Space Debris [warning]

The work and its context

Space Debris [warning] is project 80 on the Art Blocks contract 0xa7d8d9ef8d8ce8992df33d8b8cf4aebabd5bd270. The index records 81 invocations against a maximum of 81, the runtime p5@1.0.0, a square aspect ratio, a price field of 1 ETH and the licence label "NFT License" with no link ¹. The collection page files it under Factory and the Art Blocks 500, with a release date of 24 August 2021 ². Its description is the distress call shared by the whole series: "L5-A752 to dispatch... we have been attacked, badly... Lagrange stability has been compromised" ¹.

Each output is a near-black square crossed by a lattice of coloured blocks and bars, over which 25 to 50 small shards drift ¹.

Warning is the middle chapter of a trilogy. Space Debris [m'aider] (project 79) has 93 outputs and Space Debris [ravaged] (project 81) has 32 ³. The earlier AB5D essays read the falling edition sizes as a deliberate narrative contraction ⁴⁵.

This revision finds a different explanation on-chain. The three projects were not sold as three separate drops. They were prizes in a single auction run by WhaleStreet, a DeFi protocol, and paid for in its token, $HRIMP. A Chainlink random number chose which of the three each buyer received, with warning as the middle tier ⁶⁷⁸. The edition sizes are therefore largely the outcome of that draw. WhaleStreet's follow-up contract calls its successor "Season 2", which implies the trilogy was the first season of its DeFi Keys, and it names pxlq again ⁹.

Conception and development

The two partners. WhaleStreet described itself as "a decentralized, non-custodial protocol for 'Whale Swaps'". Its token $HRIMP is "used to bid for and buy DeFi Collectibles", which it defined as NFTs "that give the holder power to orchestrate swap events" ¹⁰. That page sits on Lendroid's domain. The verified minter contract carries a licence header pointing to Lendroid's protocol.2.0 repository ¹⁰⁶. Amy Castor's March 2021 report on Metakovan states that "Lendroid powers WhaleStreet", names Vignesh Sundaresan as Lendroid's founder, and notes that "WhaleStreet hosted the B20 sale on Jan. 23" ¹¹. WhaleStreet's launch post of December 2020 says $HRIMP had no team allocation and that the protocol ran on an eight-hour cycle of "heartbeats" ¹². A second post says the collectibles give holders "the right to decide which tokens will be swapped" and set the fee percentage they earn ¹³. Lendroid's GitHub organisation holds the B20 contracts, but the WhaleStreet repository its page links to now returns 404 ¹⁴¹⁰. Etherscan labels the Art Blocks artist address for the series, 0x0950…e6d0, "WhaleStreet: Deployer" ¹⁵.

pxlq is a pseudonymous generative artist. Art Blocks describes pxlq as "a generative artist and creative coder who experiments with a range of abstract styles" ¹⁶. By June 2021 pxlq already had four solo projects in the index: Dynamic Slices (project 4), Cyber Cities (14), Sentience (20) and Hieroglyphs (30) ³. The companion AB5D essay on Sentience sets out that background and pxlq's January 2021 OpenSea Spotlight in detail ¹⁷¹⁸.

Who wrote what. No statement divides the credit, but the code offers evidence. Warning's random helpers have the same names as pxlq's Hieroglyphs and as the other two Space Debris scripts ³¹. Its palettes come from pxlq's earlier work (code reading) ¹³:

• Cyber is the list Sentience publishes as Royalty and Cyber Cities also uses, duplicated blue included.
• Moonrise is the palette of the same name in Sentience and Dynamic Slices. It is the wesanderson package's Darjeeling1 ¹⁷¹⁹.
• Voyage and Essence share colours with Cyber Cities.

The drawing code is therefore very likely pxlq's. WhaleStreet's part, on the evidence found, was the sale mechanism described below ⁶⁷. No statement of pxlq's terms (fee, royalty split or share of the $HRIMP) was found.

Three settings of one program. All three scripts share the Lagrange class, the steering routine dark_matter and a GTYPE variable set to 0, 1 and 2 ¹³. Warning sits between its siblings on almost every setting:

Source: the three programs in the Art Blocks index ¹³; the m'aider and ravaged columns follow the companion ravaged essay ⁵.

How the work was constructed

The program is a single script of 5,323 bytes, SHA-256 e6040632d7b56fea3210df2179b20bd5bc1ad6a9ac8244f727937a6f9f9f4c94. It was retrieved from the Art Blocks index and read in full. No code is reproduced here ¹. To test the claims below it was run headlessly in Node for all 81 hashes; the eight renders inspected match the palettes and densities predicted (computed) ¹.

Randomness. The seed is the first sixteen characters of the hash, "0x" included. A xorshift generator then draws every value, each rounded to one of a thousand steps ¹.

Palette. One of seven palettes is picked: Cyber, Pulp, Essence, Voyage, Moonrise, Cult and Eternity. Each has five to seven entries, and the background is always #000003 ¹. Three colour cursors, for whole-region blocks, strips and debris, each repeat a colour one to five times before moving on. The simulation gives Cyber and Eternity 15 tokens each, Moonrise 13, Pulp 12, Essence 11, Voyage 8 and Cult 7 (computed) ¹.

The lattice. A recursive routine cuts a field 1.3 times the size of the canvas into rectangles. At each step there is a 30 per cent chance of partitioning the current rectangle into strips of 50 to 100 units. The first one to five boundaries are skipped, so the first strip is always wide ¹. A strip is filled with a probability of up to 20 per cent. In 90 per cent of cases it also gets a twin reflected across the diagonal of the field, which produces the crossing horizontals and verticals. Occasionally a whole region is filled as one block ¹.

Stored blocks range from 6 (#46, #68) to 768 (#62), median about 150 (computed) ¹.

The debris. Each shard has a random position, velocity and stretch. Between 0 and 50 per cent of shards are "glyphs": irregular shapes whose corners are picked from the corners of a square. Across the edition they number 555 of 3,076 shards, 18 per cent (computed) ¹. Each frame a shard steers gently (scale 0.1) towards the average position of shards within 50 units. Shards wrap around a field 1.5 times the canvas, so fewer than half are visible at any moment (code reading) ¹.

Quirks in the algorithm

A full read of the program, checked against all 81 hashes, turned up the following. Where a point rests on the code alone, it is marked as a code reading.

1. Two names, one palette. Moonrise and Eternity list exactly the same five colours in the same order. The code has six distinct palettes under seven names, and 28 of the 81 tokens (13 Moonrise, 15 Eternity) share one scheme of red, teal, gold, orange and sky blue (computed) ¹.
2. A duplicated blue. Cyber lists #4361EE twice, which doubles its weight. In #0 it fills 149 of 538 blocks, against 71 to 82 for each other colour. The same duplicate appears in Sentience and Cyber Cities, so it was inherited (computed) ¹¹⁷.
3. Ghost blocks. Cult's first colour, #040404, is almost identical to the background. Such blocks read as faint dark panels that hide whatever lies beneath. In #66, 11 of the 82 blocks are ghosts; in #13, 82 of 439 are (computed) ¹. The ravaged palette B/W has the same effect with an exact match ⁵.
4. Arguments in the wrong slots. As in ravaged, the block calls write invert= and a= as if they were named arguments. JavaScript assigns them as globals and passes them by position ¹⁵. The inversion flag lands in the "flip" slot, so base and twin coincide and the twin, drawn second as an outline, covers the solid block: the hollow boxes of #66 and #72. Inversion is on for 20 per cent of draws, or off entirely, per layer, so 28 tokens have no outlines while #9 and #72 have 60 each (computed) ¹.
5. Dead texture code. The grid-of-dots routine that ravaged uses for half its outputs is present in warning, but its gate requires a random value above 1. It never runs ¹.
6. Four or five corners, almost never three. The vertex count is a decimal from 3 to 5 used as a loop limit, so fractions round up and only an exact 3.0, drawn once in #68, gives a triangle. Corners are picked with replacement from four positions, so 197 of the 555 glyphs have fewer than three distinct points and draw as a line or nothing (computed) ¹.
7. Uneven choices. The array picker scales by 0.99 before rounding down, so Eternity, the last palette, comes up 134 times in 1,000 against 144 or 145 for the others (code reading) ¹.
8. Almost no gathering. At a steering scale of 0.1, the mean nearest-neighbour distance falls only from 105 to 101 units after 600 frames; in ravaged, at 0.75, it halves (computed) ¹⁵. Warning's debris drifts rather than condenses.
9. No traits, no interaction, fixed motion. The index records no features; the palette names exist only in the code. There are no mouse or key handlers, the animation uses no unseeded randomness (runs at 700 and 1,000 pixels agree after 600 frames, computed), and GTYPE is never read ¹.
10. A heavy redraw. Every frame repaints the whole lattice before moving the shards: 768 rectangles per frame for #62 (computed) ¹.

The most coveted variants

No trait data, auction-house results or collector commentary were found. What follows picks out structurally distinct outputs, with the few traceable sales.

The top traced sales (#3, #42). OpenSea's collection page gives #3 the highest last sale in the edition ²⁰. It was bought in the $HRIMP auction on 3 June 2021 for about 63,247 $HRIMP (computed) ¹²¹. On 7 August 2021 it sold on OpenSea for 1.5 ETH to the address resolving to sendonly.eth, which resold it for 3 ETH on 22 August ²²²³. #42 was minted on 12 August for about 50,584 $HRIMP, close to the auction floor. Under eight hours later it sold on OpenSea for 2 ETH to silversurfer888.eth (computed) ¹²¹²⁴.

Invocation 0. #0, a dense Cyber work in blues, violets and pinks, was one of the deployer's test mints on 1 June 2021 ¹⁷.

The sparsest (#46, #68). Each stores only six blocks. #46 reduces the lattice to a single teal cross. #68 shows two pink bars in a nearly empty field, and it is also the only output whose glyphs can be triangles (computed) ¹.

The densest (#62) and its twin palette (#20). #62 has the most blocks in the edition. #20 uses Eternity, which is the same palette under another name. #20's holder address carries the self-declared Art Blocks profile "Snowfro" ¹²⁵.

Outlines (#72). Voyage in cream, slate, sage and coral, with 60 outlined boxes, the joint highest ¹.

AB5D's #66. Cult, with seven entries in the edition, is the rarest palette. #66 shows its cyan, teal, red and pink with ghost panels and hollow boxes ¹. It was bought in the auction for 111,804.49 $HRIMP on 31 August 2021 ⁸²¹. Among the 74 warning keys only #60, bought on 26 August for about 115,618, cost more (computed) ²¹. The Chainlink fulfilment minted it to the address resolving to dancebabby.eth at 19:07:44 UTC ²⁶. It later sold for 0.0701 WETH on 14 August 2025 and for 0.1647 ETH through OpenSea on 24 September 2025. It reached an AB5D wallet 27 minutes after that sale ²⁷²⁸¹.

Notable collectors

At retrieval the 81 tokens sat in 53 addresses ¹. Art Blocks profiles, which holders fill in themselves, name several of them ²⁵:

• The largest holder, with eight (#8, #11, #15, #19, #23, #42, #64, #69), has the username ss888. Etherscan resolves the same address to silversurfer888.eth ²⁴. All eight were among the 11 warning listings on OpenSea at retrieval ²⁰.
• The address that received all six closing mints (#75 to #80) is the auction contract's DAO treasury (see below) ⁷.
• zeneca's profile holds #30 and #36; Snowfro's holds #20.
• Charley (punk9512), whose bio claims "the first complete AB101 collection ever assembled", holds #2, #9 and #25.

A wallet holding seven (#12, #22, #26, #28, #32, #34, #62) has no profile or named owner ¹²⁵.

The $HRIMP auction

The on-chain record shows how the three projects were sold ⁶⁷²⁹:

• The minter. ArtBlocksKeyMinter holds project IDs 79, 80 and 81 under the tiers REGULAR, UNIQUE and LEGENDARY. Given a number from 1 to 100, it mints ravaged for 1 to 15, warning for 16 to 50 and m'aider for 51 to 100 ⁶.
• The auction. MainnetArtBlocksAuctions takes the buyer's $HRIMP, sends it to a DAO treasury address and requests a Chainlink VRF random number. When the number arrives it reduces it modulo 100 and calls the minter ⁷.
• The fee field. The minter also stores a "DAO treasury fee" of 50, 25 and 5 per cent for the three tiers. The auction writes that figure into each key's record, next to the Art Blocks token it points to ⁶⁷. WhaleStreet's blog says a collectible sets the fee percentage its holder earns from swaps ¹³. The natural reading, not stated in any source, is that the treasury took that share of a key's swap fees, so a ravaged key kept the most.

The draw fits the result: of 191 auction tokens, 91 were m'aider, 74 warning and 26 ravaged (48, 39 and 14 per cent, against roughly 49, 35 and 15 implied; computed) ¹³.

Epochs. The auction contract reports a price of zero once a key has been bought in the current epoch ⁷. The epoch clock sits in the unverified curve contract, but WhaleStreet's successor minter publishes it: a heartbeat start of 00:00 UTC on 6 December 2020, the day $HRIMP farming began, and an epoch of eight hours ⁹¹². On that clock the auction's PurchaseMade events carry epochs 533 to 823, from 1 June to 6 September 2021 ²¹. There are 191 purchases in 191 different epochs, one for each auction mint (computed) ¹³²¹. So the sale was one key per eight hours at most, and 100 epochs passed with no buyer.

The price. The 191 keys cost 11,740,245 $HRIMP in all, with a median of about 51,451 each (computed) ²¹. The price never fell below exactly 50,000, and 78 keys were bought at that floor. Every one of the 30 purchases that followed an empty epoch cost exactly 50,000. After a sale, the next epoch opened higher and decayed towards the floor over a few hours, so most buyers waited three to five hours into their window. Keys bought minutes into an epoch, such as #8 and #38, paid about twice the floor (computed) ²¹¹. The exact formula sits in the unverified curve contract ²⁹. The 74 warning keys cost 4,705,366 $HRIMP, a median of about 54,104, and 26 were bought at the floor (computed) ²¹¹. The index's 1 ETH was not what buyers paid, and no contemporary dollar value of $HRIMP could be retrieved ¹.

Season 2. KeyMinter2, deployed on 6 September 2021, starts its season at epoch 823 and rotates artists by 21-epoch weeks ⁹. Comments in its source name three artists, pxlq, Arturo Sandoval and 38 per Mille, whose prizes are WhaleStreet's own ERC-721 contracts, not Art Blocks projects. pxlq's first two, "WhaleStreet Defi Key S2 Artist 1 Key 01" and "Key 02", show supplies of four and one ⁹³⁰. At least nine more purchases followed, up to 11 September ²¹.

The mint

The deployer created the minter at 02:00 UTC on 1 June 2021, then made four direct test mints to one address with draws fixed at 70, 70, 41 and 11. One 70 left no token, probably a failed transaction; the others gave m'aider #0, warning #0 at 04:40:02 and ravaged #0 ⁷¹. At 04:44 ownership passed to the auction contract ⁷. Warning #1 followed on 2 June and #74 on 6 September ¹³. That day the deployer took the minter back and pointed the auction at KeyMinter2 ²⁹⁹.

On 22 and 23 September 2021 the deployer closed the trilogy by hand. It called the minter directly with fixed values: 7 for ravaged, 37 for warning and 87 for m'aider ⁷. Warning #75 to #79 were minted on 22 September and #80 at 02:25:41 UTC on 23 September, all to the treasury address, which still holds them ¹⁷. That address is an ordinary wallet, inactive for about four years ³¹.

The index's start date, 05:15:21 UTC on 24 August 2021, is the second #56 was minted, so 56 tokens predate it, as in ravaged ¹⁵. By month there were 17 mints in June, 14 in July, 36 in August and 14 in September ¹. OpenSea reports a creator fee of 7.5 per cent and lifetime volume of about $237,000 ²⁰. At retrieval the lowest listing was 0.537 ETH ¹.

Copyright and licensing

The index records "NFT License" with no link or version, and the script has no licence notice ¹. The minter's Lendroid licence header covers the contract, not the artwork ⁶, so the image terms are unconfirmed. p5.js is supplied at view time under its own licence.

Significance and limitations

Warning's interest lies less in its image than in how it was sold. It is an early case of an Art Blocks project used as a DeFi reward, bought with a farming token and assigned by Chainlink randomness as the middle of three tiers. The edition sizes read as a narrative are mostly the result of that draw plus a hand-finished close ⁶⁷. The drawing code is recognisably pxlq's and inherits its palettes. Its oddities (two names for one palette, a duplicated blue, near-invisible ghost blocks) come from reused lists, not new design ¹¹⁷.

Outside the chain the record is thin: no artist statement, interview, video or press coverage was found. WhaleStreet's blog and Amy Castor's reporting give only the protocol's context ¹¹¹²¹³.

Unresolved research questions:

1. What did WhaleStreet announce about the Art Blocks season, and on what terms did pxlq take part? The epoch length is now settled on-chain, but the price formula and the meaning of the fee field are not. The blog's index pages refused automated reading, the Wayback Machine and archive.today were blocked, and @WhaleStreetoffl on X could not be read.
2. Were the maxima of 93, 81 and 32 set in advance, or only once the deployer closed the trilogy?
3. How many Season 2 keys were sold in all, and do the pxlq, Arturo Sandoval and 38 per Mille works survive anywhere with images?
4. Who controls the treasury address and the unnamed seven-token wallet?
5. The quotations, contract summaries and $HRIMP amounts, including the 200 PurchaseMade events, were read through automated WebFetch extraction. For 25 August to 2 September the extracted timestamps were offset by one row, so prices were matched by epoch. The #66 figure agrees with the separate treasury-transfer record ⁸, but the full series should be re-pulled from Etherscan and checked by hand.

Bibliography