coopart

About Coopart

Coopart [ koh-op-ahrt ] is the first-ever cooperative tile-based NFT art marketplace. 1- Create a canvas and add the first tile. 2- Other artists expand the canvas in any direction and add new tiles. 3- People can vote tiles in or out. Each canvas is its own DAO and self-governs. Some tiles are voted out and some tiles are voted in to replace them. 4- Canvas is sold and profits distributed to all its contributors.

Inspiration

I first got the idea to create Coopart from looking at the $69 million Beeple's NFT. The piece of art is made from 5,000 tiles merged together into a common canvas. I thought it would be great if each tile was made by a different author, and so Coopart was born. Many artists can contribute tiles to a common canvas that is then sold as a single piece, and profits are shared between all of them.

Try it out

Getting started

The platform is live at coopart.io and running on the Tezos Florence Testnet. I'm a big fan of Tezos and have contributed to many projects. I coded the smart contract in CameLigo and integrated the frontend with the Temple wallet. Before trying out the platform, make sure you have a funded account on the Florence Testnet. You can easily get a faucet account at faucet.tzalpha.net. Click Get Testnet Tez then download the faucet file. In Temple, click Import Account then Faucet File. You should see your account appear. Make sure to select the Florence Testnet and that you have at least 1 Tez. If your faucet account does not have enough Tez, email me your public address at coopart@protonmail.com and I will send you some Tez on Florence.

Now, on Coopart, click Connect wallet and Temple will open to ask you for authorization. Your Tezos address should then appear in the top right corner.

Create a new canvas

You are now ready to create a new canvas or contribute to the existing canvases. Click Create New Canvas. You will see an empty tile and a few options. First, choose a tile size. Note that all tiles in a canvas will have the same size, even for other contributors. Let's choose 130 pixels by 340 pixels. You can also select the time period for other artists to contribute to the canvas. After that, the canvas will automatically lock and be put on sale, meaning that no more contribution will be possible.

Note that when hovering your mouse over the tile, you can see its coordinates and an upload button. You can click the arrows to expand the canvas on the right side, left side, top side or bottom side. There is no limit to the canvas size, this could technically scale to millions of tiles. Upload a first tile wherever you want. Click Upload and choose an image file. Wait while the tile is uploading. Note that I am using IPFS with Infura to store the images, so it is fully decentralized and tile owners can be reassured that their art is stored safely forever.

Once the image is uploaded, it appears in the tile you chose. Then a Tezos transaction to mint the tile is automatically started. I am using the FA2 Token Standard in the smart contract to store the tiles as NFTs and comply with transfer and storage conventions. This makes Coopart compatible with all wallets, exchanges, DeFi dapps, etc. on Tezos. For beginners, FA2 is basically the Tezos equivalent of ERC721.

Click confirm to start the minting transaction. A notification in the top right corner tells you that the transaction has been sent. Wait a few seconds, and another notification will tell you that the tile has been minted. You can check out TzStats to confirm that the transaction is indeed successful. This canvas is now officially started. You can add more tiles yourself or wait for others to contribute.

Contribute to existing canvas

Click Marketplace and wait a few seconds for all canvas and tiles to load from the smart contract's storage. There, you can see on-going canvases that still have time left in their contribution period and canvases that have expired and have automatically been put on sale. Click any ongoing canvas. The tile editor opens and fetches the tiles from the smart contract. Wait until the loading status in the top right corner disappears. Expand the canvas in any direction and/or upload an image for an empty tile. Confirm the minting transaction that appears. Reload the marketplace to see that the updated canvases.

Vote on tiles

What if someone ruins a canvas with an inappropriate tile? That's where voting comes into play. In phase II of the development of Coopart (see dev roadmap below), contributors will be able to vote on each tile. If they believe a tile should not be in a canvas, they can vote to remove it. On the contrary, if they believe a tile is a perfect match for the canvas, they can vote to keep it. Each canvas will be its own DAO and self-govern. There are two ways to implement this, and I have not yet decided which way to go:

First possibility: Only tile contributors can vote on other tiles. Each tile contributor can cast one vote per tile (upvote or downvote). If a tile has more downvotes than upvotes, it gets removed.
Second possibility: Anyone can vote. This gives potential buyers a way to direct the devolpment of a canvas that they might want to buy. People vote by delegating Tez to a tile. The more Tez, the more the vote count. If a tile has more Tez for downvotes than upvotes, it gets removed. On the contrary, people liking a canvas can delegate a lot of Tez to the tiles they like. The delegation also proves that the potential buyers have enough tez to buy the canvas later.

Let me know your opinion about this. I'm also open to other suggestions.

Buy/Sell canvas

Once the contribution period of a canvas expires, no one can contribute to it anymore, and it is automatically put on sale in the marketplace. For now, I've only implemented a simple fixed price sale at 1 Tez as a proof of concept. I will develop a more robust auction sale system in phase II (more in the roadmap). You can click Buy Canvas and submit the transaction. After a few seconds, all the tiles from the canvas will appear in your wallet. I had first created an entrypoint that would merge all the tiles into a single FA2 token for the whole canvas, but then I thought that keeping tiles separated might allow owners to sell them separately and create a sense of collection. Buyers would then try to buy all tiles to complete their collection and reconstitute the whole canvas. This would increase the value of a single tile to a collector that already has all of them except that one. Just like the Infinity Stones in The Avengers, you just need to have them all!

I am not yet fully decided on the way to go. This is still a concept that I am still playing around with.

Anyway, when a canvas is purchased, all the tile creators (except those that were voted out) are paid according to the number of tiles they contributed. E.g., if a canvas has 10 tiles and is sold for 1 Tez, each tile creator will receive 0.1 Tez. If someone contributed 2 tiles to that canvas, he would receive 0.2 Tez.

Dev roadmap

It's been a wild journey since I started working on this project only three weeks ago! It is such a complex platform that I could not develop everything by the end of this hackathon, so I have divided its development into 3 phases. The first phase is the current proof of concept that you see. It has a functional tile creator and editor with a smart contract that can mint tiles into FA2 tokens. Anyone can contribute new tiles. Canvases can then be sold for 1 Tez in the marketplace.

Phase II will include the canvas DAO and voting system discussed previously. It will also have auction sales for canvases. Finally, I also plan to add a second form of cooperative art development: layer-based instead of tile-based. Here is an example. This image could be a first layer from an artist. Then another artist could add a mostly transparent layer but with a triangle in the middle. Then someone could add a layer with a grid, a layer with rocks, a layer with a person, and so on. Layers could also be voted in or out of a canvas.

Phase II should be finished on August 23rd as I plan to submit it to the upcoming Gitcoin's Tezos Hackathon

Finally, phase III will be mostly bug fixing and many tests before deploying the smart contract on the Tezos mainnet in September.

Smart contract interaction

Here is a summary of the interactions between the frontend and the smart contract. Note that the merge() entrypoint is still under consideration.

Run locally

The Github repo for Coopart is private. You can find Github credentials to access it in the uploaded file in Additional info for judges and organizers. Alternatively; or if you are still having issues accessing the repo; email me your Github username at coopart@protonmail.com, and I will add you as contributor.

Once you have access to the repo, you can run the frontend locally using:

$ cd src/frontend
$ yarn install
$ yarn start

If you want to redeploy the smart contracts:

$ cd src/contracts
$ yarn global add truffle@5.4.0-tezos.7
$ truffle compile
$ truffle migrate --network florencenet

Make sure to use truffle@5.4.0-tezos.7 as the latest version 5.5.0-tezos.4 does not work correctly.

Copy the contract address, e.g., KT1SS5CMP6wfqt63jtwzisb22QgpRq13b77W and paste it into COOPART_ADDRESS in dapp/defaults.ts. Restart the frontend to now use this smart contract address.

Conclusion

Coopart is a revolutionary way of building NFT art cooperatively. Both tile-based canvas and layer-based canvas will lead to exceptional artistic pieces from thousands of artists working together and maybe worth millions.