1/ Just deployed my first smart contract. Rather harrowing as there's no such thing as rollbacks.
While NFTs seem to be about art and community now, NFTs have use cases beyond those. One of them is Lineage.
2/ The linked article resurfaced a question I had previously pondered - how might we be certain someone is truly part of a family?
In Chinese culture, there is a tradition to record genealogy in a type of book called the 族谱 (zupu).
3/ A family's book would be entrusted to a single individual for protection and maintenance.
As families grew and people migrated, one can imagine the flow of information to and from the keeper of the book becoming harder.
4/ The physical nature of the book made it susceptible to be lost, damaged, or destroyed.
What if this information is stored on-chain? What if lineage can be recorded and verified across time and space, immutable and everlasting.
5/ The Lineage contract is my attempt to experiment with this idea.
Each address can only hold one Lineage Token.
There is no self-minting. Only someone with a token can mint for another.
If you transfer your token, you lose the right to mint.
One address, one mint.
6/ It is common for wealthier families to have physical symbols of lineage.
One such symbol is the signet ring that is typically engraved with the family's crest.
Wealthy families might craft their rings with silver, royalty with gold.
7/ One can imagine that if lineage is stored on-chain, a chain's higher cost for transactions is a desirable property.
Royalty will deploy their lineage contract on ETH (or whatever is more expensive once ETH 2.0 arrives). Others will deploy their lineage on a L2 chain.