About NextGen

NextGen is an on-chain generative art NFT contract. It is also a tool to support the ambitious aspirations of the 6529 community in the areas of art experimentation and decentralized social organization.

The central 6529 thesis is that, with the popularization of NFTs, we now have the complete toolkit available to create decentralized, open and transparent social and economic systems.

We believe that the classic values of liberal democracies such as human rights and public goods / commons should apply in the digital domain also and that it is important that the digital domain is not exclusively corporate-led.

We often call this end-state an "open metaverse", but other names for it could include "a network state focused on decentralization" or "a decentralized social system".

Whatever it is called, the desired end-state is 100,000 or 1M or 10M or 100M people organizing some meaningful part of their societal activities through decentralized systems (blockchains and smart contracts). This is what we are trying to build and NextGen is another piece of the infrastructure we consider important for this mission.

Overall Approach

The fundamental structure of the NextGen contract follows the overall approach pioneered by Art Blocks in 2020-2021.

• A single core contract (with various supporter contracts) with custom token number spaces to separate out different collections by different artists
• On-chain storage of the generative script and the seed/hash used to generate the image
• Randomized traits at mint

Given the above structure is generally well-understood, we would like to focus on a few areas where we have adjusted the standard approach to support our specific goals and needs.

Native Allowlists

We believe that allowlists are the best approach for most in-demand mints. They support fairness and transparency in minting allocations, reduce gas costs, and permit both artists and projects to remain in control of their mint price and distribution approach.

NextGen natively supports complex allowlists, across multiple minting phases.

Native Delegation

We have been a leading voice for wallet safety for a long time and design all our systems to encourage 6529 collectors and community members to use safe practices when interacting with our website and smart contracts.

To support this objective, we launched NFTDelegation.com in Spring 2023 and have been using it within the community to support address consolidation and delegation.

NextGen is the first NFT contract to support NFTDelegation natively. Allowlist members will be able to mint using whichever delegates they have active at the time of mint.

Personalization, Customization and Collector Provenance

The classic approach to a generative mint is that the algorithm is fully randomly (or pseudo-randomly, to be precise) determined at the time of mint. This is a good practice and we are supportive of it.

We believe, however, that there are both art and non-art use cases that could benefit from the output being influenced by information about the collecting or minting address.

This is most easily explained with two examples:

• Pebbles, for example, will pass some collector information for certain mints and adjust the output to reflect their provenance in a small way.
• The NextGen contract has been also deployed by the University of Nicosia to deploy student generative art certificates with on-chain student information (grade and name).

We believe this area is largely unexplored and potentially very fruitful.

Extra On-Chain™

Most generative collections, even the on-chain ones, serve an off-chain URI with metadata and potentially rendered images, to easily interoperate with marketplace and galleries.

NextGen mints will start off working in this model, but the NextGen contract has the ability to switch metadata and rendering data to be 100% on-chain.

This removes even the smallest dependency from off-chain systems and, more importantly, makes the metadata composable on-chain.

The combination of the ability to personalize the output and then serve the data on-chain is extraordinarily interesting to us.

It unlocks the ability to have a form of permanent Art Oracles on-chain. We can’t wait to see what people come up with.

Artist Provenance

NextGen allows the artist to cryptographically sign a NextGen collection from an ethereum address or ENS of their choice.

As our protocol for community-verified identity improves, we hope the combination of the two will be able to give assurances of "who the artist was" over decades and even centuries.

Multiple Randomization Methods

NextGen supports three different randomization methods with the capacity to integrate more approaches in the future.

Strictly speaking, all commonly used randomization methods are, scientifically speaking, pseudorandom methods but the differences have no practical effect in this context. For the purposes for which they are used for, they are effectively random.

Phases / Periodicity

NextGen supports a wide range of phased and periodic minting approaches, from simple mints to periodic mints that can stretch for decades.

Minting Sales Models

NextGen supports all widely used (and some not-widely used) minting sales models

• Airdrops
• Fixed price mints
• Phase priced mints
• Linear descending auction
• Exponentially descending auction
• Linear ascending mint
• Burn-to-mint (internal or external collection)
• Swap-to-mint (internal or external collection)
• Mint-to-auction

The combination of Minting Sales Models and Phases can be used to create very interesting and experimental minting dynamics.

On-Chain Libraries

NextGen supports the ability for collections to reference on-chain libraries to have no off-chain dependencies in rendering.

More Information

NextGen Collections Model

We do not have a fixed plan in place post the genesis Pebbles collection and will develop and refine our approach over time.

This is what we currently believe will be our direction:

• We do not anticipate a large number of NextGen collections in the short-term.
  • Generative collections require a lot of work to be done correctly and we only would like to make interesting drops.
  • We have no pressure to mint NextGen collections, so we will mint a collection whenever we feel right about it

• We are broadly interested in 3 categories of collections:
  • Collections that support our decentralization objectives
  • Collections that explore interoperability or composability on-chain
  • Collections that are unusual or interesting aesthetically or technically

• We have a strong bias towards all NextGen collections being released under a CC0 license.

• The NextGen contracts are available under an Apache 2 open-source license
  • Anyone who would like to take advantage of the work and time we have invested in the contracts, is welcome to deploy their own instance of the contracts and mint their own collections.
  • You do not need to ask our permission, but I am sure we will appreciate hearing about what you are doing with the contracts

If you have an interesting idea along the lines above, please get in touch with us. We would love to brainstorm about it and see if it is a fit.