SQUIWORMY

Links

My Chia DID: did:chia:1wm5sxf3kv24wng5ttmgea7f0j64ex44yey9ae57ex6d66r5ktr4qvr28tp

Purpose

Experimentation. Are you even living if you don’t experiment with projects that excite you? :P Squiwormy exists primarily because I have a need to experiment. In this case, I wanted to test the release of Chia NFT1 standard that I wrote about here.

Squiwormy is fun. I really wanted to know how Chromie Squiggles were drawn in p5JS. Once the code was written for the body shape I then added the eyes. The eyes made the whole thing come to life.

Next came the decision about rarity. I wanted something simple and quickly discoverable by anyone. Having one eye seemed like a reasonable choice at the time. That’s how I ended up with 2 squiwormies #0006 and #00029 as having split eyes = no in the metadata. I did have to change the code manually to add differences in eye span/location. This is obviously not optimal for a larger project and an improvement to be done in future projects.

The fastest path to sharing Squiwormy with the world was through SkyNFT.org. They built up a minting process that allowed one to give special names to “embed” metadata during PNG upload:

...
squiwormy #0005____5____worm_yes__eyes split_yes.png
...
squiwormy #0029____5____worm_yes__eyes split_no.png

The process went well overall. There were a couple of gotchas:

____5____ was supposed to generate offer files with 0.5 XCH price but that didn’t work
SkyNFT creates custodial wallets which you can export
- I generally don’t trust custodial wallets and since they know the mnemonic I wouldn’t reuse this wallet for any purpose.
SkyNFT, at the time of writing, asks for a passport/photo ID for human verification.
- Most other Chia NFT marketplaces only require a DNS TXT record such as did.scotopic.xyz and a DM in Twitter.

Usage of sales

Donating 100% of primary sales will either go to

A) Hope Distributed that gives away food, clothing, and furniture IRL in my community.
or
B) Funding my friend who is in Ukraine for the war relief effort.

I realize the latter option is less desirable for public trust and I’d have to prove it somehow. I’ll try to figure out the details and update this space. The process will likely be converting XCH to FIAT since most don’t know/use XCH yet.

Donating 100% of primary sales can be tough when I haven’t made a living off of NFT art. However, I know I’m lucky enough to be making art in the first place. Giving to my IRL community is how I’d like to see everyone live out their life so this is a good start.

I’ll make an announcement on Twitter when/if we pass either 5 XCH primary sales or at some point in the near future.

Price experiment

The first price experiment began in 2022-07-01 where the generated XCH for each squiwormy coorelated to the squiwormy number. For example, #0001 = 0.1 XCH, #0002 = 0.2 XCH ..etc until #0029 = 2.9 XCH. While the rarest 2 squiwormy got 7 XCH offers generated.

Greed or experimentation?

My focus is experimentation. If all sold out, which you can never know until you try, this could have funded bigger/longer term projects. If none sold, then you simply try again ;)

A week later several of the pieces sold and total primary sales collected was 1.8 XCH. THANK YOU EVERYONE! This is a success in my mind because someone found the work I’ve done valuable enough to exchange XCH for it. I’m grateful for you.

As of 2022-07-05 one more was sold for a total of 2.3 XCH. The highest price paid was 0.5 XCH for a squiwormy. Thus, I changed the rest of the offers to be 0.5 XCH and will wait a while longer to see what happens next.

Improvements for future projects

Create the JSON metadata myself.
Mint via Chia CLI or another minting tool that doesn’t rely on a 3rd party or a custodial wallet.
Generate a more extensive set with more rarity.
Build rarity into the art generation.