Stripes are the colors at the top of your 3bra profile! But where do they come from?
I realized a long time ago that ETH addresses share the same name space as hexadecimal colors in HTML (base 16). Aside from the 0x
at the beginning, ETH addresses and a hex colors only contain the characters 0-9
and a-f
. For example white in html is #FFFFFF
and black is #000000
. Capitalization doesn’t matter for colors, and only matters in ETH addresses as a checksum which isn’t always necessary.
I never had any practical application for that insight, until I had the idea for social profiles on ENS. Now, stripes are a visual encoding of your ETH address and a cornerstone of your 3bra profile! In fact, stripes are where the name 3bra comes from!
To generate Stripes, everything after the 0x in your address is broken up into chunks of 3 and repeated twice to create each color. For example, 3bra.eth’s ETH address is:
0xeB1Ad340B88EC469B9C142d6c71942f109B4C7A7
Which becomes:
eB1-Ad3-40B-88E-C46-9B9-C14-2d6-c71-942-f10-9B4-C7A-7
So 3bra.eth’s stripe colors are:
#eb1eb1
#Ad3Ad3
#40B40B
#88E88E
#C46C46
#9B99B9
#C14C14
#2d62d6
#c71c71
#942942
#f10f10
#9B49B4
#C7AC7A
#777777
An ETH address always contains 0x
+ 40 characters, so dividing into chunks of 3 leaves one remaining character. That’s why the last color in your Stripes is simply the final character repeated 6 times. This is actually a pretty nice feature in that it always results in white (if F), black (if 0) or a shade of gray.
I played with tons of “algorithms” for generating Stripes, and this one resulted in the right amount of stripes and the most vibrant colors.
I have a feeling we’ll see some pretty cool sets of Stripes as more and more people connect with 3bra. I could see Stripes turning into a cool NFT project or even used by other projects to display ETH addresses more visually.