Generative NFT Coding

Information Regarding Generative NFT Coding Services

What it is, and how my new company GenerativeNFTs.io approaches it.

Lol, this looks nothing like the code we are referring to. But, it’s code, so it’s a nice pic here. Photo by Pankaj Patel on Unsplash

Lately at Array Web Development (now known as GenerativeNFTs.io, I’ve been asked a few times about generative NFT coding assistance. [AUGUST 2021 Update: Make that many hundred times!] So, I wanted to talk about that and describe how I approach such opportunities. (Since first writing this, I’ve actually quit my job to focus solely on bringing generative NFT drops to life for clients around the world!)

To begin, you might ask me the following question:

What Is Generative Coding for NFTs?

Good question! What we’re talking about here is the programmatic generation of non-fungible tokens (NFTs), which usually would mean graphic files when we’re talking about generative coding. Even that may sound vague to some, so let’s use an example.

1. Let’s say you have a basic outline of a face.
2. You also have other “traits” you’d like to include, at least sometimes. Think of these as options or variations. For example, sometimes the face is smiling, sometimes it’s frowning. Sometimes it’s wearing eyeglasses. Sometimes it has blue eyes, sometimes green. It can have one numerous hair styles (long, short, straight, curly, none, etc.). You can also think of other changeable aspects as traits — things like the background color, which you may want to be able to change, and/or any extra items that might show on the graphic when it’s generated.
3. You might have special rules as well — almost anything you can imagine. Things like, “if the character has pink hair, then they can only have red earrings” or, “if the character has eyeglasses, then there’s a 50% chance that a bird will show in the background.” Literally, any scenario imaginable can be coded into these systems.

As you can imagine, there would be many millions or billions of combinations, just based on the basic examples given above. It would be tedious and extremely work-intensive to generate a set of, say, 10,000 unique combinations (out of the millions or billions of possibilities) by hand. So, instead of going down that road, we ask a computer for help. And that’s…