Competitive art experiment on Starknet
art/peace: a shared pixel canvas, onchain
Every player gets a few pixels at a time. Alone, that is a dot. Together, it is a mural. art/peace takes the idea of Reddit’s r/place to Starknet: pixel placements go through the game’s contracts, so the artwork the community builds is public and verifiable.
Four steps
How it works
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Connect a wallet
The app offers Cartridge Controller, whose session keys place pixels without a wallet prompt for every click — the app sums it up as “No fees + Sessions!”. Standard Starknet wallets work too, and Phantom connects Solana users.
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Pick a color
Each world has its own palette. The project’s canvas configuration ships 15 base colors, and a world’s creator chooses which colors that world uses.
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Place your pixels
You get a small batch of pixels. Place them all and the button reads “Out of Pixels”; after that it counts down until the batch refills. Placements go through the art/peace contracts, so the state of the board is public.
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Build it together
A single player cannot draw much alone. Communities pin stencils to the canvas as a shared guide and split the work across many players.
In the game
Features
The first rounds layered quests, color voting, factions and NFTs on top of pixel placement. The later app, used for the round 3 contest, is organized around four tabs: Canvas, Stencils, Rankings and Account.
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Later app
Stencils
Upload a PNG, JPEG or WebP image, let the app convert it to the world’s palette and pin it to the canvas as a guide others can follow pixel by pixel.
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Later app
Image adjustments
Before pinning a stencil, tune its contrast, saturation, exposure and tint, or remove the background. Music and sound effects can be muted in settings.
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Later app
Rankings
Leaderboards rank players by the pixels they placed, alongside the top worlds.
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Later app
Explore & favorites
Browse hot, new and top worlds, the newest and top stencils, and favorite the ones you want to come back to.
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Early rounds
Color voting
Beyond the base palette, players voted on new colors to add, so the canvas could grow richer as a round went on.
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Early rounds
Daily quests
Short daily tasks — place a few pixels, claim a username, join a faction — rewarded extra pixels on top of the regular batch.
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Early rounds
Factions
Players joined a faction to represent their favorite chain and drew as a team, with shared stencils for the group.
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Early rounds
NFTs
Pieces of the canvas could be minted as NFTs, and other players could like them.
Canvas, worlds, rounds
Worlds & rounds
Rounds with a final snapshot
art/peace runs as a series of rounds. A round opens and closes at fixed times, and when it ends, the final snapshot of the board is the artwork that remains.
The round 3 contest
Round 3 ran from February 21 to February 25, 2025. Its contest worlds measured 256 × 192 pixels and allowed 5 pixels every 5 seconds, and the winners received awards in STRK.
Worlds
The art/peace contracts support many canvases — worlds — each with its own name of up to 31 characters, size, palette, pixel rate and schedule. During round 3, the app showed the contest’s fixed settings for new worlds.
- Main canvas
- 1024 × 768
- World canvas
- 528 × 396
- Base colors
- 15
- Votable colors
- 25
- Color depth
- 5 bits
- Round 3 worlds
- 256 × 192
Open source, MIT license
Under the hood
art/peace is fully open source. The rules of the game live in Starknet contracts; everything else exists to make a very large canvas feel fast.
The project’s README lists Reddit’s technical write-up on r/place among its references. The canvas itself is kept compressed in Redis for fast reads, and an indexer turns Starknet events into data the backend can serve.
- Onchain Starknet contracts for trustless onchain interactions
- Indexer Apibara watches Starknet events and forwards them to the databases
- Backend A monolithic Go service for requests, interactions and data
- Redis Keeps the compressed canvas in memory for fast reads
- Postgres Stores the general data for analytics, frontend and backend
- Frontend A React application where players draw
Questions
FAQ
What is art/peace?
A collaborative, competitive pixel-art game on Starknet. Players place pixels on a shared canvas and coordinate with stencils, and each round ends with a final snapshot of the board.
How is it different from Reddit’s r/place?
The core idea is the same — a huge shared canvas where everyone places a few pixels at a time. In art/peace placements go through Starknet contracts, and over its rounds the game added its own layers: worlds, stencils and rankings, and in the early rounds quests, color voting, factions and NFTs.
What do I need to play?
A wallet. The app supports Cartridge Controller, whose sessions spare you from signing every pixel, standard Starknet wallets, and Phantom for Solana users.
Which networks does it support?
The game is built on Starknet, and the app has both Starknet Mainnet and the Sepolia testnet configured. Solana users connect through Phantom.
Is the code open source?
Yes. The contracts, indexer, backend and frontend are published on GitHub under the MIT license, and contributions go through the project’s contributors guide.
What happens when a round ends?
Each round runs between a fixed start and end time, and the final snapshot of the board is the artwork of that round.