Minting Your Base History as Onchain Art
One of my favorite ways to visualize data is by transforming it into art.
This sort of artmaking challenges and expands how we think about information. It also gives us a way to curate memories into history, and now thanks to NFTs, into digital keepsakes for posterity.
One project doing interesting work at this crossroads is Pob Studio, a team behind multiple commemorative onchain art series like Hash, Even v. Odd, and Merge.
Pob Studio’s latest innovative effort is the Ethverse, a duo of collections that lets users turn blockchain history into unique, collectible relics. The Ethverse now supports Basenames, so let’s walk you through how you can easily mint your own Base history moments accordingly.
What is the Ethverse?
Right now, the Ethverse is a series of two collections: Terrene Exeo and Terrene Hiraeth.
These fully onchain projects are centered around elevating and preserving the stories embedded in Ethereum and popular Layer 2s (L2s), from the collective memories of entire NFT collections to personal milestones like your first transaction on Base.
Terrene Exeo
Terrene Exeo is an NFT collection that transforms the data of other NFT collections, e.g. Azuki, into dynamic, generative art.
Currently in its Pre-Alpha state, Exeo isn’t live to the public yet. Still, the project is designed to derive artworks from the smart contracts of Ethereum NFT collections, where addresses, token holders, and other data are reinterpreted to generate immersive, city-like landscapes.
Exeo is particularly interesting because its pieces will evolve over time, too, and entirely onchain. The appearance of each NFT changes over time as the data from its corresponding collection shifts—as new holders trade in, the generative art adapts to reflect these ownership updates with new roads, bouncing balls, etc. In this way, Exeo pieces grow alongside the collections they represent.
Terrene Hiraeth
Terrene Hiraeth takes a different approach, focusing on immortalizing individual blockchain transactions as digital relics.
Each Hiraeth NFT represents a single transaction—like contract deployments, token swaps, NFT mints, etc.—and captures the essence of that moment as a unique piece of generative art. Over time, these digital relics “age,” visually reflecting the passage of time and adding layers of character to each token.
Hiraeth is currently in Alpha and live on Ethereum, Base, and OP Mainnet, so you can also try it today. Every transaction holds its own narrative, whether it's a massive NFT sale or someone’s first foray into DeFi, and Hiraeth’s magic is that it lets you transform these transactions into one-of-a-kind digital artifacts that evolve over time.
By turning these moments into collectible art, Hiraeth encourages us to reflect on the history of our onchain interactions and preserve our favorite happenings for the future. That's applaudable!
How to mint your own Base history
Pob Studio recently released a streamlined Hiraeth minting flow for Basenames users, so if you’ve already registered a Basename, this is a great starting point for easily diving into the Ethverse and minting your own curated Hiraeth moment.
First, head to www.pob.studio and connect the wallet associated with your Basename ID. Then click on the “Have a base.eth domain?” button on the homepage.
Doing so will take you to a search bar where you can type in your Basename, then press “See your history to proceed.” This will bring up a series of curated moments to choose from, like the first time you funded your Base wallet with ETH.
Once you find a moment you want to commemorate, press the “Mint” button and complete the transaction with your wallet. Creating the moment for my first Base transaction as seen above cost 0.009 ETH, or ~$21 at the current ETH price.
And voila, that’s all it takes to mint your onchain history! Keep in mind that if you want to dive in deeper, you can head back to the main Hiraeth page and press the “Ethverse awaits” button to pull up a search bar to look for more mintable moments by address or transaction hash and across Ethereum, Base, and OP Mainnet.
Why this matters
Runtime art is a new medium, and it’s what you get when you cross fully onchain art with dynamic art. The Ethverse collections are innovative, noble advances in this new frontier with their unique emphasis on cultural curation and preservation, two things that need more attention and love around crypto.
Yet a series like Hiraeth is also just fun—it’s satisfying to mint a moment as a fully onchain NFT and then observe its evolution over time. Hiraeth blurs the lines between art, collectibles, data, and history in a really accessible way, making it precisely the kind of experiment I love to bring attention to. It’s worthy of a mint, I say!