Read me

ASA Compass is a record of the NFTs minted on Algorand in 2021, back when the chain was young and most of these pieces were made by people who have since moved on. Marketplaces of that era closed and took their listings with them. What remains is on the chain, and this site reads it back.

It is built for collectors who care where a piece came from, not for traders. You will find no charts, no floor prices and no rankings designed to make you act quickly.

Every asset minted in the period is read from the chain, with its name, its creator, its metadata and the round it appeared in. Pieces are then grouped into collections, collections are scored, and only those that look like real work by a real author are published.

Nothing here is entered by hand, which is the point: an archive that depended on someone typing it would stop the day that person stopped. It also means the machine makes mistakes, and the next section is about those.

Grouping is guesswork. Names are the strongest signal, so a series called Zombie Punk, Nerd Punk and CowboyPunk is recognised by the word they share, wherever it sits in the name. That same method will occasionally put together two things that merely sound alike, or leave a piece out because its name went its own way.

Some creators used several wallets, and some wallets hold several unrelated series. Both cases are handled, neither perfectly. If a collection is grouped wrong, saying so is the fastest way to fix it.

Most 2021 pieces point at IPFS. Public gateways answer one request happily and fail roughly one in ten when asked for hundreds at once, which made pages full of empty frames. Every image is therefore fetched once and served from this domain instead.

A piece whose image no longer resolves anywhere keeps its entry, with its identifier in place of the picture. It existed, and that is worth recording even when the artwork is gone.

Every price shown is a trade that already happened on the chain. Nothing is an estimate, an appraisal or a suggestion. A collection with no price simply never traded, which is true of most of them.

Live token prices in the top bar come from Vestige and are shown in US dollars. A unit price keeps as many decimals as it needs, since a token worth billionths of a dollar rounds to zero and would read as worthless. A balance is shown in dollars and cents.

Trading is not open yet. The settlement contract is written and tested, and opens once it has been reviewed by someone other than its author. These rules are already set in it:

Pieces held for sale sit in the contract itself, not in anyone's wallet. Cancelling returns them at any time, and the deposit that covers the network's storage comes back with them.

Connecting a wallet reads public data that anyone could read without you. Nothing is stored on a server, and no transaction can ever be signed without your explicit approval inside your own wallet application.

This site will never ask for a seed phrase, a private key or a password. Nobody legitimate ever will, here or anywhere.

The archive covers 2021 mints so far, and 7 collections are marked as adult content and hidden by default. Buying and selling are not open. Some collections are grouped wrong. Some images will never come back.

These are stated here rather than discovered by you, because an archive that oversells itself is not worth trusting on the parts that are right.

If you recognise a collection that is missing, grouped wrong, or credited to the wrong creator, saying so is worth more than any amount of automated tuning. The same goes for a piece of history: who made it, what it was for, whether the project is still alive.