The evolution of cryptoart & NFTs
After the NFT industry began to break out in early 2021, it can be roughly divided into three small cycles:
Beeple’s sky-high auction set a fire on the cryptoart market. Cryptopunks began to gain market attention, the floor price reached 10ETH and the OG NFT project received the first round of exposure.
Following by early August, PFP NFTs set off the second round of craze in the market, and at the same time, generative art which represented by Art Blocks became the sought-after items.
The third wave was marked by VISA’s collection of punks, which further expanded the influence of NFT outside the crypto, so that the floor price of CryptoPunk rose up to 100ETH directly.
From the perspective of creation techniques, the NFTs goes from the IPFS based metadata represented by Cryptopunks to the algorithm generated metadata represented by ArtBlocks, and then to the block native content which represented by Loot. The community is increasingly inclined to crypto native NFT assets
In essence, any digital media on the Internet can be minted as NFTs. However there is a problem that has not been solved for a long time - How to prove the minter of NFT is also the creator of content in a decentralized way? Copyright is the natural right owned by creators, but also relies on the certification and endorsement of centralized organizations.
So we can see two different types of NFTs: the copyright NFT market endorsed by large companies and the native NFT market created by the crypto community. The former is represented by NBA Topshot, and the latter are represented by the mainstream NFT projects built on Ethereum.
With reference to the evolution of the Internet, from portal websites like Yahoo with read-only content (web1.0) to social media/social network with interactive content (web2.0). Users are given the power to create, and are no longer the one-way recipients of information.
So we can simply divide NFTs into two types: read-only metadata NFT and readable & writable metadata NFT(2.0). Whether it is a Punk, ArtBlocks or Loot, although they have different generating mechanisms, their final metadata are fixed and cannot directly call smart contracts for secondary creation and provide additional value for the original NFT during evolution.
If you think about the product design of Twitter, when a Tweet is retweeted and commented by others, it is actually the retweeter who made a secondary creation based on the original content, at the same time spread and promote the original material, which is a text-based evolution. It could be considered as a basic idea of interactive NFT design if the creation of an NFT can evolve and capture value as it evolves.
So how did the TopBidder team design NFT2.0 products? Here we need to innovate around three aspects: product mechanism, financial mechanism and technology realization.
First of all, the team has the following basic concepts for NFT2.0:
- No certification is required to mint NFT works
- The NFT creator owns the crypto native verifiable intellectual property on the blockchain
- The “intellectual property” of the work should be open sourced and can be derived by other works
- The material which derives other works should receive corresponding value when these works generate revenue.
Product mechanism:
- An image is composed of rectangles, which replace brushstrokes and become the basic elements of creation on the blockchain. Because the rects have good composability, it is suitable as a standard interface for multi-person creation and can be used as a basic component of collaborative NFT.
- The image is generated and recorded natively on chain, and then rendered off the chain
- A single NFT is used to record and retain the historical creation state, and it can fall back to any state in the creation process to fork. The entire system is a 32-level deep tree, giving the NFTs a space that can grow and evolve.
- Any work in the system is modular and can be used by other works in the form of components
- The size of the canvas is set to 240×240, which can be divided into 18 different precisions
Financial mechanism:
Separate the copyright owner from the publisher. NFTs has two direct beneficiaries: the creator and the curator(NFT owner), and the benefits of both parties are aligned.
The curator is the current owner of the NFT and has the right of receive passive income from all its child NFTs (each NFT can evolve up to 255 child NFTs)
With the help of the built-in Bonding Curve pricing mechanism by TopBidder protocol, the gaming among the curators for the publishing rights of a NFT can provide the best market price for the NFT creator.
All NFTs evolved from Genesis formed a value chain. Each NFT’s bidding not only brings value to its parent NFT holders, but also can capture the value from the child NFTs’ bidding through the above-mentioned game mechanism.
Technical realization:
To record the evolution path of a NFT through tokenID so that the tokenID of any ancestor NFT can be deduced, each evolution creates an index.
Separate the storage status of NFT metadata: one NFT only stores the current 8 rects and the name of the work, and then read the metadata of the ancestors’ NFT through the index of the tokenID recursively to obtain the final full image.
Due to the expensive cost of gas, only the basic elements including coordinates, size and color of the image will be recorded on chain. The rendering will be handled off chain. A variety of rendering tools can be achieved through plug-ins crafted by the community.
What creative scenarios does RECT have?
- Crypto Artworks
- Collectables, Wearables, PFPs, Logos, Memes…
- Items, NPC, Cards in a game or billboard in a metaverse
RECT.ART not only supports multi-person relay creation, but also allows NFT minting through multi-sig contract address. For the artists group, the metaverse architects team or a project DAO, joint creation can be carried out in this way, so that the multi-sig contract could receive the passive income continuously. This could be a way of public fundraising for the community.
The Metaverse is still in the early stages, and players can use public NFT minting platforms such as RECT.ART to make contributions. At present, the disadvantage of NFTs on Ethereum is the expensive gas cost. When the layer2 become more mature, it is expected that there will be a more cheaper gas cost.
RECT.ART will start testing in late November and is expected to land on the Ethereum in early December. Welcome to join the Discord community to participate in the discussion. The community will hold online AMA activities and prize test activities in the near future.
Join the community
https://rect.art (opening soon)
