GCR

EXPERIMENTS WITH NFT’s

Recently I have been fascinated with crypto history, firsts and lasts and going down some ever deepening rabbit holes. The DAO tokens, Cryptopunks and even early rug pulls. History is where we learn that most newly invented things were already invented in the past. Though usually lacking proper timing and memes. During the original rug pull meets Stanford Prison Experiment I was introduced to some of that interesting history through the DADA Creeps and Weirdos collection. Not sure why this project had a gravitational pull, but there is something honest and fresh with artists engaging in NFT “conversations” years prior to Paris Hilton or Beeple claiming the space for their own. Plus they are splendidly and fantastically weird and in varying degrees creepy as well.

The “collection of 100 unusual limited-edition drawings made by artists worldwide on DADA. These drawings are available for purchase with Ether cryptocurrency. The collection will have five levels of scarcity, from common to extremely rare drawings, all of which have been curated and priced according to their popularity and where they appear on DADA’s visual conversations.”

THE DADA EXPERIENCE

DADA was/is an early pioneer and the original smart contract associated with the collections that the NFT’s were minted on is particularly interesting as it ensures artists royalties in a particularly novel way. The contract mints at certain rarity and at certain eth values, but then stores these sale prices in the contract to allow the artists to have a 40% royalty of the net profit. The net profit is the increase over the last sale which the data of the “last sale” is presumably saved on chain. The DADA contracts are unverified on etherscan, so much of this is from innuendo and verbal representation.

During crypto winter, the project was somewhat buried under the blowing ice and snow of bear markets and mostly forgotten, some of the artists moved on, but others have kept plugging away. At some point the Dada storefront was frozen and new sales were disabled on the front end. Additionally, the DADA community was never able to get agreement from Opensea to “honor” the royalty scheme that is hard coded into the DADA smart contracts. So, Opensea sales were frozen as the contract froze transfers via the Opensea storefronts. Therefore, the only current way to sell these works (to my knowledge) is through person to person transfers.

THE INVISIBLE ECONOMY

As a recovering attorney, I find conversation through art much better than conversation through pleadings and interrogatories. As novel as the conversation-through-art is, I would be remiss not to mention the DADA goal of the “invisible economy” which similarly is an early blueprint for the DAO and creator economy that are governed by tokenized incentives amongst its participants rewarding the doers. It is a 12 part series and difficult to completely paraphrase, but I would highly recommend giving it a read. The invisible economy presents many interesting ideas that were perhaps too early, or we are too late. Hopefully we the people, and the proper ideas, can all get on the proper plane of existence at the same time. The ability to remix artistic expression similar to open source code is SUPER fascinating, as tokens enable microeconomy score keeping and allow the community to basically award market points. But clearly, I can’t say it any better than this from Part 8 of the series.

“Until recently, digital art had no value because it can be reproduced endlessly. But now, blockchain technology makes it possible to turn digital art into unique digital assets that can be transacted, bringing scarcity, authentication, and ownership to digital art, and allowing it to capture value just like physical art. This has spawned the emergence of a digital art market. Through cryptographic digital assets called tokens, blockchain also makes it possible to add layers to a digital artwork without the need for permission, allowing artists to collaborate freely while keeping track of their attribution. Since DADA is already a collaborative platform, this paves the way for exponential co-creation and for art to evolve freely in unexpected ways.”

https://powerdada.medium.com/the-invisible-economy-db46897d4f07

So perhaps rather than parroting the latest words from VC’s or popular influencers, maybe we need to get in touch with the artist within, reach back to our childhood and allow an innate sense of fairness to develop. Though NFT token networks are mostly collectibles and art currently, their impact will soon shape legacy institutions as these integrated reward systems and royalties get filled out and user experience improves. Cascading royalties can be added similar to this “decaying” royalties scheme, from Stamford Hwang of Moleart DAO that I hope will dramatically change the need for traditional licensing regimes governing patent, copyrights, etc. It seems necessary to reward early innovation, and yet at the same time add market forces to allow the “Social Good” to purchase the right to open source intellectual property.

I CAME FOR THE FOIE GRAS

Clearly, you are all wondering what does any of this have to do with Foie Gras (as a metaphor)? I am irrationally excited about the infinite possibility of Charged Particles project and its ability to use NFT’s and ERC20’s and remix these into primitives similar to those envisioned in the Invisible Economy. Therefore, I accepted it as a challenge when told that it is impossible to sell these early Creeps on Opensea. I wondered if a NFT minted on Charged Particles could serve as the wrapper to stuff DADA’s into it. Basically force feed DADA NFT’s as “covalent” bonds into the parent NFT. Then the parent could be programmed with artists royalties to the DADA address, both creator resale and percentage of interest. Additionally, the NFT can be stuffed to the brim with personal tokens from the artists to tie the artist with the collectors, and would be a way to inexorably tie the artist and collectors. In other words, the NFT serves as a drop zone for all future interactions allowing artists, collectors and collaborators to share the same digital space and plane of existence. An example of this dynamic looks like it is already playing out as can be seen by artist @mxjxn (below) and @robnessofficial allowing his NFT’s dumpsters to be used as the receptacle to hold more $TRSH art.

LET’S MEET AT ETHERSCAN

The remainder of the article goes deep into etherscan links and labels, but much fun can be had from etherscan and though somewhat risky, interacting directly with contracts has actually bailed me out a time or two when a front end has gone dead as a dodo. Here we are looking how to interact with the Charged Particles protocol and mint wrapped Dada NFT’s:

1. The Charged Particles contracts linked below, allow the minting of covalent bonds. A fancy word for dropping NFT’s into other NFT’s. https://docs.charged.fi/charged-particles-protocol/developing-on-the-protocol/smart-contracts-documentation/contracts
2. Documentation for Developers for reference https://docs.charged.fi/charged-particles-protocol/developing-on-the-protocol/smart-contracts-documentation
3. The smart contract “Function” is covalentBond, but first need to

• Approve the token spend by the Charged Fi contract at 0xab1a1410ea40930755c1330cc0fb3367897c8c41
• An example of how to mint the Covalent Bond as follows

• The Basket Manager is likely generic, get the token ID’s of the Proton (the target charged particle NFT) and the subject (the NFT to send into a covalent bond with the target)

EEK DADA NFT CONTRACT IS NOT VERIFIED

As you will see when you go to the DADA NFT contract it is not verified on etherscan, which means you can’t access the ABI. https://etherscan.io/token/0x34d77a17038491a2a9eaa6e690b7c7cd39fc8392#readContract Which also means you can’t read the contract or interact on etherscan. So I went a much scarier path (don’t recommend). I figured I would look at other successful patterns from transactions on etherscan and try to emulate these on the blockchain using MEW (My Ether Wallet).

• https://etherscan.io/tx/0x85614a6953f61a738f8dd8d8170e47119cb2a0b4d99bb9fb4da184b5f026a715 DADA Transfer. Could use this to transfer a NFT.

• https://etherscan.io/tx/0xa94e4ca7ca53d5d81e8787afa609ecdecdf4e93f4b3a83b89ced10207a0451a7 Dada Approve. Would need this to be able to approve the Charged Particles contract to be able to spend all tokens from the DADA contract. What?
• We want to try to allow the Charged Particles contract to spend the DADA to make it a covalent Bond with the Proton NFT (the vessel).

MEW FOR OLD TIMES

Go to MEW and connect the metamask account holds the DADA tokens.

After your connection, go to send transaction. You may remember this interface from such fun times as my transaction is stuck and I need to unstick it by playing games with nonce and higher gas prices to cancel.

The To address is the one we want to send the token approval for. Or the DADA contract (as this is not verified on etherscan, we need a workaround)

Next we input the data Add Data from above that calls the method setApprovalForAll

We mimic this function like so:

0xa22cb465000000000000000000000000aB1a1410EA40930755C1330Cc0fB3367897C8c410000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001

We see that the function requires the Method ID, followed by the address we are approving to spend (in our case the Charged Particles contract) followed by the string of zeroes and a 1. That will switch the boolean to “approved”.

We enter that string into the MEW wallet Advanced tab

Here looks like it worked or at least it successfully gave the Charged Fi contract the right to spend my DADA https://etherscan.io/tx/0xacc8473873254722937ab85209ec0972c149293fe83e6040b86dc66898fa7707

BUT DID IT WORK? (WELL NO)

As you will see we still ran into roadblocks or missteps. Here I played with minting my NFT the Devourer of Worlds and DADA as a Charged Particle.

• Next we want to Foie Gras a Dada NFT into the one we just minted on Charged Particles, because he has an insatiable appetite for Creeps and Weirdos.
• So we go back to the Charged Particles contract and try to mint the “Covalent Bond” function. Input the data (similar to 3b above), connect to metamask, and click Write.
• Unfortunately it doesn’t work, and shows the infinite gas error which is a telltale sign that something isn’t correct.
• What could it be? More likely than not, DADA would need to “whitelist” the Charged Particles contract to enable the function to work. Suspecting this, I asked in their discord and confirmed that they would need to whitelist the contract to allow the “wrapping” of the DADA’s into the Charged Particle NFT’s.
• Perhaps, I am just missing something simple. Too Bad. My dream of filling the gullet of my NFT with Creeps and Weirdos will be on hold. But I do want to feed my NFT something.

Neeraj A Pizza seems fitting. Though it seems likely to give my NFT indigestion and gas.

What can be creepier or weirder than force feeding it a lawyer NFT. You may remember these fellows from earlier escapades minting a lawyer NFT that is preloaded with music MP3. Like a lawyer bearer instrument of beats.

We force fed the “I ate a DADA” with the lawyer NFT. This way the lawyer is safe from wreaking havoc on the world and the dope Zplit beats will play ad infinitum in stommy. Here is the NFT in all of its glory, even charged it up with some lexDAO social token.

Special thanks to Nick Rishwain for providing comments and bearing with the zany nature of this article.

About LexDAO

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