Animated objects, stored on chain
Most object networks store a pointer and hope the file outlives the link. GIFCHAIN stores the frames themselves. Every object is a leaf in a merkle trie, every block commits a root over that trie, and ownership is a field on the leaf rather than a row in somebody else’s database. That single decision explains the fixed mint price, the sealed supply, the frozen object module and the way the bridge works.
height
4,134,613
current head
block time
3-7s
2 block finality
object limit
16 KB
per object, hard cap
standards
721 / 1155
plus 165 and 2981
The encoding of frames, palettes and traits, and the two token standards built on top of it.
read the standard →Hardware, sync modes, bonding as a sequencer and what gets you slashed.
run a node →- deploy — a collection reserves N slots and fixes its royalty. Supply can never grow.
- mint — frames are written into the trie, traits are derived from the mint hash, and a leaf appears.
- hold — the leaf resolves at every height. Nothing expires, nothing needs renewing.
- list and sell — escrow holds the object, the market module pays seller and creator atomically.
- bridge — the leaf freezes, a mirror appears elsewhere, and the frames stay exactly where they were.
- burn — the leaf is cleared. The frames stay in history forever, but the slot is never reissued.
| term | meaning |
|---|---|
| object | An animated image stored directly in chain state. Frames, palette and traits all live in the object trie. |
| object root | A merkle root over every object leaf, committed in each block header. It is what makes ownership provable. |
| leaf | One object plus its owner. Transfers rewrite the leaf in place, they never copy the frames. |
| slot | A reserved position in a collection. Supply is sealed at deploy, so slots cannot be created later. |
| escrow | The market module account that custodies an object while a listing is open. |
| mirror | A token on another chain that points at a locked GIFCHAIN leaf. Burning the mirror releases the lock. |
| epoch | 4096 blocks. Sequencer order is fixed for an epoch and reshuffled at the boundary. |
| hot index | The recent window the explorer keeps fully denormalised. Older data is still queryable, just not listed. |
Everything on this site is simulated: the heights, the wallets, the prices and the sequencers. The behaviour is modelled carefully, but no value moves anywhere.