Dordinals is the first Ordinals collection specifically designed for Bitcoin and bitcoiners. Dordinals is a crypto-art collection of 100 units baked by crypto-artist Xerak and PoW tech creator Laurent Benichou, with the considerable help of Ordinals expert CryptoClay. Dordinals is our tribute to Bitcoin.
“We couldn’t imagine just clogging up the Bitcoin chain with cryptoart that could easily seat somewhere else. We had to invent a collection that made sense for Bitcoiners and was a tribute to Bitcoin.”
Laurent Benichou
Satoshi. We had to start from scratch: Satoshi. But how? Satoshi is still unknown, invisible and silent. Besides, people like Craig Wright are still actively working to cloud the issue on who Satoshi really is. We considered using a ghost image but we were frightened people would think we celebrate the AAVE protocol so we opted for the unoriginal idea of re-using the face of Dorian Nakamoto. Dorian still is, in the absence of alternatives, the least bad solution to celebrate Satoshi.
Hal Finney. Dordinals are a reference to the 1993 idea of Hal Finney in its effort to promote digital cash. Hal Finney assessed it would be effective to present it as “Cryptographic trading cards”. He further mentionned the beauty of those elements under the label “cryptographic art”. This is exactly what we do with Dordinals
Len Sassaman. Why are those Dordinals faces ? We wanted to refer to the tribute to Len Sassaman by Dan Kaminsky and Travis Goodspeed. In 2011, shortly after this Satoshi ‘usual suspect’ passed away, they included the face of their friend in the Bitcoin blockchain at block 138,725. To do so, they injected hexadecimal data in the pkscript fields of transaction 930a2114cdaa86e1fac46d15c74e81c09eee1d4150ff9d48e76cb0697d8e1d72. Through a Bitcoin explorer, you can extract those pkscript fields, convert the middle of each line from HEX into ASCII and find the face of Len Sassaman. This was to our knowledge the first art included in the Bitcoin blockchain.
100 Bitcoiners. More extensively, Dordinals are 100 unique tokens that each hold a name of a Bitcoin VIP: potential Satoshi Nakamotos, Bitcoin Core contributors, earliest Bitcoin adopters, Pre-Bitcoin cypherpunks, Bitcoin ecocystem participants, Bitcoin media and promoters, Austrian economists… and Bitcoin artists. It is always very difficult to make such a list as we certainly forgot some prominent names and added ones that will be considered highly controversial. We hope readers will agree on most of the names and forgive those we did not mention. As Bitcoiners ourselves, we know that it is always a reputational risk within your community and a personal security risk to speak out for Bitcoin. By giving them a Dorian face, we symbolically mention the personal risks they are or were taking by promoting Bitcoin or any pre-Bitcoin cryptographic tool.
Generative art through Proof-of-Work. Each Dordinal starts from the same starting version (black and white with a grey background color). We like to call this image the seed .GIF. Then the generation of colors is applied through a Proof-of-Work process that applies to the .GIF image pretty much the same process as the Bitcoin mining process: iteration until a specific hash range is found.
Information in SHA-256 hash. Like Bitcoin, the Dordinals Proof-of-Work process had to be based on SHA-256. The first digits of each Dordinals hash give precious information on the Dordinal number as well as redundant information on the letter seen in the bottom-right-hand corner of each Dordinal.
Crypto-art. Dordinals celebrate the pixel art style often used in well-known NFT collections, starting from the iconic CryptoPunks. Pixelization of Dorian was not only a way to reference our collection as being truly made for the digital space but it is also a reference to previous well-known important collections for crypto-art collectors.
kruptein-art. On top of the hidden information stored in the hash of Dordinals, each Dordinal holds a letter, a punctuation mark or a space. All Dordinals were inscribed in random order, yet a hash-based reordering assembles letters in a way that creates an intelligible sentence. The sentence is hidden, just like when you play Scrabble.
Download all Dordinals
Meet all Dordinals
About us.
– Xerak: The creator of the seed .GIF is famous digital artist Xerak. He has been the author of multiple PFP collections, a numeroted NFT comic-book called PSHYCHO GUM and many 1/1 artworks, some of them in pixel art.
Twitter: @presidentmutant
– Laurent Benichou: the PoW generative art inventor is the founder of Scratch Tech and provides artists with a crypto-tool box to play with cryptography and build crypto-enriched art
Twitter: @laurentbenichou
– CryptoClay: our ordinals inscriber is not less than the great Bitcoin lover and crypto-artist CryptoClay, famous for his well-known Cryptopunks variation: the ClayPunks
Twitter: @CryptoClayArt
