REPLICATOR: Art of the Contract

Beyond the incredible art work, the NFT smart contract designed for REPLICATOR is worth viewing as its own example of a novel product created by the artist.

REPLICATOR’s smart contract source code authored by Manifold, owned and deployed by Mad Dog Jones on Ethereum blockchain.

By now you’ve heard of Mad Dog Jones’ REPLICATOR auction. Beyond the incredible art work, we think the NFT itself is an example of how an artist can create a novel product for the collector community. Here is a quick overview and neat facts about the custom NFT contract we designed with MDJ:

1. REPLICATOR is a platformless NFT. In contrast to NFTs sold on centralized platforms like Nifty Gateway, MakersPlace, and Foundation, REPLICATOR was minted with a contract that was deployed and owned by Mad Dog Jones. This adds a further level of provenance unique to a creator’s identity and allows the artist to add custom features specific to their art.

2. REPLICATOR supports native Smart Contract Ownership. All operations including each ‘print’ event uses ‘safeMint’ and ‘safeTransferFrom.’ This means the NFT can be wrapped by any other smart contract which can react to these events however the owner chooses.

3. Like a DNA sequence, REPLICATOR token IDs are designed such that each unique ID provides its complete lineage of origin in the REPLICATOR genealogy. That is to say, for each NFT minted by REPLICATOR, the token ID provides a mapping to its unique path in the REPLICATOR family tree.

4. REPLICTOR creates a jam or a given jam variant based on a probability function seeded entirely by on-chain non-deterministic variables (block hash, difficulty, timestamp, and an internal nonce).

5. REPLICATOR lives on the permaweb. In order to ensure all metadata and media assets exist forever, everything is stored on Arweave, a decentralized data store. Under the hood, the upload process is performed by a MDJ-owned server and automatically kicked off each time a new print event happens.  During the upload process, metadata and media assets are temporarily served by MDJ’s servers to provide immediate access.  Post upload, the tokenURI for the NFT is updated to point to the Arweave location.

You can view the REPLICATOR smart contract in its entirety here.

We hope to dive deeper into these mechanics and how they can be customized by creators in future posts. Follow Manifold team for more.