Reporter’s View: How NFTs Faired On Arweave In 2023

Web3 is booming, and Arweave is becoming a popular infrastructure choice for developers. PermaDAO is a community where everyone can contribute to the Arweave ecosystem. It's a place to propose and tackle tasks related to Arweave, with the support and feedback of the entire community. Join PermaDAO and help shape Web3!

Author: Adeola @ Contributor of PermaDAO

Reviewer: Henry @ Contributor of PermaDAO

One of the things the Arweave Protocol was used for in its early stage was storing non-fungible tokens (NFTs). But the advancement in technology, especially in blockchain, fuelled the expansion and applicability of NFT to videos, audios, music, among others. In the Arweave ecosystem, developers have in the last year invented many ways in which NFT innovation can be used and how Arweave could support their drive. There are projects such as everPay, ArSeeding as well as PermaDAO that supported NFT projects in Arweave. everPay organised 12 NFT auctions. The support from the everVision products to these NFT projects ranges from infrastructure to enhance storage and facilitation of payment. These projects went on to build tools and features that distinguished them.

everPay NFT Auction

everPay, a payment protocol participated in the NFT space by conducting 12 NFT auctions. everPay NFT is a series of NFT artwork launched in collaboration between everPay and various projects or artists for participation in everPay auctions. A total of 12 auctions were conducted which had 108 art pieces on display. Notable artworks included Winston Family, Year of the Tiger NFTs, Old Gods Remastered, Wonderland and the Funny Fellows, Breaking Panda, Inner Motion, Microplants, Dragon Turtles, Crypto Slang Gang, Ark, and Birdsong. Beyond the satifaction of holding NFT artworks, it also gives other rewards including participation in early liquidity mining on Permaswap and becoming an early Router node for Permaswap. everPay also explored other variations of NFTs by joining Degame NFT community for the NFT gaming summer.

Rareweave

Less than nine months old and built in three months, Rareweave has done a few notable things in the Arweave ecosystem to make itself known. It is the first Arweave native NFT marketplace. Payment for transactions is powered by everVision’s payment protocol, everPay. It released sub-accounts which is a new way for permaweb apps to manage and use user keys. It was later upgraded to v0.1.0. In June, it introduced Glome, a performant, scalable and flexible SmartWeave core engine. Glome has instant interactions due to Irys integration, while maintaining support of base Arweave transactions. A plugin was built for Glome later in July. Also in June, FilterScript or SortScript were released, powerful tools for fetching multiple contracts if your app requires it. Filterscript was later replaced by Lua as well. Rareweave launched SocioWeave, which is the social API for Arweave. It also shipped a universal wallet interface feature.

Artbycity

Artbycity, an application that helps artists to upload their content on the permaweb did not have many activities this year. It began 2023 by integrating Decent Land’s ark protocol. It was an integration that impacted the core of the Artbycity’s infrastructure. It allowed artists to bring their own preferred identity to Arweave. It was to allow artists to prove attribution of their work on multiple chains. For example, artists could publish to Arweave while proving they are the same person on another chain.

DarkBlock

Darkblock kick started the year with promotions for some of its revolutionary NFT products in audio, video and image formats. One of such products was literary NFTs which involves using AI and other projects to encrypt and attach a book to an NFT. It even partnered with Soltype, Solana’s first platform for literary NFTs. Darkblock’s NFT technology was integrated by NFT-TIX to transform ticketing. For Darkblock, revolutionizing how NFTs have always been used is a way of ushering in the next wave of creator economy. In March, it launched the beta version of PFP Content Factory, a tool that gives PFP project founders a quick and easy way to create PFP derivatives and spread the vibes.

Glass Protocol

This year, Glass Protocol gave an idea of the capacity and profitability of its business. It said the projects had helped creators to release more than 200 videos and earned 1.5 million dollars. The project announced that it got 12,000 signups on the Glass Pass waitlist, which is a feature that works as an identity for people intending to create videos on Glass. While releasing multiple musical videos, Glass introduced the Circle which was to help creators build communities. The projects also migrated back to Ethereum from Solana, a move it said was prompted by users’ request. But shortly after, it moved to Optimism. It blamed high gas fees for switching to Ethereum layer 2. But the growth and development of Glass Protocol was short lived. In September, the project announced that it was ending active development. It said sustainability was a real issue as the platform’s revenue does not offset development costs.

Gridacity

Although a games platform, Gridacity has been around since at least 2020, not much is known about it. In 2023, it had some activities worthy of being acknowledged. It launched Reveries of Ymatar, a collection of 100 games on Bitcoin powered by Ordinals and Arweave. Games are stored on ArDrive.

LiveArt

LiveArt, describes itself as a web3 platform for art powered by a global art price database, utility token and artificial intelligence-driven art market analytics. The bulk of its activities this year were on releasing art. In the middle of the year, it launched the LiveArt Collector Hub. The feature has collection opportunities, keeping track of Live Art token reward and the collector circles. It attracted an unannounced investment sum from Mapleblock and other investors including Binance Labs, Animoca Brands and Samsung Ventures.

Metaplex Protocol

At the start of the year Metaplex, a leading digital asset protocol on Solana but associated with Arweave, issued an announcement denying that an attack on Magic Eden where fake NFTs were sold as a scam did not affect it. Programmable NFTs got the attention of Metaplex in the first quarter of the year. Metaplex also boosted its royalties feature with programmable NFTs being used to enforce royalties and an upgrade process for existing collections. The response of many applications to the feature suggested that it was a welcome development. Programmable NFTs were also added to the NFT diagram by Metaplex Foundation, symbolizing recognition for the tech. Programmable NFTs also got deployed on the Metaplex mainnet. It also updated its JS SDK to support programmable NFTs. The protocol took feature building further by launching creator studio. Metaplex’s programmable NFT was integrated by Solana wallet, Solflare. Metaplex’s infrastructure also got some upgrades such as token metadata deployment to mainnet and rust and js packages and Candy Machine version3 which allows for programmable NFT minting. Metaplex creator studio invitation had a setback when Mailchimp suspended the service. Metaplex described the situation as gatekeepers fighting against Web3 creators. It resorted to sending the invitation through compressed NFTs. Metaplex collaborated with Solana Foundation to make token Metadata immutable as a way of strengthening its defence against censorship. Token Metadata is explained further here. The monorepo of Metaplex programme library was broken up into individual repos to allow for a cleaner space that promotes productivity. Metaplex foundation announced steps to decentralise the protocol through a governance mechanism. NFT compression tool was deployed on mainnet and its Rust package was published and in the fourth quarter of the year, Metaplex announced that over 130 million NFTs have been minted on the platform. It is ending the year with an initiative to reduce rent cost for new NFTs by decreasing token metadata account sizes for new mints, beginning with the master edition account. Metaplex also introduced inscriptions and engravings which it said was a new standard for fully on-chain and immutable digital assets on Solana.

Mintbase

Mintbase, a platform that allows the minting of NFTs, began the year by launching an affiliate system with the goal that anyone can build their own NFT market, selling other folks NFTs and receiving market fees. It said the affiliate system bring value to the community as anyone can earn a market fee without ever talking to the seller or Mintbase. It also embarked on integration of more wallets to give users more options. Collaborating with Stateless Dao, Mintbase introduced the Cootoo project which is a distribution contract that makes it easy to distribute funds on a Mintbase store. It launched a series of grants programmes that eventually funded dozens of projects. Mintbase experimented with ChatGPT experiments, changed its user interface and added payment in stablecoins and via Stripe credit card. To further boost the experience of its users, Mintbase created easier NFT management solutions, which will make interaction with NFTs possible on Store Pages and Profile. It also introduced ‘tabs’ which help to share project details, images, codes etc in one place. It also infused a chat-powered search tool on Mintbase for developer docs.

OLTA

OLTA, a toolkit for creators to publish interactive art began the year with a slow start. It revealed that they were finding it hard to have its NFTs collected on the platform. It called for suggestions on what it could do to improve sales. On the infrastructure of its application, OLTA announced that it was building a time and event based dynamic media protocol where the value proposition is focused around participation with art. There was no word on when it would launch.

Pianity

Pianity released new features for its mobile app in January, including creation of new channels; refined reply to messages and mentions; customizable notifications. Pianity also enabled users to connect to Metamask. It said the technology that made this possible was made possible by Redstone. This feature could be described as a bridge between Arweave and Ethereum users. It moved Club, a feature on its mobile platform, to the web platform. After announcing in January that it was building ArSnap, Pianity finally launched the tool in September.

Releap Protocol

One of the first announcements, Releap, which is social graph made this year was a support for NFT creation on its studio platform. One month later in February, Releap said more than 8000 NFTs had been created. In April, it announced an upgrade to its system to allow it function as a protocol. Releap also enabled searching by profile name and launched on the Sui network mainnet. It created sponsored transactions to help users to create content, follow and like without any fees. The project also raised $2.1million. Releap had its codes audited in August by MoveBit. Some of the major events by the end of the year was the introduction of Releap Social Tokens which symbolised its desire to pioneer social-fi and the storing of content created on Releap through Irys.

Sound.xyz

One of Sound’s biggest achievements this year was launching a mobile app. The music NFT application also added support for email sign-in and credit card payment for minting. It also introduced curator rewards which collectors could use to earn. It also introduced a community page for artists on Sound. Sound announced that it had removed limits on price, supply and drop formats. It integrated Optimism, an Ethereum layer two. In what it calls opening its project to artists, Sound announced that artists would earn 100 percent of revenues generated from their contents. If you are wondering how Sound would sustain the project, it raised $20million in their Series A. It is closing the year with a migration to Base Chain and the acquisition of Soho to accelerate and scale its vision for the music industry.

WenMint

At the beginning of the year, WenMint announced launch pad support for six EVM chains. Its staking feature which it said was tested for months, was released in the first quarter of the year. WenMint did not do much this year. The year 2024 is another opportunity for the project to build and it's users will be looking forward to it.

“Debug" Program: If you find errors in this article, including typos, grammatical mistakes, incorrect descriptions, ambiguous meanings, redundant descriptions, or other problems, you can give us feedback and we will be rewarded with incentives. Click "here" to give feedback.

🔗 More about PermaDAO ：Website | Twitter | Telegram | Discord | Medium | Youtube