what's The Pyre?

Pyre is an onchain ritual enabling users to burn any ERC-721 NFT, converting its image into a permanent, verifiable grayscale "ghost" stored in a shared vault. The original image is downsampled offchain to exactly 8615 grayscale pixels—a computationally intensive process—accompanied by a zero-knowledge proof generated via SP1 (Succinct) to mathematically confirm accuracy. This proof is verified onchain through the SP1 gateway before the pixels are appended to vault #8615 in The Vessel, an onchain programmable token collection. The burned NFT is irreversibly sent to the dead address (0xdead...), ensuring true scarcity and finality. As proof of participation, the burner receives a "grave" ERC-721 NFT with fully onchain metadata. The grave dynamically renders its ghost image by reading pixels directly from the vault using Solidity assembly to generate a BMP, embedded in an SVG, and base64-encoded into a JSON URI—no IPFS or external dependencies. This creates an immutable, communal logbook of digital funerals, where each burn contributes to a growing chain of preserved essences, blending destruction with eternal onchain memory.

The Pyre showcased a zk system turning NFTs into onchain ghosts at a Mathcastles event.