Since our change to ‘The OG Robots on Solana’, the community has been asking for a new slogan that better represents Solarians. As part of our New Chapter Initiative and our desire to better work with the community, we decided to give them ownership of the Solarian slogan. After taking in suggestions for the new slogan, we held a formal vote using the electoral voting system for verified holders in our Discord. With an overwhelming majority, the community chose ‘The First On-Chain Generative NFTs on Solana’ as the new Solarian Slogan!
In light of this choice, we thought it would be great to delve into the making of Solarians and some of the history behind these wonderful robots!
- What inspired Solarians?
Solarians are inspired in part by Blue Magician’s extensive literary forays into the world of science fiction, notably Isaac Asimov’s Foundation/Robot series. He was also highly fascinated by the field of machine-human interaction and how it transforms our concept of consciousness.
In the end though, the idea came as a flight of inspiration in March 2021; he wanted to make a cute, friendly robot. - Why 10,000 Solarians?
Ever since Cryptopunks, 10,000 was the traditional number for generative collections of all sorts, especially for PFPs. It’s also an excellent number for our RumbleWorlds metaverse plans. - Why build Solarians on Solana and not another chain?
Ethereum was out of the question due to it’s high fees, the use of Solidity and the oversaturation of the NFT market there. Blue Magician took a look at some other up and coming chains and narrowed the list down to two final candidates, Tezos and Solana.
After playing around a bit with Tezos and finding it awkward to work with on the developer side, Blue ended up choosing Solana because it seemed to offer many advantages to its tech; like not having a central transaction bottleneck. - What tools were available for NFTs on Solana and how were NFTs being created up until that point?
It was a raw experience. For general development on Solana, there wasn’t much information or tooling for developers. All you would get back then was a barebones, “Hello, world!” tutorial for writing contracts, very sparse documents and command-line utilities for working with the SPL token standard.
For NFTs in particular, the only special information available was a tiny paragraph in the token mint document that advised developers to cap the mint supply of a fungible token to 1 so you would get an NFT. You could mint them using the command line tools provided or by writing your own contract that interacts with the standard token contract. You could also theoretically write your own token standard, but that wouldn’t have been compatible with the rest of the ecosystem. - Were there other NFT builders in the space that the team could talk to while building Solarians?
No, not really. Projects like Solible and Kreechures were around, but we never managed to get in touch with them. The way they did things also was quite different from what we were trying to achieve. The main support came from the Solana Discord, which helped with the some major quirks that were encountered. - What was the process for minting a Solarian? Was it all done through contract?
No, it was done exclusively using a hand-written minting script that interfaced with the SPL-Token command line programs, along with a custom-built queuing and management logic to ensure robustness of the minting process. - Where was the metadata for Solarians before the Metaplex standard?
It resided off-chain, except for the mint hash. - What was the process for migrating metadata on-chain to the Metaplex standard? Were there any other projects doing the migration at the same time?
It required a thorough understanding of the Metaplex Token Metadata contract. We contributed several modifications to their command-line tools and spent long hours in discussion with Jordan from Metaplex who provided invaluable assistance. The other big project doing a migration around that time was Solpunks. - Was the migration difficult, and did the team struggle with it?
The process was a big headache because the early Solarians from #1 to #5766 had 9 decimals, which the Metadata didn’t allow for.
Blue Magician struggled with it in the beginning, but managed to figure it out.
However, later on it turned out that Phantom also couldn’t deal properly with the 9 decimal Solarians, which resulted with the constant dread of ending up with fractionalized Solarians when sending them through Phantom. The Phantom team has now fixed this! - What does the team think of the new slogan chosen by the Solarian community?
We think “First on-chain generative NFT on Solana” is a very apt description on how Solarians work, because they are not only generative in the wider sense of the term, but also generative based exclusively on the on-chain information of the mint hash (as opposed to an off-chain process). That also meant that the team and the minter never knew what Solarian would pop up next, until it was minted! - Did the community have a lot of options to choose from?
They did! We actually explored a lot of different options, some of which didn’t make the vote, and some which did! Some of the suggestions were:
- OG Robots on Solana
- The First User-Generative NFTs on Solana
- Creating History on Solana
- The OG Trailblazers
- Pushing NFT Innovation
- We’re here to make history
- First animated NFT collection on Solana
- First procedurally generated NFT on Solana based on minthash
- First major collection built purely on $SOL
- First major collection sold in $SOL
- First 10k collection on Solana
- First original 10k collection with on-chain metadata
- First collection on Solana with near-instant mint
Ultimately, ‘First On-Chain Generative NFTs on Solana’ won in an absolute landslide victory with 9 out of 9 of the Solarian electoral votes! - There’s been a lot of discussion about ‘on-chain’ and ‘generative’, can you help clear up these terms?
This comes down to semantics, and the terms are very fuzzy; especially because the space is still so young. Most people don’t having a clear understanding of the various layers of how some things of an NFT can be ‘on-chain’, and yet others ‘off-chain’ and ‘generative’ doesn’t have a formal definition when used for NFT creation.
Specifically to Solana and NFT projects on Solana, data being on-chain means that the data lives in accounts on a blockchain, as opposed to some centralized backend servers.
‘Generative’ can mean a lot of things and there are differences between generative art NFTs and generative NFTs. In some contexts, it can mean that a set of image NFTs were created procedurally (i.e. by some kind of computer algorithm) and then put on-chain as static images.
For Solarians it refers to a similar process, but the procedural generation is done ‘on the fly’ based on the mint hash. - Despite being one of the first NFTs on Solana, Solarians are still one of the more complex NFTs on Solana at the moment with all of its animated, moving parts. Is that something the team is proud of?Definitely! Together with our ambitious trailblazer experiments, it’s what sets us apart in a major way from other collections. Solarians was designed to explore new ways in art, technology and community.
We are really proud of the Solarian history, but even more exciting is the possibilities of where Solarians can go from here! With the team currently working on making Solarians PFP friendly with customizable accessories, a lot of work going into Rumble Worlds, and other ideas being explored, the future is truly glorious!
