Piccololi is, to the best of our knowledge, the first fully on-chain animated PNG NFT collection on smartBCH. It starts off as a fun project and hopefully will remain so, adding good vibe to the smartBCH community.

How did it begin?

The initial motivation to make a NFT collection came after I was inspired by @ShadowKite 's CryptoR.at collection. That was the first time I took part a NFT airdrop. The fact that each RAT was assigned a distinctive character according to its token ID was what I found particularly interesting. The whole mechanism fascinates pretty much in the same manner as LEGO  or toy blocks. After some research, I started to fiddle around p5.js, a js library which eventually turned out to be the cornerstone  of the NFT collection presented.

During production, it came naturally to my wonder, given all the existing NFT collections, that would there be something more than just another set of still pictures that I could bring to the community? The idea of making animated pictures sparkled, as you probably could imagine. Making animated pictures, however, was another challenge that I had to face on top of my limited familiarity with p5.js which supplied the picture frames.

An NFT collection by and for the community

Thanks to @JeffChen ‘s tutorial, I managed to export the file to APNG format. Furthermore, @Ayukawayen taught me how to assemble and generate the final images automatically and helped me to complete the very first push request. That’s how the SLP version of Piccololi was born last year.

Later there came the smartBCH. We all saw the kick-off of smartBCH. As smartBCH is gaining momentum and enabling a different range of applications thanks to its largely increased block rates (in comparison to the main BCH chain), bringing the Piccololis to smartBCH becomes a nonstop personal pursuit of mine.

I had little success however in getting the smart contracts sorted out, until I ran into another interesting NFT-minting platform-for-all project recently created by @liwi . In addition to the support on the smart contract, @liwi also provided assistance in further streamlining the production of the Piccololi animated pictures.

In contrast to SLP tokens, one of the many advantages of NFT tokens on smartBCH is the capacity for traits, which give us a bit more elements to play with while designing Piccololi. If you are lucky, you might encounter a Piccololi with an unique personality and talent.

It is commonly said that "to go fast, go alone; to go far, go together." However, in the case of myself and Piccololi, I simply have to rephrase that into "to go fast and far, go together." Without all these people and kindness of the BCH community, I definitely wouldn't be able to present you the Piccololi NFT collection here and at this point in time. I am truly grateful to @JeffChen , who lead me into the world of BCH, from PttDigiCurrency, noise.cash and now here. Big thanks to everyone in the community who make this project work.

The future of Piccololi

I hope by now I have given you a clear account on how I, or more precisely, we, have gone this far to present you with the Picololi NFT collection. What about the path forward? A roadmap, as you may wonder. Honestly, we do not have any well-defined plan. This does not mean there’s no plan to develop Piccololi further. It’s just because we do not want to give empty promises just to create an illusion or fake hype. As said, it’s a fun project. Please do not assume Piccololi as a form of investment, financial advice, future governing tokens or any profitable objects.

Piccololi is a fun project that we would like to do together with the community. We are always open to any kind of suggestions and ideas. If you have any innovative idea about Piccololi and would like to share with us or even join the team, you are welcome to contact us anytime for collaboration. Even if you would like to start your own project based on Piccololi, feel free to drop us a message and we will see how we can help you.