Welcome to BasePaint 🎨
Inside the collaborative onchain art project!
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Dear Bankless Nation,
One of my favorite projects this year?
BasePaint!
The grand idea? Mint a brush, use it to paint on a daily canvas, then receive your pro-rata cut of ETH depending on your contributions from each canvas’s open edition (OE) drop.
I absolutely love this model and think it can be adopted far and wide, so let’s dive deeper into the basics for today’s post!
-WMP
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Intro to BasePaint
What’s BasePaint
Created by w1nt3r.eth and Zach Herring, BasePaint is a collaborative pixel art app deployed to commemorate, and make use of, the newly-launched Base layer-two (L2) scaling solution.
The thrust of the app is that artists come together daily to craft a collective pixel canvas.
At the end of each day, the day’s creation is turned into a 24-hour open edition NFT drop. Then depending on how many pixels they contributed to the final display, contributors receive a share of ETH from the OEs sales.
For example, I contributed some background pixels through the first few weeks of the project, and I earned over 0.16 ETH in that span for my colorings. Not bad!
We’re shipping another tool for your crypto tool belt 🎁
Claimables just launched on Bankless. What are Claimables? How much will you claim?
How BasePaint works
BasePaint isn’t a free-for-all. Instead, you first have to mint one of the platform’s brushes to gain access to painting on the daily canvas.
Brushes are mintable at basepaint.xyz/brush, though keep in mind that to prevent bots the platform is currently requiring that users have an ENS domain (e.g wmp.eth).
Once you have a brush in hand, you can then head to the canvas area of the platform and begin contributing pixels. You will be limited to 100 pixels, 200 pixels, etc. depending on which brush you minted.
Keep in mind that each daily canvas has a theme, and it’ll be up to you as to how you honor that theme in your drawings. The current theme is “Rick and Morty” for example, and daily themes and palettes are now decided by Prop House community votes going forward.
I’m not a great pixel artist myself, so in my contributions to date I’ve focused on things like coloring in the background, making patterns around the edge of the canvas, and so forth. You might consider similar strategies.
That said, remember that everything you do see on the canvas is being contributed by another artist in real time, so try to be respectful of where you place your pixels. If you wildly spam your pixels across the canvas, your brush will be moderated! The good news is that there’s a sidebar chat on the platform if you want to coordinate with any of the artists currently painting.
When you’re ready to finalize your contribution for the day, simply press the “Save” button and complete the paint transaction with your wallet. Once that day’s OE is over, you can then press the “Earned” button on the app to claim your cut of the ETH.
How to collect from BasePaint
While drawing pixel art can be challenging, collecting pixel art on BasePaint is simple.
To collect whatever piece the community’s cooked up for that day, simply head to basepaint.xyz/mint and connect your wallet. You’ll need some ETH on the Base L2 to continue!
Once you’re ready just press the + button to input how many mints you want, and press “Mint Art” to proceed. One OE mint will be 0.0026 ETH a pop on the platform on the day of the drop, but you can always surf the secondary marketplace if there’s any pieces you’ve missed and want to catch up on later.
If you get hooked and want to dig in deeper here, you might check out the new basepaintbot.com resource by Backseats and Sammy Bauch. In short, this service lets you automatically subscribe to minting BasePaint OEs to your wallet each day!
Zooming out
BasePaint might seem like a niche app for onchain creatives. But make no mistake, it’s fun, it’s collaborative, and its daily revenue sharing model is one that might get adopted far and wide in the years ahead.
In this light and considering it’s on an L2, BasePaint represents a new wave of crypto apps that brings together years of teachings toward new charming ends. Color me intrigued, and I’ll be watching closely going forward accordingly. I think you should be too!
Action steps:
🎨 Check out BasePaint: Mint a brush and get to painting
😎 Catch up on my previous post: Nouns Will Survive
A Bankless Citizen ⚑ turned $264 into $6,077 last year. A 22x ROI 🚀 in a bear market!
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Not financial or tax advice. This newsletter is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. This newsletter is not tax advice. Talk to your accountant. Do your own research.
Disclosure. From time-to-time I may add links in this newsletter to products I use. I may receive commission if you make a purchase through one of these links. Additionally, the Bankless writers hold crypto assets. See our investment disclosures here.