Extend - Creating the Most Customizable NFT

In the Fall of 2021, Jump took the plunge into the NFT space. Armed with the desire to contribute to the NFT community, the team decided to partner with Metaplex, home of the Candy Machine and Solana NFTs, and Impossible Finance to release a collection of 1 million NFTs. These NFTs can “extend” to do more, first as part of an interactive canvas. Why would anyone want one of a million NFTs? Read on to learn more about why we dropped everything to start building and how we approached this project.

A few months ago, our President, wrote about the work we’ve been doing at Jump Crypto with the call to action, “It’s time to build.” At Jump, we’re interested in trying anything that’s fun and challenging, where we can learn, partner and contribute. Partnering to create an interactive place for NFTs felt like a good place to start.

We’ve partnered with Metaplex and Impossible Finance to create the most customizable NFT (Medium announcement here). Users can buy and customize NFTs to contribute to the largest NFT collection on Solana.

We are at the beginning of what is possible for NFTs. NFTs are more than profile pics, avatars, and art. They can be a means to permissionless collaboration. With the canvas, users can add their unique take which, when compiled together, looks amazing.

We think of this canvas as its own community, and we are excited to see where it goes.

Why Build an NFT?

The idea for this NFT project was to create something that would be accessible to everyone, scale endlessly thanks to Solana, and, most importantly, unlock unlimited layers of utility.

The team had just come off a Solana bootcamp, and we were excited to help build something creative on-chain.

How it Came Together

The Space – Canvas

Inspired by Reddit’s amazing 1000x1000 pixel canvas located at r/place, we wondered, could we build something like that, but decentralized. Could that be done on the Solana blockchain? Could an NFT correspond to an (x, y) coordinate, giving the owner the ability to change pixel color?

1 million NFTs felt like a large enough number where it would be nearly impossible to lock anyone out of the canvas (thank you Reddit for the idea!), so size could contribute to accessibility.

Extend – doing more

But could we do more than edit a pixel on a canvas? We wanted to extend the idea of a Space to do more.

The technical requirements for a 2-D canvas that supports color changes are significantly higher than running a javascript command to initialize a Candy Machine. But the Jump team loves a technical challenge.

We took a step back and thought about how this NFT could be unlike any other as a base, generic layer of applications and utility. Each NFT is minted with an (x, y) coordinate, but could that unique ownership have meaning on more layers than just a canvas?

If you owned the Space at (0, 0), you could edit the color on the Canvas. But what if you could edit and share a personalized link on a Link layer? Or receive lumber on a Catan-like game layer?

Each new layer, each new application can extend from that Space.

A Space is not a profile picture. It’s not a static snapshot of culture. It’s more like a smartphone with access to an app store. The community can cultivate ideas and develop new layers. Anyone can develop the next layer.

Over the past few months we have contributed code in collaboration with Bartosz and others at Solana Labs and Metaplex. We’ve laid the first bricks. We’ve gotten to know and work with the Extend team and are confident in their ability to guide the future of this project. The rest is up to you, the crypto community and developers, to go to work.