Chatcasso

In 2022 we saw three separate jobs in making an NFT collection: get the art, deploy a contract, build a mint page. We thought one chat could do all three. Describe a style or upload a reference, approve what the bot draws, fill in a short form, and the collection goes live on BNB Chain with a mint page anyone can open.

It won first place in the lifestyle track of a BNB Chain hackathon held in Seoul on Dec 17-19, 2022, and took a $5,000 BUSD prize. It ran as a working demo, not a mock. The bot generated artwork from a text prompt or an uploaded image, let you accept it or hit retry, then deployed a real collection to BNB Chain, Goerli or Mumbai from inside the same chat. Every collection got a public page where a stranger could mint the next edition, with a numbered editions grid and a link out to OpenSea.

It never formally launched. By our own account we were getting the launch ready. Binance announced its own AI NFT tool, Bicasso, on March 1, 2023, two months after the hackathon. Cointelegraph reported on March 5 that Binance had been accused of copying the hackathon winner, and that Binance said an internal review left it confident Bicasso was developed independently. The launch was dropped. Chatcasso stayed a working demo and never shipped.

Chatcasso was built on generative AI in December 2022, earlier than anything else in this archive. We carried none of the code forward. What carried was the habit of building on a new capability while it is still new.