DOT Avatars: Collaborative NFTs

Inspiration

The NFT ecosystem has matured drastically over the past year. However, with success comes challenges. We've seen creators feel pressured to sell out their collection in order to deem their project successful. Launching a collection requires technical and business skills that the majority of creators don't excel at by themselves. This reality forces them to outsource tasks for their launch and possibly rack up expenses pre-launch. The built up pressure has forced creators to sideline their artistic innovation and over promise to the market, often times coming off as a "rug pull" when they can't follow through on promises.

At the same time, the consumer market has become radicalized due to what creators are forced to do. Individuals often times commit a substantial amount of money to support a single project and pray for success. When that project succeeds or fails, the creator or team is either loved or hated. The individual is either sitting on a gold mine or out of luck. In conclusion, the space does not allow for artistic freedom in fear of failure for both creators and consumers.

What it does

DOT Avatars wish to change the ecosystem by providing a chain agnostic platform for building Avatars. Instead of being a single NFT, DOT Avatars are made up of what we call building blocks, where each block is a separate NFTs. Currently, we are making use of 4 core building blocks: Head, Body, Left Leg, Right Leg where each piece is a different an NFT.

This approach opens up the doors for individuals to make their digital and decentralized avatar entirely what they want where different pieces can be different colors, backgrounds, species, race, etc.

Additionally, DOT Avatars are multi-chain. So the NFTs can be minted on any chain (where our contracts are deployed) and then added to the Avatar on a SKALE chain. We currently have a working prototype/MVP that has the avatar on SKALE testnet, and Building Block NFT contracts on the Astar and Polygon testnets.

How we built it/Challenges

Building this project was an adventure in itself. This project required a lot of creativity and hacking around different blockchains and contracts. One of the biggest hurdle building this project is the need for oracle technology on multiple chains. Although available, existing oracles are not cost-effective to users or cross-chain blockchain requests.

The near future

For this hackathon we chose not to include a marketplace. However, post hackathon we will enable the DOT Avatar Marketplace. The marketplace will allow creators to offer their building blocks to the greater community. Additionally, it will allow individuals to purchase NFTs for their Avatar on whichever chain they want.

As we grow, DOT Avatars will support minting on multiple other blockchains and further enable cross chain utility for blockchains like Astar. Additionally, while we utilized SKALE network for faster and gasless transactions while hosting and managing the avatar itself; depending on the continued growth of Astar, it is not impossible to consider allowing a secondary home for Avatars located somewhere on the substrate based Astar Network.