The NFT space moves at an incredible pace. This can rapidly overwhelm newcomers, both creators/developers, and collectors/investors.
As a creator/developer it means having to spend an unnecessarily large amount of time, untangling a web of sometimes contradicting information about tools, standards, best practices, and what approaches other previously successful projects have taken.
As a collector/investor, it creates an environment where large sums of ADA rapidly exchange hands, sometimes without much prior research. What sources of information do exist are usually heavily biased and mostly aimed at generating commercial interest and maximizing profits for the author of the content.
To address this we want to create a focused, in-depth and unbiased weekly report.
We intend to publish this for free for the benefit of the entire Cardano NFT ecosystem. Although the report will primarily serve the needs of developers unfamiliar with the space, as mentioned it can also serve as a source of information for NFT collectors/investors.
As we want to make these reports freely available, without having to rely on any ad revenue, we are applying to Project Catalyst to fund this initiative thereby eliminating any possibility of editorial influence.
To begin we will focus on existing high-profile projects and later we will branch out to cover platforms, newer projects, and possibly even projects yet to launch.
Besides quality and depth of information, our main focus for the reports will be impartiality. To ensure this, before publication, each report will go through a peer-review process by members of the NFT Guild. To ensure sufficient participation in this process, we plan to incentivize this work. Part of the budget of this proposal will go to the guild treasury, to be distributed to those who participate in the review process.
The proposal integrates perfectly with two of the challenge’s described possible directions:
Common audited repositories & overviews of existing solutions
Education for development in the Cardano & Catalyst ecosystem
With this proposal we aim to address 3 main guiding questions posed by the Open Source Development Ecosystem challenge:
How can we encourage experts to collaborate and share their knowledge and work?
How can we ensure future efforts benefit from the work that is funded today?
The reports will produce a reliable and robust knowledge base for future NFT projects that wish to launch on Cardano, thus greatly simplifying their work, provide guidance on best practices, existing tools, and solutions.
How can we develop a sustainable ecosystem while sharing knowledge and efforts?
The existence of the reports as a compiled source of information will greatly reduce upfront research costs and time to market of NFT projects preparing to deploy on Cardano. We also envision that by familiarising the developer community with each other and each other’s projects and successes, new connections will be formed between members of the Cardano community, potentially leading to meaningful collaboration.
Teams that are unwilling to cooperate with the drafting of the report for personal reasons, fear of doxxing themselves, or other concerns.
If this were to happen we foresee that we could still complete the report in a way that would add a lot of value to the NFT ecosystem by analyzing and compiling data openly available about projects and tools.