Collaborative painting using NFTs

A game where NFTs represent rights to a part of online image. It visualizes the idea of land ownership, while creating ever-changing art.

Myself, as the project leader:

• 20 years in web development,
• team leader experience,
• already completed a Catalyst-funded project

A brief note from 2030

The State of the Market is a famous painting which was created at the beginning of Goguen Era and has been updated since then by uncountable authors. The painting changed numerous times but each step of its evolution is recorded forever thanks to the everlasting blockchain of Cardano.

The initial creators, claiming to be members of a cryptic group named Catalyst Fund, divided a rectangular area into squares of pixels. For each of those plots an NFT had been created and auctioned. Then free circulation began, allowing owners to trade the tokens and — even more importantly — paint their plots however they fantasized.

An eternal contract allowed the painting process to last forever. NFT owners could do it any time they wanted, for a small fee, from which both the authors and the entire Catalyst Fund gained steady income. Each act of painting made another version of SotM generated, stored on IPFS and recorded into the blockchain with hash proving they were original.

Some of the NFTs were lost, burnt or otherwise withheld, making parts of the painting immutable forever, intentionally or not. However, the majority of the image remains in trade, making the entire digital masterpiece a testament of the early era of the cryptocurrency market.

Why?

The idea represents simplified property market based on blockchain and NFT. It visually proves these transactions could be fast, inexpensive and done without intermediaries.

History shows that both collective painting and blockchain games get viral and bring broad attention even from spectators or people who just read about it.

Technical and business details

A draft of the technical description follows. This is a descriptive text and I would like not to declare any numbers before the project starts and deep technical analysis will have been done.

However, some important things need to be declared.

Catalyst Fund remittance

The project will divert at least 10% of income back to the Catalyst treasury. These numbers will be guaranteed by the contracts handling auction and painting.

The painting process should start as soon as the first NFTs hit the market. Each operation will incur a minimum fee from the token owner, but will allow a higher payment as a form of donation to the authors and Catalyst Fund. All such income will be also subject to 10% remittance for Catalyst.

Planned functionality

Please note that Plutus is an emerging environment and perhaps no one could be called expert nowadays, definitely not me and probably not the people I'd hire to the team. Some of the declarations below might just be impossible or simply too costly to implement within the budget.

However, the following list is prioritized and in case that an item would prove impossible to achieve, the next one will be taken from the list.

Feature list

1. Division of the image area into plots and NFT emission,
2. Website presenting the image and choice of available plots,
3. NFT sale (auction?),
4. Single-plot painting,
5. Generation of new version of the image after each painting operation,
6. IPFS storing of each version of the image,
7. Other cloud backup storage,
8. Public contract allowing escrow for NFT trading,
9. Public contract allowing auctioning of NFTs,
10. Multiple-plot painting (directly on the image via browser?)
11. Monthly released timelapse video of the image history.
12. Painting by PNG file upload,

While points 1-6 are mandatory, I reserve the right to drop up to 2 features from points 7-12 should they prove too hard to implement.

Budget

The project requires input from at least 6 people, although roles may be split or combined:

• 2 backend developers (for blockchain and for web site) [6 months each, $70k/yr]
• 1 UX designer [1 month, $60k/yr]
• 1 frontend developer [3 months, $60k/yr]
• 1 graphics designer [1 month, $50k/yr]
• 1 tester [2 months, $40k/yr]

The devops part can be carried out initially by the team members. Then incoming revenue should finance growing demands for storage and image rendering.

The network fees for NFT creation, setting up initial auctions and other operations will be paid by the team.

Roadmap

The following dates are relative to the day of funding:

• 3 months: a raw MVP on testnet, with reduced image area, initial auction started and painting contract present,
• 6 months: the above equipped with features 1-6,
• 12 months: a mainnet version working and generating first revenue, NFT trading contracts present,
• 18 months: complete project as described in feature list above.

Defining success

The project success could be described in 3 stages:

• good: it generates positive revenue,
• very good: the above and the image changes at least once per day (someone paints),
• outstanding: the project becomes mentioned and/or used as example in changing existing property trading laws.