A quick introduction to Scenechain

If you know nothing about Scenechain and want to get it in short minutes then you came to the right article.

As a long-time bitcoin enthusiast, I believe that one of the most important use cases of blockchain technology is store-of-value. I am also a fan of generative audiovisual art which I believe is underrepresented in the NFT space right now. Scenechain is an NFT platform that is engineered with the goal to give the best chance for the generative-art pieces published on it to become stores of value in the long term. Scenechain uses two key mechanisms to achieve this: code-space scarcity and incentivized composability. Let’s discuss these two mechanisms.

Code-space Scarcity

Scenechain real-time movies are short programs that produce audiovisual presentations. Anyone can publish movies to the Scenechain code-space, but the whole code-space is limited to approximately 1Gbyte. 1Gbyte for all the movies altogether forever! The mechanism is the following: To upload a movie to the Scenechain code space, creators have to pay 1 SCODE token for each byte. SCODE is a deflationary asset: 1000,000,000 SCODE is created upon genesis and not a single token is created afterward. During movie upload 98% of the SCODE paid for each byte is burned, hence the approximately 1Gbyte limit for the whole code space.

Creators are incentivized to upload only quality content because the long-term value of their movie should be higher than the upload cost. Also, they are incentivized to achieve the desired effects using as little code as possible. This kind of limitation tends to foster creativity: the proofs are the amazing existing 64kbyte and 4kbyte demos in the demoscene.

Incentivized Composability

In Scenechain, creators can not only upload movies but also code libraries. (we use the term Scenechain packages to refer to both code libraries and movies.) The code libraries contain reusable-code. These code libraries can be anything a movie or another code library would want to use. Examples:

• a graphics rendering library
• a music player library
• a music decompressor library
• a music visualizer library
• a library that contains a song (data) that can be used in movies
• a library that contains utilities to generate interesting 3d geometry
• … and things that we do not anticipate today…

Creators are incentivized to upload useful libraries because they get paid a royalty each time another package uses the library.

Creators are also incentivized to use these libraries in their movies because although they have to pay royalties, it is still much cheaper to pay the royalties than to copy the code into their package.

Network Effects

It is not hard to see the positive feedback loops designed into the system:

• The more valuable the whole ecosystem is the more effort creators put into their movies
• The more effort goes into the movies the more valuable the movies become thus the more valuable the whole ecosystem becomes
• The more valuable the whole ecosystem is the more effort creators put into creating useful easy-to-use libraries
• The more useful and easy-to-use libraries there are, the easier it is to create amazing movies, and instead of solving problems already solved by libraries creators can spend their brain juice to push the boundaries further in new directions.

Scenechain is designed to simulate Renaissance Florence: we anticipate innovation and a vibrant art scene on Scenechain in the next couple of decades. Eventually — due to the limited codespace — innovation will slow down, uploads will become rare. By that time we think there will be already tremendous value captured in less than 1 Gbyte and Scenechain can become mostly the playground of conservative long-term art collectors.

If you are interested in the details please visit the Scenechain website and read the Scenechain whitepaper.