Notes: Receipt is my first accepted proposal to the Fingerprints Curation Committee. I have aligned with Fingerprints’s vision and collecting thesis for a long time, and my personal collection also has overlaps with Fingerprints’s.

Receipt

Receipt is a conceptual art collection from December 2022. It has both unique mint mechanics and unique rendering mechanics. As someone fully dedicated to blockchain-native art, and enjoy experimental art, I find Receipt fascinating.

Receipt fits both my and Fingerprints DAO’s curation thesis extensively and sits in good company with the rest of Fingerprints’s collection.

The uniqueness of Receipt starts with its mint mechanics. The amount paid during the mint determines the visual itself. During the mint, any amount could be paid, but only once in the entire collection. This creates a unique situation where the collector would determine whether the increased payment would make the piece more valuable. The supply design is also interesting: While new Receipts can be minted forever, there is an invisible cap: Low-priced mints are already minted out, and it can only increase if people keep minting the low prices.

Meanwhile, with each transfer, the artwork gets updated, making the collectors and transactors participants in art. Dynamism mechanics are built within the EVM runtime, and each piece is drawn and stored on-chain and served to the browser from the chain.

This unique onchain dynamism qualifies Receipt under the Runtime Art category, in the tradition of Moon in Motion, Terraforms, The Metro, Chaos Roads, and more.

Collectors’ or traders’ involvement in art remains even if they pass the piece on to someone else.

As the wallet addresses accumulate in the artwork, Receipt also becomes a social document, prompting discussions about how human interaction can attribute value to art.

Communities can keep sending Receipt to each other as the JPG community did. Or the owner can keep sending it across their alt-wallets to accumulate. Either way, art requires participation from collectors and traders to build up and become more complex.

While the project is conceptual at its core, it’s worth mentioning that the technical build of the SVG is impressive since it’s hard to satisfy the photorealistic look in this medium. There are uses of turbulence filters, lighting, and text styling, which are what seem to be the main components of the achievement.

Artist Profile

0xHaiku has done several conceptual projects in the past few years, such as marquee shelter, Progressive, and more. In human-readable, 0xHaiku explored text distortion as they did for Receipt.

Some of these past projects work directly in the realm of EVM runtime. One of my favorites is “Still Remember” where 0xHaiku stored the JPEG of a happy memory on-chain which gets corrupted over time and can only be restored upon transfers.

Closing Thoughts

Receipt meets all of the objective curation criteria: It's on-chain, dynamic, coordination-encouraging, ownership-driven, and doing all of these through smart contract mechanics. But beyond that, Receipt raises important questions about value and aesthetics both with its mint mechanics and with its dynamism.

Is art minted at a higher price more valuable? Is a longer receipt more valuable than a cleaner one? Is holding the piece what makes it iconic? Does having a legendary collector in the list of addresses displayed in the Receipt make it more valuable?

I am excited to continue exploring these questions as I watch the on-chain display of network activity, and follow 0xHaiku's new creations.