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Circles are Octra’s on-chain content system. Every Xpectrum collection stores its artwork and metadata in one, addressed as oct://. A collection therefore has no dependency on IPFS, a pinning service, or any host operated by Xpectrum.

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What a Circle is

A Circle is an isolated on-chain environment with its own durable key-value storage. It is not a database and not a server. Files written into it live on Octra and are read back from Octra. For a collection, that means: The collection contract stores the base URI and suffix, and resolves token_uri(id) as base_uri + token_id + suffix after reveal, or the unrevealed URI before it. So the pointer is on-chain and the file it points at is on-chain. Everything in a collection’s Circle is public and readable by anyone. That is deliberate: it is how the marketplace, any indexer, and any wallet render the collection without asking us for anything.

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Generative collections store layers, not baked images

A generative collection can store the trait layers rather than one flattened image per token, with the token composited from chain state at render time. The collection is then reproducible from what is on-chain, and the provenance hash covers the inputs rather than a set of outputs somebody has to trust. See Provenance for what the hash commits to and how to re-derive it.

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Freezing

Writing to a Circle requires its key. A collection’s Circle can be frozen by destroying that key, after which nothing can change: not by the creator, not by us. Frozen is the intended end state for a revealed collection, and the Metadata Standard treats a frozen, provenance-committed collection as safe for an indexer to cache indefinitely.

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Holder-gated private content

Not available. Private, holder-gated Circle content is in development and there is no public interface for it yet. An earlier version of this page described an implementation that is not deployed and does not reflect the intended design. It has been removed.The intended design is content readable only by the current on-chain owner of a token, with no third party in the path. This page will be updated when that is implemented, with the trust model stated in full.
No part of the current product depends on this. Collection art and metadata are public by design, and the sections above describe everything that is currently live.

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Horizon

Exploratory. None of this is live, none of it has a committed timeline, and several items depend on Octra capabilities that are still maturing.
  • Richer Circle programmability, including per-token state where each token carries its own isolated logic
  • Cross-collection interaction between Circles
  • Private Circle state built on Octra’s FHE layer