Ether Tree - Inception

What is Ether Tree?

Ether Tree is an NFT collection of 100 hand crafted tree drawings. No generative art here, I made each and every one individually.

If you haven't been there already, check out https://ethertree.org/, that has some more detail on what Ether Tree is. This article focuses on the why...

So, why then?

I made Ether Tree to try out a few ideas. The first was to create a carbon neutral or even carbon negative NFT collection. That made me think about trees, and for some reason thinking about trees made me think about rocks (?), and that made me think about ether rock.

And so we now have ether tree.

My second aim was therefore an homage to ether rock, an true NFT project inspiration. Fortunately for me the artwork for ether rock is, well, basic. Which aligns neatly with my artistic level of skill, which is basic. On a good day. With a following wind.

Which leads us to the third thing. I wanted to build the project from the ground up, on my own. This was my way of finding out how hard it is to do an NFT project from scratch as a solo buccaneer. Where are the pain points? What's the hardest part? What skills does a person need? Why won't OpenSea show the traits (more on that later, maybe in a different post).

There was, of course, a fourth thing. Which was to see how lightweight the NFT contract could be, and what we can abstract away from the minting process and associated logic.

And a fifth thing - which was the notion of having everything open and on-chain from the get go, freely able for people to see, with even metadata loaded on OpenSea. And then, at that point, have a mechanism for people to claim a tree and have no idea (and no way to work out) what item they are getting. And that was cool, 'cos I already knew how to do that.

Oh, and the most important sixth thing: An NFT project where the owner had baked into the entire concept that they would not make a single cent. My reward is the creation, and hopefully people who claim and tree and find the experience fun!

And we end up with NFTs like this!

Ether Tree 99

Created by null • Ether Tree

A majestic silver tree with light green leaves facing left with a blue bird among its leaves, it's branches heavy with fruit. The artwork for Ether Tree is released under the CC0 license.

Keeping track of things

You can track the Ether Tree project progress at https://ethertree.org/Scorecard/. I'll blog about it here too.

Something to share?

Hit me up on twitter, always happy to hear from you.