Guardian Sigils: Experimental ERC-721 🤝 ERC-20 Genart

Guardian Sigils are a 100% onchain, dynamic, animated, and interactive generative art collection, with all traits and artwork code generated onchain by a single smart contract. The contract generates image assets and HTML that any modern browser can use to render the art – but the Guardian Sigil art only renders if the account holding the NFT is a $PLEDGE Guardian (has an active pledge of 1M tokens). Learn more at https://www.thepledge.meme/

If the token is held by an account that is not a $PLEDGE Guardian, then the background will render but not a sigil. Trading the token with a Guardian or becoming one will reveal the Guardian Sigil!

Tokens can have different traits and rarities that never change, but every account’s sigil will be constant across all tokens it owns. Guardian Sigil tokens are dynamic, and they will always update themselves to draw their owner’s sigil (if they’re a Guardian).

Each Guardian Sigil NFT is summoned at a cost of 5k $PLEDGE. 2.5k of this $PLEDGE go to the artist as a tribute, and the other 2.5k $PLEDGE are locked into the token, powering its magic. At any time, a token owner can use the SACRIFICE function on the contract (or on this site) to perform the ritual to destroy the token and reclaim its $PLEDGE to their account.

Inspiration / Motivation

I’ve explored blockchain art through a number of projects, and Guardian Sigils extends and combines a lot of my past work into something fun and community oriented. Mythics of the Multichain explored on chain ERC-721 SVGs and ERC-20 tokens, CoinTokens explored ERC-20 tokens being stored in and being removed from ERC-1155 tokens, Magic Mirrors of the Mythics explored onchain HTML JS gen art with ERC-20 interaction, BLONKS explored owner-dynamic onchain art, and other technical and nerdy projects explored other technical and nerdy things.

The $PLEDGE community inspired this project. In $PLEDGE, a person behind a wallet declares that they will only transfer a maximum of 1% of the tokens per month from their wallet. The community also leaned into mythic and fantasy themes, with suits of armor and swords. I felt that the strong association of these fantasy themes; their cred0 of honor, loyalty, and integrity; and wallet-significance created a wonderful opportunity to create a magical/mystical geometry genart project that also combined a number of different elements from past experiments.

Also, it’s fun! I wanted to create something for the community to both reward them, and to be completely honest, also increase my $PLEDGE stack. 🙂

I will open the portal for 777 tokens to be summoned to Guardian wallets. After which, the portal will close, and token sacrifices may begin! As time goes on, there will be a constant deflationary pressure, and a built-in token value of each token. These are some new experiements, and I’m excited to see what will happen to the collection as Guardians come and go.

Guardian Sigil Traits

Some popular generative art projects & platforms have traits calculated off-chain with the help of APIs, but Guardian Sigils are extra magical and all traits are calculated directly by the contract. There are 5 ‘Core’ traits, 1 rarity score based on those traits, and a ‘Viewing Distance’ trait.

Core Traits:

• Mono: If true, a black and white image is generated
• Invert: If true, the image brightness is inverted
• Simplified: If true, the Sigil is drawn without node indicators and vector lines
• Ghost: If true, the Sigil shapes are transparent
• EtherStyle: If true, node indicators are rendered as ‘Ethereum Diamonds’

Other Traits:

• Core Rarity: determined solely by the number of Core Traits present
• Viewing Distance: essentially a zoom level. By default, these range from -9 to 5

Every token is HTML, and the code includes URL parameter interactivity to override or alter the default settings for temporary view…

Interactivity

The HTML generated onchain has various interactive features. Marketplaces and DApps may disable this JavaScript interactivity, but by downloading the HTML or using the viewer here (COMING SOON) you can interact directly with the generator’s code that was created onchain.

To use URL parameters, add ? to the URL and then the parameters set to a value, eg. ?still=true. You can string multiple parameters by using & between them, eg. ?still=true&ghost=true&distance=5

URL Parameters:

• address=0x...: renders an address’s Sigil
• still=true: renders in still image mode
• mono=true: engages mono mode
• invert=true: engages inverted mode.
• simplified=true: engages simplified mode..
• ghost=true: engages ghost mode…
• ether-style=true: engages Ethereum Diamond node indicators
• distance=integer: sets the viewing distance (max is 9, zoom with negative ints)
• stroke-width=integer: sets the line thickness

Keystroke Interaction:

• a: downloads the default, animated SVG
• s: downloads a still version of the Sigil as a SVG with layers grouped for plotting or software customization
• p: downloads a still version of the Sigil as a PNG image
• h: reveals Matto signature