It took 8 days to make Mergeleft. Maybe not as long as the merge itself, which was almost 8 years in the making, but it still took a lot of effort. I discarded a lot of completed versions, much like I did for Genesisleft and Dropleft, but I finally ended up with something I’m happy with.

Let’s jump into what makes Mergeleft special (yes, there’s again unique stuff that you can’t find elsewhere):

1. The story

2. The technicals

The Story

The story behind this piece is relatively obvious.

The piece begins with a depiction of Proof of Work. A rock, golden colored, energized. A rugged, worn-out pickaxe doing its job. The colors in this scene are picked particularly to represent the dirty, rugged, and robust nature of PoW. The pickaxe’s shape and color also send an homage to Runescape’s Dragon Pickaxe. You’ll also notice the smoke coming out, which represents the criticism PoW receives on its environmental impact.

Within 3 seconds into the piece, the walls or the curtains of the screen close in (or merge). The walls represent execution and consensus layers. Why 3 seconds? Because this piece is minted exactly 72 hours (3 days) before the estimated time of the merge.

The merge is a complex transition. The messiness of the past delays and the complexity of the event is symbolized by the messed-up walls.

When the merge finishes, or the way I see it: When the curtains open again, we see a new scene depicting Proof of Stake. A tree, representing not only the environment-friendly nature of the merge, but also the harmonious growth of an ecosystem. The network in the background represents both validators communicating with each other to ensure security, but also the social coordination element that the Ethereum community often talks about.

Oh by the way… Do you remember the previous piece in ART PONZI? I mentioned before that the pieces dropping from the sky in Dropleft represented the next pieces in the ART PONZI collection. If you have followed Dropleft’s story, a leaf starts to fall after one hour of watching the piece. That leaf is the very same leaf falling from the tree in Mergeleft.

Yup. ART PONZI collection’s pieces are connected like that.

Technicals

Since the first piece in ART PONZI, I have been trying to highlight the versatility and uniqueness of SVG artworks. I’ve highlighted the infinite scalability in the metaverse and infinite frames in animation. I’ve also highlighted the possibility of storing these works on Ethereum itself (100% onchain) to keep them immutable forever.

Using SVGs, ART PONZI introduced the first onchain glitch art (Genesisleft) and the longest animated NFT (Dropleft).

This time, we’re introducing an NFT that lasts forever but is not a loop. There are three scenes in this single token, and the final scene lasts forever. I’m not entirely sure, but these scenes may make Mergeleft also the first 100% onchain visual story.

Ignore NFTs, even outside NFTs, it’s impossible to make a piece like this with JPG, PNG, GIF, mp4, MOV, or any other type of media file. I’m almost sure a piece like this doesn’t exist within the NFT space, but I’m starting to wonder if it would exist even outside the NFT space, within the entire digital assets class.

I’m starting to sound arrogant, so I’ll stop here. Just a final note: You may be surprised to see these noisy and messy effects on the smoke, on the merge walls, and on the tree. Despite being limited to geometry and code, SVG also has filters that produce mathematical noises such as Perlin noise, graphical displacement, blur, and more. By using a combination of these, you can create pretty cool effects.

Here are some screenshots from discarded works.

Just as a reminder: Mergeleft qualifies its owners for the airdrop of the upcoming piece in ART PONZI, and that piece qualifies its owners for the next one. And the 10th piece in the collection will qualify its holders for a piece from a secret collection. This means; if you keep holding all drops, Mergeleft will qualify you for 8 more airdrops.

I hope everyone likes this Mergeleft as much as I do. OpenSea does not allow auctions on editioned pieces, even though only 1 piece is for sale and the rest will be airdropped to previous holders. So feel free to make a bid, even if you don’t see a live auction.