Basically, ASCIIPunks are what would happen if the CryptoPunks fell into a portal and wound up in the terminal dimension!
These little dudes are comprised of 12x12 lines of ASCII text generated entirely on-chain! That's right! When each little punk is minted, a generative algorithm is run to produce a random punk, which you can see an example of here. Each punk is self-contained on the ethereum blockchain. In other words, the NFT itself is the art.
There will be 2048 ASCIIPunks minted. They are priced on the following curve:
> 1 - 256: 0.05 ETH
> 257 - 512: 0.1 ETH
> 513 - 1024: 0.2 ETH
> 1025 - 1536: 0.3 ETH
> 1537 - 2048: 0.4 ETH
The ASCIIPunks grew out of a realization that many of the NFT's we trade and collect today are nothing more than tokens with a hardcoded link to a centralized server containing metadata. With many NFT's on the market, you have to trust that whoever is hosting the actual image keeps their promise to host the artwork for the entire life of the ethereum blockchain.
As an on-chain maximalist, I find the idea of trusting centralized services to host artwork that I own entirely too custodial, and against the overall ethos of crypto and decentralization. What value can an NFT really have, so long as the token itself is not inseparable from the art in question? It is this question that led to the development of ASCIIPunks.
So if you are an on-chain maximalist, a decentralization junkie, or a real OG crypto head, this is the project for you.
What have you been living under a rock or something? NFT stands for "non-fungible token". It is a special type of token minted on the Ethereum blockchain. Each token is unique and can not be replaced by any other token. Lately, NFT's have taken the world by storm, as more and more people use them to collect and trade their favorite digital art. Think about them as digital collectibles, whose uniqueness and authenticity is verified by the blockchain.
To buy an ASCIIPunk, you need to have an Ethereum wallet setup. A commonly recommended one is Metamask. Get the Metamask Chrome extension, set up your wallet, and fund it with ETH. Once you do that, you can use the "connect" button at the top of the page to connect your wallet to the site. Then mint to your heart's content!
After you use the site to mint, and once the transaction is confirmed, your newly adopted punk will show up here. Since ASCIIPunks are an ERC721 compliant NFT, they will be viewable/tradeable on all major platforms.
To get a little more technical for the folks who are interested, ASCIIPunks is an ERC721 compatible smart contract on the ethereum blockchain, or in other words an "NFT".
When a user mints an ASCIIPunk a generative algorithm randomly produces the ASCII-art representing the punk and emits an event that contains it. You can see an example here.
After a punk has been minted, at any time someone can query the smart contract on-chain and call "draw" with the given tokenID. Calling draw will return the tokens ASCII art, and since the draw function is a view call, it doesn't cost gas to call. Thus anyone can view the art on chain at any time, for free. Hence, with ASCIIPunks the token is inseparable from the artwork, and its value is linked intrinsically to the ethereum blockchain. So long as the ethereum blockchain survives, so too will the ASCIIPunks.
As a sort of "fallback" mechanism, and to ensure that the ASCIIPunks are easily viewable on all other NFT platforms, we also expose a standard ERC721-Metadata compliant `tokenURI` function. This tokenURI function returns a URL to our server, which responds with metadata about the punk (including an SVG image representing the punk). However, this function is not necessary to view the punks on-chain.
There will only be 2048 of these little punks ever minted, so get yours while you can.
ASCIIPunks were crafted with love by nassredean, the most degen software dev you will ever meet, and kyle, a wannabe renaissance man with a passion for crypto and art.
ASCIIPunks is not affiliated with Larva Labs, but we thank them for providing the crypto-art space so much inspiration.
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