Keeping Things Fresh in ART PONZI

Whether it’s through interesting drop mechanics or through creating new forms of visual forms such as years-long loops, everlasting non-loop pieces, or on-chain visual magic; since the beginning of ART PONZI, I tried doing something unique with every single piece.

This double-drop is no different.

Introducing Findersleft & Keepersleft.

Findersleft

With Findersleft, not only are we experimenting by doing a puzzle 100% on-chain, but also we’re doing the puzzle in a way that wouldn’t be possible with any other visual file format than SVG! And this puzzle also affects the drop mechanism of the next ART PONZI piece.

The Story

This piece continues the tradition of the other ART PONZI pieces in telling a story about the entire collection. It’s a pretty clear message but for those not familiar: The skeleton represents on-chain artists, who are storing their artworks somewhere extremely safe, in this case, Ethereum blockchain. Oh, and the artwork the skeleton is holding is the GIF-eater from my previous drop Glitchleft.

Today, more than 70% of NFTs are hosted on centralized websites whose owners can decide to shut down, or the servers running these websites might go offline. This includes the most popular NFT collection today, Bored Ape Yacht Club.

About 25% of NFTs are stored in IPFS, a decentralized storage service, which is a much safer option. But even IPFS needs to be pinned continuously, and there have been multiple occasions where the network slowed so significantly that assets would not load fast enough.

Arweave aims to solve the pinning issue. It’s by far the best option besides on-chain storage. However it still introduces a dependency on a separate chain, whose security model will need more battle-testing in the future.

On-chain storage ignores all of these issues. It only needs Ethereum to exist, which is why I have been trying to bring attention to it.

The Puzzle

This is probably the part of the article you’ve been looking forward to reading.

I realize that today in October 2022 we’re in an NFT bear market and a lot of people either lack liquidity or are worried about an expected financial crisis. But I also know a lot of people are interested in unique artworks. thought I could perhaps find a way to add a puzzle to the piece so that these people can get rewarded for their curiosity.

For this, I needed to create the second piece (Keepersleft) alongside the first (Findersleft). The first piece would include a key (a web3 wallet passphrase) to a wallet, which would store an edition of the second piece.

The wallet passphrase is hidden inside the safe our skeleton is opening. However it’s not possible to read it easily. To read each word in the passphrase, you have to zoom massively and wait for the distortion effect to be over. Thanks to SVG format, the letters of the words would not lose any quality when zoomed.

The other way to solve the puzzle would be to look at the SVG code itself! Again, only possible in SVG and not GIF or JPG formats as these are raster images, not code-based. However this approach would be trickier, because I split the words into multiple parts to make the words and their orders incomprehensible.

As the passphrase is discovered, the owner would type that into an Ethereum wallet and log in, and see Keepersleft beautifully sitting in the wallet. Additionally, if they visit OpenSea, they’d be greeted with this profile that urges them to send the asset to their own wallet. I even funded the wallet with enough ETH to transfer the asset.

I think Tokenfox, who solved the puzzle and got his reward, had a lot of fun.

The Technicals

The most visible visual effect in the piece is the glow effect on the skeleton and the Ethereum symbol. This is usually a pretty commonly used effect in beautiful off-chain glitch artworks, but I don’t think examples of it exist on-chain. Or exist-ed.

The way to do a glow effect in SVG is by having two layers: The bottom layer would have the Gaussian blur filter and the top layer would be the same element but without a filter.

The real trick when doing this on-chain is shortening the code to save storage space. To do that, I assigned the blur filter in a separate section where the visual is identified, and then deployed the “” command.

Perhaps the other artistically nerdy part here is the perspective in the Ethereum symbol. The angles of the symbol are mathematically calculated in relation to the door being opened.

Keepersleft

Oh, the number of times I iterated on Keepersleft. And I didn’t even plan to sell it. One edition was rewarded to the person who solved the puzzle in Findersleft, and the other editions were airdropped to the previous ART PONZI holders.

Of course, I still wanted to do something visually appealing, something that tells a story, something that is unique.

The Story

This was the first time I experimented with abstract glitch art. Let’s get this out of the way; abstract art is much easier when doing things on-chain, because the exact coordinates of the elements are much less problematic. This is one of the reasons we see most on-chain art projects being abstract art.

The harder part of abstract art is to convey meaning and emotion in your painting. Abstract art is often interpreted differently by different people. I’m open to other people’s interpretations, but my intention was to depict the transitory nature of art.

You’ll notice the calm color bubbles in the piece when you first look, but in about 10-15 seconds, the colors start to form a rigid structure and rush together.

Additionally, there’s the demon. The demon represents the urge to keep iterating on the artwork. You can see that the demon shows up when the colors are brightening and flowing faster. Art demons are what drives artists’ creative force, but it’s also the very thing that causes the imposter syndrome, wanting to keep changing the artwork over and over.

The Technicals

What’s unique about the piece? Apart from the drop mechanic (tied-in with Findersleft and given for free to the puzzle-solver), hopefully the visual side is a bit unique too. The abstract glitch art follows a similar pattern throughout the animation, but it’ll take a really long time to ever see the same frame again. The abstract art background is designed in a way to keep changing for a long time.

I actually wanted to introduce clipping/masking feature of SVGs in this piece, but after dozens of iterations, I decided against it as it was causing performance issues on Safari or Firefox. I’ll give it another shot in some of the next pieces.

Here are just 6 of the iterations (out of many more) I decided not to mint.

Final Thoughts

I hope everyone likes Findersleft and Keepersleft as much as I enjoyed making them. It took about three weeks to complete both, but I’m finally happy with the result.

We’re now more than half way through ART PONZI’s Series 1 drops. The collection is shaping up beautifully and marking a lot of “firsts” in the NFT space with each piece. With every piece, I’m getting better at SVG drawing, coding and optimization; and I’m coming up with new ideas to use the unique elements of SVGs to create unique experiences. Several people contacted me to say that they’ve converted to on-chain NFTs thanks to this collection, and I can’t imagine a bigger praise than that.

We’ll continue the remaining drops in the same manner. New experiments, explorations, and sometimes just weird stuff.

Don’t forget; every piece you own in ART PONZI qualify you an airdrop of the next piece. 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, the next ART PONZI piece will qualify you for 4 more airdrops of unique artworks.