Some contracts introduce new collective identities, encoding George Simmel’s 1908 idea, and our identities in Web3 are in part a function of how our activities relate to others on the chain.

These visuals illustrate one prominent type of smart contract to achieve this, called Safe vaults. Presented are thousands of smart contracts with varying numbers of signers. Some have just one signer, others dozens. These are visualized from raw data, about 4,000 Safe contracts that were created in late 2021. From bottom to top, left to right, we have ordering in time, when the contract was created. The result is a grid, and the vertices or “joints” are the contracts. The lines connecting to them are the signers. Color and length of the “leaves” correspond to the number of signers on the vault, the size of its bud corresponds to Ether balances, and the symbols of the leaf “tip” reflect how many signers are required to confirm a vault’s transaction in Web3.

All of these visual patterns are mapped from the raw data of 4,000-or-so Safe contracts, and over 10,000 unique signers across them. Using a color spectrum from dampened blues or greens into a bright terminus, a natural object appears, giving a sense of growth, getting more complex and expanding upward. Complications of the network self.

This description is derived from a fuller survey of identity concepts here:

https://cubiclearn.gitbook.io/dae/dae/g-l-space/identity