🤝Collaborations

Bowie on the Blockchain

This project was a Manifold collaboration with @opensea @davidbowiereal to preserve on chain provenance.

Artists for this project included:

@iamlirona @youngandsick @pussyriot @osinachiart @fewocious @defacedstudio@glambeckett @jonathanwwolfe @jakethedegen

Check out the collection: https://opensea.io/collection/bowie-on-the-blockchain

On-chain collaborations are tricky: how do you ensure that all artists in a collaboration can retain digital provenance while still minting tokens on the same underlying contracts?

• All pieces needed to ultimately be minted on the Bowie on the Blockchain contracts, both philosophically to tie all the works together on-chain, and practically to distribute royalties easily on Opensea.

• We also wanted to ensure that each artist still had provenance tying back their pieces to their own digital identities, and show that they were the true creators of their work.

To accomplish this, the Bowie Foundation deployed their contracts just as anyone else would, using Manifold Studio.

Each artist, however, deployed their own extension contract with its own mint() and setTokenURI() functions, which was then registered on the core Bowie contracts.

Example: The ASCII art for Fewocious' contract:

The artists then minted via the extension contract, which called mint() on the Bowie contracts - this allowed the artists to control their tokenURI themselves, and mint on their own as well - ultimately preserving their provenance for these works.

Manifold Creator Contracts are powerful on their own, but there's even more you can accomplish by building on top of them with extension contracts.