it start?
The auction distributes all 16200 unique parcels of MARS, starting on Thursday, 13th May, at
07:00 Thursday, in San Francisco
10:00 Thursday, in New York
16:00 Thursday, in Berlin
17:00 Thursday, in Tel Aviv
23:00 Thursday, in Tokyo
Mars26 launches in a fair manner.
To guarantee the same chance of catching an NFT with rare traits and interesting imagery, the NFTs are distributed randomly for fair chances, by mixing all NFTs into an initial index that is only revealed when, after 7 days, on-chain randomness sets the final sequence of NFTs.
This way everybody will know the coordinates and images corresponding to their NFTs after 7 days, on May 20th, 2021.
There is no unnecessary FOMO curve. With the auction start, price increases based on the formula set in our smart contract, until each NFT is sold.
20% of the auction proceeds go to 0x68A9, India’s Covid Crypto Relief Fund. 40% support the team and early contributors, 40% go towards the community and development grants (see Gnosis Safe here) for long-term development (see roadmap). 500 NFTs are time-locked for the team for 12 months (see here) to prove our commitment and incentivizes us to build our roadmap.
With the end of the 7 day reveal phase, M26 issuance will decrease by 50% and participants will know which NFT they are buying.
Using the strongest possible technology
When we started our endeavor, we aimed to build NFTs to last, to live way beyond humans’ arrival on Mars. And here is how we — unlike other popular NFT projects — achieved that.
Mars NFTs are deployed on Ethereum with the smart contract being public and verified on Etherscan, based on the Hashmasks projects’ proven code. The contract itself stores a hash over all NFT metadata, the provenanceHash, proving the immutability of all metadata and their randomized initial sequence.
You can even verify this by yourself by concatenating all NFT metadata IPFS v0 CIDs in their initial sequence and hashing the concatenated string using SHA2–256. Note that we hashed the CIDs in their base58 representation (starting with Qm…).
Second, all NFT metadata such as images and traits are stored on IPFS, pinned by our own server and, to be truly decentralized, we also deployed the data to Arweave where nodes guarantee long-term storage on the Permaweb and additionally pin the exact same content to IPFS. A triple insurance, if you will.
The third part concerns the link between smart contract and decentralized storage. To make this part as strong as possible, we committed ourselves to writing all IPFS hashes into the NFT contract itself. Expensive, but worth it in our opinion. Since the NFT contract is already deployed, it is just waiting for us to spend the 20ETH on gas to write the information into storage. We’ll do this as soon as possible when enough of the first NFTs are sold.
Find links to each of the steps mentioned above and verify them on the provenance page.
MARS ❤️ you
As said, we are super excited to finally launch! Do join our community on Discord and follow us on Twitter:
We want to thank NASA’s Ames Research Center for their work on the Viking Mosaic, Caltech’s Murray Lab for their work on CTX imagery, USGS Astrogeology Science Center for their work on MOLA HRSC Blended DEM as well as DLR for their work on the HRSC, NASA and Goddard Space Flight Center for MOLA, the University of Arizona for their work on HiRISE, Malin Space Science Systems for the CTX camera, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory for various work and all institutions involved in the PDS. We are truly standing on the shoulders of deep space giants.
In our previous release, the skyrocketing ETH price made an auction hard. So we deploy again, with reasonable, adjusted prices. And our hard core fans of the previous MARS will be able to claim the NFTs in accordance with ETH spent.
