Trace

Trace is a fully on-chain ASCII art NFT experiment on Ethereum with 7,777 pieces by the artist 0xvesty: each work begins as a 3D model converted into ASCII characters and exists in one of three forms, Base, Cipher or Character. It targets the cost of storing finished images on-chain: all 7,777 pieces would have taken about 179.4 MiB as SVGs, so Trace instead stores one drawing program plus a small parameter set per piece (185 KB in total across 14 transactions at roughly $18.22 in upload fees), with browsers reconstructing images from on-chain data and byte-for-byte parity verified in Chromium, Firefox and WebKit. In the decoding mechanism, a holder burns one Base and converts a Cipher into a character drawn via Chainlink VRF from a pool of 3,888 characters, while animated Bases (Blink, Rain) carry an extra vault-draw chance.

As an art-experiment collectible, Trace carries no DeFi functionality, and holders choose whether their pieces exist encoded or decoded, monochrome or color, with rarity ranked against the full pool of 3,888 characters. After decoding opened in October 2026, more than 2,000 Bases had been burned within days, revealing the corresponding characters.