NFT Protocol: August 2021 Development Update

A sneak peek at the new UI/UX design for the DEX, NFTProtocolNode - our secret weapon, thoughts on Blockparty integration and more!

Jake Cox

Aug 4, 2021

Back End Development

With the v2 smart contract finished and audited at the end of June, most of our back end work throughout July pertained to building out and testing our decentralized data management systems. In July’s development update we reported that we were working with The Graph Protocol and on our own proprietary system we’d tentatively dubbed nft-node for our decentralized data management needs.

Throughout the month of July we discovered that there were some limitations to The Graph Protocol at this time and so we began focusing more so on building out and testing what we’ve now tentatively dubbed NFTProtocolNode to fill in the gaps in our decentralized data management system.

NFT Protocol’s Blockchain Architect Tilo Ochotta had this to say about his work on NFTProtocolNode:

NFTProtocolNode is a versatile data accumulation service providing filtered on-chain information to be used by the DEX UI and future B2B customers.
Similar to The Graph, it accumulates each and every transaction from the blockchain and derives from it the required information to compile a comprehensive database with all contracts and tokens that reside on Ethereum mainnet, Polygon, and EVM chains we will support in the future.
This includes metadata information and token images.
We plan to open-source the project in the future so that the community can participate in its development.

At this juncture it appears as if we’ll rely primarily on NFTProtocolNode for our decentralized data management needs, though we of course still have our subgraph should we need it. We think there are some really great services that could be built on top of NFTProtocolNode and are looking forward to sharing it with the community someday. We truly think it’s going to be a great asset not only to NFT Protocol and its DEX, but to the NFT and crypto spaces at large.

Front End Development

UI/UX Design

August 3rd marked the end of our one month contract with our UI/UX & brand designer. He spent the month of July working with us to create designs for every screen and modal we’ll need to build in order to provide a top-notch UX for the NFT.org landing page and the DEX itself.

Please note there are placeholder images and texts in many of these screen designs.

These screens show the ‘create swap’ interface in its blank/default state and then in the midst of creating two different swaps. Users add assets to each side of the swap via the ‘+’ button which brings up the asset selection pop-up modal below. This modal allows users to view assets available in their connected wallet and also search for additional assets (necessary for adding assets to the ‘buying’ or ‘take’ side).

Users can hover over an asset prior to swap creation and a ‘-’ button will appear and allow the user to remove that asset from the swap. Users can also hover over a given NFT to reveal a menu with remove, modify quantity (if ERC-1155) and view details options (screen below).

On the ‘browse’ page users will be able to view all available swaps and filter through them by asset type, contract address, and tokenID. Users will also be able to view swaps associated with assets in their connected wallet.

Clicking on a swap will bring up a ‘swap details’ pop-up modal as seen below so that users can assess the contents of a given swap in more detail.

Users will also be able to generate and view a ‘profile’ containing a profile image and all of the assets contained in their connected wallet.

Although most of the design process catered to ‘dark mode’ we did have our designer put together a ‘light mode’ theme which will most certainly be included in the final frontend design.

The designer also put together a basic template for a NFT.org landing page that we really like and plan to implement to coincide with launch.

NFT Protocol @NFT_Protocol

The public launch of v2 of our NFT DEX is in sight! Join us on Discord and get involved as we bring the NFT Protocol DEX to life over the coming weeks! discord.gg/6QzJSUtA2Z

We’re really happy with how the design turned out and will be working hard over the coming weeks to build it out and bring the DEX to life!

Other Front End Development

Near the end of July we hired by contract an experienced front end developer, Gustavo Gualbano, to build the React-based styled components library we need to bring the above design to fruition. He’s been working for us full-time for more than a week now and has created the theme, page templates, and some of the styled components themselves.

Gustavo’s work is lining up wonderfully with Remon’s work on the front end “scaffolding” such that Remon will be able to apply Gustavo’s themes, templates and components to his architecture as Gustavo completes them. Remon has also successfully signed some transactions on Ropsten testnet using his pre-styled front end architecture.

Partnerships

Blockparty

Our development partners at Blockparty need a secondary market and so do their growing whitelabel clientele. In July’s development update we announced that NFT Protocol will be looking to provide Blockparty with its secondary market infrastructure and generate fee revenue for the NFT Protocol Treasury (owned by $NFT stakers) by doing so.

Internal discussions among NFT Protocol and Blockparty team members pertaining to what this integration looks like and how we can make it happen were ongoing this month and we’ve laid forth an iterative roadmap working towards what will eventually be a seamless integration. The first iteration will likely look like Blockparty directing its customers who withdraw assets from its platform to the NFT.org DEX via its UI/UX and withdrawal flow. The ultimate goal of seamless integration looks more like Blockparty and its whitelabel clientele having secondary markets embedded with customized front ends into their websites that are powered by NFT Protocol on the backend. Such integration would require some infrastructure changes on behalf of Blockparty and research as to what those changes ought to be has already yielded some viable and appealing options as to what those changes might look like.

Blockparty and NFT Protocol remain committed to becoming increasingly vertically integrated over time as a mutual business model and more information on this process will be forthcoming.

Immutable X

Immutable X contacted us in July and provided us with access to their documentation and testing environment. Because Immutable X is itself a smart contract on Ethereum integrating NFT Protocol (which is also a smart contract on Ethereum) with Immutable X is a nuanced and complex endeavor - we need to create a mechanism for our smart contract to work effectively with theirs as opposed to simply making calls to their smart contract as would be the case for a platform like OpenSea.

We’ve begun to poke around their documentation and do a little brainstorming as to how we can make this integration happen. It’s possible that we may be limited in our ability to integrate with Immutable X by their development timeline (there are some features that they plan to provide on their end that aren’t quite ready yet). We also foresee a means by which NFTProtocolNode could help us integrate Immutable X.

We’ll continue to explore their documentation and brainstorm possibilities such that we can fit an Immutable X integration into our product roadmap when a means of integration becomes clear.

Others

Blockparty CTO and NFT Protocol lead developer Joseph Fiscella is always hard at work with business development related activity and he has some additional partnerships and integrations in process with which we hope to move forward once the DEX is live.

Governance

When we launched our governance forum at the end of May we chose to mimic Uniswap’s three-tiered governance model and quorum requirements.

In July the NFT Protocol community successfully took a governance proposal through all three tiers of governance, met quorum within each tier, and ratified its first major governance proposal - NFTP001 - DEX Launch Liquidity Mining.

The proposal requested that a swath of tokens be allocated from the governance pool towards a program wherein people who provide liquidity to the DEX when it launches will be eligible to claim a number of $NFT tokens.

You can read more about the proposal here:

https://gov.nft.org/t/governance-proposal-nftp001-dex-launch-liquidity-mining/50

Conclusion

Things didn’t align for us to get the DEX launched in July as we’d hoped, but we now have all of the pieces and personnel in place to move swiftly towards a completed product that we will be proud to launch - and we now have a more realistic goal of launching in August in sight.

Once the DEX is live we will focus our attention on bringing forth the new $NFT staking program as outlined in July’s development update. We’ll continue to work on establishing a plan for integrating with Blockparty and Immutable X, solidifying and planning additional partnerships and integrations, planning our next feature set, and monitoring NFT activity on other blockchains on which NFT Protocol may find a home some day.

We’re really excited about the new design and all of the thoughtfulness that went into crafting an incredible UX through the design process. We’re really excited about NFTProtocolNode - how it will allow us to provide the NFT space with a truly decentralized product from front to back and side to side and for the services we hope to build on top of it. Most of all we’re really excited for you all to see and use this product that we’ve worked so hard to build - for $NFT holders and the NFT space at large. You’ll have it in front of you on your screen before you know it!

~ Jake Cox - NFT Protocol Community & Product Manager

If you haven’t already joined us on Discord - please do! The NFT space seems to have chosen Discord as its platform of choice so it’s important that we continue to build up our presence and activity level on Discord as the DEX launch approaches.