How ARTIFACTS works

256 pieces by Myles Daughtry. Each seed is sealed on-chain; only the wallet that holds a piece can open it and draw it. Everything here is done by the pieces' own contracts on Ethereum: no accounts, no custody, every sale and key on-chain where anyone can check it.

The primary sale ran on Proof House: THE SOURCE by auction, then 255 editions drawn at random by Chainlink VRF. Resale happens here, owner to owner.

Buying

1. Buy. Pay the listed price into the piece's own escrow. Your wallet signs once to make your viewing key (not a transaction), and its public half goes in with the payment.
2. Wait for the key. The seller sends the piece's key, wrapped to your viewing key. Until they do, you can cancel and take your ETH back.
3. Confirm. Your browser checks the key opens the piece (it matches the commitment locked on-chain when the piece was made), then you release the payment and the piece is yours, with its key.

If you don't confirm, anyone can release the payment 72 hours after you paid, once the key has been sent. While your payment is in escrow, the seller can't move the piece.

Selling

1. List your piece at a price in ETH from the Marketplace. You can take it off the marketplace any time until someone pays.
2. When a buyer pays, send them the key: your browser opens the key you hold and re-wraps it to their viewing key. It never leaves your browser unwrapped.
3. When they confirm (or after 72 hours), withdraw your proceeds from the piece's contract.

You can only sell through escrow while you hold the piece's key. It arrives from the curator when you first claim an edition, or from the previous owner after a sale. A plain transfer (outside escrow) drops any listing and clears the key, until the previous owner re-wraps it to you.

Fees

The contract pays these at release. No fee goes to this site. The royalty is also published as ERC-2981 for marketplaces that honour it.

Viewing keys

A viewing key is a key pair your browser makes from one wallet signature over a fixed message. Its public half goes on-chain so keys can be sent to you; the private half is remade from the same signature whenever you need it, and never leaves the page. It needs an ordinary wallet account.

Treat that signature like a password: only sign it on this site or Proof House. Anyone holding it could open your pieces.

THE SOURCE

The master. Its composition is public (the full prism, its drift, its frame); its exact dot field comes from a secret seed. The chain stores that seed sealed, beside the rules that draw it, never the image. Its owner can view it privately from the Marketplace, and holds one irreversible choice: publish its key, and from then on its token draws it for everyone, forever, byte for byte in any browser. Marketplaces show it on the piece's own page; their grids keep the seal. It can't be revealed while a buyer's payment sits in escrow: they paid for it sealed.

Each piece, its own contract

Technically, every piece is its own smart contract. Each edition's seed was published before the sale as a contract of its own (the sealed bytes are that contract's code). When an edition is claimed, its own ERC-721 contract is deployed: one token, its sealed seed, its wrapped key, its keyed escrow and its royalty. THE SOURCE gets a full contract of its own when its auction closes. That is why a resale here talks to the piece itself, and nothing is pooled.

The technical truth

• Editions: each seed is encrypted with its own random 256-bit key (AES-256-GCM). The key is never on-chain in the clear, only wrapped to the owner's viewing key.
• THE SOURCE: its seed is stored as seed XOR keccak256(K ‖ 0), locked with keccak256(K) before the auction. Revealing publishes K; the contract checks it.
• Public by design: every piece's title, palette, colour count and direction; the rules; the study of THE SOURCE.
• Look-alikes: anyone can draw pieces that share an edition's public traits, but nothing on-chain tells them which, if any, is real.
• Who else can see: the curator holds each edition's key until it is first claimed, then deletes it. The artist made THE SOURCE.
• Keys can't be checked by a contract: a seller could send a key that doesn't open. Your browser checks before you release; don't release if it fails.
• Same bytes everywhere: the rules compute sine and arc tangent exactly, so every browser draws identical pieces.

Contracts

Each claimed piece's own contract is shown on its card in Explore and the Marketplace.

Questions

Can I sell on another marketplace?

You can transfer your piece anywhere, but only the escrow here guarantees the buyer receives the key, and the artist the royalty. Without the key, a buyer gets the seal only.

The seller never sent the key.

Cancel from the Marketplace and withdraw your ETH. You can cancel any time until the key is sent.

The key didn't check out.

Don't release. Contact the seller. A key can't be verified by a contract, which is why your browser checks it before you pay out.

Can anyone see my piece?

Not unless you show them. What you do with your own piece is up to you.