Station
One Ordnance Survey register entry is chosen: pillar number, grid reference, date of levelling, height above Newlyn datum. The only human choice in the pipeline.
Hover the plate to read the ground
seed 0x8a41c2 · 2400 × 3000 · on-chain SVG
Great Gable
Cairn No. 001 · Trig pillar S1523
MA
ArtistMarisol Ayen
8F
Top bidder0x8f2a…c41d
Current bid
4.85ETH
$17,140
23 bids
23 bids
00Days
05Hrs
42Min
18Sec
ETH
Bids in the final 10 minutes extend the auction by 10 minutes. Losing bids are returned in the same transaction.
The cairn on Great Gable sits inside a ring of crags that the contours draw as five nested closures. The summit stone has been rebuilt at least four times.
Summit899 m
Grid refNY 211 104
Levelled12 June 1936
Contract0x4b1e…88f0
StandardERC-721
MetadataOn-chain SVG
Royalty5.0% · EIP-2981
Traits are derived from the token seed at render time — the contract does not store them.
Browse the edition
Eight plates open this release. Select one to load it above.
How a plate is made
Four deterministic steps, all of them on-chain.
Seed
The entry hashes to 256 bits that fix the number of summits and hollows, their positions and heights, and the direction of the prevailing slope.
Contour
The renderer walks the field and emits a contour every ten metres, with an index line every fifth, as on a 1:25 000 sheet. Colour follows height, not taste.
Settle
The plate mints at the moment of sale. The buyer's address is written into the provenance record inside the token itself.
Between 1935 and 1962 the Ordnance Survey retriangulated Great Britain, and to do it they put a concrete pillar on eleven thousand summits — very often beside a cairn that had already stood there for centuries.
Each pillar was levelled, named and entered in a register. Those registers are public record, and they are the seed material for this series. Cairn takes one entry per token and hashes it into a terrain field, then contours it exactly as a surveyor would — except the pen is a marching-squares routine that lives in the contract and never draws the same hill twice.
Nothing is stored off-chain. The renderer is 4.1 KB of Solidity that returns an SVG, and the metadata is generated in the same call. If every server on earth went dark tomorrow, the work would still be recoverable by anyone who could run tokenURI().
Collection facts
Supply512
Minted128
Owners214
ChainEthereum
RendererImmutable
LicenceCC BY-NC 4.0
Market fee2.5%
Questions
Before you bid.
What exactly am I buying?
A single ERC-721 token whose image is generated by the contract itself. There is no image file to lose: the SVG is assembled on request from the token's seed, so the plate is as durable as the chain it sits on.
How does the auction settle?
The highest bid at closing wins. Settlement runs in one transaction: the token transfers to the winner, proceeds split to artist and marketplace, and every outbid deposit is returned automatically. You never need to claim a refund.
What happens if someone bids in the last minute?
Any bid inside the final ten minutes pushes the close out by ten minutes. The extension repeats for as long as bidding continues, so a late bid cannot win by arriving unanswerable.
What does it cost beyond the bid?
Network gas on the winning transaction, plus a 2.5% marketplace fee taken from the sale proceeds — not added to your bid. Losing bids cost only the gas already spent placing them.
Can I resell the work?
Yes, anywhere ERC-721 is supported. A 5% royalty to the artist is declared through EIP-2981 and honoured by marketplaces that implement the standard.