Why bother with the contract
Most artists mint into a marketplace’s shared contract because it is the path of least resistance. It works until the marketplace changes its terms, delists a piece, or closes, at which point the work’s permanent record lives somewhere you do not control.
A Transient Labs contract is deployed in your name through a public factory. You own the address. If every platform showing the work disappeared tomorrow, including this one, the tokens and their history would be exactly where you left them.
The part we actually care about
These contracts let you write to the work permanently. Not a description field on a website, an inscription in the chain’s own log, which nobody can edit or take down, including us.
For photography especially, that changes what the object is. The image is the work; the story is why you stood there. Collectors can add to it later, so a piece accumulates its own provenance as it moves.
Write the story before you mint. Everything else on this page is logistics; this is the part that will still matter in ten years.
How it goes
Decide what the work is
A sequence of unique images, an edition anyone can mint, or a piece that can change state later. That answer picks the contract, and it is the only genuinely artistic decision in this list.
Pick the contract
ERC721TL for unique work and small runs. ERC1155TL for editions and open drops. ERC7160TL if the piece should hold several states and let the collector choose between them. The full menu, including the selling tools, is below.
Deploy it in your own name
Transient Labs deploys through a public factory using minimal proxies, so it is cheap and the address is yours. You are the owner from the first block, not a tenant in a marketplace’s shared contract.
Write the story before you mint
A Story Inscription goes on-chain with the work: why it exists, what the constraint was, where it was made. Write it while the work is fresh in your hands. It cannot be edited later, which is the point.
Choose how it is released
Fixed price, timed auction, open edition, or a price that decays the longer the drop runs. The buyer pays the protocol fee, not you.
Send us the address
We add the contract to the curated list, hydrate it, and write the note explaining why it is here. We take nothing and we do not touch the sale.
What they actually offer
Eight things, not three. The first three are token standards and decide what the work is; the next three decide how it reaches people; the last two are their own products.
1/1s
ERC721TLOne owner per token, data immutable once written. The right choice for unique work and for a numbered series where each piece is genuinely its own.
What most of the photography here uses.
Editions
ERC1155TLMany mints of one work, capped by supply or by a window of time. An open edition is a different artistic proposition from a scarce one; decide which you are making before you pick this.
Multi-Creations
ERC7160TLA token that holds several states and lets the holder choose which one is displayed. The work stops being a fixed file and becomes a set of possibilities you can add to later.
Jake Fried’s NORTH STAR runs on this: thirty-odd variants, holder’s pick.
Auctions
1/1s & Multi-CreationsReserve auctions and fixed-price sales you run yourself, from your own contract. No marketplace sits in the middle taking a cut or setting the rules.
Mint Page
Any contract typeA mint page of your own, styled by you, rather than a marketplace listing. If the release is part of the work (and for a drop it usually is), this is where that gets decided.
Redemptions
Any valid ERC-1155Holders burn an existing edition to claim a new one. Works against any ERC-1155 on the chain, not only Transient’s, so it can reach back to work you released elsewhere.
T.R.A.C.E.
Physical workA signing chip in the object itself, holding its own key and writing a provenance record only it can authorise. The artist decides who else may add to that record.
For the several of you who make objects as well as files.
Juno
heyjuno.appGenerative and interactive visuals driven by a model. A separate product rather than a contract type, and the newest thing they have shipped.
Relevant if your practice already sits in the AI room here.
What this page will not do
It will not connect your wallet. This gallery has no transaction code in it by design, and we are not going to make an exception and quietly become a marketplace again. Deployment and minting happen in Transient Labs’ own tooling, where the signing belongs.
If it turns out the collective would rather mint without leaving this site, that is a real option (their components are embeddable), and we would build it on this route only, so the gallery stays clean.
Physical work
Several of you make objects as well as files. T.R.A.C.E. is built for exactly that: a signing chip embedded in the piece, holding a certificate that galleries and auction houses can add to over time.
We have not built support for it yet: there is nothing physical in the gallery to certify. It remains the intent, and when the first physical work arrives it is the next thing we do.