Blockchain Automaton

Extracurricular Activities490/500

This experimental project involves an on-chain cellular automaton. The features and cellular automaton rules are derived from the minter's address. Being the first (unto my knowledge) project on fxhash that generates the artwork completely on chain, it seemed fitting to draw inspiration from one of the first projects on fxhash, "RGB Elementary Cellular Automaton".

What is this?

An experimental generative token that integrates on-chain generation, and on-chain storage of the artwork. This is accomplished using a custom smart contract. The artwork is generated using the generate_on_chain entrypoint in KT1GRFujk5m6feK7gJcqCU7ijJkFgx5JigEt, and the generated image is subsequently stored on-chain as a byte-string of pixels (row-major order) in the tokens bigmap in KT1GRFujk5m6feK7gJcqCU7ijJkFgx5JigEt.

How does this work?

Smart contracts have a default entrypoint which is automatically called when XTZ is sent to the contract. By using a smart contract as the primary address, the default entrypoint will be called every time a token is minted. Of course, to prevent accounts from bypassing the fxhash contracts and sending XTZ directly to the smart contract, generating and storing the artwork on-chain, the smart contract checks that an fxhash contract is the account sending XTZ. In this smart contract, the default entrypoint immediately calls the generate_on_chain entrypoint for the sole purpose of making the generation process more apparent on indexers like tzkt.

In order to make this project compatible with fxhash, the artwork produced by the code submitted to fxhash must be identical to that which is produced by the generative algorithm within the smart contract. At the time of development, the minter's address is the only piece of information which is readily accessible via the fxhash snippet API and in the smart contract. As a result, each account can only generate a single unique artwork (this is enforced by the contract). In the future, this issue could be solved if the fxhash snippet API provided access to the iteration number, as the smart contract could also keep track of this information quite easily.

Consequently, collectors who wish to collect more than one iteration must create additional accounts to mint. The tokens can then be subsequently transferred as per usual.

Why is the variations preview disabled?

Because the minter's address is the source of randomness for the generated artwork, not the hash provided by fxhash, changing the hash in the variations preview will have no effect. To see different variations of the artwork you need to modify the fxminter URL parameter in live preview mode.

Why does the mint button not work on the fxhash frontend?

Currently, the fxhash frontend has a default storage limit for mint operations that is less than what is required to store the generated image on chain. As a result, the mint button will fail on the fxhash frontend. To get around this, you can mint this token on a mini-website I created (https://blockchain-automaton.netlify.app/), or on Better Call Dev, or by injecting the transaction directly onto the blockchain.

But Why?

Because experimentation is fun.