Shackled: a 3D Rendering Engine Programmed Entirely in Ethereum Smart Contracts

TL;DR

This paper introduces Shackled, the first fully on-chain 3D rendering engine built entirely with Ethereum smart contracts, demonstrating its capabilities, benchmarking performance, and exploring applications in generative art.

Contribution

The work presents the design, implementation, and deployment of a novel on-chain 3D rendering engine in Ethereum smart contracts, along with datasets, benchmarks, and use cases.

Findings

Shackled successfully renders 3D scenes entirely on-chain.

Benchmark results showcase the performance and limitations of on-chain rendering.

Demonstrates potential for on-chain generative art and complex algorithm execution.

Abstract

The Ethereum blockchain permits the development and deployment of smart contracts which can store and execute code 'on-chain' - that is, entirely on nodes in the blockchain's network. Smart contracts have traditionally been used for financial purposes, but since smart contracts are Turing-complete, their algorithmic scope is broader than any single domain. To that end, we design, develop, and deploy a comprehensive 3D rendering engine programmed entirely in Ethereum smart contracts, called Shackled. Shackled computes a 2D image from a 3D scene, executing every single computation on-chain, on Ethereum. To our knowledge, Shackled is the first and only fully on-chain 3D rendering engine for Ethereum. In this work, we 1) provide three unique datasets for the purpose of using and benchmarking Shackled, 2) execute said benchmarks and provide results, 3) demonstrate a potential use case of Shackled in the domain of tokenised generative art, 4) provide a no-code user interface to Shackled, 5) enumerate the challenges associated with programming complex algorithms in Solidity smart contracts, and 6) outline potential directions for improving the Shackled platform. It is our hope that this work increases the Ethereum blockchain's native graphics processing capabilities, and that it enables increased use of smart contracts for more complex algorithms, thus increasing the overall richness of the Ethereum ecosystem.