OpenPalette Marketplace

This update is about our upcoming plans and vision for OpenPalette.

One of the most compelling uses for palettes is minting one-of-a-kind, personalized art. We've worked with artists to release innovative collections and collabs since day one, and we have some exciting ones coming up.

However, there's been a big bottleneck in this process: me! (@dvnabbott →). Right now if an artist wants to make a generative collection with OpenPalette, I need to write a custom contract and connect it to this website for minting, which is quite time consuming and severely limits the amount of artists we can work with. Openness and decentralization are core to Web3, and those values aren't reflected in our current process.

Since the start of OpenPalette, we've wanted to move to a better model, and we'd like to share the roadmap for that now.

An open marketplace

We want to enable any artist to easily create generative NFT collections using OpenPalette.

An artist should be able to create a new collection directly on this website, upload their generative algorithm, and the collection will be automatically added to our gallery. Collectors can then use their palettes to mint anything that's available, just like they can now.

To do this, we plan to dramatically simplify the NFT creation process — both for OpenPalette and for the wider NFT community.

We see this as a 3 step process:

1. Simplify NFT smart contract creation. To do this, we've created Studio 721. It's an all-in-one smart contract builder that has a one-click preset for creating OpenPalette-based projects. For more details on Studio 721, check out this twitter thread →.
   
   Many cool companies (and engineers at those companies) have taken interest in this tool. To name a few: Zora, Polygon, The Graph, Pinata, and others. Conversations are just getting started 😁
2. Simplify creating and hosting the artwork. We plan to take inspiration from platforms like Artblocks, EthBlockArt, Sunflower Industries, and Ko-hi, and have our own system for creating generative art — only it will primarily use palettes as parameters instead of block data. Since I'm a shader artist myself, I'm currently thinking we may start with shaders. PS: we have a collab in the works with @sunflowerindust →
3. An on-chain registry of all OpenPalette collections. When artists create collections within our system, their collections will be added to the registry automatically. If artists want to get fancy and do something custom, collections created outside our system can be added manually. We'll then curate our favorite collections — our team will handle the curation to start, but we may introduce a system for the community to vote on this.

We hope this new model will be exciting for both artists and collectors. Artists can release their work without a centralized gatekeeper, and collectors will have more opportunities to use their palettes.

While we may have more projects, you definitely don't need to mint everything! If you like it, mint it, and if not, wait for another drop! We want to have a good mix of popular artists and up-and-coming artists, to help every collector find what they're looking for.

OpenPalette Studio and Marketplace aren't quite ready yet, but we'll be setting up an #artists channel in Discord now. If you're interested in releasing a collection on OpenPalette, come say hi!

Other news

Our first advisor!

My good friend @dabit3 → will be helping out here and there to make sure the right people hear about OpenPalette. He's an incredible developer, the founder of@developer_dao →, and currently working at Edge and Node (the company behind The Graph).

L2s

Moving forward, we'd like to offer Polygon as an option to any artist who wants to use it for a collection. Polygon is EVM-compatible, so is fairly easy to support thanks to Studio 721. L2s are happening, but at least today there's still some friction for artists and collectors, so just like other aspects of a collection (pricing, quantity, etc), we'd like the artist to make that decision.

Other projects

Now that we have a faster way to deploy contracts, we can hopefully have more artists release collections, while we still make progress on our bigger projects like OpenPixel and working with Chainlink.

Anyway, here's a sneak peek of our next art drop:

—@dvnabbott