NFT Protocol: October 2021 Development Update
Having completed the UI/UX design for the NFT.org NFT DEX and acquired the personnel to build its components at the end of July, the NFT Protocol engineering and product teams have since had our heads down focused on assembling all of the pieces of the DEX into an alpha stage product. As such there wasn’t much of an update to offer in September other than that “we are working” but now that October is here it’s certainly time for a thorough update on the status of the NFT.org NFT DEX and other aspects of the project.
Back End Development
As was reported in the August development update we are moving forward building the DEX using our proprietary decentralized data management system we’ve dubbed NFTProtocolNode. Throughout August and September we’ve continued to optimize the system to meet our needs in providing sufficient on-demand data for the UI/UX of the DEX - which is no easy task due to the sheer quantity of tokens on Ethereum and Polygon, corresponding metadata, and inconsistencies in token and metadata structure.
At the time this post was published the Ethereum chain sync was at 100% and the metadata sync was at 99% - meaning the system has compiled nearly all of the token data and corresponding metadata from Ethereum mainnet. After noticing the system seemed to struggle with certain types of metadata, we’ve since optimized the system to pass over any data it can’t digest promptly and then make subsequent passes to try again until all digestible data has been captured or identified for additional review.
With this system we believe we’ve built perhaps the most comprehensive decentralized database of Ethereum token data and corresponding metadata in existence and as such we are already fielding substantial demand for access to NFT ProtocolNode. There is already one application aside from the NFT.org NFT DEX being built with this system which you will hear more about when it is completed.
Front End Development
The frontend of the DEX is where we’ve been doing the bulk of our work over the past couple months. The frontend team took the design we created with our designer in July, built its components and then applied them to the frontend “scaffolding” to create a comprehensive frontend for the DEX akin to what we shared in the design mockups in the August development update.
We’ve been testing and evaluating a minimally viable alpha version of the DEX for about a month now and, as is to be expected when testing and evaluating an application for the first time, we have found numerous things we overlooked in the design process that have needed to be added or modified in certain ways. We’ve also identified key points in the user experience that we feel need to be improved in order to bring to market a product that we can be confident will make the impact we’ve all been looking to make.
We are also continuing to identify and address anomalies in how the frontend fetches data from NFTProtocolNode in order to ensure we are providing a satisfactory user experience for DEX users.
We are most definitely in the final stage of development in which we have identified and are addressing only the adjustments, refinements and fixes necessary to yield a production-ready product. We anticipate being able to identify and declare a launch date very soon.
Blockparty’s Secondary Market
In pursuit of building Blockparty’s secondary market infrastructure Tilo has been doing research on existing royalty standard proposals within the Ethereum developer community in order to ascertain if something already out there might suffice for our needs or if he’ll need to build something new. He has a fairly good grasp on where to start and will be constructing a prototype over the coming weeks. We will likely introduce our royalty standard first through Blockparty’s secondary market and then consider applying it to the NFT.org DEX in a future update once it’s been sufficiently refined.
Blockparty’s designer has been working on re-skinning the DEX design such that it will align with its branding.
Governance
The NFT Protocol governance forum had its first community member submit an idea regarding NFT staking for a temperature check in September. The idea passed its temperature check round and is now being refined in preparation for the consensus check round. Please keep an eye out for the coming consensus check on Telegram, Twitter or the governance forum and leverage your $NFT tokens to make your voice is heard on this idea.
Conclusion
Our focus this month will be on finishing the DEX such that we can identify and declare a launch date. The past couple of months have been full of a lot of hard work on behalf of our engineering and product team bringing the DEX to life and we are looking forward to releasing what we’ve created out into the wilderness that is the NFT space. Blockparty CEO Vlad Ginzburg and CTO Joseph Fiscella have been working on a go-to-market strategy for promoting the DEX launch, the $NFT token and announcing some significant partnerships. I have also been in contact with additional crypto-native entities who we are looking to involve in this strategy.
We truly believe the NFT.org NFT DEX is going to make an impact on the NFT space and we can’t wait to share it with all of you and with Blockparty and its whitelabel clientele via its secondary market - which will happen shortly after we launch the DEX.
Thank you all for supporting us through this development phase and if you haven’t yet please join us on Discord where we will be focusing more of our community engagement efforts when the DEX launches due to that being the apparent platform of choice for the NFT space.
~ Jake Cox - NFT Protocol Community & Product Manager