1,506 characters remain encoded. whether they take another form or stay encoded is entirely up to you.

"the character is the tone map. everything else is interpretation." there was a reason i ended my last article with this. the next stage: leave your trace onchain.

to switch between monochrome and color: 1. go to the "Switch" tab on the website 2. select the characters you want to update 3. save your changes you can switch back anytime. traceforms.xyz

details. each character is made up of 8-12 layers, stacked and blended in real time directly in your browser using onchain data. it all starts with a 65×39 grid. then come: > color > color flow > burn effect > chromatic aberration > up to five layers of glow > glow dispersion > light rays using character #931 as an example: if you look closely, you'll notice there's no orange in its original palette. the glyphs are green and magenta, and the orange only appears where the glow layers overlap. this is just one example of how colors interact across the collection.

the palette

gm

2,105 / 3,888 RGVjb2RlZCBUcmFjZXM=

Alongside sharing Trace’s artwork, I also want to share how it’s built. Here’s one of the decisions behind the first forms: Base and Ciphers. For the ideas and experiments behind @traceforms, it was important to me that the artwork be fully onchain and reconstructable from data stored on the blockchain. We could have uploaded all 7,777 finished pieces directly as SVG files. Together, they came to 179.4 MiB. That’s not much data for an ordinary computer, but it’s a lot to store on a blockchain. By our calculations, storing those files on Ethereum would have cost around 7eth in gas fees. Instead, we stored a JavaScript program that draws the artwork, along with a small set of parameters for each piece. Think of a weaving pattern: you can preserve the finished fabric, or preserve the instructions needed to reproduce it. This approach works for Trace because collection shares a visual system. The rules for arranging symbols, building the grid, and drawing light and borders only need to be stored once. Each artifact then needs only the data that distinguishes it from the others. The program and that data are stored on blockchain. Your browser reads them and reconstructs the image. For all 7,777 first forms: • 185 KB stored onchain • $18.22 in upload fees • 14 transactions, completed in 3 minutes We then reconstructed every piece in Chromium, Firefox and WebKit. In all three browser engines, the generated files matched the originals byte for byte. And these are only about the first forms. As the artwork becomes more complex, storing finished images would mean more data to upload and higher costs.

In two days, 1,893 of a possible 3,888 Trace characters have been decoded. Almost half. One of the ideas behind Trace: an encoded artwork can be complete even if its content remains unrevealed. A Cipher represents a character through encoded data. The collector chooses whether to preserve that form or decode it. Each form stands as its own artwork. Decoding requires an irreversible change. A Base, whose visual form was originally inspired by fire, is burned. The Cipher keeps its token ID and becomes a character. You know which artworks you’re giving up, but not which character you’ll receive. I wanted to leave room for both curiosity and attachment. Decoding stays open permanently: you can reveal your character whenever you want, or keep its encoded form as the artwork you’ve chosen to collect.

Finalizing the last few changes, almost there. Sorry for the delay. The official post will go live on @traceforms within the next hour.

Trace decoding opens tomorrow at 6 PM UTC. You can find the full breakdown of how decoding works and the odds of revealing rare characters in the article below. A few more things to know before we start: 1. Does it matter if you merge early or late? A maximum of 3,888 characters can be decoded. They are not generated at the moment of the merge. All characters are already prepared in advance and placed into a pool, essentially the set of characters that can be randomly revealed when a merge happens. Each Cipher type has its own percentage-based odds, and VRF is used to randomly select a character from the remaining pool. The published odds are calculated while the pool is full. As more characters are revealed and removed from it, the exact percentages can gradually shift depending on what remains. So there is no need to rush and be one of the very first. A rare character can be revealed by someone near the beginning or even by the last person to merge. The difference only becomes more noticeable if a significant part of the pool has already been revealed and the remaining distribution is no longer proportional to the original one. 2. Animated Bases A Base never affects which character you receive, but they have a different bonus. Merge using an animated Base and you get a chance to receive an NFT from our vault, which will contain different types of NFTs, including characters. You receive your character either way, the vault draw happens on top of it, not instead. There are two animated Base forms, with different odds: Blink: 50% Rain: 17% Blink is rarer: 117 exist compared to 272 Rain pieces, which is why its vault chance is 3x higher. 3. Batch decoding You can decode multiple Ciphers in a single transaction instead of doing them one by one. That means fewer signatures and lower gas per pair. 4. Delegated wallets There is no need to connect your main wallet directly. Delegated wallets are supported, so your cold wallet can remain untouched while a hot wallet handles the transaction signing.

Gm 🤍 As we prepare for the decoding process, all official links and detailed information will be shared through the @traceforms account. There will be no stealth launches. Please be careful. A post with everything you need to know about tomorrow’s decoding will go live on the project’s account today.