Today's "Meet John Storey" AMA Transcript

Front End Developer John Storey joined us on Telegram on January 14, 2021 for an AMA regarding NFT Protocol's NFT DEX nearing its private alpha launch.

Jake - NFT Protocol: Alright, everyone. It's 12pm EST so let's go ahead and get started with the AMA. Say hello to @johnDanger our Front End Developer. I think he'll get started with a sort of overview of what he's working on, then dive in to some of the questions submitted via the form yesterday, and then go ahead and feel free to ask him anything!

John D. Storey: Hi - To give a little background I've been focused on front end development most of my career, and back in 2016/2017 took an online MOOC about blockchain - that's when I first was introduced to topics surrounding DAOs and that's when I started playing with web3.

Since then I've dabbled with all sorts of things, but my attention towards NFTs started with learning about land titles on blockchain and denoting individual properties with a token -- and from there learning about all the different kinds of things denoted with NFT such as art/music/etc -- and now it feels like with the new 1155 protocol they've kinda tied fungible and non-fungible into a single token standard, which we are aiming to build support for in our products.

Franklin Fitch: Don’t want to cut other questions in line but curious to hear your take on the advantages of a DEX for NFTs compared to centralized systems. What benefits will it provide artists and users?

John D. Storey: First off, there is almost a moral incentive to participate in DEX depending on one's own alignment in the blockchain world. I for one really get pulled towards things that are decentralized, even if it comes at a slight cost in what some would consider user experience or custodial issues.

Secondly, I think it really empowers people to create and allow for the community to grow organically in trading assets that don't need to go through the approval of some central exchange that has to gauge the risk or validity of the underlying tokens. This opens up a useful tool to anyone in the ecosystem without a gatekeeper.

Cryptradamus: Will the NFT token be part of the dex?

John D. Storey: We've been playing with ideas on a fee structure in which lower fees can be an incentive to pay with NFT, however this is all still in development.

Zanzibar: Can NFT proposals be submitted for DEX features from the community? (Similar to the staking proposal that @irishllama proposed)

John D. Storey: Ahhh, that would be great. We've spoken about having feedback functionality put on the site. Would be cool to stake NFT as a mechanism for "upvoting" feature requests...

Anyone here have a feature or functionality they'd love to see incorporated?

Zanzibar: Possibly look at integration of other chains to the DEX.

John D. Storey: This would be interesting indeed. Say there are 2 parties trading, would they be able to bundle multiple assets together on different chains and have them stay on those chains when they transfer? Or are you thinking of a type of "bridge" system where you could trade them across chains?

Zanzibar: Maybe more of a bridge, not entirely sure.

John D. Storey: As we continue development we are primarily focused on the core swap and web3 interface for doing transactions. After that phase we'll be more focused on other dynamics such as increasing transactions with payments and token incentives.

Bridge would be hard to automate from the perspective of an end-user. However, I could see something like this working if the token issuer built their respective bridges and the DEX essentially would just take another parameter of where the bridge they wanted to use was located rather than us trying to spin up bridges on the fly.

Sigma: I have read the NFT Dex development blog and I was wondering how are things progressing?

John D. Storey: Thanks, yeah we are in the thick of it. We have the beginnings of a user interface, connecting a wallet and using url parameters to pull in tokens to trade in order to create a listing.

We are still going through the smart contract side of things, and next will be adding support for erc20 to be included in the swaps. Also, will be doing some usability and design tweaking in the upcoming weeks to make sure it has a fresh aesthetic feel.

Sigma: In the blog I read that the initial fee structure will be denoted in the underlying currency but that a discount will be issued for using the NFT token, what kind of discount are we looking at?

John D. Storey: Still to be determined, we haven't gotten that deep into the details yet.

irishllama: https://twitter.com/coinbase/status/1349770797615869954
Team should get on this ASAP.

John D. Storey: Interesting, just published today... will need to check out. Do you think this will enable people to deposit their NFT of say art into the coinbase ecosystem?

irishllama: I have no clue, it's hot off the press about 2 mins.

John D. Storey: Hmmm... looking at their page, seems like a way they might be allowing yeah other ERC20 and probably 721 tokens into their interface. Probably has limited support but I wouldn't be surprised if this will be used to support an in house version of uniswap.

Jake - NFT Protocol: I'm going to share some of the questions that were submitted via the form yesterday that haven't quite been covered yet.

I'm paraphrasing here...

Is there anything that sets NFT Protocol apart from the dozens of other NFT solutions being built? Something the competition would have a hard time replicating?

John D. Storey: One that really piques my interest is its plan to be fully decentralized -- I'm into the tech what can I say -- but also I'm really looking forward to the ability to support multiple token standards 20/721/1155.

Jake - NFT Protocol: How is project management for development handled at Blockparty/NFT Protocol? Do you work in sprints? How do you go about planning, estimates, roadmapping, etc…

John D. Storey: We work in loose sprints yes -- maintain a backlog in Jira and have, just this week actually, coordinated with another member of Blockparty to help in kicking off sprints. Because the team is relatively small it leaves a lot of wiggle room to expound or tweak our tasks as they are being done.

Ask any developer - timelines and estimates are hard -- especially when working with the amount of unknowns and on a greenfield type of project.

Jake - NFT Protocol: Do you have any favorite/new frontend tools or technologies you're using?

John D. Storey: Hmmm....we haven't deployed via IPFS yet, but i'm excited to get into that sphere. Also, nice to be using new react hooks in place of things like Redux 🙂

Jake - NFT Protocol: What's the one feature you really want to build, but don't have the time for?

John D. Storey: I've wanted to build a serverless app for a while, so that is really probably my top aspect.

Jake - NFT Protocol: How do you handle data storage for stuff that isn't "on chain"?

John D. Storey: The DEX is going to keep everything on chain -- Blockparty uses a standard postgres DB under the hood.

Jake - NFT Protocol: Very cool. Well that brings us to about the 1 hour mark, so we should probably wrap this up and let you get back to working on the DEX. 😊

Any last parting words, John?

John D. Storey: Cool. Excited to keep pushing things forward. Thanks to all that participated 🙂