Can You Own a Color? A New NFT Marketplace Is Trying to Find Out | Hacker News Reader

Can You Own a Color? A New NFT Marketplace Is Trying to Find Out

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5 pointsomarfarooq15 comments

As time goes on, I hate the NFT space more and more. This stuff is just ridiculous.

I had the exact same idea but, I am to lazy to market it, plus it's ridiculous.

https://opensea.io/collection/real-life-solid-colors

Founder here. We are building an NFT marketplace where a portion of transaction fees for settled trades is distributed with Color NFT holders based on the proportional use of the color associated with their Color NFT in a given traded NFT.

It's more than just color.

Interesting, but I do wonder what the SEC might think of this scheme.

What happens when multiple people mint each of 16.7 million RGB-representable colors each?

They can't in our smart contract. We take the color hexadecimal and convert it into a pure number and use that as the NFT's tokenID—which is the primary immutable component of the ERC-721 specification. Two tokenIDs cannot occupy the same number.

Interesting! And how do color components get passed from an image file to the blockchain?

Do your servers retrieve and analyze the image?

That's a great question. To render the NFT Card (for example: https://color.museum/gallery) we simply reverse the tokenID's number with the numberToHex function of web3.js (we used hexToNumber to convert it in the opposite direction). This allows us to recreate the color as needed.

There's an image file associated with the Color NFT in its metadata, but everything rests on the tokenID's resolution to a specific color hexadecimal.

Right, this is about the color NFT. But how about other picture NFTs that would pay fees to the color ones?

Surely the processing of a picture is done in a centralized fashion, and that is what determines the amount to pay to each owner of a color NFT.

Yes, processing of the amount of the royalty will be done offchain, but will be auditable and independently verifiable. Disputes can be brought against the dev team. We are receiving 50% of the accumulated transaction fee pool to maintain and grow the market; so in the event of mistakes we will be prepared to cover.

All transaction fees will accumulate into a pool and will be callable by addresses only in proportion to their share of the pool.

Thnk you for clarity! Indeed, I believe this is the best practical solution.

I imagine minting say, a whole PNG, and doing the processing on-chain would be prohibitively expensive. Unless the image were very small and the algorithm very optimized.

Certainly! We've already indexed the Bored Ape Yacht Club collection and have the color hexadecimal used per pixel for all 10,000 of them. Finishing up CloneX Now.

We are seeing several color minting strategies spawn, and one of them is minting a color that is often used in one of the more expensive NFT collections. For example, someone minted these shades of red, blue, purple which are prominent in Cryptopunks: https://color.museum/gallery/9786703 & https://color.museum/gallery/6522262 https://color.museum/gallery/9334710

Interesting times ahead!

tldr: the answer is no

Actually, yes. [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colour_trade_mark

You should clarify that it is not universal ownership of a color, but limited rights in the context of products/services that might be confused with each other.

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