OnChainDonald has Always Been Open Source

Releasing source code to a smart contract is an industry standard. It is also a requirement for verification and crucial for allowing users to interact it without trusting any third parties. Source code for OnChainDonald has been verified and is accessible from Etherscan.

The code has been released under MIT license. MIT license is a permissive open source license. In simple terms, it gives users expression permission to reuse code for any purpose. Anyone willing to do so, could take a copy of the contract, make redeployment of the contract, and mint more OnChainDonalds on their own.

Entering Public Domain with CC0

If you continue extending the idea of being permissive on what can be done, the other end of spectrum is relinquishing all rights. In Creative Commons (CC) toolkit for licensing, this is called CC0 (CC0, Creative Commons Wiki):

CC0 is the "no copyright reserved" option in the Creative Commons toolkit - it effectively means relinquishing all copyright and similar rights that you hold in a work and dedicating those rights to the public domain.

By releasing OnChainDonald under public domain with CC0, we no longer control the copyright. And we not only allow derivatives, copycats and whatnot. We warmly welcome them all!

Making it Official - On-Chain Style!

As we are maximalists on having everything on-chain, we also made sure this licensing change has been captured on the blockchain.

In OnChainDonald contract, there is a special method that allows us to update metadata for all NFTs. We made a transaction calling this method to change the metadata to include information on CC0 license. The transaction is viewable in Etherscan with hash:

0x139b489c8ada7fe0a615757ddbbd257a9a0524486b10b7abe645b3c77ca61e2f

If you decode the payload, you will find out it contains an updated description.

This description is propagated from the contract into NFTs themselves. Viewing any OnChainDonald now contains this description with this important update licensing.

Conclusions

With the change in licensing, we hope to clarify any remaining unclarities. Under public domain, we relinquish of our copyright, allowing anyone to do whatever they want.

Although we are looking forwards to seeing if the community comes up with something cool in short-term, our goals and commitments lie on long term. On enabling OnChainDonald to become radically permanent and decentralized.

OnChainDonald is a generative collection of funny, vibrant and unique Donalds. All metadata and art in the NFTs are entirely stored inside the Ethereum blockchain. The project is in the public domain. Feel free to use Donalds in any way you want. Contract address is: 0xbd46b75289661765873c8c6d5051f20a6bfb5335

What Are NFTs Anyway?

NFTs, or non-fungible tokens, are unique digital assets that cannot be exchanged for other assets on a one-to-one basis. In contrast, money is considered fungible, meaning that one unit of currency is interchangeable with another. For example, a dollar bill can be exchanged for another dollar bill. Non-fungible items, like diamonds, are unique and cannot be replaced by other items. No two diamonds are exactly alike.

When you hold an NFT, you are essentially owning a unique token. Your ownership of that specific token is recorded on the blockchain. For example, if you hold an NFT with serial number 24 from an Ethereum blockchain collection called DIAMOND, it might look something like this:

An NFT stored on the blockchain only contains limited information, such as the serial number of the token and the owner's identity.

But wait. I thought I own a diamond. Where is the diamond then? How does the diamond look like? That’s where the fun part comes in.

How Most NFTs Work

Most NFTs actually don’t store anything more inside blockchains. They just point to another place where it is stored.

What this means is that the picture and information about our diamond is not stored inside Ethereum blockchain. The term that is often used to describe this is off-chain: you need to look up the details about your NFT from outside blockchain.

The blockchain still says you hold the NFT. But when you try to retrieve the image of your diamond, you could be surprised to find out that it has been replaced with an empty box! And what was a cool rare diamond, is just a picture of an empty cardboard box.

Most NFTs try to avoid this problem, by using data storages that cannot be altered, with technical solutions including IPFS and Arweave. But even that doesn’t fully solve the problem, as a hacker that gains access to the collection could still change the pointer to different location.

On-Chain to the Rescue!

On-Chain NFTs solve this problem once and for all, by storing the entire art inside the blockchain itself.

By moving the art and the information about our diamond inside Ethereum blockchain, we can be guaranteed this information stays intact and unmodified.

For as long as the Ethereum blockchain lives, art in your NFTs will be stored inside that blockchain!

How do I know if an NFT is Really On-Chain or Not?

If you're technically savvy, you can verify if an NFT is on-chain by using Etherscan. If you're not familiar with this process, don't worry! We'll walk you through it.

Our project, OnChainDonald, claims to be an on-chain NFT. To determine if a specific NFT in the collection is on-chain, we can navigate to Etherscan and look for a method called "tokenURI”

For example, let's say we hold OnChainDonald number 1 and we want to see where the data for it is stored. We can input the number and click "Query." The resulting information might look something like this:

The lengthy and cryptic stream of letters in the bottom half is the response from the blockchain. If you look closely, the first line of the response contains term “base64”, which is a data encoding method. There are lots of simple tools for decoding Base64 data, and once we use one here, what we get out of it looks like this

First part of the text starts to become more readable. What is says is that:

• This NFT is called “Patriot Donald #1”

• Eyes are “Pearl”

• And so on

The actual NFT image is also stored inside. It needs to be decoded again, but once we do that the following data is revealed:

<svg xmlns=”http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" preserveaspectratio=”xMidYMid meet” viewBox=”0 0 256 256"><pattern id=”p1" patternUnits=”userSpaceOnUse” width=”8" height=”8" patternTransform=”rotate(-55)”><line x1=”0" y=”0" x2=”0" y2=”30" stroke=”#e01010" stroke-width=”6" />...

When you take that full text, save it into a file and open in a browser it looks like this:

So, even the artwork itself is fully stored inside the blockchain!

But Why Isn’t Everyone Doing This?

And that is a good question!

First limitation is the cost. Storing data inside Ethereum blockchain is very expensive. Even storing a small photograph, say less than 100 kilobytes, could cost you several ETHs! Which could translate into thousands of dollars. And remember you need to pay that again for every new photograph!

The second limitation is technical difficulty. As storage is very expensive, we need to find out effective ways to create best possible looking art with tiniest amount of data to store. And this leaves us mostly having to create on-chain art programmatically.

Even Most On-Chain Art Takes The Easiest Route, But We Didn’t

Most on-chain NFTs go for the easy route and choose to create low resolution pixel-based art. By storing, say 24 x 24 pixels on the blockchain, you can avoid most of the storage costs. But then also the expression of your art is also limited to what you can do with a handful of pixels.

Another way to create on-chain art is to use vectors. By creating your on-chain art in Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG), you can create art that is clean, precise, and infinitely scalable.

So let’s take a look into our Donald #1 again:

Since the art is made out of geometric shapes, it can be scaled. For instance, let’s take a closed look to the face:

Even the details in the suit and tie are crisp when zoomed:

and again, all if this is entirely stored inside Ethereum blockchain!

Making Great Looking Art is Difficult — Especially for On-Chain

Since making on-chain art is technically difficult, it is oftentimes created by tech-savvy people. And let’s be honest: tech-savvy people don’t always make the greatest looking art.

To give you an impression of how the collection would have looked like, if we had let the developer choose, here’s an early draft:

That’s Why We Brought In Art Talent

So instead of “just letting a developer run wild”, what we did, was that we paired a developer with an actual art talent. In modern programming, we oftentimes talk about agile programming and iterations. And this is exactly what we did. After hundreds of rounds of iterations, we were able to polish the on-chain art using an artistic vision that lead to a full, generative collection that is designed to look good.

As a testament to our commitment, here’s a snapshot of the design guide we ended up doing in the process:

Making Great Design is Also About Making Metadata Accessible

Remember that we talked about the metadata also residing on-chain? A lot of projects take also shortcuts on how the metadata is handled. Even if you nail the art, you can make the experience of collection and price discovery a pain, by taking shortcuts on that.

To make comparison, let’s view an example from another on-chain collection: OnChain Monkeys (OCM). Just like OnChainDonald (OCD), the monkeys use on-chain for storing both metadata and art. But storing data on ethereum is expensive. And metadata for OCM is represented as numbers:

For any user browsing the collection, trait names are only shown as numbers. There are no descriptive, user-friendly names. For instance you can have earrings that are called 0, 1 or 2. But in order to know which ones look like which, you need to memoize the numbers or use another additional datasheet to figure out which one is which.

Great design is not just about making good looking art. Thats why we took an alternative route. Even though it is expensive, we decided to use the actual trait names that are both descriptive and fun.

For comparison, here are the traits for Donald #67:

The traits are instantly descriptive. You will quickly realise what “Laser” eyes mean, or how a “wink” expression looks like, making the collection very accessible.

Summary

There are several good reasons why it is a good idea to do fully on-chain NFTs. One of the key reasons why most NFTs are not on-chain is that it can be challenging and often comes with limitations. While creating on-chain art is difficult, creating visually appealing on-chain art requires both technical and artistic skills.

As an NFT collector, its always worth considering: do I really also own the art? Or do I just hold a token that points to art that may get lost over time? This is where on-chain NFTs really shine: the art cannot get lost as its entirely stored inside the blockchain.

OnChainDonald is a generative collection of funny, vibrant and unique Donalds. All metadata and art in the NFTs are entirely stored inside the Ethereum blockchain. The project is in the public domain. Feel free to use Donalds in any way you want. Contract address is: 0xbd46b75289661765873c8c6d5051f20a6bfb5335