Substandard
A passion project. We came at this as technologists, pretty good with Google but not Solidity developers by trade. The art wasn't the focus — the architecture was. "We are plumbers, not painters."
For the full chronological story (origin, art process, mint day, sellout, handoff to Pilgrims), see the timeline →.
Original FAQ
WTF?
This is a collection of programmatically generated images. Our objective was to figure out how to properly architect NFT collections. The art wasn't our focus, so these were free to mint. We are plumbers, not painters.
If it's free to mint, where does the money come from?
It doesn't. We kept 100 of the 10,000 NFTs as souvenirs and gifts. The rest minted free.
ArE yOur ImaGeS hOsteD oN iPFs?
Is that what you heard you should ask? Cute. IPFS is decentralized but, despite the hand-waving in this space, it is not permanent. IPFS is like paying a subscription for someone to keep seeding your BitTorrent file. Permanent storage of our image files is on the Arweave permaweb.
When was the reveal?
Done. Much faster than expected — sold 200 on day 1, then 8,000 in the first ten minutes of day 2. The index offset is 3988.
What about a roadmap?
Of course there is no roadmap, these were free to mint and we are using Times New Roman font on our website.
A passion project
We came at this as technologists, pretty good with Google but not Solidity developers by trade. Substandard was the first one — the project that taught us how all of this fits together. The art wasn't the focus; the architecture was. "We are plumbers, not painters."
The collection sold out
10,000 of 10,000 minted on Ethereum mainnet. The collection is closed — but every token is still live, owned, tradeable on OpenSea. The real ones live there. Here in the museum, you can build a hypothetical one and see how the mechanism works.
How a Substandard token comes together
Each Substandard NFT is built from layered PNGs across ten trait categories: bases, heads, eyes, noses, mouths, eyebrows, hats, subs, countries, and easter_eggs. The mechanism is deterministic given the seed: pick a base, layer on traits in z-order, output a 1024×1024 PNG. All 10,000 are minted; provenance hash is on-chain.
Want a real one?
All 10,000 are owned, traded on OpenSea.
OpenSea collection → verified contract → build a hypothetical →