Crypto Fermentables

Lifeforms are dNFTs that function like Tamagotchis. They need regular care, attention, and must be “properly looked after,” meaning they must be given away within 90 days of minting in order to keep them alive. Their changing owners trigger the smart contracts to keep them alive. If they aren’t traded within the specified time, the lifeform dies and disappears from the blockchain and cannot be revived.

Fragments behaves a bit differently to most dNFTs. In this experiment, NFT owners are challenged to fill a cube. Each NFT represents one side of a cube and each side is divided into smaller squares. Each time you mint, a few of the small squares will fill and the goal is to fill each side of your cube by filling in all the small squares. It becomes dynamic when you start trading your fragments with other fragment owners in order to get the missing squares. But you can’t just add lawlessly. There is a limited supply of squares and the supply is reduced each time two fragments merge, so your cube may be unsolvable if none of the pieces you need exist on the marketplace. You can sell your pieces if someone else’s cube is close to completion, and as more cubes get completed your pieces can gain value. Realtime minting leaderboards show who is closest to a complete square.

goblintown.wtf NFTs are ridiculous and unconventional NFTs based on meme culture. These bizarre and even “ugly”-looking goblins are an answer to the superpolished—oversaturated— NFT marketplace. The changing metadata happens in the goblintown collection with five mystery eggs; every couple of days they begin to crack, exposing a goblin eye and telling a story through changing imagery. These goblins are rule-breaking, havoc-wreaking creatures that bounce in and around the underbelly of Web3. They are even trolling the traditional NFT trading platforms. At the time of writing, Truth Labs has disabled bidding, listing, buying, and selling on Blur and OpenSea because of potential market manipulation created by “farming,” which rewards traders for flipping NFTs. Goblintown’s creators are also calling out the hosting platforms for undercutting content creator royalties in secondary markets. The future is unknown, so we’ll keep checking back to see how these goblins are rewriting the rules while overwriting and amending smart contracts.

ChainFaces dNFT experiment uses user engagement and gameplay in an “arena” to change NFT metadata giving the ASCII text ChainFaces battle scars. During a month-long “tournament,” 17,031 Chainfaces battled against each other, eliminating 12,775 ChainFaces, reducing the supply to 4,256 survivors, who were awarded with generative “battle scars” that increased their rarity depending on how many rounds they lasted.

OG.Art’s Heterosis are photorealistic rendered variations of the dNFT. In this “breedable” dynamic NFT project, owners of Heterosis flowers can pay and be paid to pollinate with other flowers in order to create offspring that display traits from both parents. The more rare they are, the more valuable they become. This visually seductive NFT features flowers engaged in algorithmic entanglement in order to pass down genetics, an interesting experiment in gene editing and the commodification and trading of traits. Users must pay a fee to the owner of the flower they wish to breed with, creating two virtual flower markets—one for selling rare digital flowers and the other for selling DNA traits. The project becomes almost a simulation of the alternative present worlds that could have been.

It’s not super clear who is actually behind the Moonrunners NFT experience, but with almost 60K followers on Twitter, these 8bit dogs and their community are trying new things. When it comes to its changing metadata, Moonrunners’ contract logic or moonphase logic is based on the eight possible phases of the moon. Here the moonphase controls the metadata, showing owners a different image for each phase. But sometimes it’s hard to tell if an NFT is dynamic because the owner is the only one who can spot the changes. For now, Moonrunners is world building and filling that world with lore “aim[ing] to underpromise and overdeliver.” This next iteration of dNFTs may transform our NFT experience, mining our own online movements to change metadata, creating richer and more personal online experiences.