Project Catalyst Fund 9 Proposals
The NFT community and ecosystem are vibrant and crucial parts of the overall Cardano ecosystem. In 2021, a large part of the transaction volume on the Cardano network was related to NFTs.
In past funding rounds, the needs of the NFT Ecosystem were not properly represented by Project Catalyst challenges. By introducing this challenge we aim to take the first major step in connecting the NFT community to Project Catalyst by creating a space where NFT related ideas and experiments can be born.
How can we support effective and impactful projects and initiatives to build and support the NFT Ecosystem and Community?
NFTs play a crucial role in the Cardano Ecosystem. A Catalyst Challenge would incentivize the building of NFT based projects on Cardano.
Potential Directions :
Developing NFT Tools
Developing Platforms and Marketplaces
Developing NFT Standards
Proposing and actively developing NFT related CIPs
Change existing tools to support and adopt new standards
Organizing Community Events with a focus on NFTs
Providing services that help increase the Communication, Coordination and Collaboration between NFT projects and initiatives
Academic research and analytics on topics related to NFTs or NFT tooling
Investigating or developing new use cases for NFT technology
Note:
This is NOT an actual proposal to be implemented. This proposal seeks to define a new challenge in Project Catalyst Fund10.
To learn more about challenge settings see here.
The NFT Guild is an Assembly of highly engaged and dedicated Cardano Community members which come together to identify & initiate solutions for the healthy growth of the NFT Ecosystem
We organise Community Events & Initiatives to nurture collaborative efforts of Community members, key players and thought leaders in the NFT space.
The two main services that we currently offer are:
Weekly Community Calls ( Public Events )
In these Events we hold general discussion on the NFT Guilds operations & activities while receiving input & feedback from the Community. This helps us stay close to the real needs and challenges the NFT Ecosystem and community are facing.
Cardano NFT Roundtable
The Cardano NFT Roundtable (CNR) is an initiative between Cardano Community Members, NFT Platforms, Minting solution providers, Toolmakers, Cardano Ambassadors the NFT Guild and the Cardano Foundation, coming together to discuss and align on common challenges and to identify & initiate solutions to support the healthy growth of the Cardano NFT Ecosystem and its Community.
This proposal partly covers the time investment from the NFT Guilds members to communicate, coordinate & collaborate our actions across the Cardano NFT Ecosystem and Community.
This proposal is for the second part of the NFT Swap Infrastructure Project, which was successfully funded in Catalyst Fund 8.
Often the seller of a CNFT does so to purchase another NFT from the same collection. This results in unnecessary fees & lost opportunities.
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. These will be easily adaptable and implementable by any NFT project in the Cardano space.
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.
Project Catalyst Fund 9 Results
Unfortunately none of the NFT Guild Catalyst proposals were funded in Fund 9.
Project Catalyst Fund 8 Results
As the first concrete steps in our journey, we have submitted a series of Catalyst Fund 8 proposals (detailed below) to obtain funding, enable and accelerate the development of our community-oriented projects.
The majority of our Fund 8 proposals and initiatives were approved and funded by the Cardano community and we have begun delivering on the scope of our projects. You can keep up to date, and track our progress through this website, our social channels and the Catalyst monthly report.
In Fund 8, our initiative for developing a challenge setting for Catalyst Fund 9, received a very high score from Community Advisors, was selected by voters, but unfortunately was out of budget.
We will be resubmitting the challenge setting for Fund 10, as our hope is that this will offer a place where interested community members will have the opportunity to get their visions funded and start working on projects for the benefit of the entire NFT ecosystem.
Project Catalyst Fund 8 Proposals
The NFT community and ecosystem are vibrant and crucial parts of the overall Cardano ecosystem. In 2021, a large part of the transaction volume on the Cardano network was related to NFTs.
In past funding rounds, the needs of the NFT Ecosystem were not properly represented by Project Catalyst challenges. By introducing this challenge we aim to take the first major step in connecting the NFT community to Project Catalyst by creating a space where NFT related ideas and experiments can be born.
How can we support effective and impactful projects and initiatives to build and support the NFT Ecosystem and Community?
NFTs play a crucial role in the Cardano Ecosystem. A Catalyst Challenge would incentivize the building of NFT based projects on Cardano.
Potential Directions :
Developing NFT Tools
Developing Platforms and Marketplaces
Developing NFT Standards
Proposing and actively developing NFT related CIPs
Change existing tools to support and adopt new standards
Organizing Community Events with a focus on NFTs
Providing services that help increase the Communication, Coordination and Collaboration between NFT projects and initiatives
Academic research and analytics on topics related to NFTs or NFT tooling
Investigating or developing new use cases for NFT technology
The process of having NFTs verified on different marketplaces is manual and lacks a standardised approach. This is holding back the growth of the NFT segment on Cardano for end-users to easily trust that the NFTs they own and/or are buying are authentic.
Today marketplaces and NFT creators are all solving the same problem in a variety of ways, which lacks interoperability and inclusive participation.
Our goal for this project is to have an open community discussion to define solutions to the problems above and work together in defining and establishing standards in the NFT space. We will invite all NFT marketplaces and other NFT projects to participate in insights gathering to further define the problem, the solution, and the scope for what is needed to achieve safety and verification in the NFT space.
Our second goal is to create a public roadmap for a NFT Verification Tool to determine additional features and applications which could be added in the future.
Develop an open source decentralized tool that verifies NFTs based on both onchain and offchain sources of truth.
The tool itself will be free to build and run by anyone who wants to provide verification of NFTs on their site or app, most likely NFT marketplaces and wallets. The tool will be kept up to date with the standards developed by the NFT Guild and partnering tools. This will give the community a uniform verification workflow and reliable verification status for NFTs, while marketplaces and wallets can integrate the tool functionality for free and hence be able to remove their own need for manual labor in verification of artists and NFT projects.
The community will benefit from the tool by being able to post proof of authenticity to the Cardano blockchain or publicly available repositories and will therefore not experience any delay in getting their wanted “Verified Artist” or “Verified Project” checkmark.
The discussions around the NFT Royalty Standards have stalled. The CIP-27 solution has not been widely adopted by marketplaces.
We propose a collaborative process and an aligned approach to explore and establish standards and resources for Cardano NFTs overall and this is one of the key areas of interest.
As a result of the fact that in practice no standard is yet followed, marketplaces are currently centralizing the decision-making process. This can create unwanted consequences for the ecosystem as a whole.
One option that we can explore is integrating the royalty tracking and distribution information in the NFT verification tool that members of the NFT Guild are already working on.
But this represents only one of the multiple possibilities of approaching and implementing a working solution and a standard covering this issue. Community talks, consultations, and deliberations are needed in order to implement a workable and agreed-upon solution.
Often the seller of a CNFT does so to purchase another NFT from the same collection. This results in unnecessary fees & lost opportunities.
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. These will be easily adaptable and implementable by any NFT project in the Cardano space.
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.
The Cardano NFT space lacks an impartial, in-depth source of information. This penalizes those with insufficient time to research projects.
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.
We aim to create a reliable and impartial source of in-depth reports, published regularly & authored by Cardano NFT insiders and QA specialists.
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. Part of the budget of this proposal will go to the guild treasury, to be distributed to those who participate in the review process.