Dynamic NFTs Overview: Innovative Explorations Beyond Just Small Images
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Dynamic NFTs Overview: Innovative Explorations Beyond Just Small Images
This article will focus on introducing some well-known dynamic NFTs with a time dimension.
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsWritten by: WILLIAM M. PEASTE
Compiled by: TechFlow
There are still many misconceptions about NFTs. For example, this week Elon Musk claimed that all NFTs are "off-chain," when in fact many NFTs are fully on-chain.
Another common misconception is that NFTs are more or less just static images.
Certainly, this is not true! In fact, some of my favorite NFTs are those that evolve over time in one way or another.
In today's article, let's take a brief look back and highlight some notable dynamic NFTs with a temporal dimension.
1) Lifeforms
Created by artist and software developer Sarah Friend, Lifeforms are "NFT-based entities" on Polygon that require "regular care to thrive." In other words, you must transfer your Lifeform from your wallet within 90 days of receiving it, or it will be destroyed.
Today, fewer than 50 of these entities remain. When Lifeforms was shortlisted for the Lumen Prize in 2022, the series was described as:
“By introducing unexpected dynamics into smart contract systems, Lifeforms subverts the typical logic of NFTs—buy, hold, and hope their value increases—and instead requires 'owners' to become caretakers who must actively maintain or nurture their NFTs, often in collaboration with others.”
2) Chaos Roads
Created by artist, curator, data scientist, and NFT historian Chainleft, Chaos Roads is a fully on-chain art collection comprising artwork, music, and poetry—all generated entirely through code and the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM).
Notably, the project features an encoded "Entropy" system that allows NFT owners to revert their piece to an earlier visual state. Thus, these works not only evolve with every Ethereum block but can also return over time to earlier aesthetic stages. This stands as an early example of leveraging Ethereum’s always-on infrastructure for artistic dynamism.
3) Corruption(s*)
Developed by dom, the primary creator behind Blitmap, Loot, and Sup, Corruption(s*) is a fully on-chain generative ASCII crypto art project that launched stealthily in November 2021.
The series stands out for its innovative on-chain evolution mechanism based on "insight." Each NFT has an insight trait that accumulates experience over time, thereby evolving the artwork’s aesthetics. Accumulation speeds up if the Corruption remains untransferred, and slows down during periods of instability—i.e., when transferred.
4) Etholvants
First released in October 2021, Etholvants is another fully on-chain experiment designed to grow single-cell digital organisms either by combining them or by staking the NFTs. The latter method sees these organisms “grow two cells every four hours,” but hundreds have already been merged, leaving just over 8,400 Etholvants remaining today.
5) Fini
Fini consists of "active NFTs that respond via oracles to fluctuations in cryptocurrency values."
In other words, a given Fini’s mood continuously shifts on hourly, daily, or weekly timescales based on the performance of an associated cryptocurrency—such as Ethereum, Bitcoin, Solana, Dogecoin, Polygon, Chainlink, Uniswap, BNB Chain, Avalanche, or Tezos.
While I personally view the entire series as a massive conceptual art project exploring dynamism, the Fini characters themselves are also iconic and adorable PFPs, offering a delightful way to track the price movements of your favorite tokens.
6) SALT
SALT is a photographic crypto art series created through a collaboration between artists 0xmons and Figure, featuring dynamic rendering—meaning the token's aesthetics evolve based on changes in on-chain states.
In practice, this means that the series’ 180 photos cycle asynchronously from one token to another in a continuous daily loop. As the creators previously explained, “No owner possesses a specific image; all images are collectively shared.”
7) Terraforms
Mathcastles’ Terraforms has many unique aspects that cannot be easily summarized in a single sentence. In short, the series is a massive runtime artwork existing as a fully on-chain virtual world.
Nevertheless, one of the most fascinating aspects of Terraforms, to me, is its temporal nature. The NFTs in the series operate in two main modes: “Terrain” and “Daydreaming,” the latter of which helps delay or even prevent the hard-coded destruction of the virtual world.
8) Uniswap LP NFTs
Not all NFTs that evolve over time belong to the cultural sphere. On the DeFi side, the clearest example is liquidity provider (LP) positions in Uniswap V3, each represented by a specific NFT that pulls data from Ethereum and continuously renders it. If you modify your position’s liquidity, your NFT automatically reflects that change.
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