Why I Chose Bitcoin Ordinals to Release ‘Frontline’

I like to say that I do pixels very well, but I’m not a blockchain expert. I fear anything that is related to statistics and security, as any mistake usually means that you are completely wrong (when dealing with statistics) or you lose a lot of money (when it comes to security). Writing a smart contract is for me a daunting task. This does not mean I am clueless about the underlying technology that powers blockchains and NFTs/Ordinals, though: just that I stop at understanding.

For my latest collection, I am partnering with Metagood, the creators of Ordinals collection OnChainMonkey, to release it on the Ordinals protocol. This collection will be my first on Bitcoin, which is different from what I used in the past (mostly NFTs on Ethereum and Tezos) and is taking all the lessons learned from other chains to do some smart things out of the box.

What Ordinals offer

First thing that I love about Ordinals is that it has to be on-chain. That’s it. No external assets, no links. What you have is what you get. Many generative art pieces rely on code libraries (e.g. p5.js, three.js) to help with the commonly used features that are needed to generate the pieces.

The protocol has a solution to this problem that is elegant by design. Any Ordinal can refer to another Ordinal. It could be a library, it could be an asset, it could be the whole thing to create remixes. It is up to you to find creative uses of the feature. You can find the widely used libraries on-chain, on Bitcoin: p5js, three.js are there already. You know who uploaded them? Danny Yang, creator of OnChainMonkey.

But how does this work exactly? How can my Ordinal refer to another Ordinal? On Ethereum (and others as far as I know), NFTs are basically token IDs that are issued from a given contract. You then need the contract address to explore which NFTs are there, and who owns them.

Ordinals found (again) a clever solution to that issue. This feature is called recursion. A Bitcoin is a collection of one hundred million of satoshis, each with a number, according to their minting order. An Ordinal is tied to a unique Satoshi, so they are ordered. Hence they are called Ordinals. You can use another Ordinal (or other Ordinals) in your Ordinal to make a new Ordinal. You can then create complex pieces using different assets already there, and anyone can access them.

The other feature that is also interesting is the parent-child relationship. It is similar to the recursion feature in the sense that it is a reference to another Ordinal. But this one is secured in the same way blockchains work (remember the crypto part of “cryptocurrency”? That refers to signing messages using cryptography, the business with private keys/public keys). You can only refer to another Ordinal as the parent if you can prove that you own that Ordinal.

What can you do with this? It turns out this is also a smart way to establish provenance and even more. You can make one Ordinal your signature and use it to be a parent of all your future pieces. You can make one Ordinal the “generator” of a generative collection and have all the individual mints of that collection refer to the code as their parent. And even more.

Ordinals offer elegant solutions to serve the purpose of creating generative art collections on the Bitcoin chain. They, of course, are not as flexible as smart contracts and do not aim to be. They provide enough to build awesomeness.

FrontLine is my latest long-form generative art collection. I am honored to be able to share it with you, this time on Ordinals, with the OnChainMonkey community as the intended audience at first. It took me more or less one year to get to the finish line, and it is a personal journey.

“FrontLine” reflects what happened recently at various levels. The piece was challenging to create and satisfying to finalize. From the beginning this was meant to be a piece in collaboration with OnChainMonkey. I was in part inspired by the general ethos behind the community around OCM: nudging people towards “good,” but there is no clear definition of good, only vague cultural concepts around what societies accept as values to aim for. Good only exists if its opposite makes sense: there is a dimension of good versus bad, lawful versus chaotic, light versus dark, A versus B. Two sides of something, with something in between.

FrontLine tries to represent this struggle, this fight that happens in every moment. What appeared to be an obvious “good” choice a few seconds ago is now its opposite thanks to additional knowledge. The split between the two sides is never a clear cut: the battle rages on, and a lot is happening at the Frontline.

The piece combines a couple of algorithms that are competing to occupy the space: one that will look for the negative space and one that will try to connect the dots; the connecting algorithm is also clearly split into two sides with different approaches to the task at hand. How each new iteration of the algorithm is almost unpredictable yet explainable a posteriori: the rules of the underlying algorithms are actually pretty straightforward. Once the whole space has been explored, the battle begins and the frontline appears, sometimes complex and vibrant, sometimes spotty and vague – yet always present.

There is no perfect world. There is no good without bad. What matters is where to draw the frontline. It is up to you to find what you would want both sides to be. It could be ETH/BTC. I personally root for the people that innovate: they will be at the FrontLine.

Do I have an answer to all the questions? No. I just know that you have to try things to move forward. You have to be where it happens. You have to fight there. You have to be at the FrontLine.

Note: The views expressed in this column are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of CoinDesk, Inc. or its owners and affiliates.