Summary
The article discusses the technical implementation of Quantum Cats, a collection of 3333 Ordinals Inscriptions that evolve over time. This is the first collection of its kind, created to address high fees and an unpredictable fee market. The artwork for the inscriptions is published on-chain in a special encoding called an Envelope. The collection uses recursion and presigned transactions to allow for changing artwork without actually changing the data. The article also discusses fee management, the use of Replace-by-fee and Child-Pays-For-Parent to increase fee rates, and the encryption of artwork assets to prevent premature reveals. The project involved a complex process of presigning transactions, managing UTXOs, and using bulk parallel transactions to bump up fees. The result is an evolving collection of digital collectibles that remain immutable on the Bitcoin network.
Key Points
1. Quantum Cats is a collection of 3333 Ordinals Inscriptions that evolve over time, revealing different artwork. It is the first collection of Inscriptions that will evolve over time, created during a time of high fees and an unpredictable future fee market.
2. The artwork for Inscriptions is published on-chain in the witness of a Taproot transaction, making the data immutable and unable to be changed once published. However, by using recursion, inscriptions can reference the content of other inscriptions, allowing for composability and re-use of common components.
3. Presigning transactions for traits that are progressively revealed over time is the core mechanism that the Quantum Cats collection uses to evolve its artwork. By introducing Layer Connector inscriptions and factoring rendering logic into a common component, Quantum Cats successfully created an evolving collection while saving costs on inscription fees.