The problem Terrene Hiraeth solves

In our industry, every action can be traced to a record on the blockchain. Whether that action is a token transfer, an NFT purchase, a rug-pull, or the deployment of bleeding edge technology, each event is represented by a transaction hash. It’s these records that tell us about our industries behaviors, allude to history, and give meaning to the way we use the blockchain.

Terrene Hiraeth introduces the next generation of storytelling with transactions on the blockchain. Terrene Hiraeth generates dynamic art from transaction hash records, capturing the events of blockchain history. Every NFT contains details about the past, highlighting the events that occurred. Minters can also add information to the NFTs metadata to further inform the world about unique points of history.

Recognizing that the scope of blockchain history spans billions of transactions across an increasing number of blockchains, Terrene Hiraeth has been optimistically designed to scale and meet such demands. Terrene Hiraeth is a multichain experience. Deployed first on Base, followed by Ethereum mainnet, and the sky is the limit as to which blockchain to deploy on next. Terrene Hiraeth will go wherever history is happening.

Why tokenize history?

The NFT is a powerful medium for expression. The act of tokenization is developed in parallel with art creation—this is what allows for mechanical expressions of art not before possible. We call our work Contract Art—a novel form of tokenization where each NFT is produced with information obtained directly from smart contracts on the blockchain. Self-referential in nature, each piece truly captures the essence and qualities of the blockchain, reflecting the cyberspace with art.

Blockchains are the newest ruins of digital archeologists, where every chain contains a treasure trove of history. And new to the world, these records are onchain, verifiable, require no permission to read, and are forever immutable. The question becomes: why not tokenize history?

Challenges I ran into

#Challenges in Building Terrene Hiraeth
Terrene Hiraeth is a multichain NFT minting experience where every transaction can be tokenized as an NFT. Because Terrene Hiraeth is a multichain project, this comes with its own set of UX challenges. Firstly, every chain has its own UX challenges with unique subtitles, such as issues with data aggregators for transaction information or transaction event details, for example. Another challenge was building a seamless checkout or cart experience across multiple blockchains. We needed to ensure users of our dapp could add NFTs to their cart across any blockchain we serve and checkout with ease. The result is that we’ve created what we believe to be one of the best checkout experiences in crypto, especially for a multichain project.

One significant challenge around building the mint experience was developing an optimistic rendering pipeline. Since there’s no way to predict which transactions people are going to mint as NFTs, we were challenged to create a rendering pipeline that would essentially show you the art before you mint it. To do this, we had to ensure Terrene Hiraeth captures blockchain history as soon as it happens, with the capability to render art for users within seconds. This presented a range of problems we tackled, such as rendering speed, portability, and being able to deliver the art in a manner that creates a great user experience. These are all natural parts of an optimistic minting experience and we were thoughtful in our approach to building a seamless front-end, allowing users to enjoy the art without technical interruptions.

We consider all these challenges to be part of building what we call the Ethverse—a family of optimistic minting experiences that generate art from blockchain history. Terrene Hiraeth is our inaugural Ethverse project. In overcoming these technical hurdles, we developed an incredible foundation for shipping cutting edge onchain NFT minting experiences.