For a while I've been intrigued by the concept of NFTs. But there is a lot to wrap your head around (as with most things blockchain related). The best way for me to learn more about a new exciting technology, is by jumping straight into it. NFTs were no exception.
Without any doubt the best thing about my blockchain endeavors have been the friends I've made within the community. A lot of them with a similar mindset of wanting to change the world for the better and the belief that blockchain technology can help in doing so.
If we look at the start of blockchain technology, the idea of creating a better world was also perpetuated by Satoshi Nakamoto. His dream for a better world? Give people an alternative to a clearly broken banking system. Bitcoin.
When that clicked in my mind, the idea for 256ART came to me easily. Art generated by a computer. Art consisting of a maximum of 256 blocks, as a nod to the underlining cryptographic hash function for Bitcoin: SHA256. And most importantly, art that celebrates the ideals of blockchain technology and takes us back to where it started.
The creating process for me was incredible and fun, tinkering and tweaking an algorithm that consistently was able to create beautiful art pieces, consisting of maximum 256 blocks, whilst making sure there was enough there to make each piece feel unique. It was definitely a bit of a challenge.
The first step to the solution came by letting the algorithm create random RGB colors (again, up to 256 options for R G and B). Next I experimented with a bunch of ways to make each artwork feel more unique. The most elegant and esthetically pleasing solution came by randomizing the position and amount of blocks that could show up within each piece. But I didn't want to stop there, I decided to mix in different rarity colors for both backgrounds and borders, this ended up leading to some really funky combinations which (after toning it down some) I completely loved. All together, these traits form completely unique, but still easily recognizable 256ART artworks.
The next step was creating the smart contract for Ethereum. As some of you may know, I've been building Dapps for the Hive blockchain for a few years now, but this was my first time coding in Solidity (the coding language used to write smart contracts for Ethereum). It definitely took a while to figure everything out, but after extensive testing and playing around with the contract on Remix (a browser Solidity IDE), I can say that I'm happy with the final result. The contract will go live on the main net at the official mint date as to not give anyone an unfair minting advantage.
