AIP: Canonical Image Templates for Token Collections

[SaulDope]

Our team at mirage protocol is building a web2 server to generate dynamic images for Tokens based on their underlying data. I started thinking on how we could do it purely on-chain and came up with this.

The idea is still new and I'm very open to feedback. Looking forward to discussing this.

[SaulDope]

Here's some examples of others who've attempted similar:

OpenSea

They allow users to upload an entire SVG as image_data inside NFT metadata, but they say they don't recommend this. This approach definitely works but quickly brings up storage concerns as there would be one image stored on-chain per NFT.

Fully On-Chain Art

This organization promotes EVM based fully on-chain art. ERC-721 has more flexibility in the on-chain metadata, allowing for inline SVGs. They do a lot more of the SVG building on-chain than I think is needed, but one idea I really appreciated was putting a pure function to render the SVG on-chain. This helps unify client side approaches. Pure functions in EVM don't require knowledge of on-chain state, so they can be fully ported to the browser to avoid reads/view function calls to node operators.

The core idea of the approach in Fully On-Chain has similarities to my proposal above. However the implementation is a lot more work for developers, primarily because they're (to some degree) trying to force it into the standard. Parsing SVGs raw in Move is something I am hesitant about which is why my proposal did not include it. However it should at least be considered, so I'll continue to think on it.