dino pals

The work and its context

dino pals is Art Blocks project 76 on the contract 0xa7d8d9ef8d8ce8992df33d8b8cf4aebabd5bd270. The index records 100 invocations against a maximum of 100, the runtime zdog@1.1.2, a square aspect ratio, the Factory curation status and the licence label "NIFTY License" with no link. Its price field reads 0.05 ETH ¹. The project description is two short sentences: "Adorable prehistoric pets generated in a pseudo 3d space using vector graphics. Explore the different species, colors and personalities" ¹.

Each output is a single cartoon dinosaur standing on the curve of a small planet, under a gradient sky with four puffs of cloud. The dinosaur is built from fat rounded strokes, like a toy made of sausages and balls. On load the whole scene turns once around its vertical axis and comes to rest, and the viewer can then drag it round ¹. The contact sheet shows the range: a blue stegosaur with orange back plates on a sandy beach, a long-necked green diplodocus under grey smoke on a dark red volcanic world, a brown stegosaur with a startled stare ¹.

The artist signs as hideo, styled HIDΞ0 on Art Blocks. His profile there reads "Creative coder exploring the intersection of art and games" and says his work is "deeply rooted with nostalgic themes" ²³. Wild XYZ's biography describes him as Venezuelan-born, based in Santiago, Chile, with more than ten years as a computer scientist and developer. It says he came to web3 in 2017 and discovered generative art in late 2020 ⁴. Sotheby's catalogue calls dino pals "Hideo's first published generative artwork" ⁵.

dino pals is small and unusual. It has 100 outputs, Factory rather than Curated status, and a character-design subject closer to a video-game sprite than to abstraction. It is written in Zdog, a pseudo-3D vector library, and draws to SVG rather than to a canvas ¹.

Conception and development

Little is published about how the work was made. No artist statement beyond the two-sentence description, no interview and no development sketches were found for this draft. The artist's website field in the index points to an X account, which could not be read ¹.

What exists places the project in a wider practice. Wild XYZ quotes hideo as saying "I consider games to be a form of art themselves", and lists his later collections: Celestial Cyclones (interactive minigames joining art and music), Legends of Metaterra (pixel-art warriors after classic video games) and Quasar Fighter (a browser space shooter) ⁴. The Art Blocks pages list mecha suits, celestial cyclones, Legends of Metaterra, Sacred Trees and undead wyverns alongside dino pals ²³. Sotheby's describes his work as drawing on "retro nostalgia and video game culture" ⁵. Read against that later work, dino pals looks like a first step: a character generator, with the species, colour and expression of each creature rolled like a player's avatar.

The description's word "personalities" is the key to the design. The program has no behaviour and no game. Its "personality" is carried entirely by two small choices, the mouth and the eyebrows, laid over a body whose proportions are drawn at random within each species ¹.

How the work was constructed

The program is two script parts that concatenate to 11,325 bytes, SHA-256 8ec20143df947b5b65cf24c5ee1e8becc12f7ae49b1470eb4544251fa617d3fc. It was retrieved from the Art Blocks index on 20 September 2026 and read in full. No code is reproduced here ¹.

It seeds a small xorshift generator from the start of the token hash. It then draws, in this order, a world, an eye colour, an albino test, a body colour, a species, a mouth and an eyebrow type. After those come dozens of continuous values for the body ¹. To test this reading, the trait draws were reimplemented in Python and run on all 100 hashes. The reimplementation reproduced every one of the 600 published trait values (own computation) ¹.

The probabilities in the table are computed from the program; the counts are from the index ¹.

The body is a chain of limbs. A torso segment is laid down first, then a neck from its end, then a head from the neck's end. Each is a straight or curved stroke with its own thickness, length and angle, drawn within ranges set per species. Legs hang from a hip in thigh, calf and foot segments, and the arms and three-part tail are built the same way. Each limb group is then copied to the far side of the body ¹. The eyes are white balls with a hemisphere of body colour as a lid and a coloured pupil. Eyebrows, when present, are short dark strokes tilted one way for "sad" and the other for "angry" ¹.

Species add their own parts. The triceratops gets a pentagonal frill and three pale horns, the velociraptor a curved claw on each foot, and the stegosaur four pentagonal back plates and a pair of tail spikes. The T. rex and velociraptor alone have toes; the other three have none and a foot of zero size (code reading) ¹. The world is a huge ball of ground colour below the feet, with four clouds of translucent balls at jittered points around it. The sky is a CSS gradient behind the SVG ¹.

Zdog renders the scene as flat vector shapes redrawn on every frame, which gives the "pseudo 3d" of the description ¹.

Quirks in the algorithm

A full read of the program, checked against all 100 token records, turned up the following. Where a point rests on the code alone, it is marked as a code reading.

1. Only 32 bits of the hash matter. The seed is the first fourteen hex digits of the hash, parsed as a JavaScript number. The first bitwise step of the generator then keeps only the low 32 bits. In effect, hex digits 7 to 14 decide the whole work, and the other 56 digits are ignored, except that the leading digits can nudge the rounding of the lowest bits. The Python reimplementation, built on exactly this reading, matched every published trait (own computation) ¹.
2. A generator with a thousand steps, and an albino on the line. Each random value is a whole number of thousandths. The albino test passes at 0.010 or below, so 11 of the 1,000 possible values make an albino: 1.1 per cent, not 1 per cent. For #41 the test value was exactly 0.010. With a strict "less than", #41 would have drawn an ordinary body colour, every later draw, its species included, would have shifted, and the series would have one albino, not two (own computation) ¹.
3. The last option is always a little rarer. The helper that picks from a list scales its range by 0.99, so the final entry in every list gets a smaller share. Stegosaur is 19.1 per cent against 20.2 for the other species, the "black" body 13.3 per cent against about 14.3, and light blue eyes 15.8 per cent against about 16.8 (own computation). In the actual 100 the effect is swamped by chance: the stegosaur is the most common species, with 28 ¹.
4. The triceratops always has a beak. The mouth roll is made for every token, but a triceratops ignores it and always gets the beak. All 21 triceratops have beaks; the other 17 beaks belong to other species ¹. So "beak" is really two traits: a fixed triceratops mouth and a V-shaped mouth that other species roll 20 per cent of the time.
5. Every species is measured for every dinosaur. The table of species presets draws its random proportions for all five species each time, 52 values in all, and keeps one set (code reading). As a result the random stream is the same length whatever the species. The one exception is an albino, which skips the colour pick and shifts every later draw by one ¹.
6. Labels that disagree with the colours. The "black" body is a dark slate blue. The eye called "dark purple" is a deep burgundy, while "light purple" is a saturated violet. "Acqua" and "vulcanic" are the published spellings. The code's own names are rex, diplo, raptor, tricera and stego ¹. The stegosaur's back plates are always the same orange whatever the body colour, and only an albino would change them. No albino stegosaur exists ¹.
7. Dead code and loose variables. The "surprised" mouth branch contains checks for the "sad" mouth that can never be true. A zoom constant is defined and never used. The tail angle and the drag rotation are assigned without being declared, so they become global variables. The triceratops's nose horn is placed at a fixed height rather than relative to the head (all code reading) ¹.
8. Interactivity. The opening spin lasts 150 frames with an eased start and stop. After that the viewer can drag to turn the scene. Tilt is limited so that it never passes under the planet. The program keeps redrawing the whole SVG on every frame even when nothing moves, and it sizes the canvas once, on load, so a resized window is not followed (code reading) ¹.
9. Two starting angles. Each dinosaur starts turned by one of two angles, 36 or 144 degrees, which roughly mirror each other. This is not a published trait (code reading) ¹.
10. No two alike. All 100 tokens have different combinations of the six traits. 33 of the 35 possible species and colour pairings occur; the missing two are a blue and a purple diplodocus (own computation) ¹.

The most coveted variants

No collector survey of dino pals was found. What follows rests on trait counts, on the two works Sotheby's chose to sell, and on the one press report of a private sale.

The albinos (2 of 100). #41 is an albino triceratops with angry brows, light blue eyes and a beak, on a mountain world. #74 is an albino diplodocus with angry brows, red eyes and a happy mouth, on a beach ¹. Albinos are cream all over, with pale pink mouths. They are the rarest trait value in the project ¹. At retrieval #74 sat in the second-largest holding, a wallet with 12 dino pals; no source inspected names it ¹.

Sad mouths (7) and dark purple eyes (8). These are the rarest values of their traits. Sad mouths fall on #2, #31, #57, #67, #79, #83 and #94, on three species only: diplodocus, velociraptor and T. rex ¹. #67, a velociraptor, is the only token with both a sad mouth and dark purple eyes. #57 and #67 are the only two with both a sad mouth and sad eyebrows ¹.

Invocation 0. Token #0, a blue stegosaur on a beach, was minted on 25 May 2021, four days before the public sale ¹. Wild XYZ says "Dino Pal #0" was auctioned for the UNICEF Innovation Fund ⁴. No record of that auction, its date or its price was found.

The Sotheby's works. #71, a green diplodocus with sad eyebrows on a beach, was lot 1 of "Grails: Property from an Iconic Digital Art Collection Part IV", an online sale in New York from 8 to 16 August 2023 ⁵⁶. The estimate was $3,000 to $4,000. The result is shown only to logged-in users and was not seen ⁵. The provenance reads "Minted by raj1006; acquired from the original minter" ⁵. Jing Daily reported that the works in the Grails sales came from the NFT collection of the failed fund Three Arrows Capital ⁷. So #71 was the dino pal in that collection. The other 21 lots in Part IV included works by Tyler Hobbs, Dmitri Cherniak and Kjetil Golid, which put a Factory character piece beside some of the best-known works on the platform ⁶.

A year later #88, a red T. rex on a beach, was lot 53 in Sotheby's "Digital Art Day Sale", 15 to 22 August 2024, estimated at $1,000 to $2,000, with provenance "Minted by beneth" ⁸⁹. Its result was also hidden, and an automated read of the sale page did not find it among the lots listed there ⁹.

A reported 85 ETH sale. A Watcher.Guru explainer of 10 September 2021 says #9 "sold for 85 ETH". It describes it as a blue velociraptor with purple eyes and sad eyebrows, which matches the index ¹⁰¹. The same article is unreliable elsewhere. It gives the artist a surname no other source uses, reports an implausible 30-day volume of "over 37,000 ETH", calls #86 a diplodocus when it is a stegosaur, and names sad eyebrows as the rarest trait when they are the second most common ¹⁰¹. The 85 ETH figure should be treated as unconfirmed.

The mint

Invocation 0 was minted on 25 May 2021 at 21:37:05 UTC. The index records activation on 26 May at 00:52:54 UTC, and the public sale opened on 29 May at 21:01:23 UTC ¹. Sixty-nine tokens were minted in the first ten minutes. The 100th, #99, was minted at 21:20:04 UTC, 18 minutes and 41 seconds after the opening ¹. The index price field is 0.05 ETH. No source confirms that this was the price on the day ¹¹¹.

At retrieval the 100 tokens were held by 61 addresses. 49 held a single token, and the two largest held 13 and 12, a quarter of the edition between them ¹. No source inspected ties either wallet to a named collector. The artist's address holds none, and neither do the three AB5D wallets ¹. The lowest listing recorded by the index was 2.99 ETH ¹².

Copyright and licensing

The index records "NIFTY License" with no link ¹. The earlier AB5D essay read this as the NFT License 2.0 published by Dapper Labs, which lets an owner display and resell the work and allows limited commercial use, while the creator keeps the copyright ¹¹. That reading is plausible but not confirmed by the artist. The script carries no licence header of its own. Zdog is loaded by the platform at view time, and the earlier AB5D essay records its package licence as MIT ¹¹¹. Owning a token does not by itself transfer copyright in the image or the code.

Significance and limitations

dino pals is a small, early and playful Art Blocks project. In one May 2021 evening it put an interactive, character-driven toy on Art Blocks. It was hideo's first published generative work and the start of a practice about games and nostalgia ⁴⁵. Its code is compact and readable. Its one true rarity, the albino, turns out to depend on a single thousandth: #41 exists as an albino only because the test used "or equal" ¹. Its presence in the Three Arrows Capital collection, and at two Sotheby's sales, shows that the market valued it as a piece of Art Blocks history as much as for its own traits ⁵⁷⁸.

The limits are clear. There is almost no first-hand material from the artist, no sourced sale price, and no confirmation of the UNICEF auction.

Unresolved research questions:

1. Was dino pals #0 auctioned for the UNICEF Innovation Fund, and when, where and for how much? Wild XYZ's claim could not be confirmed, and it came through an automated extraction.
2. What did #71 (August 2023) and #88 (August 2024) sell for at Sotheby's? Both results require a login.
3. Did #9 sell for 85 ETH, and when? The only source is an unreliable 2021 explainer; a transfer history on the contract would settle it.
4. What did hideo post about the project on X at release (@hideogenart), and was the public mint price 0.05 ETH?
5. The quotations from Art Blocks, Wild XYZ, Sotheby's and Watcher.Guru were taken from automated page extractions and should be checked against the live pages.

Bibliography