Technology Used:
- Chainlink VRF: Randomness Source
- Polygon: Contract Deployment
- NFT.Storage: Metadata hosting
Inspiration
NFT is not a thing that has already been widely recognized, even lots of my friends in the crypto space consider NFTs just a bunch of meaningless PNGs. If something is popular enough to get lots of attention/criticism yet most of the regular people doubt it, then that’s a huge opportunity in my opinion. I think they just cannot understand that digital assets are inevitable even though they are already immersed in the digital world 24/7. We believe we are driving a new asset class and a new type of economy that comes along.
Our hands-on experience in working with creators, lead us to build our NFT platforms differently. NFTs created with our platform are composable and have great interpolability. Multiple collections can be easily wired together to create creative use cases. For example, users can easily create an upgradable pass NFT collection (e.g. Adidas Originals Into the Metaverse), or a mystery box as a separate collection (e.g. CloneX) all with zero coding requirements.
What it does
Our product allows creators to publish their own NFT collection in minutes with no coding required. We have multiple key features including NFT smart contracts (ERC1155, ERC721) one-click deployment, NFT LEGO (compose NFT smart contracts freely to suit any use cases), minting/airdropping page auto generation, fair mystery box revealing with ChainLink VRF, soulbound token publishing, NFT stacking module and more.
Most of the alternatives on the market right now can only publish plain NFTs, meaning that they can only be minted at once and can only be put on sale manually on NFT marketplaces. However, with our platform, NFTs can be lazy minted, customized mint/airdrop pages can be auto generated, and creators can specify multiple phases of sales with different rules.
Unlike the existing self-service type NFT launchpad, we built our launchpad with technical support service in mind. Leveraging smart contract’s access management, we are able to directly help users securely configure their NFT contacts without sacrificing and the ownership of the contracts.
How we built it
Our NFT platform is built with a factory contract. Creators can deploy the NFT contracts by interacting with it.
Upon the creation, the factory deployed an ERC-1167 minimal proxy to clone our feature-rich NFT templates and configure it. The advantage of using minimal proxy is it greatly saves the creators the cost of contract deployments. Compared with deploying the contract directly, it can save more than 10x on the gas fee.
The Quicknode NFT API is used for displaying NFT information. The use of Quicknode greatly improve the loading time and usability of the UI.
Our contracts have been deployed on the testnet of both ethereum and polygon.
Challenges we ran into
Launching an NFT project often requires the use of a backend as the signer to realize advanced features, for example, to filter out the bots. Often the users have to delegate the power to the platform. However, at Ctor Lab, we believe in the power of decentralization. As a result, we have multiple iterations on designing the minting functions before having our final solution.
In our platform, we invent a dual-signature scheme for NFT minting. The NFT minting is secured by two signatures, one from the creator, and the other one from either Ctor Lab or any signer chosen by the creator. Creator’s signature defines the price and sales quantity, and the other signature from the backend is used for realizing advanced features.
Our approach requires minimal trust and is secure by its design. Even in the doomsday scenario, in which our platform is compromised, the malicious actor simply cannot mint any NFTs for free.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We built this NFT platform with prior experience working with multiple great NFT projects that have thousand-eth trading volumes. It also summarizes all the NFT research we developed before:
- Low-gas In-house-designed NFT implementation: Ctor NFT platform is the only NFT publishing platform that provides highly optimized NFT implementations, in particular, ERC721Psi and ERC1155Delta. Both NFT implementations are created by us.
- Fair on-chain mystery box revealing: We developed FPE-Map, a framework that creates with fair mystery box in combination with Chainlink’s VRF service. Our approach doesn’t rely on the backend and is extremely gas efficient. (20000x cheaper than Clone X's method) Now, with Ctor NFT Platform, creators can leverage Chainlink’s service without the need of configuring the VRF themselves.
- NFT LEGO: Our NFTs are like lego. Creators can combine multiple NFT collections to make creative use cases. For example, users can create upgradeable pass (e.g. addidas), mystery box as an independent collection (e.g. Clone X), tokenized allow-list.
What's next for Ctor NFT Platform
In the future, we hoped to add more advanced features that traditionally require advanced programming skills to create. This includes:
Dynamic NFT that leverage Chainlink’s service to automatically update the on-chain metadata. Cross-chain NFT implementation that can be transferred between multiple blockchains. A possible direction of implementing this feature is through the Chainlink’s CCIP.
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