Developed in collaboration with Michelle Viljoen, Story Inscriptions enable new ways for artists and collectors to experience and add to their art, while creating news ways for all to experience and discover art. This is Social Art, not social media.
Art has so much more to it than just the piece of art itself. There is the story of the artist, the inspiration behind the piece of art, and the story from each collector of the piece.
There is no easy way to have all of these stories available to potential collectors and the community as a whole. Typically, it’s just verbally relayed amongst all parties.
In crypto art, piece descriptions get us part of the way there… but we can do so much better by leveraging blockchain technology.
Currently, crypto artists and their stories are relayed to collectors via Twitter, marketplace bios (which are typically short and hard to find), and art descriptions.
Sometimes collectors will tweet about why they collected a piece, but generally these stories are hard to find unless you’ve saved the tweet somewhere.
This space keeps talking about storytelling… but has yet to have a good way to tell these stories immutably.
Originally developed as a collaboration with Michelle Viljoen, the Story Contract was developed to overcome the limitations of traditional storytelling.
This contract allows both the artist and collector(s) can write their stories to the blockchain, where they are stored immutably and for infinitum, without censorship.
Transient Labs plans to provide a new experience where people can explore stories, in general or for a specific piece of art. We are also working with marketplaces to get this integrated.
Story Inscriptions are markdown text blobs, supporting both portions of Markdown: Frontmatter and Content.
Frontmatter is a JSON blob, with curly braces starting and ending on their own lines (as shown below). Any structured data can be put in here. Transient Labs uses namespacing for specific products, such as T.R.A.C.E.
JSON was chosen as it is the most secure and easiest to serialize across web frameworks. YAML is not secure enough in our opinion and TOML is harder to work with. There is no standard way to specify JSON Frontmatter, however, the method chosen here is widely supported across programming languages (Javascript, Python, Go).
Content is markdown text that should be parsed and escaped to avoid XSS and other attack vectors. This guide shows what is accepted as Markdown syntax: https://www.markdownguide.org/basic-syntax/
Example
{
"data": "some json data in Frontmatter"
}
# Markdown Content starts here!
You can write whatever you want down here!The Story Contract supports ERC-165. The Interface ID is 0x2464f17b. The previous interface id that is supported in versions lower than 5.0.0 is 0x0d23ecb9.
Based on local testing, the gas cost of a 5000 word story (a research paper) costs 255867 gas. At 100 gwei gas, this coverts to a gas cost of 0.0255867 ETH. This is extrememly gas efficient compared to other methods. Stories will also likely be much shorter in length and submitted when gas is lower.
You should run the test suite with the Makefile.
This loops through the following solidity versions:
- 0.8.20
- 0.8.21
- 0.8.22
Any untested Solidity versions are NOT reccomended for use.
This codebase is provided on an "as is" and "as available" basis.
We do not give any warranties and will not be liable for any loss incurred through any use of this codebase.
This code is copyright Transient Labs, Inc 2023 and is licensed under the MIT license.