Happy Friday all! I wanted to give a brief update on the state of progress for NFTEarth, almost 1 week in. First, the community has over 200 members in it now, which is fantastic to see!
To begin with some background context, in case you are not familiar with the new project, NFTEarth is an effort to revive the Layer2 NFT ecosystem activity levels that were experienced prior to the primary exchange announcing it was closing. Over the past couple months since the announcement, there has been a significant decline in volume across Layer2 networks, as you might expect. NFTEarth is aimed at serving as part of the solution going forward, and is an attempt of doing so in a sustainable way by learning from what has been attempted in the past, and using those learnings as direction going forward.
Since work officially began 5 days ago, a lot of planning and strategy has been discussed, beginning with the idea that it is important to find others who also value Layer2 NFTs and trying to answer the question of how to find them. To that end, the solution was to create a new NFT, deployed in the current state of the market, which could serve as an overall broad representation of the Optimism NFT ecosystem at large.
The specifics of how are as follows: we compiled a list of 11 of the top NFT collections on Optimism, extracted all the wallet addresses of the owners using snapshots from data provider Mintplex, and from there, combined them all together and used this data to create an Allowlist for a Free Mint NFT on Optimism. This data can be viewed on GitHub here:
The NFT minted itself is planned to be used as a key driver of incentive design for the new exchange. Check it out on OpenSea!
It stands to reason that these addresses are likely to be people interested in using Optimism for trading NFTs, and also potentially contributing to the success of a new exchange on Optimism - if we use their prior on-chain activity as a form of reputation/credential.
Of the 18,449 addresses that were part of the final merkle root used for the Allowlist, there were in total there 2,850 NFTs minted while the mint was open, and we plan to use Optimism’s AttestationStation to additionally make use of every single additional address that interacted with the contract to include them in some capacity as well going forward - via means of another form of incentive, because the results of this experiment demonstrated that many who did not qualify for the Allowlist still expressed interest in owning the NFT.
The NFT has to-date had 4,352 transactions on the contract as of this writing on Friday evening 1/13/23, and the NFT is currently trending on the OpenSea Rankings page on Optimism at #8! This is exciting to see from a 100% cold start effort 5 days ago!
We have decided that the first chain to go live on will be Optimism, followed by Arbitrum. After thorough research into trying to formulate a reason as to why the current largest marketplace unexpectedly announced it was closing, we believe we have isolated the key reason for the operations needing to be halted, and this information is what we are building from in order to make the final architecture decisions before launching. If you want to get involved, don’t hesitate to get in touch!
An NFT Exchange for Layer2 Ethereum.
-Join the community in Discord to learn more!
-Follow on Twitter
-Check out the code GitHub