Case Studies
April 7, 2022
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We are all about enabling developers in our community to succeed in building the next generation of NFT products that make a big splash!
Today, we are excited to share the success story of a creative dev, Stefan, and how his team at ETHOnline 2021 got their idea of deriving new NFTs from existing NFTs and building a product for it.
The catalyst for building Splice was a simple idea on a tweet: “Twitter banner images as NFTs? Thank me later!”
My journey in the NFT world started when building two contract-based ticketing projects during hackathons in 2019. I was a developer ambassador at a Berlin-based software agency where I educated my colleagues about the new technology and took them on a deep dive into the Cryptokittie code base for workshops aimed at NFT bucketing (an early idea of what’s achieved by Charged Particles today).
As a software engineer with two decades of experience, with a more recent focus on full-stack applications written in Typescript, Node and React, I’ve built a handful of projects using SSRs like Gatsby and Next and became a professional Web3 and Solidity coder.
In early 2021, Emily and I first collaborated on a generative music project that allows users to combine sound seed NFTs to generate ambient soundscapes. We teamed up again at ETHOnline 2021 and ended up building Splice.
Our founding team comes with different backgrounds: Emily Weil has got a remarkable track record as a digital artist of generative artworks and runs her studio in NYC, Timothy Becker is more focused on and experienced with venture building, strategic management and marketing.
Splice allows you to mint NFTs by sending NFTs you already own as an input — we refer to them as seeds.
It extracts features of the chosen NFTs such as their colour palette, runs generative art algorithms and then mints the rendering result as a new Splice NFT into the input holder’s wallet. Since the parameters for the generative algorithms are derived from the seeds, the results visually match those seeds and create unique banner images for Twitter or Discord profiles.
What makes Splice special: our artists’ generative code is minted as a Splice style NFT with its metadata and code persisted on IPFS and Filecoin. Thus artists not only profit from minting fees and royalties but can also sell or transfer their Splice style NFT. Minting revenues and royalty shares are deposited for the current holder of the respective Splice style NFT.
While being focused on artistic usage at the moment, the Splice protocol has far more advanced use cases.
A Splice NFT represents the provenance of its seed NFTs on-chain — what’s happening on the style code layer is left up to our artists to derive anything from arbitrary NFT inputs. One could, for example, write style code that takes attribute and colour NFTs to mint 3D items for the metaverse.
We stumbled upon NFTPort during ETH Online 2021 when we needed to solve an obligatory UX problem: how to display a list of all NFTs owned by an account so users can select them as seed inputs for the Splice minting process?
While many projects rely on OpenSea’s APIs to retrieve that information, we found NFTPort’s APIs are easy to use, well documented and simple to integrate.
We’re using NFTPort’s data APIs to quickly find and display NFTs owned by any user who wants to splice their NFTs. Most importantly, NFTPort yields metadata from their index, acting as a catalyst for the initial rendering process of our selection overview and saving us a lot of on-chain and IPFS queries to retrieve the seeds’ metadata.
NFTPort is a one-stop-shop for many NFT-related use cases. You’re looking for the most convenient way to launch your NFT collection, interact with IPFS reliably, or retrieve other NFTs metadata? NFTPort’s contract deployment API is by far the most convenient choice.
Even better, creating contracts and minting NFTs is free until certain limits. However, advanced use cases such as Splice might still require rolling out your own contracts but for the most common scenarios related to the metaverse, NFT gaming or artworks, NFTPort’s APIs will get you up and running in no time and cause only a fraction of the headache compared to deploying and running your contracts.
