Introduction

THE ÆTERNALS  project is at its very core, an experiment that responds to four primary questions:

1. How far can we push the playfulness, innovation, and multi-dimensionality of NFTs?
2. Can NFTs be responsive to real-time or near-real time data or a collector’s behaviours?
3. Can social impact objectives be worked into the underlying value of the NFT, so that impact would not be the outcome of an investment choice, but its own investable asset class?
4. Can we inject more sovereignty into a financial instrument and its corresponding secondary market?

Much to our continued surprise, we have found that the answer to them all is yes. In fact, passion and excitement led us to discover that we are only truly limited by our imagination and skill, rather than the existing limitations of the technologies that are shaping our world today.

Of course, we concede that the practicalities of economics, time and limited resources exist and these factors continuously contribute to our decisions of where to draw a line and actually deliver to our valued community. However, the recognition of the rate of development of many of the combined underlying technologies we have built upon also led us to keep elements of our project open for future development and enhancement, as the answer to our baseline questions continue to evolve almost daily – but more on this, later.

So, what exactly is this project all about?

Welcome to our Ecoverse.

Concept

THE ÆTERNALS are the first NFTs to combine 3D generative digital art, interactive gamification, and metamorphic change, with transparent and measured impact objectives through blockchain infrastructure.

However, beyond the uniqueness of the features described above, the specific combination and application of these features is what is truly unique and was purposefully crafted as an experimental example of a new impactful asset class and financial instrument which can be used to enhance the nature of self-sovereignty and fund/sustain global social/public goods without reliance on traditional fundraising methods.

THE ÆTERNALS NFT holder is not a passive holder of an asset post a contribution to global public good; they are now transformed into an active agent of change whose self-determined activity adds value to both their NFT AND to the global public good simultaneously beyond the purchase of their ÆTERNAL itself.

Features

THE ÆTERNALS are Artful

Each component of THE ÆTERNALS NFT was imagined, designed and crafted by our (incredibly talented) artistry team – Jesse Soleil and the team at Creator Labs.

Our initial questions when determining the design for THE ÆTERNALS were based around medium, style, structure and practicality. In keeping with our underlying guiding question – how far can we raise the bar on NFTs? – we opted for 3D over 2D, animated over static, realistic over ‘cartoon-ish’ and generative over manually created.

Each ÆTERNAL is a virtual representation of a free-floating plot of land inspired by the Amazon rainforest. Artistic license has been utilised to combine a real ‘feel’ with a possible imaginary state of the Amazon that was inspired by the mysticism, energy, and spirits that its local communities have spoken of for many decades.

Our team used a combination of software programs to design these components, most notably Blender – and spent hundreds, if not thousands, of hours over months in research and development to create artistry truly representative of the region while introducing their own style.

Our math and technology team worked closely with our artists throughout this journey to encode, objectify and randomise the selection, placement and occurrence of each of these artistic objects into fully randomised generative ‘complete’ combinations, representing these imagined virtual plots of the Amazon rainforest.

Our intended outcome (or more accurately, our designed outcome) was a fully generative collection of 10,000 unique NFTs, with a diverse arrangement of artistically-rendered Amazonian flora species of varying rarities on each plot.

As we will discuss in more detail in later sections, another element we wished to represent artistically was growth and change. We incorporated this into The Æternals by developing three visual ‘states’ of each ÆTERNAL. We call these Budding, Blooming, and Enlightened. And, as the descriptions suggest, each virtual plot increases in visual ‘lushness’, density, and complexity at higher states.

Consequently, we have actually generated 30,000 visual assets but included all three states of every ÆTERNAL to one NFT. To be clear, every ÆTERNAL actually contains links to three different visual states of the same virtual plot. The mechanism of how we achieved this is described in the section on our private blockchain.

As mentioned above, every Æternal is an entirely unique mix of Amazonian flora species with an additional unique placement across the virtual plot. Some of these species (which we refer to internally as Sub Assets) are rarer than others, as seen in the table below.

CLICK HERE TO VIEW THE PDF DOCUMENT CONTAINING THE TABLE

Every ÆTERNAL also includes one of six (6) highlighted species of Flora (which we internally refer to as Prime Sub Assets). These species, in particular, act as a centrepiece for each ÆTERNAL and change markedly when evolving through the various states. Another introduced rarity in THE ÆTERNALS collection is that a few of these highlighted species are also available in a golden hue occurring in only 0.1% of the entire collection.

THE ÆTERNALS are Gamified.

Every aspect of our exclusive and purpose-built game environment was imagined, designed, and constructed by our (highly experienced) partners and team members, MadBricks Studios.
We had two guiding questions that led us into this arena.

First, can an NFT be more than a static image or a looped video, can it change and adapt and become interactive – in short, can we make an NFT that is actually a digital toy? And second, can we create an experiential toy that represents the values and themes of the project as a whole – in particular: fun, engaging, natural, soulful, conscious, nurturing, and supportive of guardianship?

The answer, ultimately, was yes, but with modifications in our implementation to be conscious of economics as well as user complexity.

Whereas at first, we envisioned a fully ‘on-chain’ NFT asset and game, we quickly realised that there is an inherent conflict between creating a game environment that enables free, high volume, high interaction, high availability, and high scalability gameplay and highly adopted public blockchains, and that conflict is cost.

If limited resources are in high demand, the cost of purchasing those resources rises, as is the case for public blockchains (and we believe appropriately so). So while we could have built many of the same components of our game on several choice blockchains, our conclusion was that it would come at the expense of predictable cost, speed, scale, finality, and security in varying amounts for each depending on the chosen blockchain. Instead, we made the decision to keep ownership on-chain but interactions and gameplay off-chain.

What we ended up building was a separate game environment that can only be accessed through ownership of an ÆTERNAL and that through engagement, modifies and ‘evolves’ your ÆTERNAL. Login to the game environment is handled through Web3.0 wallet plug-ins. The requirement is to ‘sign’ a transaction from a wallet that holds an ÆTERNAL. From that point forward the user (assuming ownership in the same wallet of multiple ÆTERNALS) selects which NFT they wish to ‘play with’ and enters the game.

Our inspiration for gameplay came from many sources of childhood wonder and memories, as well as our admiration and observation of the gaming industry, most notably titles like Tamagotchi, Pokemon, and FarmVille.

The encompassed experience of our ÆTERNALS game, which we have now dubbed our Ecoverse, is to tend to and nurture your own digital ecosystem, personified by a virtual plot containing one of a particular Amazon flora species. Designed for a peaceful user experience, our game team crafted an aesthetically and audibly-pleasing gameplay, complete with a natural soundtrack, recorded live in the Amazon rainforest.

Actual gameplay consists of completing simple predetermined tasks that mirror natural activities that support the growth and maintenance of the Amazon rainforest, also providing a minor educational benefit to the user. Completion of each of these tasks also includes an in-game animation visually identifying that you have completed the task.

Progress is tracked and stored for each individual ÆTERNAL NFT in a dedicated database for the game environment. Cumulative progress acts as a trigger for another feature of the ÆTERNALS – metamorphosis, which is discussed in a later section.

When the criteria for metamorphosis has been met, which is the progressive completion of tasks over several days, you watch your in-game assets evolve into their next state and can continue gameplay with new additional tasks and viewable options earned (this metamorphosis is also reflected and viewable in your ÆTERNAL NFT held in your wallet, but more on this in a later section).
There are currently three states of evolution for THE ÆTERNALSs NFTs – we refer to them as Budding, Blooming, and Enlightened.

All of the features described above will be live at launch of THE ÆTERNALS but we have left the architecture of the game environment open for further improvement and additions.
The initial gameplay mechanics are shown in the diagram below but may modify overtime based on feedback from our community.

THE ÆTERNALS are Metamorphic

How much further can we push the concept of NFTs, and connect them to human behaviour?

We have already introduced the idea of a digital toy by introducing a game, but then we asked: what is the main difference between a physical    toy and a digital toy? Yes, the obvious tangibility but instead of looking at that as a disadvantage, we decided to reimagine what that difference might enable. Physical toys are confined by their material structure, all innovation must have occurred before the point of manufacture and delivery. This is not the case for digital toys, they can continue to upgrade and ‘update’ until it economically makes more sense to deliver a new digital toy than to upgrade the existing one.

Conceptually, this is probably easy to digest for those born anytime before the mid-90s. Anyone who once owned an original Atari, Nintendo, Sega, or PlayStation remembers physical video games which had no ability to upgrade and how they would become generally ‘worthless’ and uninteresting as soon as a newer game or system came into being (yes, okay, a special nod to hardcore traditional fans of some classics that never age like Mario Kart 64, but you get the concept). The point is newer game systems have driven this change and games are no longer physical cartridges or standalone units. Games are now live software connected and updated in real-time – much to the dismay of the casual gamer who sometimes just wants to play without having to wait for a 30-minute download, but here we are. They are live, adapting, changing and potentially responsive, social and enduring.

This is philosophically what we wished to introduce into the experience of owning an ÆTERNAL – a toy that changes as you play with it. But not stopping there, what about a toy that changes when you stop playing with it, or a toy that changes when a collective community hits some sort of goal or objective, or a toy that changes in response to an environmental shift or the passage of time?

Yes, this all seemed possible and we wanted to incorporate all of these but, drawing a line for practicality (time, economics and resources), we decided to incorporate some of these features at the start and some we have planned for in the future.
While, of course, this was a full team effort, special mention needs to be made of the combined technical prowess of the teams from Emerge and Penta for imagining and actually building the architecture to achieve these types of functionality.
Where we started was in simplifying the function.

Based on some type of input we wanted to exhibit a change in the state of THE ÆTERNAL NFTs.

So we needed some sort of database to manage and keep track of the state of
several of NFTs based on this hypothetical input on an individual NFT basis. The irony of the solution was not lost on us when one
of our technical leaders proclaimed – “what about a blockchain?”

But, as mentioned in one of the previous sections, we didn’t think
a public consensus on the state of one of
our THE ÆTERNALS assets was worth provisioning (and therefore paying for) from a public network, especially, into perpetuity and instead opted to build our own “Layer 2 private/permissioned blockchain” to
manage and track these state changes.

This solution became more elegant for us as we introduced more complexity. So far we have implemented just one type of input – our game environment, and specifically gameplay affecting the metamorphosis of an ÆTERNAL.

But we wished to introduce multiple and variable types of inputs. For example, IoT (internet-of-things) sensors that would monitor environmental data or third-party verified social/impact goals achieved by our NGO partner. In more familiar blockchain terminology we wanted to include a variety of Oracles, some which exist, some that currently do not, some which are trusted, and some which could one day be trustless. And so the decision to provision our own private blockchain which we could modify into the future to include new oracles or sources of input seemed the most elegant solution, or else we would have been limited to the current state of technology or the speed of evolution of the primary blockchain we chose to mint our NFTs on top of.
It’s worth noting that while the short-term idea for this private blockchain is to use it as our own ÆTERNALS test net, in the long run, we plan to build out the tooling and accessibility to open it up as a public chain that offers these features and tools to the wider community. But for now, that is beyond the scope of this white paper.

The next part of the journey was to determine the number of states of THE ÆTERNALS and how we would handle the change. We determined that three states of THE ÆTERNALS as described before: Budding, Blooming, and Enlightened, were sufficient to demonstrate the concept of evolution, however, we have technically left the possibility for infinite additional states to be added in the future.

As previously described, the primary function of our private blockchain is to track the appropriate state(s) of THE ÆTERNALS but its secondary function is to act as a pointer relay between the base layer blockchain we have minted THE ÆTERNALS NFTs on and the IPFS clusters which host the various ÆTERNALS imagery. Our private blockchain can therefore be described as a middle layer or middleware that controls which state of THE ÆTERNALS NFT an owner (or holder) sees in their wallet.

THE ÆTERNALS are Impact-Driven

As you might remember, one of our guiding questions was whether we could re-imagine impact to be its own investable asset class. To us, the future of finance needs to be less extractive and less consumptive. For this reason, we dived deep into all the ways we could make THE ÆTERNALS set new precedents and standards for ESG-compliant social innovation.

To start, we decided to donate 55% of THE ÆTERNALS’ profits to Rainforest Partnership, a renowned non-profit organisation working directly with nine local and indigenous communities to protect biodiversity hotspots in Peru, Ecuador, and Mexico. Rainforest Partnership also engages on behalf of rainforest protection at a global level through initiatives like Films for the Forest. They are also the founders of World Rainforest Day. To learn more about their projects, reach out to them directly on our Discord, or visit their website here.

The next thing we did, was consider the ways we were going to build this project so it could embody the ethos at every single touchpoint and partnership in building our multidimensional model. First, we emphasised representation. Who was going to build our project? Today, our project has regional, generational social, and economic diversity, seen below in the first of our impact measurement releases.

2. Once we fulfilled our mission of drastically reducing our carbon footprint, we were ready to offset the rest. So, by partnering with KlimaDAO, we are hand-selecting carbon projects with Rainforest Partnership. We have encoded our smart contracts with a 1% pledge of all secondary sales to the purchase of carbon credits – uncapped and in perpetuity. Not only will THE ÆTERNALS reach carbon negativity, but it will continue to help offset other NFT and metaverse projects, forever.

3. By creating our own private/permissioned blockchain to govern data transactions that trigger the met-amorphic elements instead of using protocols that are less conscious of their server energetic efficiency, we continue to operate at the environmental standards we set for ourselves and will be providing regular updates about our carbon emissions, reductions, and offsets through community updates and our regular impact reports.

We’ve been particularly proud of how far we have been able to push the boundaries of environmental awareness and action across our project. It has been well received by our community, and how we accomplished this feat is an often-asked question. Therefore, we decided to take two more unprecedented steps within our impact commitment. The first is that Emerge has led the creation of our own customised impact measurement framework. It is a combination of existing metrics and standards such as the UN Sustainable Development Goals Framework, GIIRS, IRIS, B-Impact Assessment, and more, as well as new metrics and indicators we found are particular to the NFT and blockchain spaces. THE ÆTERNALS will put out two reports a year, which includes impact statuses on the projects funded through our relationship with Rainforest Partnership, as well as the ways in which THE ÆTERNALS tracks and embodies impact itself.

Finally, we held an internal team call and decided that we also wanted to set a new standard for transparency. For this reason, we run all of our weekly team meetings completely in public – on Twitter for anyone and everyone to be able to know what is going on with THE ÆTERNALS, ask questions, and learn about all of the visions and voices that have evolved it to where it is today. To us, the true impact is connected to radical transparency, and we are proud to be exemplifying that principle each week.

THE ÆTERNALS are Real-World Useful

At launch all of THE ÆTERNALS will be issued in the first state – Budding. However, every Æternal NFT will include the code for their three states of evolution.

Holders will have immediate access to our exclusive Eco verse game environment where they can start engaging in gameplay and accruing points to upgrade their ÆTERNAL(S).

There will be specific channels within our Discord that holders can access based on the state of evolution of their ÆTERNAL(S). This feature will be powered by a data feed from our private blockchain that will be activated post-launch.
Along with our NGO partner, Rainforest Partnership, our team continues to ideate benefits that can be bestowed upon ÆTERNALS holders that both reward their purchase and contribution and also their ongoing engagement with the cause of rainforest protection.

The first of these is a special category of NFTs: ones we refer to as Ultra-Rares. There will be a limited amount of these produced every year with an estimated upper limit of 10. Ultra-Rare is not available for purchase. Instead, they will only be available through a raffle system which can only be accessed by owners of ÆTERNAL NFTs which are in the third state of evolution – Enlightened.

Each of these will be uniquely artful and contain unique, once-in-a-lifetime real-world benefits. We have already announced the first two of these benefits:
1. The winner of the first Ultra-Rare will receive the right to officially name a newly discovered frog species in the Amazon Rainforest, possibly thanks to the incredible scientific work on-the-ground Rainforest Partnership teams have been doing for years.
2. The second winner will have the right to claim a curated trip for two to a biodiversity hotspot in Amazon Rainforest, hosted by one of the local and indigenous communities partnered with Rainforest Partnership.

MINTING AND SALE OF ÆTERNALS

We have chosen to mint THE ÆTERNALS collection as ERC721 Smart Contracts on the Ethereum Network.
There were a number of factors that influenced our decision, but in particular, the size of the Ethereum community, the sophistication of the tools available, the existence of premier marketplaces, the security of being one of the longest-running smart contract compatible blockchains, and the familiarity of Ethereum with would-be first-time owners of NFTs all contributed heavily to our final decision.

In establishing our smart contract, for both initially minting and our sale, we were primarily concerned with security and fair and transparent distribution to our community. This is why we chose to partner with a highly reputable and established marketplace – Nifty Gateway.

Nifty Gateway will be handling both the minting of THE ÆTERNALS and conducting the sale on our behalf. Purchasers of THE ÆTERNALS will need to have a registered and funded account on Nifty Gateway in order to access and participate in the initial sale. Allow List spaces (sometimes referred to as whitelist spots) are available to the community in a transparent way through our Discord channel and these participants will have early access to the sale but be limited to purchases of two ÆTERNALS at that time.

All other participants in the public sale will be able to purchase up to seven ÆTERNALS when the sale goes live. Impact partnerships for funds, organisations, communities, DAOs, and others looking to help us scale the project are available. A minimum commitment of 25 plots is required for an Impact Partnership, and benefits include active amplification opportunities across our community and public-facing content. Plots can subsequently be given away at events, during giveaways, to employees, or more.

PROCEEDS OF SALE

In the primary sale, 55% of the proceeds will be donated to Rainforest Partnership for their continued stewardship of protected areas of the Amazon Rainforest and their support of the local and indigenous communities therein.

10% of the proceeds will go toward a Treasury for the upkeep of THE ÆTERNALS’ ecosystem and further development. The remaining 35% will be distributed among the 28 team members of THE ÆTERNALS.

Within THE ÆTERNALS’ ERC721 smart contract, there will also be a royalty fee of 5% on all secondary sales. 1% of this fee will be used to purchase carbon credits from our partner KlimaDAO in perpetuity, with the ambition of first becoming a carbon-neutral and ultimately fully carbon-negative project.

The remaining 4% will be reserved by the team for expansion of THE ÆTERNALS and other projects into the future.

TECHNOLOGY

We have chosen to mint THE ÆTERNALS as ERC721 Smart Contracts on the Ethereum Network. As the contacts will be minted by Nifty Gateway we are unable to provide the exact specification, but below you will find a sample ERC721 contract.

We also have constructed a private/permissioned blockchain that acts as a second layer that interacts di-rectly with the Ethereum ERC721 smart contract.

As described previously the primary function of our private blockchain is to track the appropriate state(s) of THE ÆTERNALS but its secondary function is to act as a pointer relay between the base layer blockchain we have minted THE ÆTERNALS NFTs on and the IPFS clusters which host the various ÆTERNALS imagery.

All of THE ÆTERNALS assets will be stored on the IPFS decentralised storage system. We have opted to run our own IPFS cluster on our private servers to ensure redundancy in the event of unknown IPFS issues in the future.

ASSET RANDOMISATION

THE ÆTERNALS are primarily 3D-rendered digital objects.
Our team used a variety of software programs to replicate and artistically enhance in 3D more than 36 Amazonian flora species, as well as base plots of varying levels of detail. Creating unique combinations of these species, in both variety and placement required an algorithmic approach. Our math and technology team designed custom algorithms to enable this process.

With regard to variety, they first assigned a rarity dynamic to each species (i.e.. total % of occurrence within a collection) and then determined a fixed number of species that would exist in any one ÆTERNAL. Using statistics, they then designed an algorithm with these inputs that would generate a one-time list of combinations up to a total of 10,000 ÆTERNALS. Each of these combinations is unique. 

With regard to placement, the team had to surmount the challenge of distributing the species combinations outputted by the above algorithm across a 3D space. This required advanced mathematics encoded into Python (coding language) which was executed by Blender (3D artistic software) to output placement that achieved both a natural look and avoided object collisions. The testing and reworking of this algorithm were substantial and to our knowledge has not been attempted before, at least not in a way that was useful to reducing the team’s efforts.

The next step in the process was rendering all 10,000 ÆTERNALS, which as previously mentioned was done in partnership with Tresorio.

With regard to placement, the team had to surmount the challenge of distributing the species combinations outputted by the above algorithm across a 3D space. This required advanced mathematics encoded into Python (coding language) which was executed by Blender (3D artistic software) to output placement that achieved both a natural look and avoided object collisions. The testing and reworking of this algorithm were substantial and to our knowledge has not been attempted before, at least not in a way that was useful to reducing the team’s efforts.

The next step in the process was rendering all 10,000 ÆTERNALS, which as previously mentioned was done in partnership with Tresorio.

IOT SENSORS

One of our first post-launch steps will be to implement a small collection of IoT sensors across biodiversity hotspots in the Amazon Rainforest.

Many of our team members have prior experience utilising these sensors for a variety of data applications, including supply chain traceability. The sensors will be used to capture environmental data which will be transmitted in real-time and in batches (based on service availability) to our private blockchain.

These data feeds will be used as another switching mechanism between different states of THE ÆTERNALS to simulate artistically the actual environmental conditions in the Amazon in near real-time, and ideally one day – in real-time.

This overview will continue to be updated as our project continues to evolve and blossom. In the meantime, you can find us on Discord or on Twitter. Please feel free to reach out to us with any questions.

Our hope is that this white paper also serves as a guide for any and all impact projects looking to be holistically meaningful about their impact footprint, and about the ways in which we can work together to create new standards for what impact means to the blockchain space.

Frequently Asked Questions