On-chain compression tech (for on-chain art, games, texts, etc.)

NounsDAO NounsDAO Proposals
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One of the main barriers for minting pieces fully on-chain is their size, which on the Ethereum blockchain translates directly to money. As we know, in terms of provenance, and future preserving of NFTs, making a purely on-chain NFT is crucial, and it’s no coincidence that nouns are fully on-chain.

While most artists and devs would love to have their pieces fully on-chain, they can’t pay such a big price in eth, nor they should.

That’s why in my innovation incubator, GM420, we have developed an extreme loss-less compression algorithm that allows artists and devs to get much mor complex content on-chain.

A few examples - The first fully on-chain game that is inside an NFT was recently launched by us, in collab with gmoney, and we’ve compressed it from almost 1MB to 20KB - (https://opensea.io/collection/gmoney-brick-breaker)

We also took the pixeled cryptoadz and without a lot of effort we compressed each toad from ~15KBs to ~200Bs. This is huge, and can be done for GIFs, SVGs, text, code, and more.

We started with a simple game for showcasing our ability, but we want to take it to the next level, and we have a number of ideas that will both help grow the nouns brand, and will take the space forward.

  1. We are currently developing a generative Super Mario like game, that will have a random noun on each NFT as the “Super Mario”, and the enemies will be Toadz (also random). We want to make many retro Nouns-themed mini games that will be stored entirely on-chain, as a decentralized arcade.

  2. A compression API for minting platforms - one of the things we want to do most is to allow artists to put their art on-chain for reasonable prices, and thus having 100% provenance of their work. This will be on our standalone noun minting platform, or as an add-on to other minting platforms, but will take the space forward by miles.

  3. We also want to showcase our compression by compressing nouns in a way that will be much smaller than they are now, and also to put Toadz completely on-chain.

Why is it beneficial for nounsDAO?

Well, I always see nouns as a perfect brand for retro gaming and I believe that creating a decentralized arcade on-chain with many noun-themed games would attract a lot of people and will grow the nouns brand.

Also, I believe that nouns should be the engine that takes this space forward and talks about new cutting-edge tech, and that’s a great way to do so.

What do I believe I need?

I want to make it the best on-chain compression tech that will become standard in this industry. Currently, our POCs were done by myself, 2 developer friends, and one artist, but to take it to the next level, I believe we will need 2 more devs, 1 marketing person, 1 game economy expert, and for that we need a budget.

I believe that it can be huge, and entirely change the space, and obviously, nounish branding will be prioritized in everything.

I believe that for compensation, servers, equipment, etc. I’d need a budget of 400 eth for getting a working platform and gaming system that will be noun branded and monetized after 1 year.

Would love your opinions about it before I propose it.

Thanks.

3 Likes
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can not wait to see where this goes

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Would your compression method remain proprietary as it is now?

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In proprietary you mean not open source?

I prefer to make it as open source as possible, so anyone can use it and build on top of it. That’s the nouns spirit, imo.

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Nice - and then I think about focus for the proposal itself, the title refers to the tech but the funding amount looks like it’s allocated for the gaming platform (marketing, game economics) - is there a way to break those allocations down a bit more or perhaps consider two different proposals or something to keep them focused and manageable?

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Thanks for the feedback.

I can break it down a bit more, but I think it should be one proposal, as it is part of the same effort, and the development will be in parallel.

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This sounds great. The web3 gaming and music communities are growing and would be great to be at the forefront with Nouns.

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I totally agree, and the things we can do with the nouns brand on-chain are endless!

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Totally agree. Would love to get to the point where on-chain content storage costs and chain bloat are more or less negligible.

In a follow-up comment, you mentioned that you wanted to make this “as open-source as possible”. Does this actually mean that the underlying compression algorithm is fully open-source OR that it will be closed-source, but exposed for free from an API? I would love to see the underlying compression algorithm built as an open-source public good.

Sounds great. Do you have benchmarks that you could share to showcase how much smaller we can go? Latest Nouns compression is about 110 bytes/trait on average, the bodies being only 7 bytes each and the heads being the largest at 163 bytes.

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Thanks for the feedback, my friend!

I’m talking about the compression algorithm being open-source, so people can build on top of it, upgrade it, etc. In the spirit of web3.

And Yes, I will share benchmarks soon.

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You might benefit from providing a bit more detail here, also could you break it down into milestones and deliverables? that is quite a bit of funding for an open source project, also while 1 (arcade) sounds cool, it doesn’t really seem needed to prove the point of the technology and almost sounds like a completely different idea you might want to ask funding separately (it also seems like the majority of the spend will go on that) so I’d consider maybe focusing on deliverables 2/3 as those let you achieve what you want, establish a compression solution that has traction/shows its effectiveness

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Thanks!

Great feedback!

I will surely rewrite some of it.

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@gremplin @nounsnnn

Thanks for your great feedback.

I gave it some more thought, and I feel that a lot of the effort is going to be derived from (1), as it is the product we’re building, and we find that once a product is in building, (2) and (3) will come with it.

As a Nouner myself, I believe that my mission in the DAO is to proliferate the brand, while presenting cutting-edge tech that moves the NFT space forward, and I’m sure that building a nouns-themed decentralized on-chain arcade will surely cover (3), and will make great advancements in (2).

After talking to some big retro-gaming brands, I see that there’s a lot of excitement about the possibility of on-chain games, and I believe that this kind of product is going to be very beneficial for nounsDAO.

Now, that’s why I believe that the first proposal should be building the on-chain arcade that will allow us to come up with a number of nouns-themed games, and I suggest here a breakdown of why 500 eth are required as a budget -

Deliverables (and timeframes) -

  1. Super-Mario style Nouns-themed on-chain generative game - this game is planned to launch in August-September 2022, and it encompasses the compression of Nouns and Toadz, and obviously, a lot of improvement for our already existing internal compression API. For the development of the game itself, I’m going to hire 4 more devs besides myself, a gaming economics expert, and a product manager. The cost of monthly salaries of 5 devs, a gaming economics expert and a pm are at a total of about 25 ETH per month, and I’m planning to deliver an eco-system of games in the next year.

  2. An on-chain generative RPG game - same amount of staff, and expecting launch at summer of 2023 - meaning salaries of 25 eth per month for a year.

  3. I want to get Nintendo or Sega, or another big name in retro gaming into this project, so I want to invest a lot in marketing and biz dev, and for that, at least for the start, I want 2 people to handle both as a team - 7 eth monthly salaries total

All in all - I got to ~480 ETH for about 1.5 years running this product, so with a bit of extras I didn’t think of, I’d estimate the investment needed at about 500 eth.

I believe that it is going to make nouns big, because I believe that the art is perfect for retro gaming that still has a huge market around the world.

What do you think? would love some more feedback!

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What about doing two milestones of 250e each streamed monthly. It seems like development of the on-chain game for nouns can come before doing a much larger rpg game after. Milestone 1 is deliver the nouns game, milestone 2 is deliver a more robust on-chain game platform? You will still get to 500e but it de-risks the ask to just the 250e for a more nouns focused proposal.

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Interesting, and I will change it to 2 milestones broken to 250 and 250.

Thanks!

1 Like