Mint Gallery, Marketplace, and Seedbox
BY HEEEY
Mints
The “Mint Gallery” lets us explore the QQL collection and its minted NFTs. Inside the “Mint Gallery” tab, we can see the number of seeds that have been canonicalized into the collection. This means that if there are, for instance, 321 NFTs in the Mint Gallery, there are still 678 Mint Passes available, waiting to be burned and turned into a permanent NFT within QQL.
We can filter mints in different ways. By default, the collection is presented from newest to oldest, and the order can be reversed using the drop-down menu on the top right. The filters on the left side can be used to see all mints that have a particular owner or were discovered by a particular parametric artist. This filtering can be done by either specifying an Ethereum address or an ENS, if that address has one.
There are certain “badges” that signify the occasion a particular seed was minted into the collection. These can be calendar-based (e.g. “Day 0” or “Year 1”) or special events, such as special exhibitions or QQL anniversary parties, where new mints are celebrated online during a special event. All QQLs that were minted outside of these special occasions are labeled as “Independent”.
The remaining filters help us find seeds based on selectable traits. This filtering can be very useful to find QQL seeds that share some key aesthetic traits. We can discover what previous minters liked, trends, what types of seeds are common, what traits are scarcely used or even which trait combination is missing altogether from the collection.
By hovering over a QQL we can click the gear icon to “Use traits” and start generating seeds that will share all traits with that QQL and look similar (to some extent).
Marketplace
The “Marketplace” is the collection of seeds that various parametric artists have made available for others to buy and mint into the collection. There are currently thousands of seeds available for sale.
Prices range wildly, but some of the available seeds are free. We can see those by filtering by price using the top-right drop-down.
Just like the Mint Gallery, the Marketplace has tools for filtering by traits, like color palette and structure. However, the Marketplace can’t be filtered by “Mint Occasion” nor by “Owner”, as seeds have not been minted.
In the Marketplace we can also filter by listing date. It’s worth noting that if a parametric artist updates a seed’s price, the listing date on that seed will be updated to the current date. This means that the “newest” seeds might be some of the oldest available but with an updated price, while the “oldest” seeds have simply never had their price changed.
Because the quantity of seeds available on the marketplace is rather large, it covers a vast visual output range which can be used both as a source of inspiration in our QQL exploration, as well as a visual reference to what this complex generative algorithm can produce.
Seedbox
For QQL's first anniversary, the QQL Council, a group containing several dedicated parametric artists, curated the “Seedbox”. This was a collection of over 100 of the community's most acclaimed "seeds," highlighting those that had resonated strongly among the Council members. As QQL approached its second anniversary, the Seedbox underwent a significant revamp. This update incorporated newly discovered "astonishing" seeds alongside a reflection of the evolving aesthetic preferences within the community.
The Seedbox aims to showcase the collective taste of the QQL community regarding what constitutes an "exceptional" output from the generative algorithm. The hope is for Mint Pass holders to use the Seedbox as a guide to discover community-vetted seeds that may particularly resonate with them and to encourage collectors to pull the trigger on minting a seed into the QQL collection.
Most seeds in the Seedbox are already available in the Marketplace, so minting one can happen with just a few clicks. Each curated seed includes its parametric artist’s username and a link to their X account. This is not just for attribution purposes, but can also provide potential collectors with a way to contact the parametric artist, in case the seed has not been listed in the marketplace.