# dCanvas Whitepaper

With dCanvas, our purpose is to expand the boundaries of what Crypto Art and NFTs are capable of and create a lasting legacy as the first truly decentralized community art project.

dCanvas takes a 1024 x 1024 pixel canvas, inspired by [Reddit’s April Fools project /r/place,](https://www.reddit.com/r/place/) and divides it into 4 x 4 blocks. Ownership of each individual 4 x 4 block is represented by a non-fungible token (NFT) on the Ethereum Blockchain, created under the ERC-721 standard. Ownership of a block has multiple privileges:
1. The owner is the only one in the whole world who can set the colors of the 16 pixels in their block.
2. The owner is entitled to a share of the profits from a any NFT-minted art pieces commissioned based on the dCanvas.
3. The owner truly possesses that block, so they are free to then re-sell it on the secondary marketplace.

Exciting stuff, right? Let’s dive in.

## History and Impact
NFTs today have gained significant traction as a method of creating digital scarcity. The primary application of NFTs in the art world has been to mint underlying “deeds” that prove ownership to a limited edition of a piece of art. For example, sites like [SuperRare](https://superrare.co/) will sell single edition artworks from artists like [Pak](https://twitter.com/muratpak) or [Beeple](https://twitter.com/beeple), minting an underlying NFT that denotes ownership in a lasting way.

It truly is a powerful concept and it’s no surprise that it has gained such rapid adoption. One unique piece of Beeple artwork on the [Nifty Gateway](https://niftygateway.com/collections/beeple) marketplace sold for 6.6 million USD and another was auctioned at Christie’s, one of the world’s premier art auction houses, for over 69 million USD.

However, it still feels like there is something underwhelming to the current state of NFTs. Even if you have the token proving ownership, the actual piece of art is still a JPG or MP4 file that anyone can download and look at. And there is nothing tangible in the token that you can show to your non-crypto friends that changes their experience of the art from yours.

We see a future in which NFTs are capable of so much more. Our goal with dCanvas is to push those boundaries and move us toward that future. We hope and anticipate that as a result, this project will be remembered for its enduring impact on the history of NFTs.

## dCanvas Project — The Canvas Boards

Each individual NFT in the dCanvas contract represents a specific 4 x 4 block on an overall 1024 x 1024 pixel canvas board. Ownership of a block allows you to set the color of each of the 16 pixels, using a 32-color palette that is available to everyone. The tokens will be sold through the marketplace site [OpenSea](https://opensea.io/) which provides a flexible API that can be adapted to a project at this level of complexity.

Ownership of a token actually immediately gives you access to two different dCanvas boards: _Transience_ and _Permanence_. On the _Transience_ board, you can submit color changes without paying any gas for transactions. We verify the ownership of the token using blockchain, however the actual colors of the pixels are stored in our centralized database which takes no gas for interactions. Essentially, this is a [state channel](https://education.district0x.io/general-topics/understanding-ethereum/basics-state-channels/#:~:text=State%20channels%20refer%20to%20the,advancement%20to%20being%20production%20ready.) where you can freely change your pixels and coordinate with other owners without fear of gas.

The other board is _Permanence_, where the colors of your pixels are actually stored on the blockchain in a permanent, decentralized, completely censorship-resistant manner. Setting these colors requires interacting with the smart contract by sending a transaction, and does require gas. Both these boards have their own purpose and are part of the decentralized art project.

dCanvas is an uncensored medium for community expression and as token owners, you have exclusive right to any form of expression. However, we all hold moral obligations as members of society and thus, the following art subjects will not be tolerated:

1. Hate speech based on identity or vulnerability
2. Incitement of violence or suicide
3. Sexual or suggestive content of minors
4. Soliciting or facilitating illegal or prohibited transactions
5. Personal or confidential information without subject’s consent

Token holders agree to abide by these rules and violations will result in removal of that content from the dCanvas _Transcience_ board and commissioned NFT pieces.

## dCanvas Project - Commissions

In the future we plan to commission specific series of limited edition artworks, backed by minted NFTs, based on the dCanvas boards. These artworks would then be auctioned on crypto art marketplaces, and the profits would be shared 50/50 between us and the token owners.

For each series, a snapshot of the state of the canvas board frozen at a particular time will be taken based on the time of an Ethereum block number, which will be announced at least one week ahead of time.

Our current plans are for 3 different series of commissions:
- **Frontier**. This is the initial series, based on the _Transience_ and _Permanence_ boards and will be commissioned after the initial auction blocks are completed.
- **Optimism**. This is the second series. Once [optimism rollups](https://optimism.io/) are freely available on the mainnet to developers and sufficiently battle tested, this represents a huge step toward scaling Ethereum. We will introduce a board _optimism_ built on optimism rollups that will allow very cheap transactions, and commission a series based on this.
- **Emergence**. Once Ethereum 2.0 is complete, including [sharding and docking](https://ethereum.org/en/eth2/), we will release a new board _Emergence_ that will allow for very cheap transactions in a post-scaling ecosystem. Yes, this will be far in the future. But that also means your dCanvas NFT will be valuable and relevant for a long time.

In terms of the logistics of revenue sharing, a token owner must have submitted a valid transaction setting the colors of their 4 x 4 block in order to be entitled to their share of the 50% profits. In terms of receiving your revenue stake: after subtracting necessary fees and expenses, we will generate a list of eligible token owners, the number of tokens they own that contributed to the NFT, and deposit the profits in a [vault payment splitter](https://github.com/OpenZeppelin/openzeppelin-contracts/blob/master/contracts/utils/PaymentSplitter.sol).

We had extensively researched this and unfortunately there is no trustless way to create that contract now upfront and correctly identify the eligible users in the future. But know that dCanvas is built on the principle of creating a decentralized form of community art expression. Cheating that principle would completely devalue the entire project and prevent the generation of appreciable future pieces.

## Timeline
- **Phase One - Frontier Acquisition. April-May 2021.** The first 1024 tokens will be sold in a special presale for a fixed price of 0.15 ETH. After the first block of tokens are released, we will auction off the remainder of the blocks the marketplace [OpenSea](https://opensea.io/). To make bids, you can follow their directions on [how to wrap your ETH](https://opensea.io/blog/tutorials/how-to-bid-on-crypto-collectibles) and submit offers.
- **Phase Two - Frontier Expansion. April-May, 2021.** Once all tokens are sold, there will be a period for token owners to coordinate, play around, and experiment with the canvas board.
- **Phase Three - Frontier Initial Commission. Estimated May, 2021.** We will take a snapshot of the _Permanence_ board approximately the end of May. Additionally we will take a timelapse of the _Transience_ board up until that point in time. These will be commissioned into art works that will be sold on NFT marketplaces.
- **Phase Four - Optimism Commission. Estimated June 2021.** Once [optimism rollups](https://optimism.io/) are freely available to developers and sufficiently battle-tested, we will create a new board based on optimism, and commission limited edition art pieces from the board based on this.
- **Phase Five - Emergence Commission. Estimated September 2021.** Once [Ethereum 2.0](https://ethereum.org/en/eth2/) is fully released on mainnet we will again commission limited edition art based on a new board, built on the turbo scaling enabled by Ethereum 2.0.

## Technical Implementation

The code for our smart contract can be found here.

It is a fairly straightforward contract that implements the standard [ERC721 non-fungible token standard](https://eips.ethereum.org/EIPS/eip-721). Additionally, it implements Project OpenSea’s [ERC721 Factory ](https://github.com/ProjectOpenSea/opensea-creatures/blob/master/contracts/IFactoryERC721.sol)interface to allow for simultaneous minting and transfer of tokens. It implements an additional custom method for setting the colors of a token (represented by a _bytes32_ mapped to the token id) as well as view methods for reading the colors of a specific token or of the board in a paginated fashion.

Our _Transience_ board data is stored using standard web technologies. The current board state is stored in [Redis](https://redis.io/) for fast caching and retrieval. A more robust copy, as well as a log of each update, is stored in a [Postgres database](https://www.postgresql.org/). Updates are sent over [Websockets](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/WebSockets_API). The _permanence_ board data is read directly from the blockchain, using a public method that iterates over a set of token IDs in a paginated fashion.

On the front end, the board itself is drawn using the [dCanvas API](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Canvas_API). Portions of the render functionality will be open sourced so that others can also draw the permanent board state read from the Ethereum network.

- Github Link
- Smart contract link
- Canvas github link