What is a bPeg?

A bPeg is a Base-Pegged NFT: an ERC-721 that can only be minted by wallets holding a required amount of a specific ERC-20 token.

The simple version: hold the token, mint the NFT. The smart contract checks the wallet's live on-chain ERC-20 balance at mint time. There is no allowlist, no Discord role snapshot, and no off-chain gatekeeper deciding who qualifies.

The idea grew out of ClankerCats: 200 fully on-chain pixelcats, the CCAT contract, and the first BasePeg-style bPeg/upeg experiment on Base. Mirage Garden keeps that cat-coded origin, then turns the primitive into a public ERC-721 factory for any Base token community.

That means other projects can launch their own PixelCats-style collections: bring an existing Base ERC-20 token, upload the art, set the holder threshold, and let eligible holders mint ERC-721 bPegs.

The Mirage Garden model

Every Mirage Garden bPeg collection has:

• A gate token: the ERC-20 that qualifies wallets to mint.
• A token threshold: the minimum balance required per mint.
• A max supply: the collection's hard cap.
• A renderer: the on-chain metadata/art renderer used by the collection.
• Trait storage: the on-chain image data uploaded during launch.
• A creator royalty: an EIP-2981 royalty paid to the collection creator on secondary sales.

The resulting collection is still a standard ERC-721. It can be displayed by wallets, transferred, approved, listed, bought, and sold like other NFTs. The gate applies to minting. Once a bPeg is minted, the NFT remains in the holder's wallet even if their gate-token balance changes later.

Why bPegs exist

Many token communities want an NFT layer, but typical NFT launches split the community:

Standard NFT launch	Mirage bPeg launch
Access is based on ETH, allowlists, or timing	Access is based on holding the project's token
Lists and snapshots are off-chain	The mint check happens on-chain
Bots can mint without caring about the token	Minters must satisfy the ERC-20 threshold
NFT and token holders can become separate groups	NFT holders begin as token holders

bPegs are meant for memecoins, DAOs, games, DeFi protocols, social tokens, and any other Base ERC-20 community that wants an NFT layer tied to actual token holding.

Lineage

bPeg sits in a broader family of on-chain object experiments: art and identity that live closer to the chain than a normal off-chain metadata NFT.

Bitcoin Ordinals showed how individual units could carry inscriptions and become collectible digital artifacts. UniPeg-style upegs explored on-chain art objects tied to Uniswap-era culture. ClankerCats brought that spirit to Base with CCAT, a custom upeg registry and 200 on-chain pixelcats.

Mirage Garden's factory bPegs are the standardized continuation of that lineage. They keep the BasePeg idea, but package it as normal ERC-721 collections with repeatable minting, metadata, marketplace, and creator tooling.

bPeg versus ClankerCats CCAT upegs

ClankerCats introduced Base-native on-chain cat identity through the CCAT upeg system. A CCAT upeg is not a normal ERC-721; the CCAT contract stores ownership and exposes cat data through custom functions like OwnerUpegsCount.

Mirage Garden bPegs are different:

ClankerCats CCAT upeg	Mirage Garden bPeg
Custom on-chain registry	Standard ERC-721 collection
Identified by (id, seed) pairs	Identified by ERC-721 token IDs
Read with CCAT-specific functions	Read with normal ERC-721 functions
Used as ClankerCats identity/art	Used by any Base ERC-20 project

The lineage matters: Mirage Garden carries the BasePeg idea into a reusable public launcher, marketplace, and future game world.

Further reading

These links are lineage/context references, not Mirage Garden protocol authority:

Reference	Why it matters
Bitcoin Ordinals and inscriptions	Background on inscription-style digital artifacts and why collectors care about on-chain placement
UniPeg and UPEG on-chain art	Context for upeg-style art experiments that influenced the language around CCAT and bPeg