alphagen

Anatomy of an Alpha NFT
How to use alpha
alpha and alphagen roadmap
NFT Example
NFT Value Interchangeability Example

Inspiration

alphagen and it's alpha NFT is my first NFT and art project using blockchain technology that I'm super excited to share with you all.

I'm a former artist turned software engineer who has been in the crypto space since 2015. This past year with the explosion of NFTs I've been waiting for an opportunity to express my art using code. Being heavily interested in Solana building something for the Solana ecosystem was also a good opportunity to learn web 3.

alpha is an NFT primitive similar to the Loot Project, GMoot, and Project N. While we enjoy these projects we still felt like we could make a great and unique NFT primitive on the Solana blockchain that other NFTs could be composed from.

What it does

alpha is a NFT that is comprised of 16 alphabetical characters in a 4x4 matrix. Characters are normally distributed (i.e Bell Curve), where letters at the extremes (a, b, c, ...., x, y , z) are more rare than letters in the middle of the alphabet.

These characters are interchangeable with other alphabets and values. With these values you can derive other values such as sums, eigenvectors, eigenvalues, and others we haven't thought of. These values can then be used as inputs or variance attributes for generative art.

While anyone is free to use alpha as a primitive in their NFT mints, owning an alpha NFT will also act as your mint pass on the alphagen platform for curated mints, exclusive experiences, and vote for participation in a future DAO.

The first alpha NFTs will be distributed for FREE to all Solana Monkey Business holders over a 3 day period. Unclaimed alpha NFTs will then be sold in a fair mint at a later date.

How we built it

We started by learning more about generative art, it's tools, and how to create the NFT concept that we envisioned for this NFT primitive project. After we spent a fair amount in the Metaplex Discord learning about Metaplex and Candy Machine. With community support we then set out to build.

alphagen is built using Next.js with Typescript and it's deployed to Vercel. Our database infrastructure is held on Airtable. We integrated with Solana using the anchor and spl-token JavaScript SDKs, with a lot of help from previous examples in the community.

Challenges we ran into

Our project was somewhat challenging with the current NFT tooling on Solana as we wanted to offer alpha for free to Solana Monkey Business holders. It's quite simple for bots to take advantage of mints so we had to think carefully about how we wanted to proceed.

In the end we decided to create an APL token that Solana Monkey Business holders could "redeem" for that they would later use to redeem from a Candy Machine mint that uses an SPL token for redemptions.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Learning about web 3 with Solana and creating a project that's fully integrated
Creating a tokenized whitelist for Solana Monkey Business holders
Creating a new NFT primitive that anyone can use to influence their mints

What we learned

We learned a ton about Solana, Web 3, Metaplex, and Candy Machine. We also learned a lot about their implementations and look forward to fair mint protocols that solve some of the problems we faced.

Additionally blockchain projects are hard! There are just so many angles with development, marketing, socials, and community. It's quite a bit to accomplish but also a lot of fun along the way.