The goal of the project is to create two open-source NFT swapping smart contract templates and matching off-chain code and front-end templates.
One for swapping of specific tokens that can be individually listed, with the option to accept or reject swap offers.
One for random swapping from a community pool.
When a swap would be initiated by a user sending a tx with an NFT to the smart contract address, the contract would randomly return a different NFT from those available in the pool to the sender. Depending on the needs and make-up of the project, multiple SC and associated pools could be deployed, for instance, each one corresponding to a specific rarity level.
The contents of the community swapping pool could either be visible to the users or not, depending on the preference and the needs of each project.
The smart contracts will also allow the creators of the project to charge a small fee on each swap, to ensure the sustainability of their swapping service (development, hosting, etc.).
To achieve our goals of creating easy-to-implement open source templates, in addition to the development of the code and the UI templates, we also plan on writing clear and extensive documentation for everything we release.
Besides the immediately visible benefits in providing the Cardano NFT creators community with templates that are easily adaptable to their own projects, the main motivator for us, and what got us working on the swap pools idea in the first place, are the benefits that the NFT space as a whole would get from the encouragement of the idea of swapping.
These include:
- The fun resulting from engaging with the swap pools (particularly the random one)
- Discovering or rediscovering the joy of collecting
- An easier way to complete collections
- A better appreciation of collections by getting to spend more time with them when looking for NFTs to swap
- Social interactions that can occur between collectors while looking for NFTs to swap
- Offering long term value to collections, beyond the initial hype
- And many more
All of these are meant to grow the collectibles NFT ecosystem beyond its main current drivers: profits and social status.
Most importantly, however, we hope that our efforts will bring about a new way of looking at collectible NFTs. One that will combine all the new value propositions that NFTs and the technology behind them offer, with the value layer that traditional collectibles such as Pokemon cards, basketball cards, stamps, coins etc. bring. All of these rely heavily on the experience of swapping between members of their respective communities, either as a means of completing collections or simply for the joy of collecting.
We see Cardano as a natural fit for this type of experience, as this can only happen on a blockchain with small fees and fast transactions. On top of that, through the power of eUTxO, swaps can be done in a single transaction.
We hope that from everything we have described above you will see the value that our project can bring, and the impact it would have on the Cardano NFT space and the Cardano environment as a whole. After all, the Cardano community prides itself in being motivated by factors other than quick profits and short-term hype.
Besides the factors mentioned in the first part of our proposal, our project addresses multiple key questions posed by the challenge:
How can we ensure future efforts benefit from the work that is funded today?
By creating and making the smart contract, backend, and frontend templates available to the Cardano NFT creators community, any project that wishes to implement the swapping service in the future for their specific communities will be able to do so much more easily, significantly faster, and at a much lower cost compared to having to develop their own solutions from scratch.
How can we encourage experts to collaborate and share their knowledge and work?
We will be looking to collaborate with established developers in the Cardano community. By getting them to work on this open-sourced project, we will ensure that the knowledge they have accumulated is recorded and made freely available for all to draw upon and potentially improve.
In time, as projects start to implement the swap pools feature, we foresee the codebase growing with more and more developers contributing, motivated by wanting to adapt it to their own specific needs.
How can we develop a sustainable ecosystem while sharing knowledge and efforts?
By creating the swap pool templates, projects that wish to implement the feature would have much smaller up-front development costs.
Funding the project would contribute to getting developers to work on open-source Cardano-specific code, while being compensated fairly to do so.
Projects implementing one or more swap pools could greatly increase their longevity by keeping the community engaged and motivated to collect, thus increasing their long-term sustainability.
Projects could implement a small royalty on swaps (possibly smaller than the one on marketplaces, or a fixed fee) that would further contribute to their sustainability.
The biggest challenge that we foresee is a lack of qualified and available Haskell/Plutus developers.
We see this risk as being mitigated by two factors:
- We have adequately budgeted for the smart contract developer position to make it more attractive. This is especially important to consider as the number of ventures launching on Cardano increases every day, we have seen a lot of Catalyst projects not taking this into account and not properly budgeting as a result.
- Our contacts and connections within the Cardano ecosystem.