ABOUT

A canvas painted by its own market

4,096 tokens. Each one owns a single pixel on one 64×64 canvas. No pixel has a colour when it's minted. They all start white. The colour comes from what happens to the token after. How often it sells, how erratically, how long it sits.

Each channel is ranked across the whole collection and split into sixteen tones. Your pixel's colour is where it stands against every other pixel, not a fixed number. It moves when other people trade, even when you do nothing. Holding is never passive.

The last sale. The total climbs with every sale. When it reaches a hidden target, the sealed number committed as a hash before launch, the canvas sets forever. It mints as a single artwork and opens at 1 ETH with no deadline. Proceeds split equally across all 4,096 pixels. The winner inherits the royalties. From settlement on, the 5% royalty on every pixel sale is paid to whoever holds the canvas. Hold it and you collect. Sell it and the income passes with it.

METHOD

Everything, in the open

Every rule that decides a pixel's colour, written out in full. Here's the short version.

Red, how often it sells. Total sales. A sale is any transfer where the caller is not the sender, meaning a marketplace fill. Self-transfers, gifts, and the mint do not count.

key_velocity = min(sales, 1023)

Red is buyable. Each sale costs only gas. What you cannot buy is a tone when nobody is standing near you. Climbing from a crowded part of the distribution is cheap. From a sparse part it is not.

Green, how uneven the gaps are. The population standard deviation of the intervals between consecutive sales. Steady cadence scores low. A flurry, then years of silence, then another flurry scores high.

gapSum   += gap
gapSumSq += gap × gap
n        = sales − 1
variance = gapSumSq/n − (gapSum/n)²   (floored at 0)
rhythm   = √variance                  (seconds, log-quantised)

Below three sales, rhythm does not exist. Those pixels sit at the midpoint, tone 8, and are left out of the ranking. Green cannot be bought quickly. Its whole substance is duration. You cannot manufacture a two-year gap in an afternoon.

Blue, longest unbroken hold.

open = now − lastSale
hold = max(open, longestGap)
key  = qLog(hold)

The hold running right now counts. Blue is the patient channel. It rewards the thing the other two punish.

RICHTER

4096 Farben, Gerhard Richter, 1974

In 1974 Richter finished a painting of 4,096 coloured squares on a square canvas, the last work in a series he had been circling since 1966. He worked out exactly 1,024 unique tones by grading the primaries against greys and greens with a fixed system, made four copies of each, and ran a random lottery to decide where all 4,096 squares would land. He painted none of the decisions himself. The original sold at Sotheby's in May 2023 for $21.8 million.

He painted it decades before computers were on every desk, and it looks exactly like modern digital pixels. A math experiment on pure colour quietly predicted the world we now live in.

Why it matters here. Richter was refusing authorship. He built a system strict enough that his taste could not get into it, then let the system decide. 4096 borrows that structure and swaps the system. Where Richter used arithmetic and slips of paper, this uses a market. Nobody picks the colours here either. They are produced by thousands of people trading, none of whom can see what they are painting.

Richter was the hand that held the brush while a system decided the colours. We are not even the hand. The market is the brush and every trade is a stroke. We built the instrument and let go of it. The letting go is the point.

LINEAGE

Five works this one descends from

01, Richter's 4096 Farben, is on the previous page.

02 · MILLION DOLLAR HOMEPAGE · ALEX TEW, 2005

A student sold a million pixels of ad space to pay for university. Nobody composed it. The picture is whatever the people who bought in added up to, and it outlived most of the things it was made of.

03 · RIGHT CLICK SHARE · XCOPY AND DECA

Right-click-and-Save-As Guy broken into 1,024 single-colour pixels. Holders attest onchain to keep their pixel visible, and attestations expire. Stop caring for it and it goes white.

04 · JPEG · JAN ROBERT LEEGTE

A real JPEG built entirely from code, no source image anywhere in it, rendered fresh from the token hash. Not a picture of compression. Compression, made out of itself.

05 · THE VESSEL · STEPHEN SANTORO

Ten thousand crafts, each holding exactly as many bytes as its token ID. The machine crafts store no image at all, only a pointer to code somebody else wrote. The heart lives in one.

THE HEART

The heart of 4096

The canvas is what 4096 is. This is where it came from. Everything here runs on the collection. The heart brightens when a pixel sells and fades when nothing moves, and the arteries were grown from the block 4096 was deployed in, reaching further the longer the collection lives.

It lives inside somebody else's contract. The heart is craft #1154 on The Vessel. Machine crafts there store no image at all. They hold a pointer to another contract. The contract on the other end is Heartbeat4096. The Vessel calls it, it reads 4096's state, and it answers with 1,154 grayscale values. Nothing is stored anywhere along that chain. No image file, no server, no cache. The heart does not exist between the moments somebody looks at it.

Brightness. One number decides everything. The time since a 4096 pixel last sold, anywhere in the collection. A sale takes it to 255. From there it decays front-loaded, a fast drop that flattens into a crawl.

day    0    1    2    3    4    5    6    7
level  255  202  153  110  71   38   13   0

Past seven days it is zero. One sale puts it straight back to full. No partial recovery, no memory of how long it was out.

The beat. Every artery cell knows its distance from the heart. The crest starts at the muscle and travels to the tips. Rate and strength both come from brightness, about a second per beat at full, stretching past three by day six, stopped at zero. A dying heart pulses faintly before it stops.

The arteries. Not drawn, grown. Five trunks leave the heart and walk outward one cell at a time, splitting and thinning, every decision from a single seeded random number generator. The seed is block 25,621,173, the block 4096 and its renderer were deployed in, fixed before any of this existed. The mint builds the trunks. Trading builds the fine branches at the tips. Both only ever add. It is nowhere near finished.

4096 0xEB46…FF2C · Heartbeat4096 0x4C9d…fb61 · The Vessel 0xECb9…1463 · seed block 25,621,173

THE AUCTION

The last sale

How it ends. There is no closing date. There is only a clock, and anyone can push it back.

The first bid starts twenty four hours. Every bid after it adds five more minutes, whenever it lands, on the first morning or in the last thirty seconds. The additions accumulate. A hundred bids add more than eight hours to the end, even if they all arrive inside an hour.

So a quiet auction closes in a day. A contested one runs for days, and a genuinely fought one could run for weeks. The painting does not end when a timer says so. It ends when people stop wanting it.

Holder claim. Proceeds split equally across all 4,096 pixels and are paid to whoever held each one at the last-sale block. Payment is pulled, not pushed. The claim goes live once the auction settles, and it stays available indefinitely. Selling a pixel afterward does not transfer the claim.

Bidding unlocks the moment the total reaches the sealed number. Until then this is inert. The sealed number is committed as a hash and is not public. It may never be reached.

VISIT

Your pixels

Minting is open at the kiosk beside the canvas. The auction opens only when the last sale happens. The roped piece on the charcoal wall is waiting for it.