Icons

On September 12, 2021, shortly after the Alonzo hardfork, New Mindflow in association with The Ancient Kraken, CardanoDan & ReliableStaking, launched the first Art NFTs with smart contract capabilities on Cardano, the “Icons” collection.

Starting in July 2021, we have worked closely with The Ancient Kraken on crafting, what came to be, the first smart contract on Cardano to pay residuals (i.e. royalties) to artists on resales of their works.

The Ancient Kraken a.k.a. Quinn was part of the first cohort to complete the Plutus Pioneers program and is a very successful Catalyst proposer, and member of the Cardano developer community.

It was the first iteration of the contract, based on a compile first, trust second approach and, as such, entirely optional to execute.

Apart from its functional capability we wanted the NFT collection to serve as a historical artefact, marking the moment smart contract capabilities arrived on the Cardano mainnet. But it wasn’t simply a celebratory series, they contained in their metadata an actual functioning smart contract, that those with the inclination and technical skills, have the ability to execute.

The policy id was open for just 3 Cardano epochs (15 days), it locked on 2021-09-27 21:50:16 UTC and no more NFTs will ever be minted again, marking the participation of everyone involved in this pivotal moment of Cardano history.

Because, we wanted to maintain the individuality of each piece, all NFTs are numbered and were minted in a sequential order.

The smart contract script was included in the NFT in two ways:

1. In the metadata of a unique minting transaction - a unique, one-of-a-kind version of the top tier artwork was attached to the NFT. The id of this NFT is referenced in every other NFT from the collection and contains the custom smart contract script completely on-chain. Due to the size limitations of the metadata this is a compressed version, not completely user friendly/human readable but which will compile without problems.

2. In an archive, linked in the metadata of each NFT in the series and hosted on ipfs, which contains the human readable version of the script along with the generic Plutus files needed to compile it. These should be accessible to any Plutus developer, but we are including them for posterity.

Documentation for the smart contract is available on GitHub, as well as an additional copy of the script completely open-source and forkable.

A tutorial video explaining how to compile the smart contract and run the script is also made available by the developer of the smart contract The Ancient Kraken.

The smart contract code & all the info about it is identical in all NFTs, the difference is the artwork.

Each piece features a common, uncommon & rare version.

The NFTs have been minted in a sequential order & the rarer versions were randomly dispersed in the sequence of common images.

We wanted to make the NFTs available to everyone in the Cardano community who wanted a commemorative token by which to remember that moment in time.

Each piece has 3 separate versions for 3 rarity tiers :

Common: 95%

Uncommon: 4.9%

Rare: 0.1% (Ada Lovelace - The Enchantress of Numbers rare was never minted)