PizzaDAO Presents RarePizza NFTs, Powered by Chainlink

7 min readMar 22, 2021

Rare Art for the Common Good

RarePizzas is a radical open source community-driven project centered around a simple shared vision: “Pizza Shud B Free!”

Through the sale of 10,000 unique digital pizza NFTs, the PizzaDAO team is funding a giveaway of more than 10,000 physical pizzas from local pizzerias around the globe on Bitcoin Pizza Day, May 22. Supporters are calling RarePizzas The World’s First Edible NFT.

Launched in late February from an offhand remark in a Clubhouse chat room, the project has grown organically to include more than 300 artists and 30 developers collaborating from around the world, supported by a global ‘Pizza Mafia’ dedicated to outreach and promotion.

In order to ensure each individual pizza NFT is verifiably unique and distributed in a provably fair manner, we are excited to announce we have integrated Chainlink VRF as our on-chain randomness solution to secure the Pizza creation process end-to-end. Chainlink VRF is highly secure and fully verifiable on-chain, ensuring no two pizzas will ever be exactly alike.

Algorithmically Generated VFX Composite Art

From the designs on the boxes to each ingredient of the pizzas, all concept artwork for RarePizzas has been contributed by volunteers. The ‘baking’ process is being managed by master VFX artist Anthony Shafer, affectionately known as Head Chef Shrimp, assisted by a team of technical sous chefs who are developing the topping art distribution algorithms. Chef Shrimp utilizes professional-grade motion picture VFX software to create unique composite images that are inimitable by consumer tools, bucking the pixel-art trend to create visually stunning works of art unlike anything yet seen in the NFT space.

Selected RarePizza Boxes from a series of 100 distinct designs, currently on sale at OpenSea.io and on RarePizzas.com

Round 1 : RarePizzas NFT Launch Raises $500K in Five Hours

The first round of RarePizzas became available to the public on 15 March 2021 at 3:14pm UTC. Patrons were able to reserve their pie by purchasing a Rare Pizza Box NFT from RarePizzas.com.

In just five hours, gross revenues exceeded $500,000 USD (218 ETH), achieving the project’s first target of funding the donation of at least 10,000 free pizzas to the public. It appears some patrons have an especially hearty appetite, purchasing as many as 39 RarePizza reservations. The kitchen is certainly going to be busy.

Rare Pizza Technology, Randomness, and Chainlink VRF

The best part about cooking is that it’s always a little random, even if you follow the recipe exactly. These pizzas are no different; randomness in the system is necessary to make the pizza generation process unpredictable and fun. The challenge is that a secure source of randomness is extremely difficult to create on the blockchain, which is inherently deterministic and immutable. To solve this problem, the PizzaDAO developers have integrated Chainlink’s Verifiable Randomness Function (VRF) to guarantee each pizza is unique, as well as to serve the RarePizza NFTs in a provably random distribution to hungry customers.

Through a user-supplied seed value and an oracle’s private key, Chainlink VRF generates a verifiably random number and a corresponding cryptographic proof of integrity, which is then posted on-chain. Users can then combine the seed, proof, and oracle’s public key to independently verify the randomness hasn’t been tampered with in any way. The integration of Chainlink VRF was a simple process and allowed us to focus on how the RarePizza NFTs will be crafted and distributed, without worrying about illegitimate pizza being created.

Today, Chainlink VRF is being used to randomly assign box art for reservations on the Ethereum mainnet in a verifiable manner. Tomorrow, Chainlink VRF will be used to seed a variety of functions in the pizza generation engine that require a secure source of randomness. The chefs are still cooking up the recipe, but future plans include the use of VRF on the Polygon network, where transactions are more affordable and fast for users. In turn, this will optimize the pizza making process, benefitting the pizza patrons as well as the chefs.

Why VRF Matters in the NFT Ecosystem

Randomness within generative NFT artwork has traditionally been an incredibly difficult problem to solve. Using on-chain RNG solutions like a blockhash is not sufficient as it can be trivially manipulated by miners, while off-chain RNG solutions are far too opaque and require a significant amount of trust. A Verifiable Randomness Function like Chainlink VRF solves these issues through a cryptographic proof which cannot be manipulated by anyone, including the users, miners, oracle, or even us.

The importance of ensuring the randomness used in the creation of NFTs is non-gameable cannot be overstated, not just for RarePizzas but for generative NFTs of all kinds. With insecure RNG solutions, malicious actors can arbitrarily manipulate the traits of newly minted NFTs as well as skew their distribution in any way they want. This means the NFTs wouldn’t be unique or rare, defeating the entire purpose. VRF upholds the value proposition of generative NFTs by ensuring they are truly rare through verifiable uniqueness and provably fair distributions.

This is why we see Chainlink VRF being not only a crucial component of RarePizza NFTs, but for the entire NFT ecosystem as whole, ensuring all generative NFTs are truly unpredictable.

NFTs and Fair Gaming

This further extends towards gaming, where NFTs can play an integral role in expanding game narratives, and VRF can be applied to generate fair and provable game mechanics. Consequently, by introducing NFTs into a game, we are by default increasing their utility. To this end, the PizzaDAO is dedicated to making sure that Rare Pizza NFTs are not only uniquely designed, but also have a stable or increasing utility through applications such as gaming. One such example was presented by OpenDive at ETHGlobal, who introduced Rare Pizza NFTs into a virtual reality pizza slicing game.

The RarePizza Minting Process

While the design of the individual pizzas remains a mystery (for now), the RarePizza Box designs were unveiled at the reservation sale. 99 versions exist; each version has a cover design, a name, and a description.

Individual boxes each have a $ZABOX token number, indicating the box’s serial number in the minting sequence. Possession of a $ZABOX token guarantees the holder will receive a RarePizza NFT ($RPZA) for the worldwide pizza party on May 22. Box designs have no correlatio

n with the type of pizza they will contain, adding an element of surprise for speculative collectors and traders.

The PizzaDAO and Radical Open Source Community

Beyond free pizza, many contributors to the PizzaDAO believe that information should be free. In accordance, all RarePizza assets are under a Creative Commons license. The fully open-source code and contracts are publicly viewable at the RarePizzas Github repository.

RarePizzas Media Goes Mainstream

In only three weeks since the project’s inception, social media engagement has been rapidly snowballing toward mainstream viral adoption. RarePizzas has attracted the attention of Food & Beverage Magazine, who have featured the project in a Facebook Live interview, website coverage, and multiple Clubhouse discussions. Actor / musician Drake Bell (of Nickelodeon’s “Drake and Josh”) has supported the project on Twitter and Clubhouse. As RarePizzas continue to heat up, more news outlets are picking up the story.

Bringing DeFi and Web3 to a New Audience

The enthusiastic adoption of the PizzaDAO ethos and RarePizzas project has catalyzed the adoption of advanced Web3 tools by a community with little or no prior exposure to the technology. Many pizza patrons installed MetaMask for the first time and learned how to purchase and transfer cryptocurrencies in order to participate in the initial RarePizzas NFT sale.

As Rare Pizza Boxes began trading, new users became incentivized to educate themselves and each other on how to understand gas prices, transaction speeds, and other complex components of decentralized finance technology.

The gamification of art collection for a charitable cause essentially provides a fun and accessible gateway for mainstream Web3 adoption, accelerated by an active community providing technical resources and support in real time.

Together with Chainlink, we are not just creating pizza NFTs, but creating provably rare generative NFTs with definitive proof of their uniqueness which can be fairly acquired by anyone in the world with just an internet connection. We see this combination of technologies as being a significant catalyst in the world of NFTs and we are more than excited to see what the future brings.

About Chainlink

Chainlink is the most widely used and secure way to power universally connected smart contracts. With Chainlink, developers can connect any blockchain with high-quality data sources from other blockchains as well as real-world data. Managed by a global, decentralized community of hundreds of thousands of people, Chainlink is introducing a fairer model for contracts. Its network currently secures billions of dollars in value for smart contracts across the decentralized finance (DeFi), insurance and gaming ecosystems, among others.

Chainlink is trusted by hundreds of organizations to deliver definitive truth via secure, reliable data feeds. To learn more, visit chain.link, subscribe to the Chainlink newsletter, and follow @chainlink on Twitter.

RarePizza Links

RarePizzas / PizzaDAO official website: wwwRarePizzas.com
Visit the RarePizzas Github repository
Contribute to the RarePizzas Gitcoin Grant
Follow the $ZABOX token on etherscan.io to see who owns which / how many RarePizza Boxes