Inspiration
Hexyz was born out of scratching an itch, or chasing a question. It was born out of curiosity, "Exactly how much can I do with a smart contract on NEAR?". It was partially inspired by other pixel focused projects on NEAR, such as berryclub, but it remains very distinct from these projects.
What it does
It allows for the tokenization of 16,777,216 hexcodes, called hextokens. Each hextoken represents a unique color and owning a hextoken allows the account certain privileges. You can fuse hextokens into a palette and use the palette to create art. The contract ensures that the account either owns the palette, or is approved to use the palette. All art is stored on the contract (Base64 encoded).
While artworks are essentially NFTs and the contract is NEP171 compliant, the contract aims to be distinct by encouraging alternate uses and new methods of exchanging tokens (ex. favoriting an artwork requires tipping the artist).
The contract also allows for global canvases which allow anyone with a hextoken to draw on the canvas (but only with the colors they own) as well as social canvases, canvases created from palettes, where anyone approved for the palette can draw on the canvas.
How we built it
The smart contract is written in Rust and the web app is built with Vue.js.
Challenges we ran into
The goal from the beginning was to do as much as possible on chain - minimal external storage - and the requirement that ownership of colors is always verified by the contract. this led to constantly trying to use too much processing power and too much storage, thus trying to find every little gain that would minimize the amount of gas and reduce the contract's storage costs.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
It's fun to use (at least I think it is). There were two objectives: build something fun and build something that is not heavily reliant on self hosted servers and databases. I feel like I've accomplished both of these.
What's next for Hexyz
Build a community. It has been a huge effort to build and deploy this contract/app. Now it needs some users!
Keep improving the experience. So much of the app is about drawing and collaborating and I would like the drawing experience to be at least as good as using MS Paint! There are still many other rough edges on the front end that need to be smoothed out.
Integrate with other platforms. The artworks are already NEP171 compliant. It would be great to sync up with other NEAR protocol marketplaces.
Find new uses for the color tokens. How far can we take this? I have a few more ideas brewing already!
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