Degen Blues launches groundbreaking musical NFT collection that reacts to on-chain data, powered by Chainlink Price Feeds
608 unique “robot music” NFTs representing days in Ethereum history
We are thrilled to announce the launch of our self-titled NFT collection Degen Blues, available to mint starting now. Visit the Degen Blues website to listen to all 608 musical NFTs, each auto-generated from daily Ethereum price movements. Watch the price animate as the melody tracks the movements of the ETH/USD price. Hear a different musical vibe depending on the increase or decrease in prices. For example, take a listen to Degen Blues #538, representing Mar 27, 2022:
Each Degen Blues NFT represents a day in the history of the Ethereum blockchain. Which day will you mint?
- An upbeat MOON day or a rare DOOM day?
- A volatile day in the market with a tense chord?
- A regular HODL day with a funky, catchy groove
- Your last birthday, or the day you first went down the web3 rabbit hole?
Each day is a 1/1 unique NFT so nobody owns it but you. No matter which day you choose, you can mint the Degen Blues for 0.15 ETH.
A new chapter in data-driven art
Degen Blues represents an exciting new direction for blockchain-native art. Degen Blues was inspired by the limitless potential of smart contracts as a medium. As we learned more about this new medium, we found ourselves wondering:
- How does art change as it becomes digital?
- What if art was created with the help of algorithms and data?
- Why can’t an art collection continue evolving after it’s created?
Degen Blues is our attempt to explore these ideas, and we hope it’s just the first of a wave of data-driven creations.
An ever-changing collection, underpinned by Chainlink Price Feeds
Degen Blues integrates with the Chainlink Network to access price data via on-chain feeds known as Chainlink Price Feeds. Chainlink’s future-proof architecture helps ensure that Degen Blues NFT holders can hold long-living assets underpinned by tamper-proof and accurate price data.
Currently, the Degen Blues self-titled collection has a running time of 54 minutes of machine-generated audio. However, unlike most NFT launches, the Degen Blues collection will continue to evolve well into the future. The smart contract will automatically generate a new 6-second composition once per day at midnight UTC, based on data from the ETH/USD Chainlink Price Feed. At that point, a new NFT becomes immediately mintable on the Degen Blues website.
The Degen Blues smart contract will continue to generate NFTs indefinitely at a fixed rate of 1 per day. You can read more about the technical innovations behind Degen Blues in our technical deep dive.
From data to music, without human intervention
Our design principle from the start has been to let the data express itself in music, with minimal human interference.
We judiciously crafted the Degen Blues algorithms to translate price data to music, enabling the price data to “improvise” a melody with no human composer in the loop.
Here are some things that you won’t find in Degen Blues:
- No random numbers. Each melody is deterministically generated based on the available data. There are no “mystery packs” in Degen Blues, and the only “randomness” in the algorithm is what the market provides
- No human supervision. Beyond choosing a chord and scale, we make no attempt to prevent the market from playing “wrong” notes. As you browse the collection you’ll hear dissonant, and sometimes delightful, surprises.
- No recorded samples. Notes are synthesized entirely using oscillators and synths in web audio. This is robot music all the way, from start to finish.
Using price data to generate melodies presents some musical challenges. Two design choices we’ve made have particularly influenced the sound of the compositions:
- Logarithmic scale. The ETH price should sound equally groovable at ETH $420 as at $2400. So a linear scale won’t do. Instead, the melody follows the logarithm of the price, such that a 5% increase in ETH always corresponds to a 1-octave rise in pitch.
- Auditory barber pole. ETH prices can continue going up, or down, infinitely, but the range of human hearing is finite. We wanted our melodies to smoothly jam without “running out of space” at one end of the musical scale, and without any discontinuities. So Degen Blues uses a sound illusion called the Shepard tone — you may have heard it in Christopher Nolan movies—to generate a melody that remains in the same two-octave frequency band, even while the listener perceives it to ascend or descend continuously.
Rare traits, generated by rare market conditions
It wouldn’t be an NFT collection without some rare traits. Each Degen Blues NFT has two attributes — a vibe and a chord. Instead of an artificial set of probabilities, the distribution of these attributes reflects the probability of certain market events
- Vibe. Each day’s melody is drawn from one of three musical scales, each expressing a different vibe — HODL, MOON, or DOOM. The HODL vibe is the most common, while the rare MOON or DOOM vibes are reserved for particularly dramatic days in the market.
- Chord. Each day’s chord corresponds to a musical mode that starts on the first, second, fourth, or fifth degree of its scale. The higher scale degrees correspond to higher amounts of volatility in the market. You can hear the tension of the chords increase and decrease as market volatility ebbs and flows.
Where to Mint
You can browse the collection at the Degen Blues website, and mint a melody from this innovative new data-driven NFT collection for 0.15 ETH. We look forward to seeing which day you pick!
About Chainlink
Chainlink is the industry standard for building, accessing, and selling oracle services needed to power hybrid smart contracts on any blockchain. Chainlink oracle networks provide smart contracts with a way to reliably connect to any external API and leverage secure off-chain computations for enabling feature-rich applications. Chainlink currently secures tens of billions of dollars across DeFi, insurance, gaming, and other major industries, and offers global enterprises and leading data providers a universal gateway to all blockchains.
Learn more about Chainlink by visiting chain.link or reading the developer documentation at docs.chain.link. To discuss an integration, reach out to an expert.
About Degen Blues
Degen Blues is a musical NFT collection generated dynamically from Ethereum prices. The core Degen Blues team consists of fully doxxed individuals with a track record of creating products used by hundreds of millions of people around the world:
- Andy Szybalski is a creator working in diverse mediums including painting, cartography, Solidity, and Javascript. As a product designer, he co-founded Google Street View and Uber Eats. As an artist, he created Zoom Backgrounds for Biden. His favorite jazz song is Song For My Father (Horace Silver).
- Stephen Chau is a product manager and entrepreneur who (with Andy) co-founded Uber Eats and Google Street View. His favorite jazz song of all time is Autumn Leaves (Cannonball Adderley & Miles Davis).
