# An NFT Experiment I'd Like to See

Source: https://x.com/wmpeaster/status/2076400765825126607

## Summary

The author, a former JPG team member, proposes an onchain collectible called Canonicle and open-sources the idea for others to build. Canonicle would be a free-to-mint device NFT, built as an ERC-721 paired with an ERC-6551 token-bound account, that holds tradeable onchain trinkets, skins and a soulbound seed-generated banner. The concept draws on earlier projects the author names, including Canonicon, Terraforms, Corruption(s*), Uniswap V3 and V4 position NFTs, Nouns, Disney Pinnacle and Chonks. The author says they lack smart contract skills and will not build it soon, but offers to be a first minter or to brainstorm with anyone who tries.

## Article

When I worked at the NFT curation protocol JPG, I helped the team brainstorm the Canonicon, which was our dynamic nontransferable (and free-to-mint, soulbound) governance NFT.

It was an obscure collection even then, so I'll briefly recap. Canonicon holders earned XP through proposing to, and voting on, JPG's Canons, which was a token-curated registry (TCR) system for canonizing NFT categories (e.g. The Onchain Canon, The Dynamic Canon, The Indie Canon, The Conceptual Canon, etc.). It was all governed by wallet-signature voting on Ethereum and then anchored to Arweave.

The idea was that we'd create a curatorial layer atop onchain artifacts that anyone could refer to. We'd have wildly meticulous community discussions in the JPG Discord hashing out taxonomies and edge cases, then make proposals, agree, disagree, vote, 'round and 'round. And the actual proposing and voting activities generated XP ("JXPG" specifically), which was tracked by our respective Canonicon NFTs.

As XP increased across 10 preset levels, more customizable handcrafted visual layers created by the artist @0xSTARDROP became unlocked in the Canonicon. You'd pick and lock in your choices until you wanted to change your visuals again. The NFT also displayed a static carousel of the holder's most recently exhibited NFTs, pulling from a separate personal DIY NFT galleries product of JPG's called Exhibitions.

For instance, here you can see @flakoubay's old Canonicon, which is one of the only ones remaining on OpenSea that's still archived showing what, at the time, was her most recently exhibited NFTs on JPG:

That gives you a sense of a base Canonicon example. But we can also look to my old one to get a sense for these NFTs' customization and dynamism potential. Note that it has a unique space scene I picked via unlocked layers thanks to having level 7/10 XP on the heels of 45 proposals and +500 curation votes in the Canons, and all this tracked visually in the Canonicon itself:

It was like a curatorial onchain Pokédex of sorts, which I love the concept of and have continued to think on in the years since JPG wound down, just for the fun of it.

I'm not with an NFT team now that has governance needs, and these are just personal experiment ideas, so my thinking has trended in two directions. What if instead of a single-contract, mutable-metadata design like Canonicon's, the system was more composable and more standards-based? And what if the NFTs weren't mainly a governance/reputation instrument but more in the vein of onchain art/collectible toy?

That said Canonicons are just one major inspiration. My mind also wanders to...

Terraforms by Mathcastles, which uses dynamic ASCII art, fully onchain. There are no prerendered images in this hypersculpture collection, as the visuals are rendered 100% onchain at runtime via the underlying smart contract. It's one of the great marvels of onchain cultural engineering.

@dhof's Corruption(s*), which employs a fully onchain “Insight XP” system that causes the NFTs' visuals to mutate over time, involuntarily, as long as they stay in the same wallet. Insight points reset on any transfer.

Uniswaps's V3 and V4 NFTs, which represent individual liquidity provider (LP) positions and render fully onchain SVG art generated live from a position's actual state (e.g. token pair, fee tier, current price range, so on) rather than being pulled from some static image hosted elsewhere.

And there are many more inspirations, too. OKPC toys and @token_works S2 patron passes let you draw on the faces of their NFTs onchain. Another obvious pillar to consider is Nouns, of course, and the way their galaxy-brain contracts handle flat, cheap, onchain SVG trait art, plus how their design approach itself is friendly to community-created trait submissions.

I'd also cite Disney Pinnacle too here for the distribution model, i.e. many small, limited-edition trinket drops, such that there's a low likelihood of overlap among holders' collections. If you go scroll through various users' Pinbooks on the platform, the possibilities are infinite, there's lots of variety and versions and curation potential.

I'd be remiss not to mention Chonks as well, which uses ERC-6551 token-bound accounts (TBAs) so that the main body NFTs own the individual trait NFTs as separate, fully composable and tradeable ERC-721s. In other words, customize the looks how you want by equipping what you want.

Stirring all these ideas together, I've come up with a collection concept I'll provisionally call Canonicles. It's not some revolutionary thing, but the simplest way to describe it is an onchain trinket holder. A gizmo NFT whose parts and holdings are themselves onchain NFTs, which you can collect, equip, swap, show off, etc.

My initial sketch fwiw:

As I see it the design would rest on four main foundations:

The Canonicle — The free-to-mint main "device" NFT. Under the hood it'd be an ERC-721 paired with an ERC-6551 token-bound account (TBA), i.e. a real wallet address owned by the NFT itself, which would hold all the pieces below. You could transfer and sell these main NFTs if you wanted, like pinbooks tradeable 24/7.

The Feed Seed — A soulbound NFT minted directly into a Canonicle at creation that can't ever be transferred out. Its onchain seed, set at mint, generates a unique scrolling ASCII banner pattern across the top of the device for ensuring every Canonicle has a baked-in element of uniqueness.

The Lightbulbs — These would be tradeable limited-edition paid mints, not expensive, that can be equipped to determine the skin aesthetics of your Canonicle. They'd be onchain and appear as a small icon in the upper left corner of the device itself and be fully tradeable. A moon bulb might give a midnight theme, a sun bulb a summer theme, and so forth, with new releases routinely.

The Talis — Every Canonicle has 16 onchain display slots. Talis would be the limited-edition onchain trinkets (e.g. some 1/1s, some packs, some 1/1/X large sets) sold at varying prices that can be equipped into any of a Canonicle's slots and in any order you'd like. These trinkets could be fully tradable pixel art, with cadenced official releases and community created releases (a la Nouns and BasePaint).

You could roll some other bonus elements in too, depending on how deep you'd want to go. For example, like the Insights XP system of Corruption(s*), maybe there could be a "Stronghold" box in a Canonicon that changes colors over time depending on how long its been held in the wallet its currently owned by, e.g. blue for 1 day, green for 1 month, red for 1 year, etc. Or perhaps you'd add an onchain sketchpad at the bottom of a Canonicle, a la OKPC, so that collectors could tag and draw on their gizmos.

I had Claude come up with a visual mockup of the general idea. It's cruder than what I ultimately have in mind, but you get the gist:

I'm completely uninitiated when it comes to smart contract dev work, so I won't have the means to bring something sophisticated like this to life, at least for a while. I just launched my first custom testnet contracts on Sepolia this week for another, much simpler and personal NFT experiment. This post is me open-sourcing the general Canonicle idea in case anyone more adventurous wants to pick up the mantle before I can.

I def think it's neat enough for a try if nothing else. And if anyone does try, hit me up. I'd love to be your first minter, or to brainstorm more ideas, whatever you need.