“Proof of Merge” NFTs will transform in your wallet as the Ethereum merge happens

Were you interested in crypto before the Ethereum merger? Now you can prove it with a “Proof of Merge” NFT.

A couple of creative thinkers at Web3 solid Andreessen Horowitz have made one Evidence of merger NFT with metadata that evolves dynamically as the Ethereum merger unfolds.

A16z engineering partner Michael Blau and crypto investment partner Mason Hall constructed black-and-white “Proof of Merge” Ethereum NFT, which goes through three phases triggered automatically by its smart contract. Software developer Zachm.eth designed the front end for the project.

The first phase of each Proof of Merge NFT is shown before merge and shows two separate circles. The second phase of NFT, which took place early Wednesday, shows two half-merged circles. The third phase will show the circles fully merged, forming a yin and yang symbol to indicate that the Ethereum merge is complete.

“It’s basically a side project that Mason and I hacked together really quickly over the weekend, this past weekend, and launched, and so far it’s been pretty crazy,” Blau said Decrypt in an interview.

The art is a nod to an Ethereum panda bear memesaid Hall, showing Ethereum’s execution layer like a black bear and Ethereums consensus team like a white bear. The two bears are then combined to create the ultimate Ethereum panda bear, which has become a metaphor for post-merger Ethereum.

At the time of publication, about 9,000 unique crypto wallet addresses already have imprinted a free “Proof of Merge” NFT, which is unlimited in number but can only be claimed before the merge is complete.

Why did they choose three phases? It was mostly for convenience, says Blau.

“We actually store each ASCII image on the chain, and the more phases we wanted to store, the more data we have to store, which is more storage gas taxes which we have to pay when we actually implement the smart contract in the first place, Blau said.

Especially Blau’s brother Justin Blau is also into crypto and wants to change the music industry through NFTs.

The NFTs – unique blockchain tokens that signify ownership – are non-transferable. If someone tries to transfer their Proof of Merge NFT, the transaction will fail, but the sender will still have to pay an Ethereum gas fee.

This means that the Proof of Merge NFTs also act as a kind of “proof of attendance” NFT, as they can only be held by wallets that minted them before the merge. The design has a similar black and white ASCII style to Blau’s previous Ethereum NFT collections, MEV army and x0rboth of which were launched earlier this year.

The intermediate phase of two partially converged circles was triggered by “a time stamp associated with the block,” Hall said Decrypt. “And then we spend[d] a 12-hour window before the merger actually occurs represents this intermediate phase.”

The smart contract behind the Proof of Merge NFTs is also designed to be able to determine exactly when the merge happens, so that the NFT changes to its third and final state – the yin yang symbol.

“The only way to detect whether the merge happened on-chain or not is to measure something called block.difficulty,” Hall said. “It is an attribute of a block that normally returns how difficult it was to mine that block on the Ethereum proof of work chain.”

This value will equal zero when the merge is complete.

The Ethereum Merger will happen late Wednesday night, according to estimates based on Ethereum’s current hashrate. The merger will completely transition the Ethereum blockchain’s mainnet from proof-of-work mining to a proof-of-stake system – a massive shift predicted to reduce Ethereum’s energy consumption by 99.95%.