The Atlas Corporation was pleased to accept the privilege of being selected the technology providers for the SnarkySharkz Society recent NFT PFP drop of the Snarky Sharkz. We had a ton of fun working with the Snarky Sharkz team bringing their vision to life, and encourage you to go check out the project.

About The Snarky Sharkz…

Snarky Sharkz is a generative NFT Project comprised of 5000 unique non-fungible tokens (NFTs). The community focus of SnarkySharkz is to bring funding and awareness to ocean conservation efforts that make a real impact through a collaborative and engaging NFT community.

The Snarky Sharkz team – comprised of @Murphjestic and @Slywest – both have deep experience with metaverse projects. Both split their time working for the Decentral Games (DG) DAO, the first metaverse DAO to hire people to payroll and bring a wealth of knowledge and connections to the project.

From the Snarky Sharkz team:

It’s the year 5000, all humans having destroyed our environment, left earth to inhabit other solar systems. The world is now flooded and only water covers the surface of a completely submerged, blue planet.

Sharks have taken the place of humans at the top of the food chain. These extraordinary shark creatures evolved with increased intelligence, human like characteristics and behaviors, along a twisted sense of style.

The Civilization of Sharktopia flourished under leadership of the Elder Sharkz of the High Council. To avoid repeating the humans’ fate, and ensure the long term survival of Sharktopia, the high council created Project SnarkyShark. The council is currently reviewing and selecting Shark candidates for the project. The final selection will be revealed soon and sent to a secret colony in the southern hemisphere, dubbed the SnarkySharkz’ Society.

Snarky Sharkz have partnered with a number of charitable organizations to receive donations from the Snarky Sharkz project. Organizations related to ocean conservation and wildlife protection were selected including Sea Legacy, OCN.AI, and UltraMarine. Further, to mitigate the impact of the energy use from use of the blockchain the team has partnered with Project Ark to purchase carbon offsets.

Atlas Corporation Technology

The Snarky Sharkz NFT project leverages several components of the Atlas Corp tech stack to ensure an intuitive, stable, and exciting experience for our users. The Snarky Sharkz team elected to utilize the entire Atlas Corporation PFP stack for their project.

Once selecting Atlas Corp to build our project’s smart contract, we quickly knew we had picked the right team for the job. From the beginning, Atlas was easy to work with and extremely capable. Our team is thrilled with the final product and continued support. We will return to the Atlas team for all our web 3.0 work, and recommend them, every time.

@Murphjestic
Image Pressing, trait-randomization and meta-data manufacturing

The first step in the process is to create the Sharkz themselves – the images and the metadata that describes what’s present in the images. The most time consuming and detail-oriented step, image pressing and trait assignment takes the artwork created by the Sharkz team and compiles all of the pieces into a final image. The Sharkz are meant to be randomly generated from a set of traits and probabilities, so a computer program was created to represent the decision workflow. We use node-red for this such that the resulting code is visual in nature; it is quite helpful for our code reviews to reference this visual representation of the code so that everyone involved can easily understand what’s going on.

An example node-red flow for trait assignment.

This process can be time consuming as you iterate and learn what exceptions (think “if this then that”) need to be incorporated to prevent mismatched traits while still maintaining intended probabilities. This can grow into a computationally intensive optimization problem if the scope and artwork is not well defined, which is why selecting good partners is key to a project’s success. This process typically involves several rounds of reviews with the wider team, reserving the final run to be kept private to ensure the integrity of the sale.

Provenance

We then ensure the sale is fair through the use of our provenance methodology. Provenance is the process that helps reinforce the integrity of any randomly generated PFP sale. To generate provenance, we hash each image in the order they were generated. The hash generated is used to verify that the image hasn’t changed after the fact – any difference in the image being hashed will generate a different result. Once we have 5000 hashes we then hash the combination of all of the hashes stuck together to generate the final “provenance”. This final hash then proves not only that the images haven’t been changed (or the resulting composite hash would be different) but that the order has not been tampered with.

This composite hash is added to the smart contract prior to launch for all to see. After the sale, anyone can verify that hash is correct by repeating the process of hashing all of the images and then hashing the resulting hashes to come up with the same resultant hash that we did. We don’t publish the individual hashes until after the sale is complete to prevent any hint of what Sharkz have yet to be minted (even if it is highly unlikely to derive any value from these hashes). To further rule out any privileged information the team involved might have about the location of rarer NFTs, a “starting index” is introduced at the time of sale to randomly decide where in the list to start distributing from.

Although we like to believe we are upstanding, trustworthy folks – this is blockchain, so you shouldn’t have to trust us.

NFT Reveal Server

As part of an NFT launch, we also include an NFT-reveal server as part of the stack. A reveal server is only necessary if you want to protect the data of not-yet-minted NFTs, as images on IPFS are publicly accessible. Therefore the NFT reveal server is simply a web server that connects to the smart contract directly to determine if an NFT token ID has been minted yet and therefore whether to expose the meta-data. If not minted, generic meta-data is returned.

For the Sharkz project, like most Atlas deployments, the NFT reveal server is intended to be temporary. Once all Sharkz have been minted, the NFT server can be retired and the meta-data moved permanently to IPFS. The smart contract URI can then be updated to point at the new source of meta-data.

Smart Contract

The smart contract is ultimately the most critical piece of infrastructure and therefore requires the most confidence in its deployment. Atlas Corporation will use OpenZeppelin contracts where possible, but have introduced a number of innovations that we include in our PFP deployments. These innovations include:

  • Provenance with locking mechanism
  • Starting Index – for “cutting the deck” (see above)
  • tokensInWallet function to more easily lookup which NFTs a particular address holds
  • Overridable URI, to leave the ability to decommission the reveal server once all images have been released and can be posted to IPFS and made public.

To disperse funds, a second smart contract known as a payment splitter is deployed. This allows for trustless allocation of funds that have been received by the main contract to be dispersed directly into the payment splitter, after which each address listed can pull their funds at their leisure. Again, this is blockchain so trust should never be part of the equation.

Mint Site
quiknode

The most visible part of the technology stack is the Sharkz mint site where users can go to adopt their Sharkz. The mint site integrates with your wallet and allows you to interact directly with the smart contract to view and mint your Sharkz.

The mint site is supported by a full Ethereum node powered by Quiknode. Quiknode – Atlas’ choice for all blockchain infrastructure needs – provides scalable and dedicated nodes which can be trusted to support any volume of requests. As minting NFTs is the most stressful part of the user experience when joining your community, you want to rely on trusted partners and robust infrastructure to make sure the experience is a good one!

Conclusion

There are still plenty of Snarky Sharkz waiting to be adopted today. For convenience, below are some links for you to learn more about the Snarky Sharkz and view the pieces of the infrastructure we’ve outlined above.

About Atlas Corporation

Atlas Corporation is a group of shadowy super coders who come together to work on awesome projects, like the Snarky Sharkz. Charged with the mission is to help build the foundation for the burgeoning metaverse and web3 ecosystem, you’ll find Atlas involved in initiatives and projects ranging from smart contract development, metaverse analytics, digital real estate development, smart contract gaming auditing, and other forthcoming web3 innovations.