John PalmerCrowdfund: $ESSAY
A new experiment begins today: using crypto to crowdfund the next essay I'm writing, titled Scissor Labels. Instead of publishing my work for free, or putting it behind a paywall, I'm doing something in between: raising funds to produce a new essay in exchange for ownership of the work. This will allow me to devote my full time to writing the piece, while allowing it to exist as a public good for anyone to read. The crowdfund is now live, and will stay open for one week, or until th...
John PalmerScissor Labels
We live in an age of constant narrative conflict. But today, not every battle is legible to the untrained observer. While some grifts are plainly perpetrated by would-be thought leaders, other battles for narrative control are hiding in plain sight, happening under the guise of intellectual debate. When these battles go unrecognized for what they are, even the best among us fall victim to meaningless conversations that waste the time of those involved. In this piece, I introduce the concept o...
John PalmerShields Background
In 2021, Timothy Luke and I received a grant to build a new brand for the Uniswap Grants Program (UGP). When we looked at UGP, it felt clear that the program’s core was the grant recipients themselves, and the projects they were building. We saw a wide range of work being funded and completed through UGP, with each individual project shaping the program’s overall identity. Inspired by the concept of headless brands, we sought to create a visual identity that felt true to UGP: individually uni...
New every morning.
John PalmerCrowdfund: $ESSAY
A new experiment begins today: using crypto to crowdfund the next essay I'm writing, titled Scissor Labels. Instead of publishing my work for free, or putting it behind a paywall, I'm doing something in between: raising funds to produce a new essay in exchange for ownership of the work. This will allow me to devote my full time to writing the piece, while allowing it to exist as a public good for anyone to read. The crowdfund is now live, and will stay open for one week, or until th...
John PalmerScissor Labels
We live in an age of constant narrative conflict. But today, not every battle is legible to the untrained observer. While some grifts are plainly perpetrated by would-be thought leaders, other battles for narrative control are hiding in plain sight, happening under the guise of intellectual debate. When these battles go unrecognized for what they are, even the best among us fall victim to meaningless conversations that waste the time of those involved. In this piece, I introduce the concept o...
John PalmerShields Background
In 2021, Timothy Luke and I received a grant to build a new brand for the Uniswap Grants Program (UGP). When we looked at UGP, it felt clear that the program’s core was the grant recipients themselves, and the projects they were building. We saw a wide range of work being funded and completed through UGP, with each individual project shaping the program’s overall identity. Inspired by the concept of headless brands, we sought to create a visual identity that felt true to UGP: individually uni...
New every morning.
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The reason on-chain SVGs matter is not why most people think. It's not just that they live on-chain with no dependencies, or that they have stronger guarantees of being around for a long time.
On-chain SVGs matter because an on-chain render function makes an NFT dynamic. Not in the sense that the asset itself contains animations, but rather - an on-chain render function can make the same item appear differently over time. The same way javascript turned websites from read-only documents into interactive ones, on-chain SVGs turn NFTs from static assets into living digital objects.
An item whose render function generates an SVG each time it's called doesn't need to return the same thing every time. The NFT itself can read any on-chain data and use it to decide how it should appear to its owner in the moment. It can look up relevant state changes, user actions, and external activity, and then display them either as literal information or as abstract visual characteristics. This allows the NFT to provide much stronger affordances to its holder as to its functional purpose.
This kind of dynamicism is really what makes on-chain SVGs so important. They take seriously the idea that NFTs are not just static media, but living digital objects we can use for all kinds of things online. As more people learn to build digital objects in this way, we'll accelerate towards a world where our understanding of NFTs today looks as outdated as the web before javascript.
The reason on-chain SVGs matter is not why most people think. It's not just that they live on-chain with no dependencies, or that they have stronger guarantees of being around for a long time.
On-chain SVGs matter because an on-chain render function makes an NFT dynamic. Not in the sense that the asset itself contains animations, but rather - an on-chain render function can make the same item appear differently over time. The same way javascript turned websites from read-only documents into interactive ones, on-chain SVGs turn NFTs from static assets into living digital objects.
An item whose render function generates an SVG each time it's called doesn't need to return the same thing every time. The NFT itself can read any on-chain data and use it to decide how it should appear to its owner in the moment. It can look up relevant state changes, user actions, and external activity, and then display them either as literal information or as abstract visual characteristics. This allows the NFT to provide much stronger affordances to its holder as to its functional purpose.
This kind of dynamicism is really what makes on-chain SVGs so important. They take seriously the idea that NFTs are not just static media, but living digital objects we can use for all kinds of things online. As more people learn to build digital objects in this way, we'll accelerate towards a world where our understanding of NFTs today looks as outdated as the web before javascript.
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