https://twitter.com/blitmap/status/1589726387446771712

In a recent announcement, Dom Hofmann linked to a Notion site with a ton of information about the upcoming drop, including these details: (i) the Logos will come in three different fidelities that can be toggled in the marketplaces, (ii) keys will be delivered to Blitmap and Blitnaut holders with additional keys available in a public sale and (iii) the team is introducing a “revert” feature that allows the owner to revert back to a key and craft a new character prior to locking a Logo into place! The only drawback: we’re going to have to wait until the new year to start making our Logos! Dive into the full announcement here, give the tweet some retweet love and get ready to look forward to something this New Year besides breaking your resolutions!

In other news, long-time holder WrongNebula is in the process of releasing a project called huweb3, seemingly a reference to the “Humans of Web3.” An accomplished photographer who has worked for many international publications, WrongNebula has not only captured photos of the “developers, founders, artists, anons, [and] users” of web3, but also has recorded in-depth conversations with them about their thoughts on the space.

https://twitter.com/huweb3/status/1588293103437328384

The first interview, with Sup founder and original Blitmap artist Totally, includes a fascinating discussion on the accelerated pace of innovation in the crypto world (see the 5:30 mark). Also available in WrongNebula’s series are conversations with performance artist, Blitmap artist and bagel aficionado Mike Varley, Blitmap OG artist and Chain Runners pixel perfector BRAINDRAIND as well as artist and musician SaintStereo of Chain Runners (more on the latter two individuals in our story below)! Looking forward to seeing, and hearing from, more voices in the web3 ecosystem!

So without further delay, let’s hop over to the interview with the Chain Runners team. We’ll talk a bit about their origin story, the storytelling meta, the influence of CC0 on their project and some other projects they’ve got coming up on the horizon.

Chain Runners: Hack the Planet

The Blitmap project has become influential for many technologists and teams in the web3 space when it comes to on-chain art and licensing assets in the public domain. And there may be no project more philosophically aligned with these concepts than the Chain Runners team.

Chain Runners is the brainchild of three individuals who were friends in the physical world, with Mid as the connecting glue among the trio. Mid befriended Knav some seven years ago after they met at a hackathon; Mid also was the connection to Dozer where the pair worked together for five years at a web2 company. The group was beginning to explore the web3 and NFT world, and when Mid discovered the Blitmap project; all three were part of the Blitmap mint and have been holders to this day.

(A quick aside for some Blitmap history: Mid made the first ever Blitmap trade, sending over his first mint Jess Boombox #168 in exchange for Dom Hofmann’s Glitcho original #90!)

Within the Blitmap community, they started vibing with the pixel art of BRAINDRAIND, one of the original 17 Blitmap artists, and he introduced them to his long-time creative collaborator and colleague in AAA game development, SaintStereo. Inspired by the momentum building in the NFT world, the team decided to launch their own pixel art project based on a cyberpunk aesthetic. Chain Runners was born.

“We wanted to be a bit different than maybe traditional cyberpunk that is overtly dark and dystopian,” Knav said. “Sure, we have those elements in Chain Runners, but we also are a bit optimistic and lean into the self-expression part of cyberpunk, pushing the bounds of what normal humanity might offer.”

At its core, Chain Runners is a classic 10k, PFP project that borrows on many tropes that are popular in the space. There’s something for everyone in this project. For those that “do a little hacking,” there are dark black hoodies (which became an instant hit after power collector flashrekt began scooping them up), different styles of Chainspace decks that a character could use to plug into the Metaverse and a synth wave sunset background that has become emblematic of the project.

For sci-fi fans, there are traits like the Geordi visor from Star Trek, Zorg hair from The Fifth Element or a pill on an outstretched tongue that’s a callback to Neo’s scene with Morpheus in The Matrix. And for those firmly rooted in the NFT space, there are riffs on the classic Cryptopunks pipe, the divine robe from Loot (for Adventurers) and those square Nouns glasses.

But some of the most endearing callbacks came in the form of different Blitmap traits that were built into the project, including the Logo Hat, Genesis Hat and Dom Rose. “I love Blitmap,” BRAINDRAIND explained. “I'm from Blitmap, and all of the Chain Runners founders knew each other from that project. Many of us worked together to crank out the Blitnauts, so there's this really strong connection in our group. When we were crafting traits for the genesis Runners, we wanted to bring a lot of love back to Blitmap.”

These Runners inhabit a world called Mega City and are revolting against Somnus, the AI architect behind this remote physical world. According to the official lore site, “With Somnus in complete control of the city and the number of Somnites growing, liberating Mega City from these oppressive systems may only be possible by uniting the Runner counterculture and directing their abilities against Somnus and its followers.” The minting process drew on this very cyberpunk origin story, as users had to access the mint from a computer terminal.

Empowering Digital Self-Expression

As the line between our physical and digital worlds becomes ever more blurred, the Chain Runners team understands that the importance of digital identity and self-expression will only grow. And while many PFP projects were criticized for having primarily male-dominated, cisgender traits, the Chain Runners team purposefully chose to fill Mega City with inhabitants that had a full spectrum of identities for individuals to choose from.

“So much of the cyberpunk aesthetic is about self-expression, and so much of the NFT space is about digital identity,” offered Knav. “With a digital identity, you can become who you want to be, which may or may not reflect who you are in real life. We wanted an individual to be able to find a Runner they identified with and become that Runner.”

As if anticipating the question of whether a 2D, pixelated profile picture can truly serve as a form of digital identity, the team has extended their vision beyond a 32-by-32-pixel canvas. Chain Runners has entered a higher-fidelity realm with the XR collection, a series of native 3D avatars of each Runner that can be plugged into virtual environments such as Nifty Island. And after the team released a set of grenades with which to equip Runners as part of their Chain Runners Gear collection.

The team has also created a Discord prompt meme generator and face filters that can be used for video conferencing and VTubing, enabling the owner to become their Runner and use it as a form of self-expression. The Chain Runners project is clearly leading the pack when it comes to empowering individuals to adopt their chosen identity in the digital sphere.  

“I'm from the male-dominated video game industry, and it's exhausting and bland,” BRAINDRAIND explained. “It's also generally the same in our web3 and NFT space. So when we were making the Chain Runners we wanted to ensure Mega City was inclusive. We wanted females, non-binary and transgender people to want to be involved in this story.”

Storytelling and CC0 from the Start

It’s no secret that the meta changes at a breakneck pace in the crypto world—at the time of this interview with the Chain Runners team, the storytelling meta was quite en vogue. And while many projects slowly gravitated towards building narratives, this was part of Chain Runners’ DNA from the beginning. 

“There was already that context for a compelling narrative right out of the gate with the mint process,” SaintStereo said. “There was a universe that was established before you even had a token.”

After the mint, holders could go in and write lore about their Runner through an online terminal. This was a page out of the Forgotten Runes Wizard Cult playbook, and while not stored on-chain, it gave holders the ability to begin telling their stories. Later, the team released a wiki for canonical lore where they explained the origin story, locations and traits in the universe.

By placing Chain Runners in the public domain via the CC0 license, the projects’ creators encouraged holders and non-holders alike to contribute to the lore and to develop derivative projects. The team’s foundational decision to give the community permission to adapt, remix and create with Chain Runners IP has in turn created a very vibrant community.

“The combination of CC0 with the cyber punk ethos attracted a lot of builders, artists and people who wanted to continue to flesh out this world with us,” Dozer said. “From the beginning of the launch, we showed this community that we were pushing the bounds of blockchain technologies to create a high-fidelity, on-chain art project. And providing a few guardrails to this world that we're building—along with a permissive CC0 license to let people extend it themselves—attracted a high-caliber set of people. I love to see it!”

Nifty’s Nook

Who’s ready to hack the planet with me!?!? While time seems to move at a rapid clip in the web3 and NFT world, it is also interesting to reflect on milestones. I cannot believe that Chain Runners has been released for over a year! Seems like just yesterday that Mid posted the following message in the Blitmap Discord—it’s crazy to think how far Chain Runners has come since his post, seen below.

One thing I find fascinating is the “breadcrumbs” that have led Chain Runners holders over to the Blitmap community. This phenomenon is a testament not only to the fact that the founding team coalesced in the Blitmap Discord server, but also to the way they strategically employed Blitmap traits in the Chain Runners project. Knav echoed this observation in our interview.

“In many ways this is the promise of CC0,” he said. “I feel quite good whenever I see somebody who started with Chain Runners join the Blitmap community because they became familiar with Blitmap through our project. Dom has always been extremely supportive of us, and clearly Chain Runners got a boost from being associated with Blitmap, so it just feels good to see the interaction between the two projects.”

This is a core tenet of CC0: driving awareness—and ultimately value—back to a project by granting holders the freedom to use those assets in any way imaginable. It’s exciting to see these experiments and ideas around intellectual property play out in real time!

NiftyPins is a member of the Blitmap community and a comms professional—you can find him frequently hanging out in the Blitmap Discord or on Twitter at @niftypins.

But before we hop into the story, my oh my, there is a lot to discuss from the Superverse! First, we had this tease from the Sup team with no real explanation other than the photo. Who are these people on the boat? Where are they going? And what’s on that island?

https://twitter.com/supdotxyz/status/1564314000657158149

We then had a series of rapid-fire tweets from @html that basically outlined the thesis of Sup as a company that “builds fictional worlds and the communities that nurture them. it’s also a fictional world itself, but that’s for another time. internally we call sup the ‘shared universe project.’” In the Twitter thread, user @html (an entity that represents the “behind-the-scenes markup language that forms the document object model (or dom)”) covers all the worlds that Sup is helping craft. The thread is worth a read, provided the tweet hasn’t been deleted! But one thing that stands out is a comment about Sugar. Not only will this forthcoming card game be available to play in the physical world, but it will also make an appearance throughout the broader universes that Sup creates, with @html noting that “people in the blitmap universe also *play* sugar.” Talk about meta.

https://twitter.com/html/status/1564629954511478788

Finally, we were left with some sneak peeks of the Logos drop. The artwork is nothing short of amazing, with the characters embodied by 3D models, high-fidelity 2D artwork and 2D pixel art. No launch date has been set as of publication, but remember: holding a Blitmap or Blitnaut will grant you a key to mint a Logo NFT!

https://twitter.com/blitmap/status/1564610706154168322

PHEW! Now that is a flurry of updates! Remember: summer comes to an end in the Northern hemisphere on September 22, so “Sup Summer” isn’t over just yet! But I’m going to switch gears now and jump into my interview with the three founders of OKPC!

Boot Up My OKPC

A little over a year ago, Loot (for Adventurers) shook the web3 world. After the dust settled and the project was minted out, people began sorting through exactly what had just happened. It was in the fan-created Discord server that OKPC co-founders and developers Shahruz and Scotato first met. Both were working on separate Loot-inspired projects, both fascinated by the developer world that had exploded from this seemingly simple eight lines of white text on a black background. At the same time, Shahruz and cjpais were working on a project called Exquisite Land, a collaborative pixel-art experiment where users are assigned a 32x32 pixel plot of “land.” The owner of the land can choose to craft something entirely stand alone or complement the parcels adjacent to their own. But it wasn’t until the emergence of Corruption(*s), a mysterious project released by Blitmap creator Dom Hofmann, on the scene that all three began to work together.

“We were all really interested in the mystery behind Corruption(*s) and the fact that it was another innovative project coming from Dom,” Scotato recalls. “We all participated in the community together, with cjpais creating an app that shows a feed of all the on-chain messages that the game maker published to the blockchain. Shahruz crafted an Ethereum contract that allowed all the ‘active players,’ or holders of Corruption(*s) NFTs, to respond as a collective through the blockchain.”

The group later went on to work on a Reflection(*s) contract, a gift to the community that enabled Corruption(*s) holders to mint a reflection of their NFT. The money made from the mint was put in a community wallet to be used for purchasing Corruption(*s) NFTs to “deviate,” an action that would transform the evolving NFT into a static, ASCII art image. During this collaboration, Scotato began working on a 32 x 32 pixel art character for Corruption(*s), since the original NFT didn’t play well as a profile picture.

As Scotato was working on this design, Hofmann tweeted the following: “idea//tiny-83 graphing calculator friend.//plug in a formula to draw on screen.” Shortly after, an anonymous developer ran with this idea, launching the TINY-83 project. As people began minting the project and plugging in formulas to be graphed, one user realized that they could write a program that could turn specific pixels on and off. Instead of graphing equations, the TINY-83 began a vehicle for displaying pixel art.

https://twitter.com/dhof/status/1453022235791343616

“It was this magical feeling of having an NFT, but then all of a sudden you could change it,” Scotato says. “We weren’t used to seeing NFTs update on OpenSea—they were typically static JPEGs and remained that way forever. TINY-83 was such a novel concept, making it possible to draw on an NFT.”

https://twitter.com/scotato/status/1455925799358369798

Scotato immediately hacked together a pixel art project with a paint app interface that lets users draw on the screen freely rather than having to create a math equation. cjpais lent a hand in decoding the data so it could be formatted on-chain. When Scotato sent a preliminary pixel art console drawing to Shahruz, he knew that they were on to something, and that the trio should make their own NFT project. OKPC was born.

OKPC: An On-Chain Toy in the Public Domain

In a nutshell, OKPC consists of two components. First, there is the 24 x 16 pixel art that serves as the “screen” of the OKPC. Each NFT is shipped with a particular piece, from a selection of artists curated by the team, at the time of minting. These artworks then become interchangeable with others from the gallery (more on this in a moment).

The initial artists were a veritable who’s who of web3, including Gremplin (CrypToadz, Nouns), Dom Hofmann (Blitmap, Nouns, Loot (for Adventurers), Corruption(*s), Sup), Dylan Field/Zoink (Figma), Timshel (Loot Genesis Project/Open Quill), John Palmer (PartyDAO) and MannyNotFound (Manny’s Game). Additionally, many original Blitmap artists also participated, including Totally (formerly BigPapap), BRAINDRAIND, Worm, Numo, HipCityReg, Veenus and Zod.

https://twitter.com/scotato/status/1525998136308531200

The low-fidelity pixel art resulted directly from the constraints of the Blitmap project, according to Scotato. “I wasn’t an artist on the Blitmap project and missed the opportunity to craft a Blitmap during the minting process, but I kept coming back to how fun it must have been to create artwork under those constraints,” he says. “Applying those constraints of Blitmap yielded 100 interesting 32 x 32, four-color artworks that were a natural fit for the imagery of on-chain NFTs on the Ethereum blockchain.”

Beyond the visual aesthetic, cjpais says that OKPC has a direct line to the technical lineage of the Blitmap contract. “Exquisite Land, the project that Shahruz and I worked on, drew heavily on the Blitmap project,” he recalls. “The Blitmap renderer became the canonical renderer for on-chain pixel art at the time, and I learned how Dom constructed the data from that contract. We then built that into a more generic form for Exquisite Land, and I continued development on that path to create Exquisite Graphics, a renderer that can create 64 x 64 pixel on-chain artworks with up to 256 colors. This is the technology that powers OKPC.”

The second component of OKPC is a computer console or monitor featuring characteristics that were imprinted on the NFT at the time of minting, including the NFT color, the design of the speakers on the left and right of the screen, a headband design and a printed word on the bottom lefthand corner. These items are fixed on the OKPC and serve as a picture frame of sorts for the pixel artwork. Additionally, there is a clock speed mechanism that increases the longer a person holds the OKPC—if it is transferred, the clock speed value remains the same, but the rate at which it increases is reset. The team notes that the Corruption(*s) insight score was the catalyst for this clockspeed.

But OKPC is more than just pixel art on a screen—it is an open-ended technology that the team can expand and build upon. Case in point: in the first expansion, the team opened a gallery that initially featured all the artworks that originally came with the NFT, allowing OKPC owners to purchase the art and add it to their collection. The OKPC thus became an NFT that could contain NFTs, a mind-bending concept that had yet to be explored in the space. Each artwork had a limited run of pieces that an OKPC holder could purchase for 0.02 Ethereum—Gremplin’s “Swampy” became a fan favorite and was the first gallery piece to sell all 500+ copies!

https://twitter.com/okpcnft/status/1512448339358351363

The team then followed up by allowing owners to put their own art on-chain and to save it to the OKPC display screen. Currently, if an NFT holder decides to draw another image on their OKPC, the previous creation will be erased from the NFT, creating what cjpais calls an “Etch-a-Sketch surface that is pretty enjoyable in itself to play with.” He does note that even though that artwork may be erased—as it can on an Etch-a-Sketch—a breadcrumb remains on the blockchain where it can be reconstituted by on-chain sleuths.

Comparing the OKPC to a beloved child’s toy works for Shahruz; the developer likes viewing OKPC as a playful item. “It leaves a lot of open-endedness as to what we can do with the project,” Shahruz explains. “It’s a way for us to play with these novel ideas around art, collection and trading through a toy-like filter.”

We are already seeing different manifestations of such experimentation. Shahruz points to the OKPC Gold (OKGLD) airdrop, a play on the Adventure Gold airdrop in the Loot ecosystem, that has helped make light of some DeFi concepts. The team has already exchanged an OKPC to an individual in exchange for OKGLD and plans to use that token to facilitate upgrades, such as providing a palette of different paint colors in addition to the original paradigm of black/white pixels.

By refusing to put OKPC in a box with a concrete definition, the team hopes that they can continue to return to the project and develop it as the space matures. “The three of us are obviously builders,” says Scotato. “We have a lot of ideas about what we want to do, but we didn’t want to build it all in from the start. So we left open a lot of these escape hatches with the ability to upgrade over time.”

With so many CC0 projects influencing OKPC, it’s no wonder that the trio decided to put their project in the public domain as well. Scotato says that as engineers, the team relies on open-source software to do their day jobs, so it just makes sense to put OKPC in the public domain to help creatives make derivatives of their project with their own flavor.

https://twitter.com/okgonft/status/1566506386875375619

Coincidentally, after interviewing the team for this newsletter, @0xnewtype launched OKGO, a project that incorporates many OKPC features in an on-chain card game. The release of OKGO seemed to affirm a point that Shahruz mentioned in the interview: “With CC0, we’re basically inviting others to have fun with us. This license is so interesting, and I’m hoping that we see people take advantage of it and find interesting applications that we haven’t considered.”

But what about the question on everyone’s mind: Do you really only need one OKPC?

“You only need one in the sense that you only need one character in World of Warcraft,” Scotato says with a laugh. “If you want to do more, if you want to express yourself in different ways, you can have multiple OKPCs. But to engage with the project, to be part of the community and to put your mark on the OKPC world, you only need one.”

Nifty’s Nook

One of the things that I love about OKPC is how open-ended the team is leaving the project. While it admittedly seems “toyish,” I don’t think we are fully aware yet of all the ways OKPC may evolve over time. I often see comments on Twitter or Discord comparing OKPC to Terraforms by Mathcastles, another project that seems hard to grasp. On the surface, OKPC seems like purely a vehicle to display art. But with three talented individuals at the helm who are in touch with the meta of the space and stay on top of the technology, it is also reasonable to see OKPC evolving into something that we can’t quite yet grasp.

Time will tell if history looks back at OKPC as something truly revolutionary in the way that we now consider earlier examples of generative, on-chain and AI-driven art. It’s also possible that the project will remain an on-chain toy allowing folks to push pixels akin to a 21st century Etch-a-Sketch. But with such a talented team, I’ll be tuning in to see what happens!

One final note: as you may know, Scotato recently joined the Sup team as an engineer! Sup is the organization Hofmann and Totally founded to help them cultivate fictional universes, and the Blitmap universe is their first. Scotato was in the middle of his first week at Sup when I interviewed him for this article, excitedly getting up to speed on all their projects.

“Sup has an environment that prioritizes creativity,” he says. “A lot of the early Sup hires are artists and builders, and the team is pushing each other to think differently. It’s not just about creativity in the visual and world building arenas; it’s also about searching for fun new ideas and experiences to share with the world.”

Super excited to see what Scotato and team have in store for us with the Logos release—in the meantime, enjoy the OKPC theme song by Fabians.eth!

https://twitter.com/fabianstelzer/status/1479576697385197571

NiftyPins is a member of the Blitmap community and a comms professional—you can find him frequently hanging out in the Blitmap Discord or on Twitter at @niftypins.

But before we get to the news on Mirakai, I got to give a big shout out to the folks who coordinated the Blitmap x Chain Runners party at NFT NYC 2022 this past month! While I wasn’t in attendance, it looked like a fun time was had by all at VR World in New York City, where holders near and far were able to connect. I even heard that original Blitmap artist boyprison was spinning some tunes for everyone’s enjoyment! Hope all y’all had a great time, and I hope to make the next one!

Another recent development in the Superverse is that Corruption(*s) Chapter 2 looks like it is just about to kick off, with some messages coming in across the ether. To provide a summary of this project is near impossible, but let me give it a try. After Dom Hofmann released 4,196 Corruption(*s) NFTs, a loosely networked group of holders formed to try to make sense of it all. Since that time, tooling was developed to communicate with the artist across the portal, and the community had to make decisions on what to do next as a singular player in a meta game. All the while, the NFT was gaining “insight” that could then be “deviated” from the string of characters into a different ASCII art NFT that no longer evolved.

In the first Blitmap community call, Hofmann teased that at the beginning of Chapter 2, holders of Corruption(*s) NFTs would have the ability to vote on-chain on whether they would like this fictional universe to be nurtured by Sup, a company started by Hofmann and original Blitmap artist Totally. Whether or not you’re a holder of Corruption(*s), this is one of the most exciting projects in the space—you can get up to speed by dropping in the Corruption(*s) Discord server and checking out the website now!

But before you do that, take a minute to learn more about Mirakai! I was super happy to catch up with Beans, co-founder and Solidity developer of the project, who provided a lot of insight into the project. Enjoy!

Building with Heart

Beans, Mirakai’s co-founder, has been active in the crypto world since 2017, but it wasn’t until last year that he participated in the NFT scene. At that time, ArtBlocks was on such an astronomical rise, along with the PFP projects du jour, that he started messing with NFTs purely as a flipper. However, after Beans got involved with the Chain Runners project, he began to see the technology through a different lens.

“Chain Runners was the first community where I spent a significant amount of my time in their Discord server,” Beans recalls. “It was different because I wasn’t solely in it for profit, but rather talking about how cool the tech was. The CC0 vibe was far different than other projects I encountered; everyone in the server was talking about pushing the space forward.”

Beans began digging into the Chain Runners contract and was blown away by the amount of care that went into getting all the different traits layered properly and put on-chain. Out of love for the project, he published an article to Mirror that took a deep dive into the on-chain mechanics as an attempt to convey how much passion the Chain Runners team put into their project. The warm reception that followed his post helped Beans realize that CC0 communities are just built differently—he knew that if he ever created a project of his own, he would have to release it into the public domain. That is exactly what happened with Mirakai.

At its core, Mirakai is two separate projects—Mirakai Scrolls and Mirakai Heroes—and combines elements from the NFT and DeFi spaces, including deflationary mechanics, gacha elements, pre-reveal vibes and implicit rarity. The Scrolls are completely on-chain and feature ten unique traits that are listed out in simple text. This idea is a callback to Hofmann’s Loot (for Adventurers) project. A person who holds a scroll has two options: (i) rerolling a specific trait (except for the Clan and CC0 traits) to get a more rare or aesthetically pleasing attribute, or (ii) burning the scroll to summon a pixel art hero once the holder likes the ten traits.

And while Mirakai is a pixel art PFP project, there is quite a bit of depth to it, starting with the name. Mirakai is a name coined by the team that was derived from the Greek word meraki, which can be loosely translated as doing something with absolute passion and soul. To Beans, the name represented the kind of heart and conviction he and his co-founders put into the project—it was monumentally important for this anonymous founder to build something exceptional.

“While I am an anon co-founder, I’ve put a lot of effort into developing my online reputation by doing Ethereum contract breakdowns on Twitter,” Beans said. “The other co-founders, Ben (front-end developer), numo (artist) and water (artist), have also developed their anon personal brands. We’ve all worked hard in this space to get where we are, and we were not going to jeopardize that with a low-tier, low-effort project.”

Instead, the team began working tirelessly on Mirakai for over six months, an undertaking that resulted in several unique project features that blended NFT and DeFi elements, including:

ERC20 Token Drip. This may be the most revolutionary aspect of Mirakai—essentially owners of a Mirakai Scroll get $ORBS automatically dripped to their wallet. There is no staking or gas fee on the holder’s end; instead, the tokens just magically appear in the wallet! What the ERC721A implementation was to Azuki, the ERC20 Drip is to Mirakai, and Beans has open sourced the code on Github!

On-Chain Reroll of Traits. After acquiring a Mirakai Scroll, holders can reroll the traits associated with it via an on-chain action where 10 $ORBS are burned to get a new trait. While other projects may have afforded holders this option, this reroll is done completely on-chain.

Blend of On-Chain Data, Off-Line Rendering. While the Mirakai Scrolls are completely on-chain, the Mirakai Heroes (the pixel art characters that are generated when a scroll is burned) are rendered off-line. This is due to the complexity of over 20 different layers that goes into each hero! “Our head trait is not just one layer—they are actually composed of three different layers,” Beans explains. “We did this so they would layer properly with the different kinds of weapons that each hero can have.”

Outstanding Pixel Art. The work that the artists numo and water did for Mirakai is exceptional, and the amount of detail and crafting that went into each trait is mind-boggling. Seriously, take the time to browse the Heroes collection and you’ll be blown away. Knowing that high-quality art was key to the success of the project, rather than paying the artists a flat fee for their work, Beans brought them both onto the core team.

“With the quality of pixel art that we were looking for, I knew that this was going to be incredibly time-consuming work for numo and water,” Beans notes. “We wanted to give them more skin in the game, more sense of ownership and responsibility. I’ve also seen how artists frequently get the short end of the stick—they do all this work and yes, they get paid, but if the project blows up they don’t get to reap those rewards. This is very unfortunate because a key component of NFTs is the art. We wanted to make sure that our artists were rewarded properly.”

This is the heart, the meraki, that Beans and team put into the project. And to honor the CC0 project, that had a major impact on the members of the team, such as Blitmap, Mirakai threw in an extra treat for those communities.

Amplifying the CC0 Universe

Projects in the public domain, like Blitmap, Chain Runners and Anonymice, inspired Beans because he felt there was something more to them than your average NFT project.

“CC0 projects are just more builder focused,” explains Beans. “Those communities understand the potential of web3 and how it can revolutionize our approach to intellectual property. I knew that Mirakai had to have the CC0 license because that was the type of people I wanted to attract. And to say thank you to those folks in the CC0 communities that served as inspiration, we made it possible for people holding certain projects to ‘roll’ a special CC0 trait.”

These traits included Nouns glasses, backgrounds from Chain Runners, a mouth from Cryptoadz and a nose from GoblinTown. While each of these traits is special, the Blitmap CC0 trait really takes the cake. Rather than being part of the hero, this trait adds an entirely new item on the left pane of the NFT!

So far we’ve seen the Drink Me and Mana potions summoned with a hero, along with a Hot Damn hotdog and mustard, banner with a Logo coat of arms and the Dom Rose enclosed in a glass case like the one in Beauty and the Beast. But there are a few more Blitmaps that have yet to be summoned, according to Beans.

“The Blitmaps were the hardest CC0 trait to incorporate into Mirakai. There were multiple times where we thought we should drop the trait, but obviously we couldn’t because we love the Blitmaps,” Beans says with joy in his voice. “When people think about Blitmap, the item that often comes to mind is the Dom Rose. We tried putting the rose in the hero’s ear or mouth, but it kept clashing with the other traits. Then we realized that we could add it to the scene as an extra item, and we found that it seemed to elevate the composition.”

The Blitmap CC0 trait is in high demand. With little more than 50 of these scrolls in existence, they carry a huge premium over the floor Mirakai Scrolls. However, if you’re a Blitmap-loving collector, there are several Blitmap-esque and inspired traits you can look for in other scrolls or reroll yourself, including:

• Blit Amai Hat

• Blit Sprout Head

• Blitnaut Helmet

• Teddy Hat

• Blitmap Jess Mouth

• Lost Realm Fur

The Mirakai team is not only amplifying the CC0 universe, but also contributing back to it. In addition to the ERC20 drip code being open-sourced to Github, the pixel art assets and layering mechanism will be put into the public domain. And while the traits are rendered off-line, the DNA for each trait is on-chain, meaning that another individual or community could use these assets in a novel way.

“As soon as Mirakai was released, it was instantly composable, where anyone can take my contracts, inherit from them and build on top of them,” explains Beans. “That’s the mantra of web3, to be open and composable, and with CC0 no one owns the rights to the intellectual property. This creates huge potential for what can be created in the future. But the bigger corporations are coming into the space and trying to close things down, tracking wallets and essentially bringing web2 into web3. I don’t want that. I want web3 to continue to be built by the people, for the people, which is why all these public goods are crucial for the future of web3.”

Nifty’s Nook

What a great story, and big thanks to Beans for taking the time out of his schedule to chat! The story of Mirakai has been so refreshing to me, especially considering all the low-effort, cash-grab PFP projects that have become all too common. What really strikes me is how the Mirakai team could have easily released something during the PFP meta and made a stack of ETH, never to be seen again. Instead, they decided to do something more—something better—and push what could be done in this space forward.

I think that the automagical $ORBS token drip is particularly special. By automatically putting those tokens in a user’s wallet, the friction of having to claim (especially when the blockchain is congested and the gas fee is exorbitant) goes away completely. My only wish is that they would have “capped” the number of $ORBS that can be in existence. To my untrained eye it seems like there is an unlimited amount of tokens that can be generated, which means that there is really no cutoff point (other than the gas cost) to re-rolling for the exact traits one is looking for in their hero. Regardless, it was a savvy innovation, and I’ll be keen to see how other projects adopt it in the future!

NiftyPins is a member of the Blitmap community and a comms professional—you can find him frequently hanging out in the Blitmap Discord or on Twitter at @niftypins.

But before we get to Blitkicks, I just wanted to acknowledge the current state of the web3 world—this article was slated to go live on Tuesday but by then the NFT ecosystem turned on its head. Like many of you, I have experienced a roller coaster of emotions the past several days. While I’ve been in the tech industry for a while (and “crypto aware” during most that time), this is my first bear market as a participant. Plainly put, this has been an awful feeling. I recognize that this is a very stressful moment and genuinely hope that everyone takes care of their mental health during this time.

Switching gears, I also wanted to give a shout out to a fantastic mashup project released at the time of writing by Blitmap holder Steve. In this 50-piece collection called blit merge --force, the artist combined two Blitmaps in a creative and hysterical take on the original collection. If you’re a fan of Blitmap and haven’t seen these NFTs, take a spin over to OpenSea and check them out! As Dalawho wrote in the holders channel, “Haha, i’m [sic] trying to get my newborn to sleep in the carrier and laughing at this woke her up again 🙄😂 worth.”

I feel the same way, Dalawho! All right—let’s dive into Blitkicks and the highlights of an interview I had with Bennett Collen, CEO and co-founder of Endstate!

Endstate: Bringing Kicks from the Block to the Blockchain

Collen’s journey to the blockchain started when he founded Cognate, a company that helped small businesses and entrepreneurs leverage the blockchain to protect their intellectual property (IP). By recording a business’s trademark use to the blockchain, Cognate was able to provide that company with definitive proof of the use of that IP on a distributed ledger. This enabled smaller organizations to enforce or defend their rights under common-law trademark rules without having to hire expensive IP lawyers.

“Instead of focusing on helping people who already had registered trademarks to protect their rights, we were trying to help people who may have trademark rights and were not aware of it,” says Collen. “Often these smaller businesses wouldn’t have anything compelling to prove ownership. Cognate gave them a cryptographic, hashed and timestamped record in a distributed database that’s propagated across thousands of different nodes. It leveled the playing field for the holders of these unregistered trademark rights.”

After selling this business to GoDaddy, Collen knew that he wanted to create another company built on blockchain technology.

“I always knew that my next play would be in NFTs, just because I was so fascinated by the concept of having blockchain-based records of non-fungible (everyday) assets,” Collen recalls. “[ERC-20] tokens were interesting for specific use cases, but NFTs just seemed limitless to me.”

One category that Collen viewed as the perfect combination of physical goods and digital assets was sneakers. While he’d never worked in the footwear industry before, Collen says that he is a lifelong sneakerhead and felt that it was a culturally relevant category. To complement his blockchain experience, he brought aboard industry veteran Stephanie Howard as Endstate’s co-founder.

“I attended a webinar that Stephanie was a speaker on and, frankly, I just bothered her for a few months and got her up to speed on NFTs,” recalls Collen. “Stephanie has an incredible résumé with 25 years of experience in the footwear industry. She was a design director at Nike and New Balance and designed some pretty famous sneaker silhouettes, including the New Balance 850, which was rereleased in 2019!”

The easiest way to make a custom kick is to “borrow” an existing silhouette and then apply a new colorway to it. However, Collen and Howard opted to design an entirely new sneaker from scratch for their Drop 0 release of 115 pairs of the 00:Predawn silhouette on the Solana blockchain. Available in Army, Navy and Tungsten colorways, this was their first foray into the “phygital” space. The drop was initially priced at 2 SOL ($470 at the time), and currently these shoes from their first release have a floor price of 18.6 SOL.

But Drop 0 was just the beginning—Collen would soon use the silhouette to launch Endstate's first community crossover with Blitmap. He made this choice in large part because the Blitmap assets were available in the public domain through the CC0 license.

Building the Blitkicks Thanks to CC0

After coming across Loot (for Adventurers) last summer, Collen started researching other projects by Dom Hofmann and came across Blitmap. As someone familiar with IP, Collen was particularly intrigued by the CC0 license around many of Hofmann’s projects.

“CC0 has such interesting potential for communities, and I think NFTs serve as building blocks of creativity,” he explains. “DeFi is often referred to as ‘money Legos,’ and I feel that NFTs are similar building blocks for culture and creativity in their current instantiation. When a project is in the public domain, it unlocks a lot of human creativity that would otherwise be shut out for fear of not having the right licenses or being sued.”

It was this permissive license that first drew Collen and Howard to Blitmap to initiate their first NFT crossover with Endstate. Collen adds Blitmap’s strong community, beautiful project aesthetic and history of success were also strong motivators for working with the project.

“Before determining which community we’d partner with, I had recently acquired a Roscoe Blitnaut (#453), and I loved it because it looks like he’s wearing streetwear—it just screams Endstate,” says Collen. “We had some conversations with other NFT projects, but we were really intrigued by the CC0 license and how it allows you to move quickly and drive value back to the ecosystem.”

After choosing Blitmap as their first Endstate collaboration, the team began to solicit feedback from the community on the decision of the design. Howard noted that this was unusual for her as a designer in the industry.

“In the early stages of this project, we created a few designs and sent them to the Blitmap community for voting before we landed on this final design,” Howard said in a previously recorded Twitter Spaces. “And I just love, after all these years of just designing, talking to people that I'm designing for but never having this sort of direct [contact].”

The design the community chose leaned heavily towards the RGB palette from the original Logo (#84) design by Hofmann. The heel tab features a repeating checkerboard pattern of the red and green squares from the design with the bright blue as webbing on the outside of the shoe. Along the interior of the sneaker is Hofmann’s Rose (#1) composition, a design that Collen called the “perfect combination of minimalism with the right level of detail.”

The Endstate team wanted to be sure to nail the craftsmanship of the shoe, especially with a public mint price of 0.25 ETH. It was important to Collen to use premium materials and to manufacture the shoes domestically to ensure good working conditions and minimize the environmental impact of overseas shipping.

But what really takes the Blitkick to the next level is its tight integration with the Ethereum blockchain.

NFT Serves Authentication, Utility

Accompanying the physical Blitkick is a digital NFT featuring the pair of shoes on a Roscoe-esque television screen. The shoes spin around within the monitor to show off some of the details of the forthcoming physical item. Owners of the NFT can redeem it for a physical pair of shoes on Endstate’s website. And if you’re looking to pick an NFT up on the secondary market, be sure to refresh the metadata and see if the shoes have already been redeemed.

Paired with the physical piece, the NFT serves as a vehicle for authentication so that the end user knows they are getting a legitimate set of kicks instead of a forgery, a problem that has historically plagued the high-end footwear industry. But the Blitkick NFT goes beyond the authentication to deliver both IRL and digital utility.

While he has never formally been involved in the footwear industry until now, Collen says that growing up he would fill notebooks with sneaker designs. One thing that always interested him was the idea of creating shoes with additional functions. As an adolescent, this meant something silly like having a pair of shoes that could perform a dreaded chore for you, such as setting the table. But the notion that a sneaker could be more than footwear took root in Collen’s mind, helping shape the idea of the digital NFT counterpart to the physical shoe that he would later bring to Endstate.

The IRL sneaker has a near-field communication (NFC) chip inside that ties to the digital token. This creates opportunities for token-gating real-life events, such as parties. Just as an NFC chip can help record your 5K race time when you run over a sensor, the Blitkick can serve as a physical ticket to enter an exclusive event. Collen notes this potential for having Endstate parties at future NFT conferences and events. And the utility can be extended into our digital realms as well.

“We already spend a ton of our time online, and more and more of our experiences are migrating there and becoming digital,” offers Collen. “Asset utility in the emergent metaverse is really exciting for us because a lot of our online interactions will change from typing furiously into our glowing rectangles and become more rich, high-fidelity experiences.”

Collen expresses a hope for a defined protocol in the metaverse for future wearables. This will allow digital goods to transport seamlessly from one digital environment to another.

“It's tough right now because different environments render items with different poly counts, which affects how high-fidelity you're able to make the asset,” explains Collen. “Then there's the different engines, so Unity and Unreal Engine are the two big ones, and the graphics and the designs are interpreted differently. It really is very scattershot. But I believe the ultimate end goal would be the ability to move digital assets from one place to another, independent of the individual requirements of the environment that you want to wear them in. And long after a customer has received the physical Endstate sneakers, the digital utility will continue to improve.”

Already the team has a second Endstate native sneaker drop in the pipeline that will feature an entirely new silhouette. To get more information about the drop, readers are encouraged to check out the Endstate Discord server. But Collen says that sneakers are just the beginning—he’s hopeful for the future and is bullish on the possibility of more and more physical items being tokenized for digital experiences.

“Our name comes from the fact that we envision the end state of product ownership to be that any physical item of value will have a digital counterpart,” states Collen. “We’re planning to expand into a variety of categories that are valuable and have cultural cachet, creating items a person would want to own in both a digital and physical environment. That's the end state that we're building towards.”

Nifty’s Nook

After interviewing Bennett for this newsletter and checking out some of the Endstate unboxing videos, I’m really regretting only picking up one pair of Blitkicks! But then again, I may have the only size 14 Blitkick on the market—talk about rarity!

There are two main things that stuck out to me from this interview. The first is how Endstate was able to tap into the collective community without fear of reproach or infringement, which really shows the value of CC0. Not only is the community able to purchase a sneaker that is top shelf, but Endstate is also driving value back to the Blitmap project by releasing such an incredible physical product. I expect we will see more and more of these boutique/bespoke fashion brands interacting with CC0 communities, in particular with Blitmap. Between Endstate and Blitwear, high-quality physical merch projects are choosing Blitmap to launch their line—this should give all holders an immense source of pride.

My second thought concerns the need for an open protocol for the metaverse. If we cannot have truly portable wearables, I feel that we run a very real risk of these digital environments becoming the web3 equivalent of our web2 social networks: walled gardens. There is clearly a lot to win by becoming the de facto metaverse—a company that controls the most popular digital destination can exact a “tax” on digital goods much in the same manner as the App Store charges developers a 30% premium to have their app listed there. This, my dear readers, is not decentralization. But with so many big brands, who is going to build the decentralized metaverse that can compete with the Sandboxes and Othersides of this brave new world?

While Genesis (#0) was deployed on May 15, 2021, the minting opened up on May 31, 2021 with Genesis Edition (#100) being the first sibling created. And how times have changed—instead of selling out in mere minutes, Blitmap took over a full month with the final Blitmap, Chessbirdy Jess (#1699), minting on July 2, 2021!

Over the next month, there are sure to be tons of celebrations of this first anniversary as we enter what is colloquially being referred to as Sup Summer. I’m excited to not only see what is coming, but also to reminiscence a little about where we’ve been!

Enough dillydallying—let’s get to the interview with Hofmann and Totally!

The Blitmap Origin Story

While Hofmann has cemented himself as one of the most prolific artists and technologists in web3, it’s hard to believe that his first Solidity contract was Blitmap and that it was deployed just over a year ago. Hofmann said that he had been involved with crypto since 2013—he purchased some Bitcoin then and later, in 2017, some Ethereum. But the space didn’t grip him as a creator, saying that he mostly “just watched the price go up and down.”

While he is largely known as one of the creators of Vine, which was acquired by Twitter, Hofmann founded another company called Byte after he left Twitter. This company achieved a certain degree of success when there was a scare about the data sovereignty of TikTok in the summer of 2020. And while it was one of the most downloaded social networking apps in Apple’s App Store, it just couldn’t compete with the wide proliferation of TikTok.

Hofmann sold Byte to Discord and went to work for the company to help them drive creator revenue by empowering individuals to monetize Discord servers and communities. But it was at that time that he noticed that the NFT space was beginning to break out as a platform that could enable digital creators to derive value from their work.

“I took the oldest Vine that still exists and listed it on Foundation just to see what that process was like,” Hofmann says. “That piece sold for almost nine Ethereum and it gave me a start on noncustodial ETH.”

ethereum://0x3B3ee1931Dc30C1957379FAc9aba94D1C48a5405/77

With the proceeds from the sale, Hofmann began going down the rabbit hole. He purchased a Cryptopunk and became interested in the technology and programming side of the web3 world. Hofmann dug into what it meant to write a Solidity contract and found this web3 work incredibly interesting. It ultimately led him to leave Discord even though he had not completed the vesting period from his sale of Byte.

While he continued to produce 1/1 works with the off-the-shelf contracts for which Foundation, Rarible and a host of other services are known, Hofmann became fascinated with on-chain art. Hofmann was intrigued by the possibility of having the work itself housed in the Ethereum blockchain rather than hosted on a centralized server or a decentralized service such as IFPS. He began working on his own on-chain contracts.

“I realized that there wasn’t much that was happening on-chain,” recalls Hofmann. “There was Autoglyphs [by Larva Labs], which was a big inspiration, and Avastars, an early PFP project. At the time, there wasn’t anything specifically around pixel art that was on-chain, so I started working on the Blitmap contract and learning Solidity at the same time.”

During the time Hofmann began this experimentation on the Ethereum blockchain, he was an active member in a Discord server that Totally spun up for game developers and folks adjacent to the industry to connect and create during the pandemic.

With the popular press talking about NFTs, web3 was soon a topic of discussion in the Discord community as well. Hofmann raised the concept of Blitmap to the folks in the server and began formulating how originals and siblings would work. He began asking if anyone would be interested in contributing art within the constraints of a 32 by 32 pixel grid and using only four colors.

“I was part of a group that started a Discord server for people in the gaming industry during the pandemic to keep our minds off stuff,” Totally, the co-founder of Sup and a Blitmap original artist explains. “We were just working at night and having fun without any constraints on our creativity. The only rule was ‘Don’t build an MMO.’ People were working on mobile games and digital art in a very free-flowing way. But then Dom came to us with this idea for Blitmap and it had constraints on size and colors for each piece. It really reminded me how much creativity comes from constraints.”

While many of the artists came from the server, Hofmann also put out an open call for pixel artists on Twitter and opened other spots to people he had met in web3. The first artist (after Hofmann) to create a composition was BRAINDRAIND, who made Caffeinate (#74). And the first test run for making a sibling was the combination of Genesis and Caffeinate. Hofmann says that the collection was originally supposed to include 128 compositions (something that BRAINDRAIND noted in a recent tweet about Blitmap’s anniversary), but after the first 100 compositions were completed, he was eager to launch the project to the world.

Modest Expectations, Deliberate Action Led to Engaged Community

At the time, the prototype for most NFT collections was to release a collection of 10,000 animated profile pictures through a blind reveal, with traits having varying degrees of rarity. By the spring of 2021, bonding curves (in which a mint gets progressively more expensive) had fallen out of favor, replaced by a flat fee across the entire collection. This new kind of minting process, chosen by The Bored Ape Yacht Club, became the de facto standard in the space.

But Hofmann decided to deviate from this norm in two major ways:

1. The Blitmap collection would consist of only 1,700 total pieces

2. The person minting would be able to craft their NFT and know what they were getting

This was a paradigm shift in the space. The inherent lack of rarity (there are 16 siblings for each composition), coupled with friction where the individual had to craft their NFT instead of blindly smashing a mint button, was just not the way that these projects were supposed to work. This shift was one of the main reasons that Blitmap took over one month to mint out.

“My main goal was for the collection to be completed,” Hofmann says. “I thought about it all the time during the slow minting process. But to me it made a lot of sense that Blitmap wouldn’t be picked up in the same way as other projects, and that was good. People coming in were willing to appreciate what the friction in the minting process gave them and appreciate something that was novel.”

Throughout the mint, the project began to gain steam. Curious individuals came to Blitmap because it was so different than the normal projects. Rather than picking an NFT blindly, people were given the ability to create the Blitmap that they wanted to have. These mints were celebrated in the Discord channel as they slowly trickled in, with observers excited to see what composition and palette combinations would be created next.

The Discord community was very welcoming, with Hofmann and the artists making a point to always greet newcomers and comment on the latest mints. And as people came on board, another quality of Blitmap came to unify the community: the understanding of what being “on-chain” meant. This was a quality that differentiated Blitmap drastically from other projects launched at that time.

In short, on-chain means that the data and information required to recreate the piece is stored immutably on the Ethereum blockchain. This lends a certain degree of permanence to a piece that has yet to be seen over the course of human history. On-chain artworks are (in large part) immune to environmental decay or armed conflicts—as long as the Ethereum blockchain is in existence, so too will be all 1700 Blitmaps. Because Blitmap was one of the earlier on-chain projects, many in the community became interested in how the blockchain was itself being used as an artistic medium.

The intrigue of an on-chain project, small number of holders, community crafting mechanics and long minting process have led to one of the most cohesive Discord channels in the space.

“The friction of the minting process worked in our favor,” says Hofmann. “It not only took active effort to choose a composition and color palette, but also sort of a passive effort to understand what the project was in the first place. Many had a creative background or a technical background themselves, along with a good amount of curiosity. Those are all good traits for a community when you mix people together and give them a common thread of a storyline…. There is an active interest in what we are trying to achieve together and how we are going to do it—that makes the community very durable.”

While most people enter the NFT space with the goal of collecting a particular digital piece, that community crafted element has led many individuals to have a fair degree of affinity for the pieces that they minted. Even those who pick them up on the secondary understand that the Blit they have purchased was created by someone rather than algorithmically generated.

“With Blitmap, there is more than just the secondary market to align around. There’s more than just the collectability,” Hofmann says. “If you’re wanting to build for the long term, that’s community-driven at its core. It’s OK to start smaller, to be deliberate and to do things with purpose. It doesn’t get you mega-scale and a pop right away, but I think over time it does work out.”

Most Surprising Things this Past Year

Even though Blitmap was highly successful in a financial sense, the two things that most surprised the Sup, Inc. founders had nothing to do with the bottom line. In fact, what most surprised Totally was the widespread proliferation, acceptance and adoption of CC0, because the act of putting assets and intellectual property in the public domain runs counter to the traditional IP rights that most companies cling to. While Nouns was the first major project to announce that their assets would be placed in the public domain, Hofmann (one of the ten original “Nounders”) and the 16 Blitmap artists voted shortly after to allow their originals to be in placed in the public domain as well.

“CC0 is finding its cultural identity,” Totally says. “The entire culture is shifting in how it approaches creativity, and CC0 and web3 are a major part of it. You can see how on Discord people are sharing and collaborating in a very different way than we did three years ago—it is so inherent to web3 and the internet culture in general. And while there may be instances where CC0 is not a great fit, when it does work, on a long-term scale it is going to be incredible.”

The CC0 conversation has been front of mind for Totally and Hofmann as they have begun to staff the Sup offices in Manhattan. Totally says that many of the artists and creative directors are not familiar with web3 and NFTs, or often have a more jaded view of the space. But he notes that when he talks about CC0, their faces light up—it removes all the complexity around IP and just lets people create.

Hofmann agrees that the proliferation of CC0—and the different Blitmap compositions across other projects—was one of the most surprising things from this past year.

“It’s interesting to see the Blitmap logo on the Chain Runners hat,” Hofmann says. “It’s interesting to see imprint on polys.art. It’s interesting to see the Rose in all sorts of contexts. The Blitwear stuff has been amazing, and all the merch that NiftyPins has created has been incredible. And even some of the concept work. I’m not surprised that all these things are happening, because you can zoom out and see how the public domain is so conducive to this creativity. But I am surprised at the quality of these things and how they are impacting the space.”

Another thing that has surprised both Hofmann and Totally is the number of holders who have “attuned” their Blitmap by turning it into a Blitnaut. The duo hatched the idea for the Nauts while hanging out at a pool over a weekend getaway with their partners. After they became aware of the staying power of NFT PFPs, they decided they wanted to try this with the Blitmap collection.

Thus, the Blitnauts were born. As opposed to with most project expansion mechanics, an individual can create a Blitnaut from an “unattuned” Blitmap in perpetuity. While there have been some incentives to do so (such as the forthcoming Logos drop), there was no explicit time frame. Despite that, 1,505 Blitnauts (almost 89%!) of the totally supply has been minted at the time of publication, a fact that surprised Hofmann given how involved the process to create a Blitnaut can be.

An Eye Towards the Future

As we enter the second year of Blitmap, many Holders and people in the NFT community want to know what’s next. The duo have been teasing “Sup Summer” on Discord and Twitter with a number of sneak peeks and teasers. “We have a bunch of things that will be celebrated over the coming months,” Totally says, a little guarded about what’s about to unfold. “We’ve announced the Logos and the comic series and are still working on a few other things.”

In tandem with these announcements, Sup has been actively building a team that is headquartered in Manhattan. Something that is exciting for Totally as he hopes to continue to round out the team over the next couple of months.

“With every new person we hire, we get extra energy,” Totally offers. “It’s more momentum, more focus. Every new person is coming in and working on something cool and it is just exciting. No matter what the market is doing, Sup is staying true to ourselves and continuing to innovate in web3.”

While Logos have been in sight for a while, the other major project that has been announced so far is the comic. Holders got a glimpse of the cover, and many people have begun teasing out Easter eggs: the hidden 6, the rabbit, the mention of the Fragments of the Old Machine, which was hinted at in one of Hofmann’s Sugar (Genesis) cards, Pluto’s Quill. While he wouldn’t reveal many details, Hofmann said that (i) the writing and art was insane, (ii) a major publisher was backing the comic, (iii) it would be available in English and Japanese and (iv) it should significantly expand the awareness of the Blitmap universe, as it would be available in comic stores around the country!

In tribute to the origins of Blitmap, the comic will have a community-crafted element. Does this mean that Holders can vote on the storyline or the characters inside it? Maybe they can choose the covers? Or even decide who is good and bad? Time will tell, but Hofmann did write in Discord that these decisions will “shape future issues as well as the universe and canon.”

But Hofmann was quick to point out that this comic announcement is just the first of a string of announcements for Sup Summer.

“Sup is announcing and releasing a lot of things starting this summer and through the fall,” he says. “After the comic announcement, Corruption(*s) chapter two begins, which I think will be pretty interesting. We follow that with the Logos release and will then begin work on our first formal release as Sup [i.e. not Blitmap]. After that, the comics will be shipping to stores, and then…”

According to the founders, a key driver of these releases is that they want Sup and the Blitmap universe to break through to the mainstream and onboard new people to the space rather than just appealing to those already here. One way to do that is through physical collectibles, such as the comics; the other way is to provide more acceptable price points for newcomers while maintaining the scarcity of the original collection for the current holders.

Sugar (Genesis), the card game that Hofmann has been talking about and releasing in small batches this past year, looks to enter into the spotlight as the Superverse expands. Hofmann called this collection “extremely ambitious from a technological execution standpoint as well as in terms of artistic merit,” and noted that it has the potential to set some world records. “We’re taking big artistic swings,” he says.

Hofmann feels that Blitmap will be a cornerstone of whatever Sup builds.

“From a theme perspective, Blitmap is closer to Nintendo’s Metroid. It’s more like science fiction or science fantasy,” Hofmann says. “However, in terms of proliferating the things we want to do with Sup, and just the meaning of all of it, Blitmap is closer to Mario. It’s just going to keep showing up and expanding. It’s a through line through everything.”

Nifty’s Nook

Holy moly! Are y’all as hyped as I am?!?! Getting to talk with Dom and Totally was one of the most energizing conversations I’ve ever had in my life. The hour phone call ended up going well over two hours, and some of the things that they talked about were incredible!

I tried to balance things that I could talk about and things that I was asked to keep in confidence. But my conviction in what Sup is doing to nurture open, fictional universes in web3 has only increased. There are several reasons for this:

1. Sup is helmed by a team of builders with a tech-first focus. It appears that to make it in this space, you must combine both technological and artistic expertise. Blitmap was important not just purely because of the pixel art, but due to the technological mechanics of how that pixel art was stored on-chain along with the artistic direction of letting individuals craft their NFT.

2. The team is growing. In a market where we’ve seen a lot of volatility and instability, Sup is heads down and building. The addition of theflamingskunk, along with the recent announcement of long time holder kaesha and four other new folks, has me excited to see what’s coming.

3. They have an audacious goal. Dom and Totally aren’t looking simply to make a collection where “number go up.” Instead, they have a defined North Star to on-board new people to the space and, as @html (who we know is somehow associated with Sup, probably Dom?) has said, “the goal is to create the most significant media and collectibles of the 21st century.”

If anyone can achieve this sort of audacious vision in this web3/NFT space, it is Sup. They have the vision, talent and integrity. I will be cheering them on as much as I can, and I am ready for Sup Summer!

One final note: I am so happy to be part of this Blitmap journey and to have met so many of you in the Holders channel. After reading one of Zeneca’s newsletters, I joined in midway through the mint and created City Looney (#821). From there, I minted a handful more and began picking up pieces on the secondary that I felt were important to the collection and wish I had minted.

I got to experience BlitDay (July 29) during the Summer of JPEGs, while on an epic road trip, when we were all going crazy about hitting 100 ETH in total secondary sales. I pulled over on the side of the road during a road trip to be part of the Blitsquad PartyBid for the Foundation piece. I’ve made a number of trades and sold a number of things to pick up pieces I’ve loved. From the mint price of 0.1 ETH, I saw the rise of Blitmap to 30ETH (!) and the subsequent fall back to Earth at 5ETH (!). And I enjoyed minting my Nauts.

However, the best part is that I’ve seen a glimpse of what web3 could become by interacting with people in Holders. I’ve always believed that technology can be a great enabler and equalizer. I remember the lofty ideals of the first iteration of the web, which later gave way to SEO trickery and advertisements. I remember the joy in true connection to friends, family and people who shared like interests in the second iteration, which later devolved into algorithmic feeds that are optimized to divide us and keep us in echo chambers.

I never thought that I’d see a third iteration of the web, and I certainly didn’t expect it to look like this. And we have a chance, albeit a very slim one, to get it right. While it’s likely that it will be ruined like the other iterations, seeing this incredible amount of creativity and collaboration gives me an inkling of hope that this iteration might be better.

Here’s to the second year of Blitmap!

NiftyPins is a member of the Blitmap community—you can find him frequently hanging out in the Blitmap Discord or on Twitter at @niftypins.

But before we get to Stitchmaps, a lot of activity has been brewing in the land of the Blits since we last spoke. Namely, the incredible visualizations behind the rivals. Originally known as Log.0x, the rivals are now known as the Logos, which Dom Hofmann described in a Discord announcement as “a faction of androids who collect and wear logos and other memorabilia from the fallen brands of the era of humanity.” And keeping in line with the previous Blitmap and Naut minting experience, Hofmann promised that there would “be a unique minting mechanic attached to this collection.”

When the imagery was first released, our Blitmap Discord server saw a massive influx of people who were curious about how to snag one of the Logos. What we know now is that all Blitmap and Blitnaut holders will receive a key/pass to mint one of these NFTs. But inquiring minds want to know: will there be a public mint? According to Hofmann, that is on the table, but they haven’t determined the mechanics of it just yet. In the meantime, be sure to join the Blitmap Discord server, because Hofmann will be posting a daily sneak peek of the Logos for the next two weeks.

And if that wasn’t enough, another collection of Baby Blitnauts, known affectionately as Scribblits, was teased on Twitter from the official Blitmap account! If the Logos got drip, the Scribblits are bringing the cuteness to the Blitverse. Why is the team making us wait for all this goodness?! What are these special minting mechanics for the Logos?! What were Hofmann and Kevin Rose brainstorming about?!!?!????? And does Totally, the artist formerly known as Bigpapap, actually look like his namesake Blitmap composition?! Time will only tell, Dear Reader!

But since you’re here, why don’t you stick around and read all about the incredible Stitchmap project?

Stitchmap: Building a Blitmap, Stitch by Stitch

Part of the elegance of Blitmap is the simplicity of its design. Created from only four colors on a 32-by-32 grid, the compositions lend themselves to being reimagined in the physical world. Quetzalcoatlia, who entered the NFT space as a creator on the Tezos blockchain vis-à-vis Hic et Nunc, saw parallels between Blitmap and cross stitching after an online friend and Blitmap holder, Ticklish, introduced her to the project.

“When Blitmap popped up on my dash, I thought that it could work for an embroidery project—each pixel could be a stitch,” Quetzalcoatlia explains. “Whereas some of the other projects I'd considered embroidering would've taken days to complete, Blitmap seemed just the right size. A Stitchmap requires 32 stitches by 32 stitches, which is quite a manageable little snack of a project. I thought I could do a couple of these as a test—it wouldn’t take too long and I could see if anyone was interested in them.”

When she started out, Quetzalcoatlia said that she made the mistake of using very small-count fabric. This caused the stitches to be incredibly small, resulting in long hours and a laborious process.

“They were so delicate that I had to sit with like a magnifying glass and a flashlight set up like an Anglepoise lamp,” Quetzalcoatlia said with a bit of a laugh, “so that I could hear at these tiny stitches and get each one perfect. Then I realized I could make my life a lot easier with a slightly larger fabric count.”

Even now, each Stitchmap takes her between six and seven hours. Quetzalcoatlia often works on them on the train to and from work, and sometimes steals away during lunch to work on them. And while six hours may seem like a lot of time to put in on a piece, she told me that Chain Runners (another CC0 project that was started by a group of Blitmap holders and an original Blitmap artist) can take nearly 12 hours to complete due to the high number of colors used in their designs!

One of the most fun tasks for Quetzalcoatlia is picking out the different thread colors for her Stitchmaps. However, it can sometimes be challenging to match digital hues with analog colors.

“I enjoy choosing thread because it means I get to go to my local thread shop,” she says. “I take my phone with the little picture of the Blitmap that I’m stitching to find the right color. I've got a pretty huge collection of thread colors at home. But some of the Blitmaps are just so bright and vivid that it's kind of impossible to get an accurate color match, especially some of the really neon ones. These colors almost don't really exist in real life.”

Digital NFT Tied to a Physical Item

A Stitchmap is not just a physical item—Quetzalcoatlia also photographs the finished product and creates a digital NFT on the blockchain as part of her NFT collection on OpenSea. This is an example of tokenizing a physical object with a digital NFT. Not only does it provide provenance from when that item was created, but possession of the NFT also serves as an authentication mechanism for the physical piece. Tying the physical to the digital is particularly meaningful to this artist: Quetzalcoatlia feels that blending the digital and physical realms gives a little “soul” to the art.

“When I was fairly new to Twitter and the NFT scene, I just wasn't hooked up yet with that many amazing projects,” she remembers. “There were a lot of churned-out, mass-produced, slightly soulless things. I felt that something physical would somehow feel more genuine.”

After Ticklish introduced her to the Blitmap community, Quetzalcoatlia soon learned that Blitmap was in the public domain with a CC0 license. This meant that she could create—and sell—physical, stitched pieces that individuals could commission based on their favorite Blitmaps. All of the sudden, she found her opportunity to make something unique that could connect with a buyer. She advertised that people could hire her to create bespoke Stitchmaps, even though she was not a Blitmap holder herself. Soon people began knocking down her door.

Many of her customers hold the Blitmap they are getting stitched, and Quetzalcoatlia believes that her derivative project helps makes that relationship between the collector and the NFT stickier.

“The people that commission me to stitch their Blitmap do so because they love their Blitmap,” she offers. “They have a kind of an emotional connection to this awesome little piece of art and they love supporting derivative projects that visualize their piece in a different way.”

But she does not require that an individual own a particular Blitmap for her to stitch it. In fact, Quetzalcoatlia enjoys making Stitchmaps for a person who may not own that Blitmap—or a Blitmap at all—as a way for helping them to connect to a piece that is out of their range.

“I think there are a lot of Blitmaps that people feel a bit of a personal connection to that they don't own,” she explains. “Even though they may have missed their chance to pick that composition up, or maybe the price is just too high, they can still get it stitched. It's another way of being attached to a Blitmap.” However, Quetzalcoatlia does note that once a Stitchmap is produced, she will not issue another NFT for the same Blitmap.

All-Time Favorites and How to Commission

Quetzalcoatlia says that she has a soft spot for all the “cute compositions,” but the Stitchmap that stands out most was the one based on the original Amai by boyprison.

“The original Amai was just ridiculously pretty,” she says with a smile that emanates over the voice chat. “I used these pastoral, rose-colored threads and lavender. It came out so dainty! I've got to choose that one as my favorite!”

She also enjoyed stitching a run of the sushi compositions by Veenus, saying that they “look tasty when you stitch them up.” Quetzalcoatlia chose a glossy white thread that lent a 3D sheen to the pieces, which she says made them look particularly delicious!

At the time of publication, there are eight different OG Blitmaps that Quetzalcoatlia has stitched and is selling on OpenSea for 0.06 ETH: Totally, Scramble, Night Moon, The Sun, Node, Edition and Din Din. Buyers can claim the physical Stitchmap by reaching out to Quetzalcoatlia on Discord and paying her for the postage and handling to ship the piece to their location.

And if none of those originals strike your fancy, you can commission her to stitch any of your favorite Blitmaps, Flipmaps or Chain Runners for prices that start at 0.06 ETH! The beauty is that the CC0 license makes this all possible for artists like Quetzalcoatlia.

“By being in the public domain, Blitmap puts the power and agency into the hands of artists and says, ‘Take a look at this project.’ I think that's an incredibly generous thing to do, and it gets people excited,” she explains. “On a personal level, Blitmap has had a big impact on me because it helped me rediscover my love of stitching and embroidery. I've created a body of work now that I can be proud of.”

Nifty’s Nook

What a story and what an artist! Interestingly, I was the one who commissioned Quetzalcoatlia to stitch the original Amai, and she didn’t remember that it was for me! I wanted to get it stitched for exactly the reasons that she mentioned: there was no way that I’d ever own the piece otherwise and it was one of my favorite Blitmaps around.

I also feel that she hit the nail on the head by saying that when a person commissions a derivative of a piece, they are more likely to keep that piece. This is definitely true for me—by investing in a derivative of a work I own, it makes me that much fonder of the original piece. I’d be curious to know if others have had that same reaction.

Finally, Quetzalcoatlia’s story shows the power of CC0 to empower an artist to build a business around a project without even having to own an original piece. This will be a huge boon for artists and freelancers who wish to create derivatives, physical items, music, videos and lore around CC0 projects in the future.

NiftyPins is a member of the Blitmap community—you can find him frequently hanging out in the Blitmap Discord or on Twitter at @niftypins.

But before we take a deep dive into Blitwear, there is one development in the Blitverse that I need to cover: the hyperlink connection between the Blitmap and Corruption(*s) communities. If you are unaware, Corruption(*s) is part NFT, part performance art and part experiment in decentralized community building that was kicked off by Blitmap founder Dom Hofmann in November 2021. It’s a complex project, but the best way to get caught up to speed is to hop in their Discord and read the “getting up to speed” channel for the full background.

Recently, a portal known as “hyperlink” was opened between the two channels that allows Corruption(*s) holders to communicate directly with Blitmap holders. Hyperlink paved a potential path to connect communities that share an affinity without granting a specific “holders” role in each channel. This communication tool comes at an interesting time: the Corruption(*s) community will soon vote on whether to join Blitmap as part of the Sup ecosystem, an organization that Dom and Bigpapap formed to help nurture fictional web3 universes.

We’ll have to wait and see what the Corruption(*s) community decides! But for now, let’s turn our eyes to the incredible Blitwear project!

Disclosure: Since the end of 2021, I have been actively advising Core3D on how to tie a digital NFT to a physical asset, and have had a small role in helping the team craft website copy and communications.

Core3D: Providing Digital Tools for the High-Fashion World

While Blitwear may be the first NFT project of Core3D, the company has been in the digital space for a while now as an online 3D-design platform for the fashion industry. CEO and cofounder Gwan Yip notes that the Core3D platform helps brands increase their speed to market and reduce waste by eliminating their dependency on physical products.

“Typically the product development process takes between six to eight months, with a lot of back and forth,” he explains. “It works in this very linear order, where a spreadsheet of requests goes to the designers who sketch up the designs. They then create physical samples of the approved pieces, and those that make the cut move to the selling phase. This is where a store is ‘mocked up’ and the brand walks potential buyers through the physical space to see what the collection will look like on the rack. Buyers, such as department stores and retailers, can then decide whether to make the buy.”

This process, Yip says, has been around, unchanged, for the better part of 60 years. But not only does it introduce a huge delay for brands to create the hundreds of samples needed to stock the faux store, it also results in a huge amount of waste in terms of both labor and materials.

Core3D solves this problem by creating a virtual environment that allows buyers to visualize how the product would look on shelves. While a small subset of samples must be produced to ensure size and fit, brands no longer need hundreds of physical samples—many of which may never see the light of day—to stock a sample store.

After a chance encounter with some of the original Blitmap artists at a friend’s birthday party, Yip soon realized that his company’s ability to “digitize fashion” could open the door to creating a NFT x IRL fashion crossover. At the end of 2021, he began pouring his efforts into creating Blitwear.

Blitwear: NFT x IRL Fashion

Some say that luck equals preparation plus opportunity. I’d like to add a third ingredient to the mix: an open mind. When Yip had a happenstance reunion with old friends (and Blitmap composition artists) Varley, BRAINDRAIND and Bigpapap at that party, the stars seemed to align when Varley started talking about his work with NFTs.

“This was back in October 2021, and prior to catching up at the birthday party, I’d had a rudimentary understanding of what an NFT is but didn’t fully get it,” he recalls. “At the time, I’d asked myself if this was something that I should explore further, but the answer was ‘No.’ I just didn’t see the value in it.”

That changed after experiencing Varley’s enthusiasm about the space after what Yip calls “an hour-and-a-half masterclass on NFTs” with the Blitmap artist. He asked more pointed questions to BRAINDRAIND and Bigpapap and began to see what they were all so excited about.

“After the party, I took a step back and mulled over this new information from three creators for whom I have a huge respect,” Yip says. “At that point I realized that there was definitely something there with NFTs, which prompted me to do my own research. This ultimately kickstarted another conversation with Varley where I got to learn more about Blitmap and its community.”

Around this same time, Yip and Core3D were accepted into the San Francisco-based ODX accelerator program and began working on a virtual holiday marketplace to showcase pieces from independent designers in a virtual space. As part of the marketplace, Yip thought it would be interesting to riff on the Blitmap designs that he had been exposed to and create some custom designs on his own to be featured in the marketplace.

"Having worked with some of the leading brands in the industry, it was not difficult to recognize the appeal of the Blitmap artwork," Yip says. "This was not purely from a color palette perspective, but also from a design perspective—the Blitmap pieces easily translate into print patterns and logos that pop with color.”

After creating a virtual storefront for his Blitmap-inspired pieces, Yip sent some screenshots to Varley, who began buzzing with energy. It was at this juncture that I became involved with the project when Varley connected me with Yip based on our mutual interest in NFT x IRL crossovers. My draw to the web3 world was attempting to connect digital assets with physical goods (particularly with enamel pins). When I first saw Yip’s mockups, I was instantly excited and told Yip that he had to transcend digital by also creating high-end physical pieces to accompany them.

“Making a physical product was never my intention. I mean, none of this was really planned out. It just evolved naturally through conversations and support from people in the Blitmap community,” Yip says.

Newly inspired to make a physical product, Yip got to work. He took his preliminary designs and began to refine them for clothing. At the same time, he worked with different print makers to see if they could produce a fabric to match the vibrant colors so often associated with the Blitmap palette. Yip ended up creating a collection of 25 pieces that include an assortment of t-shirts, hoodies and sweatpants based on popular Blitmap designs.

Like an ERC-721 token, the garments in the Blitwear collection are one-of-one pieces. When an individual wins a Blitwear NFT from the auction, they also can claim a physical garment that is truly unique. Apart from a dress or formal wear custom made for the stars to walk the red carpet, you’d be hard pressed to find similar, truly one-off fashion pieces like Blitwear.

The showcase piece of the collection is the varsity jacket, an item tailor made for the individual who wins one of these NFTs. Paying homage to the community-crafted Blitmap minting process, the winner will not only be able to select the Blitmap they want as an embroidered patch on the jacket, but they will also have the ability to fully customize the color palette for the fabric and different accents. Check out this video by Core3D to see all the different things you can customize the Blitwear varsity jacket!

CC0 License Empowered Core3D to Think Big

Blitmap’s choice to put the assets in the public domain with the CC0 license was the catalyst for Blitwear coming to life—not just because the IP was available for Core3D to use, but also because this CC0 concept is what made web3 and NFTs click for Yip.

When BRAINDRAIND took Yip aside at that birthday party and began to show him derivatives people had made based on his original art, it marked a pivotal moment in the designer’s NFT journey. He saw embroidered, graffiti and 3D renderings all based on the original artwork that was in the public domain—not only could these creators make fan art, they could also sell it. Yip realized that there was not only an explosion of creativity around BRAINDRAIND’s original works, but that CC0 projects naturally tended to develop a passionate community of creators.

“I started to understand that with CC0 it's more about expanding the IP through community creativity where everybody wins. This revelation helped me see the potential of what NFT communities like Blitmap are doing. And I have been fortunate to interact with super talented people who have contributed to this Blitwear project because of the energy Blitmap has—without CC0, this never would have happened.”

As a veteran of the fashion industry, Yip knows that if a brand wants to collaborate with a pop culture phenomenon there’s often a large degree of legal wrangling and licensing agreements that can bog down the process. In contrast, when developing Blitwear, he took advantage of the fact that the Blitmap intellectual property was placed in the public domain with the CC0 license. This freed Core3D up to focus on the design prototypes rather than on securing permission to use the Blitmap images.

“The CC0 license was so important in creating the Blitwear collection,” Yip says, “because we were able to move quickly without having to cut through red tape to secure a licensing deal. This enabled us to express our creative vision using the Blitmaps as a base that we could expand.”

And boy did he and the Core3D team express a creative vision! With the help of many in the Blitmap community, the Blitwear launch party saw one of the largest events ever to be held in the Cryptovoxels universe. Tons of people attended the party the other night in spaces that spanned several plots on Scarcity Island, including Varley’s Highley Varlet Studios and nic’s Scarcity Stadium. MasK constructed the plots with voxel art specific for the launch party, and attendees could don Blitmap- and Blitwear-themed wearables by nic while enjoying a DJ set by SaintStereo. Two high-quality hype videos by the Core3D team fired up the crowd before the auction opened for the 25 custom Blitwear items.

As of publication date, all items are up for auction through Sunday, March 20 at 7:30 p.m. EDT (UTC -05:00) with 5 of them already receiving bids! The winners of the Blitwear NFTs can claim their physical items by reaching out to the Core3D team via Discord or Twitter and authenticating their ownership of the items. While this is a manual process, Blitwear is largely an experiment by the Core3D team. If it proves to be a success, the team will look to implement a more robust web3 experience to facilitate a more automated claiming process for future drops.

“Blitwear has been an incredible project supported by a number of people in the Blitmap community,” says Yip. “I have been super focused on creating an event that was executed at the highest level and following through with high-quality, real-life products. I haven’t allowed myself to spend a lot of time thinking about what comes next, but I’m excited to see where this goes!”

Nifty’s Nook

Wow! What a story and what a fantastic party in the Cryptovoxels space last night! After working with Yip for the past several months, it was incredible to see all this hard work and effort come to fruition. There are three major takeaways I have from this project—two are directly related to the notion of NFT x IRL crossovers and the other concerns how web3 anon/pseudo-anon personas help create new opportunities.

First, I have had a huge interest in NFT x IRL for over a year now—in fact, it is what brought me to this space. While there are many facets that are interesting to me, one that Blitwear makes clear is that NFTs can serve as authentication for high-end products. When an individual owns both a Blitwear NFT and the physical garment and decides to sell it on the secondary market, a buyer can rest assured that they are getting the genuine article if the seller can transfer both items to them. In a way, the NFT is akin to a title for a car—having it accompany the physical item means that it is legit.

It’s not too far-fetched to envision a future where Nike sends an NFT with every pair of Air Jordans, or Louis Vuitton has a token for every purse sold. This combination should not only curtail the creation of fraudulent pieces, but also eliminate the need for authentication services.

Second, as we move more of our lives to the metaverse, there will be a desire to bring things that express who we are as a person. Fashion is clearly the way most people express themselves in the physical world, and as digital tokens begin to accompany physical pieces, we will be able to “wear” items that exist in our Ethereum wallets in digital spaces. Look to more mainstream fashion brands jumping into web3.

Finally, the anon/pseudo-anon aspect of web3 has afforded me opportunities that, quite frankly, would have been near impossible in the physical world. Even though I have the fashion sense of a loaf of bread (I rock New Balance and the Old Navy collection from 2014), I do have an interest in developing products and seeing NFT x IRL crossovers happen. This natural curiosity is what led me to Yip’s project and afforded me the opportunity to contribute in a small way to work with a high-fashion industry vet who has partnered with some of the industry’s top brands. Outside of web3, I don’t know how our paths would ever have crossed, much less how we would have collaborated. We are indeed early—now is the time to build relationships and create new ways of doing things. And the crazy part is that all skills are needed!

NiftyPins is a member of the Blitmap community—you can find him frequently hanging out in the Blitmap Discord or on Twitter at @niftypins.

Leading off is the recent announcement from Nifty Island that the Blitmap universe will be integrating with their open metaverse. In the tweet, Nifty Island praised Blitmap as the “OGs of on-chain pixel art and pioneers in web3 community building.” What sort of integration comes about (3D Blitnaut avatars? 3D Rivals?) is yet to be seen, but I’m sure it will be stupendous! And already a number of Blitmap holders are beginning to build out there virtual islands.

The other big story was a demo of Paper, a game engine Sup developed to enable the rapid prototyping of browser-based games. You may remember the first Blitmap community call where Dom Hofmann announced that he and Bigpapap formed a company called Sup to help steward and build fictional universes in the web3 space. With Paper, Sup hopes to create a cheap pipeline to rapidly scale out games and narratives. In two (since deleted!) tweets, Dom teased out an idea of what Paper would look like. So be sure to give @dhof a follow on Twitter and try to catch the next preview before it vanishes!

It’s hard to believe all this news went down in the week since the last newsletter! Maybe this is a harbinger of what’s to come this spring. Regardless, it’s time to dive in and learn more about the Everything is Everything project by Varley!

The Roots of Everything is Everything

If you’ve spent any time in the Blitmap Discord server, as either a guest or a Blitmap holder, you’ve undoubtedly interacted with Varley. He is a major burst of positive energy for the holders community, a chronicler of Blitmap history, a cheerleader and supporter of derivative artists and a host of a metaverse parties in his 3D Cryptovoxel gallery. He is the original Blitmap artist of the Everything, Hot Damn, Soft Boy and Pizza Time, compositions he dubs the “four major food groups of New York,” something the Long Island native knows a thing or two about.

Everything is Everything, at its core, is the first-of-its-kind NFT collection of restaurant reviews—in this case, Varley’s reviews of the everything bagel for which the city is renowned. You may wonder, how can Varley have such comprehensive knowledge of the bagel scene across the five boroughs? How did he discover these gems? The answer is that Varley and Jessi Highet, his wife, embarked on a one-of-a-kind piece of performance art: the pair literally walked a marathon each weekday, that’s five marathons a week for a year, across all five boroughs of New York City, for a project called “2020: Total Clarity.”

“For three years prior to 2020: Total Clarity, every summer Jessi and I took a vacation to a different part of America and planned an extended walking route,” Varley says. “After the third trip, we started formulating our 260-marathon journey. I put in my two weeks’ notice at Avalanche Studios on March 1st, 2020. By my last day, March 13th, the entire office was packing up their computers and no one has returned since. Our intended start date for the project was March 21st.”

At that time, the pandemic was sweeping the United States, hitting New York City particularly hard. Lockdowns and curfews became commonplace as the city grappled with the impacts of the virus. While it was frustrating for Varley to see years of planning halted, he said he felt incredibly lucky that he, Jessi and their families had remained healthy. And as businesses began opening in the summer of 2020, the project was back on track.

“We started the project properly on June 20th, 2020. Businesses and public facilities were just starting to open up, and more of our broader understandings for how the virus spread were coming into shape,” offers Varley. “To have one simple yet challenging physical task we could take on every day kept us focused and centered. Knowing that we were witnessing and capturing an indelible moment in New York's history kept us constantly enthralled.”

During this year-long performance-art piece, Varley documented everything. This was nothing new for the artist who has created across a wide variety of mediums, including film, spoken word and writing. Varley appreciates that NFTs provide him a way to create, and have an immutable record of his creations, without having to physically store or maintain the documents. They enable him to not just display his work in the immediate moment but also to call up a digital archive of his pieces to show the “through lines” that connect all his pieces, independent of medium.

Categorizing the City’s Best Bagels with NFTs

Blockchain technology turned out to be the ideal medium for his and Jessi’s 2020: Total Clarity project, of which Everything is Everything is the first of five installations. The mint opens this Sunday, March 13th, at a price of 0.1 ETH at http://everythingiseverything.nyc/ and features a collection of 203 NFTs that highlight the best bagels across Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island and the Bronx. Each NFT contains a photo of the bagel and a total score that comprises points doled out for the store, bagel and cream cheese.

While Varley certainly understands the importance of on-chain NFTs, it was impractical for him to store a photo of each bagel completely on-chain. Instead, the photos of the savory treats are stored on IPFS, while the metadata for the reviews and scores are stored completely on-chain. “In this world of NFTs, you never know what somebody's going to be inspired to do with the information you provide,” he says, addressing the composable nature of on-chain data. “So I thought it would be cool to have as much information and data stored on-chain as possible.”

Varley notes that in addition to the 202 bagel review NFTs, one special piece in the collection will be stored entirely on-chain to pay homage to Blitmap’s roots.

“There will be a 1/1 piece to honor the on-chain nature of Blitmaps. It will be a version of the Everything composition, which has a Highley Varlet gold-and-blue background and a description of the rating criteria for each bagel store, cream cheese and bagel,” Varley says, referencing the color scheme that is a hallmark of his projects with Highet. “That is a through line that we intend to put in play across all five projects. One of the future projects for 2020: Total Clarity will be completely on-chain, but each of the five projects will have a small token dedicated to the on-chain ideal.”

Everything is Everything is especially interesting because it bridges the world of web2 and web3—the web2 experience is chock-full of information, photos, reviews, stats and charts and complements the collection of NFTs on web3. Varley notes that the beauty of CC0 licensing is that the asset can be anywhere—it doesn’t just have to live as a web3 NFT derivative. He applies this concept by using the different palettes of his Everything composition as icons on his website’s map to identify the relative quality of 202 bagel shops across the five boroughs, including:

• Everything Cherrybomb: Not Up to NYC Standards.

• Everything Vanilla: Passable Bagels.

• Everything (Original Composition): High-Quality Neighborhood Spot.

• Everything Gato: Bagel of Note.

• Everything Genesis: The Best of the Borough.

So after trekking 7,000 miles across New York City and eating countless bagels, which was the one that was, to quote Sinatra, number one, top of the list, head of the heap, king of the hill? Varley found bagel nirvana at P&C Bagels in Queens. But like many reviews of favorite culinary things, the review went beyond taste and smell and into the metaphysical.

“I only reviewed one bagel out of 202 places that achieved a score of five. And yes, the bagel was objectively good, but the review process of bagels is also very much a subjective experience,” Varley recalls. “I was sitting down on the railing and eating the bagel immediately outside of this store that was a block away from the cemetery where my dad is buried. Two blocks away from where my mom grew up. And I began thinking about the future. How I would come back with my family someday to see my dad’s grave and that we’d probably stop for bagels here. This moment transcended the physical experience of eating an exquisite bagel and brought it to a level that was truly a five in my experience.”

With Everything is Everything being one of the early review projects on web3—if not the first of its kind—Varley sees the potential for folks who blog or write reviews to seize some of the power back from web2 behemoths like Yelp.

“When you go on Yelp or on Google and give your review labor, those companies are profiting off your work and, at most, give you an increased user score,” he says. “Web3 gives the creator the ability to turn that review labor into an NFT. Even if it doesn't sell immediately, the person retains ownership for their work that they could potentially convert into monetary value.”

Varley is unsure of how exactly this might play out in the future; however, he is convinced that a model will emerge for online reviewers akin to what has happened for artists.

One final note about the Everything is Everything mint: when the project mints out, Varley plans to give away pieces from his favorite Blitmap derivative artists as post-mint holder prizes. The first to be revealed was the Everything Dripmap by Blitmap holder and Polys.art artist Ticklish and the second gift is a Stitchmap by Quetzalcoatlia! This offer speaks to the level of support that this OG composition artist has given to the Blitmap derivative community.

Why CC0 Matters to this OG Blitmap Composition Artist

As one of the original 17 Blitmap composition artists, Varley was among the people who made the key decision to place Blitmap in the public domain under the CC0 license. And he didn’t hesitate to vote to put his original work for the project in the public domain: in fact, for him, CC0 is one of the most exciting ideas in the web3 space.

“Web3 and NFTs are in this explosion phase, with tons of ideas and creativity coming on the scene like magma and lava. But later, in a few years’ time, there'll be a cooling period where the new normal will be defined,” he predicts. “Some of our ideas will die off and some will succeed. And I really hope the idea of art in the public domain and the CC0 license succeeds.”

Varley points out that IP that can be renewed in perpetuity is problematic because over time the general population who loves a cartoon character, story or work of art puts as much energy into it as the original creator. He feels that the CC0 license is a way to “alleviate the anxiety” of would-be creators and artists so they can take those assets and ideas and add back to the canon with their own creations. After all, Varley points out that rarely is a creation completely novel: we are all influenced by what has preceded us.

“Anything I have ever made has been informed by something, someone else in this world,” he says. “I really hope that the idea of CC0 succeeds in this new world.”

Nifty’s Nook

Everything is Everything is notable not just for its comprehensive review of New York’s bagel scene, but for how it demonstrates that web3 can be extended beyond the artistic and gaming worlds. With the proliferation of review aggregators and the general shift towards “free” online digital content, many writers have struggled in a similar vein as musicians and artists. I’m hopeful that the opportunity web3 presents for people to monetize their writing can open new avenues for authors and journalists to fund their endeavors. Everything is Everything is one such channel, and another is Mirror, the platform on which this newsletter is written, which allows people to “mint” editions of NFTs to sell to their fans and readers.

Additionally, Everything is Everything bridges the gap of web3 to web2 in a very subtle way by using Blitmap NFTs as the icons on the map. Currently, the web3 ecosystem is small—it can often feel like an echo chamber on crypto Twitter or inside our favorite Discord haunts. It has become a trope, but we are, indeed, early. The beautiful thing about CC0 projects is that we can imbue popular culture with imagery and icons that are part of the NFT ecosystem. At the highest-level, we saw Bud Light do this with the Nouns glasses during their Super Bowl ad and with media and sports personalities changing their social media avatars to NFT PFPs. Everything is Everything continues this trend, one you will likely begin to see more of both offline and in web2.

NiftyPins is a member of the Blitmap community—you can find him frequently hanging out in the Blitmap Discord or on Twitter at @niftypins.

Later, in the first Blitmap community call, Dom walked through how Sup will focus on world building, specifically with Blitmap. I’m absolutely stoked to see what happens! And from the looks of it, so are other folks: this past week saw Blitmaps and Blitnauts flying off the shelves as we welcomed a number of new folks to the Holders channel! What will happen? How will this universe unfold? When can we all gather for virtual drinks at the Frigate Tavern? I suppose we’ll have to stay tuned, dear reader!

This newsletter highlights HyperLoot, a project that launches very soon that looks to bring the Lootverse together with other CC0 projects, including Blitmap. Ready to learn more? Let’s dive in!

The HyperLoot Team

The HyperLoot team is a doxed group from Thailand composed of husband-and-wife developer duo Thanakron Tandavas and Herin Kim, along with renowned Thai artist Wanchana Intrasombat. Tandavas, a front-end engineer/UI designer, and Herin, a full-stack engineer, run a software development agency that has worked with startups and corporations in Silicon Valley, New York and the European Union. The duo has been involved with the NFT space since 2018 when they first purchased CryptoKitties and were part of the original Blitmap minting process, with Tandavas first minting Sasquatch Boombox (#357) and Herin minting Cool Cat Watcher (#360). Wanchana, known colloquially as Vic (short for his artist name Victorior), recently joined the Blitmap community by purchasing Mana Drink Me (#248).

The team first met in the early stages of the Thai NFT community, where they began fostering a young collective of artists and technologists. Vic had one of Thailand’s first major NFT sales on Foundation, a piece entitled “To the Waterfall” that he sold for 1.888 Ethereum. This was the catalyst that really jumpstarted a lot of artists diving into the space.

ethereum://0x3B3ee1931Dc30C1957379FAc9aba94D1C48a5405/4919

“At first, people were asking why they had to pay a fee [gas] to be able to sell their piece,” Herin explains. “But after Vic had one of Thailand’s first major NFT sales on Foundation, artists quickly realized that NFTs worked. Because many of our Thai artists do not know English, language has always been a barrier. But this is no longer the case with NFTs, because now the artists can speak through their art.”

Vic’s sale was a watershed moment in the Thai NFT community—in a country where the minimum wage for a person is just $10/day, an artist clearing almost $6,000 on a single sale was massive. Soon, more young artists began joining the community, and the country at large became NFT obsessed.

"Coming from the physical art world, I typically would sell my art prints at Comic-Con for $10. I began to develop my skills in digital art, which at that time wasn't appreciated as much as physical prints,” Vic says. "When I found out about NFT, I had to jump in. I was able to sell my first NFT for almost $6,000, which is the same art that I sold at $10. I realized that with blockchain and NFT technology, digital art can be valued."

Upon seeing the potential of NFTs, the trio came together to work on HyperLoot. Tandavas and Herin ceased working on web development client work altogether and are now focusing on this project full time.

What is HyperLoot?

To understand HyperLoot, you must first understand Loot (for Adventurers), a project Dom launched in late August 2021. The premise was simple: there were 8,000 total NFTs stored on-chain that featured white text on a black background. All Loot NFTs (known as “bags”) were placed in the public domain, and Dom left the next steps up to the users, tweeting “no images or stats. intentionally omitted for others to interpret.”

What happened next was a tsunami of Loot-derivative projects and interpretations, many of which were text-based interpretations of the project. This inspired the Thai-based team to create HyperLoot, an effort to allow people to visualize their Loot bags.

“One of the challenges that we have seen in the Loot ecosystem is that many projects do not focus on visualizing the items themselves because drawing all the different pieces and combinations is a lot of work for the artist,” offers Tandavas.

This is where Vic comes in. Leaning on his 12 years of experience as an art director, concept artist and character designer—with project collaborations that include Illumination, Clash of Clans, Disney, and a Netflix film by Sony Pictures—he began to create all the variations of gear contained in the bags that would outfit a HyperLoot character. Having compelling imagery that tells the story visually solves another major challenge with Loot: the language barrier for non-English speakers.

“People who do not understand English may not really understand what is inside the Loot bag they hold,” Tandavas notes. “For example, many non-native English speakers don’t know what ‘war hammer’ or ‘grimoire’ even means. But if we can visualize those items, making them compelling and easy to understand, maybe we can reach more users and expand the Loot universe.”

For the launch, there is a supply of 20,000 NFTs and people who hold either Loot, More Loot or a Genesis Adventurer will be able to mint one HyperLoot for each bag that they hold. And similar to the Blitmap minting process, the minter is granted a certain degree of agency in the creation of their NFT: they can choose a number of customizations for their HyperLoot character, with nods to Blitmap and other CC0 projects in the minting experience. In the image above, you can see two Blitmap references: numo’s Teddy is in the left hand and the face of the HyperLoot character is Bigpapap’s Totally composition.

“Blitmaps and Blitnauts took a really long time for users to mint what they liked, but after minting they felt connected to the piece on a deeper level because of the choices they made. We know that owners love their Loot bags, and many have reasons for not wanting to sell,” says Herin.

Building a Composable, 3D-Gaming Platform for Devs

However, these 2D visualizations and this 20,000 piece NFT collection are just the beginning. The team has ambitious plans to model all the HyperLoot assets and figures in 3D visualizations that can be taken into the metaverse. Why? The team aims to develop an animation library and visualization layer that is accessible and licensed under CC0 and can be called on by developers for all Loot and MLoot bags to build games, animated films, experiences and more.

“We chose to double down on the idea of Loot and CC0. The NFT itself would be worthless if others were not building on top of it,” says Tandavas. “And the more things that are built on top of Loot go on to give it more exposure. We view HyperLoot in the same way. If we are allowing other people to use our assets to build something else, we are happy to see HyperLoot succeed even if it is not something that we are directly building.”

The CC0 license has made this notion of composability possible, granting the individual agency to do something creative with the assets.

“The Loot community has a lot of builders, but there are fewer artists. These builders have good ideas and are quick to build, but lack art assets for their projects,” says Herin. “HyperLoot can provide high-quality assets that can help the community build more quickly.”

This spirit of CC0 and the potential to bring in other characters from the public domain was on full display in HyperLoot’s tease of a person-to-person combat game a la Smash Brothers. When they posted an image that not only featured a HyperLoot character, but also a Blitnaut, Cryptoadz and Nouns figures engaged in an epic battle, the Blitmap Holders channel and Twitter immediately erupted into a frenzy.

Making NFTs Accessible to the General Population

However, possibly the most interesting aspect of HyperLoot as a visualization layer is that it extends well beyond the 8,000 Loot bags that are often cost prohibitive for the general population. The team purposefully built HyperLoot so it could be extended to More Loot (MLoot), a version of Loot that is free + gas to mint, currently has a supply of 1M+ NFTs, and grows at a 10% rate of Ethereum’s block rate. It can also (potentially) be extended Synthetic Loot, a bag inherently associated with any Ethereum wallet.

“Many projects are not supporting More Loot because it was already a challenge to support all the variations inside 8,000 Loot itself. Supporting MLoot is an even larger burden, so most of the projects only support Loot bags,” says Tandavas. “We see that as a problem because not everyone can afford a Loot bag. In building HyperLoot, we wanted to support everyone, and we want people who have MLoot to experience this Lootverse as well.”

The purpose for ensuring that HyperLoot is compatible with those two less expensive options becomes obvious when you realize how early we are to the web3 space. As NFTs become mainstream, a supply of 8,000 NFTs will not be enough to meet demand. Sure, it works now as this space is fairly niche, but as the general population onboards to this latest iteration of the web, it will be paramount to have an accessible option that will allow them to participate.

In an era where few PFP projects dare to go above the 10,000 threshold, it’s hard to see the big picture that someday a project with 1M supply may barely cover consumer demand. Just as the “race to a million” users was the benchmark in the early days for web2/mobile applications, so too will it be table stakes for web3. And HyperLoot is building for that future.

One key driver for the HyperLoot team’s vision is that they are from Thailand. While Loot was quickly inaccessible for the average Thai collector, More Loot proved to be quite popular there—it was a way for collectors in that country to have a stake in the Lootverse at a fraction of the cost.

“Especially in the Thai community, many cannot afford the Loot bag now because of the price,” explains Herin. “Everyone here has at least one MLoot bag after learning about the Loot project from a Twitter thread by Tandavas.”

The understanding that current costs will price out many from the general population puts the HyperLoot team a step ahead of most projects. They understand that success lies in getting as many people as possible to use their CC0 assets and to play the game.

Nifty’s Nook

Getting to interview the HyperLoot team was such an amazing and eye-opening experience. First, it helped me realize how shortsighted many of us are right because we are so early. As more of the general public comes to this space, there is going to be a demand that will far exceed the current 10,000-piece drops. This is something that Dom acknowledged in releasing More Loot and that the HyperLoot team foresees in supporting that collection of 1M+ pieces.

The second major takeaway is that while the Blitverse, Lootverse, the Swamp and Mega City will certainly remain as universes for specific CC0 projects, there may also be the potential for a much larger CC0-verse. This is a place where team-ups and storylines can mix, interact and become intertwined, something akin to the Justice League or The Avengers. It’s a thrilling possibility to consider: that projects in the public domain may expand well beyond their predefined space and become pieces in a much larger universe.

NiftyPins is a member of the Blitmap community—you can find him frequently hanging out in the Blitmap Discord or on Twitter at @niftypins.

What is Flipmap?

As you may know, the canonical Blitmap collection consists of 100 original compositions by 17 different artists. When minting opened on May 31, 2021, individuals were able to mash one composition up with the palette of another, resulting in what is called a “sibling.” But there was a catch: only 16 siblings could be created for each composition. This resulted in 8,300 total composition/palette compositions ending up on the cutting-room floor.

Enter Flipmap, a project created by Blitmap holders When Lambo and Sara Sioux that launched on January 1, 2022. Flipmap made it possible to mint those 8,300 lost combinations and “flipped” the composition on the vertical axis.

“When I read the article about Blitmap being put in the public domain, it was a no-brainer to launch a collection like Flipmap to allow people to mint the lost Blitmaps,” explains Lambo. “I had kind of hoped and expected someone else to do it, but time went by, and nothing came together. I put out a call for developers in the Forgotten Runes Discord server, and Sara answered the call. It was a stroke of luck that it happened to be us that ended up making Flipmap a reality.”

For Sioux, who had already worked on many different avatar projects, it was a combination of Lambo’s enthusiasm and the technical challenge presented by Flipmap that convinced her to collaborate with him.

“As an engineer, I want projects that are challenging, fun and are innovative,” she says. “Non technical founders can attract developers with the work itself, and the projects that Lambo proposed to me were extremely challenging. I had to learn all new things. I had to really go deep on reading other people's code. That's what pulled me in.”

Four Facets that Make Flipmap Unique

While Flipmap is a stand-out for several reasons, the most obvious one is that it brings back the original minting experience.

“Everybody that talks glowingly about Blitmap refers to the minting experience,” offers Sioux. “They loved having some agency into the creation of the thing. So there was no way we were going to launch Flipmap as a blind mint—it had to be interactive.”

However, as the project was reaching its final stages, Lambo realized that Sioux was going to have to write the Flipmap preview mechanism from scratch. To help streamline the process, he reached out to Dom Hofmann, the Blitmap creator, on Christmas Eve to ask him how he had been able to display the preview in the original project. And Santa came right on time for Lambo.

“On Christmas morning, of all days, Dom drops me a link to the code he had written for the preview UI with instructions on how to change it for our Flipmap requirements,” he recalls. “It’s beyond generous that he would share it so readily, but then again that seems to be his hallmark. He full-heartedly embraces the web3 ethos, and we will be forever grateful for that benevolence.”

Second, the Flipmap team removed the ability to mint any of the 1,700 Blitmap combinations in their project. This was an interesting twist deviation from many of the flipped-avatar projects that we see on the market today. With Flipmap, all the pieces in the collection are “net-new”—prior to Flipmap, Amai Genesis or Teddy Logo didn’t exist. This creates a much different kind of derivative project, one that branches off from the original collection and takes it in a new and exciting direction. As a derivative project, Flipmap is completely separate from Blitmap. So while Flipmap holders do not have access to the Blitmap Holders channel, airdrops or expansions, they can still tell their own story about the collective Blitverse in a novel way.

Third, the team put Flipmap entirely on-chain. Sioux notes that she pored over the original contract and really dove into the code of Hofmann. She populated an on-chain database of the previous 1,700 Blitmap combinations to remove the ability for them to be minted, a decision that cost a considerable amount of Ethereum. But in having the data and artwork on-chain, Flipmap becomes composable much in the same way—people can call on that data and continue to create new things.

Finally, the Flipmap team made the incredible decision to offer a royalty payment to all the original Blitmap artists. While they certainly did not have to take this measure, this was a move that endeared them to many in the Blitmap community, including yours truly!

“The CC0 license means that anyone can use that work, be it for a personal project or commercial gain,” says Lambo. “However, we wanted to give something back to the artists who created the original art—we wouldn’t be here without them.”

Flipmap Launch

On New Year’s Eve, the day prior to launch, Sioux and Lambo were performing some final checks and found that the images on OpenSea testnet were rendering with strange lines. Recalling a previous chat about this very issue in the Blitmap Holders channel, Lambo contacted Mid, a co-founder with the Chain Runners team, who had been on that thread. A few Discord exchanges later, the Flipmap team joined a private chat with the Chain Runners team (BRAINDRAIND and Knav hopped in) and received a line of code that completely solved the rendering problem! The Chain Runners team also offered Discord moderator tools and tips that helped protect the Flipmap server from bots.

“It’s just incredible how helpful people are,” Lambo recalls. “I mean, here are a number of developers working on their own project, building their own community in what web2 would view as a ‘competing space.’ But they just freely shared information and code to help out a new project. This is the paradigm shift of web2 to web3 in full flow. And it works.”

With the issue resolved, Flipmap was ready to launch on New Year’s Day, 2022, with a message from Lambo in the Blitmap Holders channel. Minting officially started at 12:39 PM EST with the first Flipmap token, Genesis Otoro #1700. The final token, Otoro Hand #9999, was created a mere nine hours later, at 9:56 PM EST.

Without any prior marketing and little fanfare at the launch, Flipmap minted out a collection five times as large as the original Blitmap collection in nine hours! By replicating the original minting experience, placing the NFT on-chain and paying it forward to the original artists, Flipmap had all the ingredients it needed to catch fire—with both Blitmap holders and new entrants alike.

Just as open source-software revolutionized software and web development, Flipmap’s experience is proof positive that CC0 will impact art, music, photography, gaming and more.

“I love the ethos of web3,” notes Sioux. “I love open-source code, and I think we all get better by building on top of each other’s work instead of constantly starting from scratch. I’m super comfortable with this when it comes to code—the libraries we use and the communities that build—but when it comes to creative content, this notion of open-source is not quite as universal. The creative commons CC0 license for creative works just fits in perfectly with the open-source licenses so common in the technical world.”

Nifty’s Nook

While derivatives have no formal connection to the core Blitmap team’s work or plans, it is exciting to see such a significant CC0 contribution to the Blitverse at large emerging. I might compare the relationship to the Marvel multiverse, with Blitmap being Earth-616. Flipmap is in another universe, and while completely separate, it uses some similar tent poles (the compositions, palettes, minting process and even the burning of an NFT). These commonalities help lend context to the overarching narrative.

Most exciting of all is to be able to see the unique course that the Flipmap team and community has begun to chart on their own thanks to CC0. After all, Miles Morales needed to develop in a separate universe from Peter Parker to become a beloved modern comic book character. I can’t wait to see what comes out of Flipmap!

NiftyPins is a member of the Blitmap community—you can find him frequently hanging out in the Blitmap Discord or on Twitter at @niftypins.

NANOBLITS: A Quarter of a Blitmap at a Fraction of the Cost!

As we all know, Blitmaps are pixel art created on a grid of 32 by 32 pixels. Take it from me—this art may look simple, but it is actually incredibly difficult to produce from scratch. After joining the Blitmap community I downloaded Pixaki and tried my hand at making my own creations, learning that creating art as nuanced and detailed as that of the OG composition artists is difficult.

But what about doing it in less space? That’s what Blitmap holder and artist Yanis attempted to do with his project NANOBLITS, a derivative project that shrunk the Blitmap compositions down to an 8 by 8 pixel grid. Although these NANOBLITS were a quarter of the size of the originals, the amount of work the artist put into them was no less incredible.

Discovering Blitmap

A former designer at a prominent web2 company, Yanis had been following Blitmap creator Dom Hofmann on Twitter, where he saw Dom’s tweet about the start of Blitmap minting.

“Dom doesn’t post a lot, and so I vividly remember his tweet about Blitmap. It was like a single tweet and I didn’t feel the urgency to go and mint right then,” Yanis recalls. “I ultimately forgot about it and missed out on the minting completely. It wasn’t until I saw Dame [another Blitmap holder and popular NFT Twitter personality] tweeting about Blitmap—they did a great review of the project and I went to take another look at it, but it was already sold out. I read more about the idea on blitmap.com, peeked into the Discord server and had a good feeling. My girlfriend saw the beautiful Mushroom Moderator. It has a classic color palette paired with a meaningful symbol. Even though it was a lot of money we took the leap and bought in. Blitmap is a special story to be a part of and contribute to.”

After Yanis made the purchase of Mushroom Moderator, he did what he noticed many collectors do: relist the NFT at an exorbitant amount. For him, this was 18 ETH, a sum of money that he thought was absurd and one that no one would pay. But five short days later, the floor was swept, and his beloved Blitmap was gone in the blink of an eye. He didn’t want to be left out of the Holders channel and promptly rejoined by purchasing Looney Gato a short time later.

“Before Blitmap, I was already learning the tech side of NFTs: figuring out how the wallet works, exploring different marketplaces and minting a few of my own artworks. But there was no sense of community for me yet,” Yanis says. “And then I came across Dame’s tweets, which were very enthusiastic about Blitmap. That’s how I found this great community. I’m in Blitmap basically thanks to Dame, who is such a prominent and positive force. ”

Paring Down Design to its Raw Essence

After talking with Yanis, it didn’t surprise me that he gravitated to the Blitmap community, because he is an artist who cares deeply about personal experience and design. After leaving his web2 company, Yanis relocated from the Bay Area to Los Angeles where he began working on his passion project, the MINE.PINK application.

The online app description simply states “many uses, just one app.” But its design is reminiscent of the days of the early web when we created web pages and blog posts more for ourselves than for our social media audience.

“While it's great that we have these powerful social tools, it's important to have great personal spaces too,” Yanis believes. “Apps like Notes, Photos, Voice Memos and Messages haven’t seen much innovation and feel disconnected. With MINE.PINK, I'd like to create the best personal tool that starts with you as an individual. One that isn't limiting or distracting to you, but rather there purely to support you. ”

What Yanis created is hard to describe, but the aesthetic and feeling evoke something very similar to his NANOBLITS project, which is why I mention it here. Both seem to trim off any excess and cut to the essence of design.

Developing NANOBLITS

“When I joined the Blitmap Holders channel, I was surprised,” Yanis said. “I didn’t know that this kind of community spirit still existed on the internet. Furthermore, Dom's communication style of being to the point, very concise and clear is a skill I'd like to develop. He’s mastered making art, building clever mechanisms and communicating it well. ”

Yanis began to notice that many people were eager to get into the Holders channel, but were priced out by the steep entry point of a Blitmap. He became interested in tackling this problem, which has been echoed in the channel by holders and artists alike. To make the originals available to people at a fraction of the price, NANOBLITS was born. Yanis began creating the designs with Grix by eBoy, a pixel editor iPhone app with a simple drag-and-drop interface.

“Creating NANOBLITS was challenging—it took a month and a half to complete the set," Yanis explains. "I remember starting on the day when Dom dropped Loot. First with the simple compositions, the obvious ones that would translate down to the smaller grid. But looking at the many more complex ones, I felt there was no way I'd be able to make those into 8 by 8. ”

For those more difficult and abstract Blitmaps, Yanis realized he would have to create his own interpretation of the pixels and not hold himself to the standard of making exact replicas of the originals. One such NANOBLIT that comes to mind is Warm Vibe, which I recently picked up on the secondary market. The heart featured in the original composition by BRAINDRAIND was already abstract in the 32 by 32 Blitmap; however, Yanis had to take the abstraction a step further, invoking more of a feeling of the original than an exact representation.

While most artists balk at questions around their favorites, Yanis was clear cut in choosing the NANOBLIT that was based on Numo’s Fishy.

“I like the creepy little Fishy guy,” Yanis says with a hint of fanboy in his voice. “That was one of my favorite Blits when I first saw the collection months ago—I just loved how sleepy, dreamy and weird it is. And so when making the NANOBLITS, I waited to make Fishy until the very end, and was extra precious about it. I was like, damn, I really have to make it right!”

Besides developing all 100 original Blitmaps (and a few nods to other related projects), Yanis created a companion web interface built on his MINE.PINK platform where you can view all of the NFTs at once. If you haven’t clicked over to see it, I highly recommend doing so—seeing all of the NANOBLITS together in a curated environment is something special, demonstrating the need for online spaces to showcase collections in general.

An insider tip that I initially missed out on, which Yanis pointed out during the interview: click and hold any NANOBLIT on his site and it will toggle over to the original Blitmap composition. This Easter egg is incredibly fun to play around with.

Yet despite how impeccable both the NFT art and web experience are, Yanis felt slightly apprehensive about launching the project. It wasn’t until he traveled to NFT NYC and ran into Blitmap composition artists Varley and Zod that he got the push he needed to launch. After showing them a demo of his NANOBLITS and the companion site, both artists told him he had to go for it.

“I'm just standing there in NYC, feeling the energy of the OG artists, then Varley posts an announcement that I was working on a derivative project on Discord right away,” Yanis said. “And he shows me the post and I’m like, OK, I’ve got to go back to California and put them out!”

While the CC0 licensing was much appreciated, Yanis said that he considers himself a street artist and would have put the project out regardless.

“I love Blitmap, and would’ve made NANOBLITS whether they had an open-source license or not.” Yanis said emphatically, with a bit of a laugh. “But when Blitmap was announced as Public Domain—it felt very inviting. A big part of being an artist and making art is you must be open and confident, CC0 takes that to the next level. There will be positive future outcomes that we can’t even imagine now. Blitmap going with the CC0 license is very experimental. It’s beautiful.”

Nifty’s Nook

This was such an inspiring story, and Yanis was a wonderful person interview! I left the call feeling amped up about where the Blitmap derivative scene stands today and the high-quality creations that people are creating.

It’s also amazing how helpful this community is to one another—that nudge from Varley and Zod was just enough to help push NANOBLITS from an idea to production. I think it would be equally great to someday see a NANOBLITS minting platform akin to what we had with Blitmap. Yanis has the idea and artwork—it would be terrific if he could find a collaborator for the code. Regardless, it’s fascinating to think about the possibilities!

NiftyPins is a member of the Blitmap community—you can find him frequently hanging out in the Blitmap Discord or on Twitter at @niftypins.

With the recent tease of the enemies, many of us in the Blitmap community are getting excited about the forthcoming release. What will a high-fidelity enemy look like? Will it take on the properties of a Blitmap’s composition and palette? Why are they and the Blitnauts at odds? And how do the original Blitmap NFTs “power” them, the heroes or the universe? Only time will tell.

This newsletter is not just about what’s happening in the Blitmap universe but also about the people building on top of it. When Dom and the other sixteen original Blitmap artists took the revolutionary step of making the original Blitmap compositions part of the public domain with a CC0 license, they ensured that derivatives wouldn’t have to be made in the margins, but could be celebrated in public. Later the Blitmap community would follow suit by voting to make all siblings part of the public domain as well. Ultimately, the public domain decision is predicated on the view that creations riffing on the Blitmap artwork drive value back to the original pieces.

Setting the Stage

This monthly newsletter will focus on derivatives of Blitmaps and those who are creating them. The power of the CC0 license is that it allows individuals (and companies) to create art, games and narratives without the express consent of the Blitmap creators or holders. In a recent tweet, Dom summarized the license’s value: “establish backstory & building blocks, create examples of character driven narrative in diff formats to fire up imagination, cc0 all of it, add incentives see what happens.”

Can you imagine having the power to do anything you wanted with a Pokémon character without fear of reproach? Or the ability to remix some of the most classic beats without having the estate of a famous singer coming after you? Or even producing a unique story arc in a Marvel storyline (in the vein of their smash-hit Life Story series) without having to request permission from Disney? That is the power of the CC0 license—individuals can create, riff on and produce amazing things with the characters they love the most.

That age-old tech industry debate of open vs. closed is now playing out on the Web3 battleground, pitting intellectual property against the public domain. But the battle extends beyond open-source software and proprietary platforms; today, it is playing out in artistic endeavors fueled by the rise of NFTs.

Who I Am and Why I’m Writing this Newsletter

Now that the table has been set, allow me to introduce myself. I’m NiftyPins, a long-time-listener, first-time-caller to the cryptocurrency/NFT/web3 world. I’ve been on the periphery of this tech for a long time without ever jumping in. I missed out on Bitcoin because I thought $10/coin was “the ceiling,” and I didn’t get a Cryptopunk in 2017 because the free ones were already claimed, and someone had the audacity to sell one for real US dollars when I could just “right-click-and-save-it.” It wasn’t until the spring of 2021 that I finally dove into NFTs, later discovering the Blitmap project and community.

I was around for the “Summer of JPEGs” and saw a meteoric rise in the interest in and price of NFTs. But despite the scene’s craziness, the Blitmap community remained one of the most solid around, a Discord server I wouldn’t be ashamed to have my kids scroll through.

When Blitmap was made public domain, I was thrilled to see the different projects and creations that began springing up. These derivatives were being created not just by holders—the Blit magic became a draw for creators outside our immediate community. And these folks were accepted as well. I began collecting some of the derivatives and interacting more with folks in the Discord, and soon I replied to Dom’s request for writers. So without further delay (sometimes us Texans take a while to get to the point), let me introduce the first derivative project to be featured in this newsletter!

Hashmasker1’s 3D Blitmaps

One of the first projects to catch my eye was a 3D voxel project by Hashmasker1. This individual hails from Lisbon, Portugal, and became a Blitmap holder on the advice of a friend.

“I’m in a Telegram group with other crypto/NFT friends and we often share projects we like. When one person talked about Blitmap, I immediately thought it was interesting,” Hashmasker1 says. “I was intrigued by Blitmap being fully on-chain, and the final art being created by combining two pieces. The clincher was when my friend made a YouTube video about Blitmap. After watching it, I quickly bought one on the secondary market because minting was already closed by that time!”

Hashmasker1 became a holder before the public domain decision was announced. But even before that, he was tinkering with voxel art after watching another video on YouTube.

“Even though I’ve made a career in physics, I’ve always enjoyed drawing,” he continues. “After watching that video, I installed MagicaVoxel on my PC and began tinkering around with the program. I had already purchased my Blitmap [Embryo Ever Lovin #1689], and I thought it would be fun to make a 3D version of it.”

After it was announced that the original 1,700 Blitmaps were now part of the public domain, Hashmasker1 began working on developing his collection, 3D Blitmap.

“Derivatives are an expression of the creativity of a community and help create artistic ties between the community members while providing alternative artistic interpretations of the original art. They also offer an economic incentive that is possible because of web3,” he explains. “With the announcement, the Blitmap community at large could start developing art or other products based on the universe, ultimately driving brand awareness to Blitmap as a whole.”

While it was tempting to just import the 32-by-32-pixel Blitmap into MagicaVoxel and begin building, I was drawn to Hashmasker1’s project (and ultimately to purchase one of his pieces) because I saw that he went beyond merely adding dimensionality to the Blit. Often, he will put the Blitmap into context or add some interesting background elements.

The piece I purchased was his take on Genesis—I love how the Blitmap is framed on a subway-tile background, something of a tribute to the many artists based in New York City. His Watcher is both striking and spooky, putting the window with two beady eyes in context by incorporating it into a dimly lit house. Hillside is interesting because the sunny, bucolic scene it features is set against dark brick that reminds one of a jail cell—perhaps this is the prisoner’s only peaceful view into the outside world.

But for my money, the Mushroom 3D Blitmap takes the cake. Dubbed “Mushroom Pi” by the artist, the Mushroom Blitmap serves as a chip on a Raspberry Pi-esque device. The piece epitomizes the “maker” ethos that is so pervasive in the Web3 landscape.

The other thing that impresses me about Hashmasker1’s collection is that the artist is looking to expand beyond voxel art. In fact, prior to the interview, he posted in the #derivatives channel that he is now working on bringing his 3D Blitmaps to life through augmented reality (AR).

Hashmasker1 notes that “Voxels and AR are a perfect match,” and that moving forward he plans to distribute the voxel file and the AR file together with the NFT. For those who have already acquired a piece, the artist is going to provide a claiming mechanism for the AR file.

The Blitmap community has really responded to Hashmasker1’s 3D Blitmap collection. It is one of the few derivative collections that are completely sold out and, at the time of this writing, there are no pieces available on the secondary market. Next on his list to tackle are Blitmap #39 Periwinkle (the first to ship with the AR file), along with #54 Nude and #60 Eye. Due to work commitments, Hashmasker1 says that he does not have much time to work on his project during the week, so the process is somewhat slow. However, having time to breathe in a space that is often fast and furious gives him enough time to discover and develop new ideas.

A final note—I chose Hashmasker1’s work to be my first Blitmap derivative feature not just because I love his 3D Blitmap Collection, but also because he is a genuinely nice individual. When I was messing around with MagicaVoxel and had some challenges, he graciously put together a guide to help. Hashmasker1 has allowed me to link to it here to help others looking to explore this voxel medium.

“If someone asks for help, I always try to help if I can do it,” he explains. “The Blitmap community has been very welcoming and supportive since I've joined it, and it makes 100% sense to help someone who asks for something.”

Nifty’s Nook

Before I sign off this first ever Blitmap derivative newsletter, I want to thank you for reading it and being part of the greatest community in Web3! I’m constantly impressed by the creativity and kindness of folks in both the #holders and #general channels.

This first newsletter is a bit long, but I thought it was important to set the stage around the importance of public domain license and provide context for the decision that the Blitmap founder and founding artists made. Thanks to Hashmasker1 for being so kind, both in taking time out of his schedule for the interview and in all his contributions to the community!

NiftyPins is a member of the Blitmap community—you can find him frequently hanging out in the Blitmap Discord or on Twitter at @niftypins.

Today, in keeping with our commitment to make Blitmap a public domain universe, we have released the Blitnaut collection under CC0.

You are free to use the Blitnaut collection for any reason and without restriction, personally or commercially. This includes any selection of characters within it or the collection as a whole. Of course, it also allows you to create your own Blitnauts or otherwise incorporate or extend any aspect of the collection or universe into your work in any way that you like.

We will continue to collaborate with the community to develop our own lore for the Blitmap universe, but will also ensure that our approach allows for the possibility of infinite dimensions and timelines. In other words, everything is canon. We believe this represents a new and emerging opportunity to collaboratively build a multifaceted universe of substance.

Does my derivative also need to be public domain?

No. There may be mutual community benefits in it but it is entirely up to you.

Do I need to acknowledge Blitmap or Blitnauts in my derivative?

No. There may be mutual community benefits in it but it is entirely up to you.

I’m making a commercial derivative. Do I need to share profits with Blitmap?

No.

Does this include merch/games/toys/shows/etc?

Yes. You can do whatever you like.

What about naming?

CC0 does not affect trademark rights. We are working on opening up the naming separately, but this will require a little more work on our end. For now, we would ask that you refrain from the following phrasing in your derivative works: “Official”, “Canon”, “Blitmap(s)” or “Blitnaut(s)” followed by any sequence number, or just “Blitnauts(s)”.

✅ My Little Blitnauts

✅ Baby Blitnauts

✅ Blitnauts & Friends

✅ Blitnauts Go West

✅ CryptoBlitnauts (don't use this name, it's terrible)

❌ Blitnauts

❌ Blitnauts 2

❌ Blitnauts Mk III

❌ Blitnauts Part 4

❌ Official Baby Blitnauts

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We love NFTs and the new possibilities they open for world building and storytelling. Building a public domain fictional universe is a bet on the NFT premise as a whole. It is also a natural extension of our own “community crafted” values. We are looking forward to seeing what we can make together.

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Last night we voted unanimously to make the original Blitmap collection public domain under CC0.

Starting today, you are free to use the original Blitmap collection for any reason and without restriction, personally or commercially. This includes any selection of pieces, components, or characters within it, or the collection as a whole.

Recent developments in the NFT ecosystem indicate an increasing desire for NFTs to incorporate some of the same ideals that crypto itself is based on. Namely, that value comes from a decentralized ledger, the provenance it enables, and the trustless composability that comes out of it. At the same time, these new ideals encourage a more open ecosystem of work where historical gatekeepers (“moats”) are not the primary drivers for proliferation or longevity.

We choose to incorporate these values into our beliefs around Blitmap.

We believe that attention and mindshare — in other worlds, culture — are increasingly becoming the greatest drivers for sustainability in our space. It doesn’t matter if derivative works or outright copies can be created. In fact, it’s probably better. Every derivative work shares some of its significance with the original it was based on, and vice versa. Over time, the original has the capability to become a platform and ecosystem in and of itself.

In making our decision, we considered some pros and cons:

Pros:

• Decentralizes distribution and significance. Derivatives are created trustlessly. Every derivative increases attention and mindshare of the original.

• Aligns interests. Creators can make self-sustainable derivatives. They are incentivized to create more (and hopefully, higher quality) derivatives.

• Simplifies things. No more worrying about rights, or answering questions about what is and isn’t okay. Everything is spelled out and easy to understand. We can focus on our work and we can be *surprised *by what the community does.

• It’s crypto-native.

Cons:

• No exclusive rights. Both the entity and the individual artists have the same rights as everyone else: to create derivatives.

• Bad actors. The IP could be co-opted or otherwise tainted by trolls, extreme political groups, cults, etc.

• Will seem less valuable to some. Some people will believe that IP is the moat and believe Blitmap has less significance if it is given up.

We also considered a list of fictional works and universes that are already in the public domain:

• King Arthur

• Shakespeare

• Dracula

• The Wizard of Oz

• Jane Eyre

• Little Women

• Moby Dick

• Peter Pan

An interesting thing about these examples is that many of the derivative works they are reponsible for are not public domain. In other words, just because the foundation and universe of King Arthur is public domain, it does not mean that adaptations like The Green Knight or The Sword in the Stone are. Still, these adaptations contribute to the significance of the original as a whole. Imagine a world where the King Arthur mythology was started on a blockchain and its components were represented as tokens. Surely, there is value in proving one is the creator or the owner of the Excalibur.

Does this include Blitnauts or future expansion packs?

Currently, we are releasing the original Blitmap collection, including any selection of pieces, components, or characters within it, and the collection as a whole.

Our plan is to release all IP created in Season 1, including Blitnauts, the third expansion pack, and the lore reveal shortly after their respective drops. After Season 1, we will reevaluate and decide on our plans for future IP, but we are optimistic!

You are, of course, free to create your own expansions or interpretations (including new Blitnauts) at any time.

Does this include both originals and siblings?

Because the siblings themselves are derivative works made by combining originals, they are in a bit of a grey area. In theory, we currently have the right to release siblings, but just doing that feels strange. We value community involvement and acknowledge that the community owns most of the siblings in existence. To that end, we will put out a vote to Blitmap owners today asking for support to also release the sibling collection.

Regardless of outcome, you can always use the original Blitmaps however you like, including (but certainly not limited to) remixing or combining them to create your own siblings.

What about naming?

CC0 does not affect trademark rights. We are working on opening up the naming separately, but this will require a little more work on our end. For now, we would ask that you refrain from the following phrasing in your derivative works: “Official”, “Canon”, “Blitmap(s)” or “Blitnaut(s)” followed by any sequence number, just “Blitmap(s)”, or just “Blitnauts(s)”.

✅ My Little Blitnauts

✅ Baby Blitmaps

✅ Blitland

✅ Blitmaps GAN

✅ Coolblits

✅ Blit Blit Maps

❌ Blitmaps

❌ Blitnauts 2

❌ Blitmap Mk III

❌ Blitnauts Part 4

❌ Official Baby Blitnauts

Does my derivative also need to be public domain?

No. There may be mutual community benefits in it but it is entirely up to you.

Do I need to acknowledge Blitmap in my derivative?

No. There may be mutual community benefits in it but it is entirely up to you.

I’m making a commercial derivative. Do I need to share profits with Blitmap?

No. There may be mutual community benefits in it but it is entirely up to you.

Does this include merch/games/toys/shows/etc?

Yes. You can do whatever you like.

When does this take effect? Is there documentation?

All the original artists agreed unanimously in a 17 of 17 decision, so we believe this takes effect today. For anyone who wants further assurance and immutability, we are also working on creating a smart contract that contains the release, which every artist will sign with their wallet. We expect to deploy this in the coming weeks.

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We love NFTs and the new possibilities they open for world building and storytelling. In some ways, this change is a bet on the NFT premise as a whole. In other ways, it’s just a natural extension of our own “community crafted” values. We are looking forward to seeing what we can make together.

If you are interested in discussing this or anything else related to Blitmap, join us on our Discord: https://discord.gg/blitmap

P.S. This post should be on Mirror but we’re still in the process of setting it up. We’ll …mirror… it over there as soon as we do.