Philosophy

If you're only interested in NFTs from a speculative standpoint this won't be interesting to you. I just want to get some thoughts and ideas out there that I played with in this experiment and hope to continue exploring.

First, I should admit that I've been super skeptical of NFTs. I thought CryptoKitties was silly and would have been a better experience without the blockchain. NFTs really hit a mainstream push in early 2021, and I just found it a bit odd that I wansn't actually interested. Especially considering the type of stuff I was into as a kid, from baseball cards to Beanie Babies to Pokemon cards, every few years I was seeking out the rare items in these worlds and trying to convince my parents they'd be worth lots of money some day. So you'd think this new sort of collectible would be interesting to me, but it just wasn't. I decided to spend more time understanding this new space to understand what I was missing, what wasn't clicking. I spent a few weeks listening to podcasts and researching other projects and some of the NFT token standards.

I got my bearings by reading up on the seminal projects of ERC721 tokens, like the work from LarvaLabs on CryptoPunks and Autoglyphs. Autoglyphs caught my interest by writing a data representation for an image on the blockchain, and by generating this with an algorithm. The instructions for rendering the art will live on the blockchain forever, and can be rendered on whatever planes we create in the the future.

I'm a global football fan and have been playing fantasy sports for more than 20 years, so I played around with Sorare. I really liked that they are wanting to create an open ecosystem so I started hacking on a React Native app for the Sorare marketplace. But I soon realized Sorare wasn't that open, and I wasn't actually learning anything about blockchain tech, I was just building a React app with familiar GraphQL tooling.

While I was deep in the weeds learning about NFTs and exploring projects, my parents were lucky enough to get the COVID vaccine. I was fortunate to be able to get out of the city and visit them upstate for a few days. I spent time away from my laptop; I went for hikes, I dug out the old sports card collection and fondly remembered the excitement of pulling a Vince Carter Net Shredders from a pack in '99. I didn't realize it at the time, but a thought wormed its way into my brain that would ultimately become CryptOrchids.

I was on the roof deck marveling at a tree that my brother had planted 25 years ago. They used to give us seedlings at elementary school on Arbor Day and told us to plant them at home. I imagine the survival rate was pretty low, but this particular Norway Spruce was planted on the crest of a hill where it had little competition for sunlight and has just grown and grown and grown. It could be the Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree one day to give you a sense of how impressive this specimen is.

Perhaps I'm just getting old, gaining perspective, but it truly blew my mind that some silly little sapling my brother planted that long ago was still around, still going. The things it's seen, survived. It reminded me of stories that have had similar effects on me, like the one about a 512 year-old Greenland Shark that may not be as true as I had hoped. Imagine the life of Jonathan, a Seychelles giant tortoise, the oldest known animal in the world, who was born when the lightbulb had yet to be invented, and cars were still half a century away. But these creatures coudn't just sit in cold storage, remaining pristine, or check into an Austin Powers cryochamber to be taken out in the future only when they are most useful. They had to eat, they had to avoid predators. They had to work to survive.

This longevity despite the odds is what I wanted to try exploring with blockchain tech. I don't know if things should live forever. I do think nothing in our current planes of existence live forever without tender love and care and work. Plants, animals, relationships. We care for our bodies, our homes, our material items cars or clothes. Our daily lives are so shaped by deterioration, or by extremely harsh conditions that created our physical world, from asteroids to glaciers. I think it would be a mistake to embark towards a metaverse that doesn't include these forces. It would be a mistake to absolve creators or producers from needing to make something of quality, something that lasts. It would continue down this path from craftsmanship to mass consumerism where the the items we produce are designed to not last, are destined for the landfill.

CryptOrchids emerged from the soup of all of these thoughts swirling around. I would require owners of the CryptOrchids token to "water" their plants. I wasn't really sure what that meant, but I knew that I didn't want to create a server that would be a single point of failure; I knew I wanted CryptOrchids to be open. I want you to be able to display your CryptOrchid in your NFT art gallery, but you should be able to water it there too!

That led me to on-chain metadata, and I started exploring some Solidity code to understand what that actually meant. To be clear I'm still very much a beginner and still learning about Solidity and adjusting my perspective for developing against the blockchain and the constraints it adds. The contract code is test-covered and the tests are available to view. That felt important to help growers be confident that the game acts in the way I describe it here. Testing is good, write more tests. I've been advised that the term of art that I should be thinking about is "Gas golfing", but once you're reading this the contract is probably final. I have no idea how much it will cost to water your plant on mainnet.

Next steps

I'm frankly not sure what the future of this project holds. It is designed in such a way that I feel like I could walk away from it all tomorrow and you could still play the game, still continue to invest into your CryptOrchid. Maybe 3rd party sites will pop up.

One thing I definitely want to do is get CryptOrchids into a metaverse in a style that matches the metaverse. Putting a 2d image of a flower on a wall is not what excites me - putting a 3d CryptOrchid that you can water directly from the metaverse absolutely excites me. Metaverses don't need me to implement this, the engineers on those teams can do it themselves, but I'm more than willing to help get that accomplished.

After a couple of weeks working on the project, I'm confident that a future iteration should be built on a different blockchain. Flow feels like the best choice right now. The goal would be to allow better mainstream adoption, where users can buy in with fiat like you can on TopShot and Sorare. I'd want to build a mobile app, generate more artwork for various growth stages, implement a bloom cycle along with a watering cycle. How cool would it be to have the Corpse Flower in a metaverse that take years to bloom? It would be an event that draws visitors from far and wide much like it did at the New York Botanical Garden.

Anyhow the point is that I'm not necessarily making a long-term commitment. Who knows, it's an experiment, a silly toy, but sometimes those things end up turning into something more. I definitely want to keep exploring similar ideas, I'm also really drawn to cars as NFT collectible objects with more utility than a flower. I bought hashrods.io 🤷‍♂️. But it feels right to be transparent.