FXHASH

Guide to publish a Generative Token

This document will walk you through all the concepts you need to know to understand how you can build and publish a Generative Token (GT) on fxhash.

Table of Contents

General overview

This section will give you a rough overview of the Generative Tokens on fxhash. Don't worry if some informations are missing for you to properly understand the process, some particular aspects are covered in other parts of our documentation.

Upload and mint a GT

Generative Tokens on fx(hash) are essentially tiny websites that display visuals, animated graphics, play sounds and can sometimes even be interactive. What’s important is that the output of these GTs is deterministic, and based off of a 51-characters base 58 encoded number (don’t worry if you don’t know what that is right now, you can find more information about base 58 here) - basically the output of these GTs is derived from a long string of letters and numbers, which is more commonly referred to as a hash (or transaction hash). This string originates from the Tezos transaction linked to a collector’s purchase of an iteration of your GT.

GTs should be designed in a deterministic manner - feeding in the same hash into your GT should always produce the same output. Different hashes should produce different outputs. There’s a lot to unpack here already.

Generative Token overview

Your project is stored

Your project will be stored on the IPFS network, and then stored on the tezos blockchain. It ensures its immutability.

People mint a unique token from your GT

When a GT is published on the platform, anyone will be able to mint unique iterations from it. When such an event arises, the mint transaction generates a unique hash. The hash is sent as a URL parameter to your project. The @fxhash/project-sdk extracts the hash from the url so you can use to as the seed for driving the randomness of the generative artwork.

Mint overview

Image preview

When a token is minted, fxhash provides a service to generate a preview, which will be attached to the tokens as an alternate way to visualize them.

How to create a Generative Token

If you want to create your own generative token you can find all relevant information in our docs:

fx(lens) development environment

To facilitate the creation of fxhash projects, we have created a fully-featured development environment. We recommend its usage to remove the pain of setting up the files manually.

screenshot of fxlens

More information about the development environment fx(lens) in this section.

Leverage fxhash modules for your projects

The @fxhash/project-sdk exposes different functionalities that you can use to build your generative artwork. We are listing the main modules below:

  • fx(params): gives artists the option to define a set of parameters collectors will modulate before minting their iteration
  • features: can be used to expose the features of an iteration
The Project SDK documentation page goes in-depth into what can be done with the various fxhash modules.

How to publish (mint) a GT

Zip, test & mint

Once you are done developing your GT and you are sure it follows the Artist Code of conduct, you will need to compress all of its content into a ZIP archive. fxhash only accepts the ZIP format. The index.html file must be located at the root of the archive.

The @fxhash/cli also offers a command to bundle your project. You can find more information here

Once you have your ZIP file, you can check that it behaves properly by uploading it to the sandbox. The sandbox can be used as a quick way to test your project.

Once you have properly tested your project, you can mint it by following the instructions on the page.

Sync your wallet

First of all, you will need to have a Tezos wallet synced with fxhash.

Mint your GT

Once your GT is ready to be published (once it's been carefully tested in the sandbox), you can open the mint page. This page will guide you through the different steps of the process:

  • authoring: select who's authoring the piece: yourself alone or collaboration ?
  • upload to IPFS: drop your .ZIP file and wait until it gets uploaded to IPFS through fxhash servers
  • check files: check again if your project behaves properly once uploaded to IPFS. Also if you implemented features, check if they work properly. This step is also used to configure which hash will be used for the preview of your project.
  • configure capture: select the capture mode and configure it. Also check if the capture is working properly
  • verifications: a comparative check between the preview & the live version
  • distribution: number of editions, pricing & general distribution settings
  • explore variation settings: configure the variations a collector can explore when viewing your token
  • project details: contextual informations about your piece
  • preview & mint: a preview of your project once published, and the mint button

There are lots of steps, but each step is required for your project to be released in the best possible conditions.

You can find more information on individual steps in the following articles:

Have fun

We hope this guide will cover most of what you need to know to build tokens on fxhash. If you have any issues, feel free to join our Discord server.