Proposal: Funding for Andromeda NFT Protocol 1.0

Governance & Proposals
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Funding for Andromeda NFT Protocol 1.0

updated: 9AM CST (UTC -6) Tuesday, June 8

Overview

Andromeda Labs has an ambitious vision of creating a new NFT paradigm in which contracts are embedded with governance, rules, royalties, and other commercial terms. This will establish a new standard for development and delivery of multiple industries and opportunities in the Terra ecosystem.

We are submitting this community grant proposal to help build the first iteration of this protocol: a set of smart contracts with embedded royalties and legal agreements in a marketplace with zero rake/house fees.

Vision

The existing NFT ecosystem, starting with ERC721, is extremely limited in its ability to protect the interests or even reflect the intentions of creators. There is no way to enforce agreements or even maintain any sort of legal continuity throughout the life of the NFT.

Andromeda addresses this by creating a user-friendly modular and programmable logic-construction environment that progressively stacks business requirements, risk transfer and value protection “rights”. Each Andromeda mint will encapsulate a multifaceted solution that “travels with the NFT”, and store all transaction logic on-chain.

As such, Andromeda will function as the infrastructure that enables new products, services, and financial value on the blockchain — as the horizontal “rails” that creators can build on top of, to design innovative business models.

Some examples of verticals that we have identified are:

Real Estate
Equities
Jurisdictional Fencing
Patents
 Insurance
Bonds
Credit Scoring
Carbon Credits
 Royalties
Taxes
Regulatory Compliance
Medical Records

Timeline & Roadmap

We expect the full Andromeda NFT Protocol to be a medium- to long-term project. As such, we have an ambitious 4-month goal to create an MVP of Andromeda, including:

  • creating smart contracts with embedded royalties and legal agreements
  • partnering with a market leader in collectibles
    (e.g. gaming/virtual collectables, digital art, other collectable markets)
  • building a marketplace with zero rake/house fees

We are confident this first iteration of Andromeda that showcases the utility of functional NFTs will be the proof of concept that leads to numerous partnerships and integrations as it unleashes the full potential of NFTs.

Note: we are currently in talks with several players in the space that are interested in our protocol. Due to the sensitive nature of these talks, we are not ready to make any announcements at this time.

Team

Cody Marx Bailey
Protocol Manager

Cody is a veteran in the blockchain, cryptography and distributed systems space. In 2013 he started working on early developments in Ethereum Smart Contracts. In 2017, he co-authored the ERC-721 Non-Fungible Token standard for the Ethereum chain. Since then, he has been developing complex financial blockchain instruments.

Brendan Cooper
Business Use Cases & Economics

Brendan Cooper has led the strategy of all NFT Collectibles, eCommerce, mobile commerce, and mobile gaming platforms at scale for Panini SpA and Panini America, Inc. While at Panini, Brendan gained deep early insights with over four years of NFT and twenty years of licensing experience. He is a global digital transformation leader for Fortune 1000 companies and angel/venture funded startups.

Connor Barr
Lead Developer

Full stack, COSM/WASM, and blockchain integrated web and DApp development. Developed a Blockchain supported road toll app, as part of a team, which placed 2nd at the 2019 MOBI Hackathon first phase, also receiving the “Most Feasible” award.

Mant Hawkins
Leadership, Operations & Economics

Mant is a serial entrepreneur with Founder and CEO level experience in directed energy technology, smart building commercial real estate, “the business of blockchain” consultancy, and a CEO mentor and advisor. As a military veteran he commanded at the USMC F-18 squadron (250 people/12 F-18s) and group level (3 squadrons) and led all USMC air combat operations in Iraq ($2B Project).

TBD
Protocol Architect

This role will be in charge of the “boxes and arrows”, technology selection, overseeing interoperability, standards compliance and overall protocol design.

The Ask

We are asking for $130,000 to complete the initial launch of NFTs on Terra and the first iteration of the Andromeda NFT Protocol. With this initial funding, we will hire a full-time team of 5 people to build on this ambitious project.

Use of Funds

Salaries

  • Developers (3 at $8k/mo) $72,000
  • Business Leads (2 at $7k/mo) $42,000

Operational Overhead

  • Branding & Content Development $6,000
  • Business Systems (Email, Github, Zoom, etc.) $10,000

Thank you

We’re excited to be a part of the Terra community. We have been involved since around the beginning of the year and have seen so much incredible growth and excitement that it compelled us to go ahead and jump in and help drive more adoption, value, and excitement to our chain.

We’ll be publishing updates as we make progress towards our goals. I think everyone will be excited to see what we have envisioned.

21 Likes
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Fantastic initiative. Looking forward to integrating NFTs into Loop and other projects that we’re working on!

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Interesting project,
If i may ask, how did you guys discover the Terra ecosystem and what convinced you that it was the right place for such a project?

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Love it! This will give a much-needed service to the ecosystem and world at large. Looking forward to following the progress of this.

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Well, there’s a few reasons. I found Terra in January '21 when someone told me about Mirror Protocol. I thought that idea was brilliant and the way it was backed by stable tokens made a lot of sense. That lead me to the question “What are these stable tokens and how do they work?” - Enter LUNA.

I read through the white paper and sorta down the rabbit hole I went. I started to get to know the different folks in the community and saw how everyone was driving value together.

Then I realized that the technical underpinnings were superior to Ethereum due to the smart contracts being written in Rust and not Solidity, which I’ve been extremely frustrated with.

Then, lastly, I realized there wasn’t any sorta NFT layer (that I know of) and I’ve been kicking around the idea of creating these functional NFTs and boom, the decision was pretty self evident.

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How long after the $187K MVP do you expect vertical integrations? Like you say, this seems like a project that will take a lot of building, and the initial price tag of building just the MVP is worrisome personally. Why not raise some VC funding at this rate?

Do you expect tokens/airdrops? i hate the wen questions but just trying to figure out how the community can benefit from this more directly given cost

Trying to make sense of this - so in 4 months, there will be an MVP of the protocol, and also more “generic” NFTs launched by the team? Any idea what this will be?

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Tersera,

Great questions… Let me attempt to answer them. We’ll most likely look int VC funding for further expansion. Internally, we’re already realizing that in order to pull this off, we’ll need to really build out the engineering team and organization.

We also need to develop some sorta governance/token structure that keeps the protocol open and accessible to anyone. No gatekeeping or hostage situations here. We’ve got some ideas on that, which would, of course, keep in the spirit of all airdrops in the Terra ecosystem. That’s sorta on the back burner for now. We want to focus on the short term for now and show what we’re made of, so to speak.

To your last question/point… yes, the platform would be launched on mainnet allowing anyone to create NFTs and program them through the UI. We’re in talks with a few potential partners to help us with use cases/requirements.

I hope I’m making sense here. Please feel free to ask more questions :slight_smile: Glad to add transparency to the motives.

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Thanks for the answers,

Whats the best way to get into contact/PM with you?

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For now, [email protected]

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Really great initiative! Solid ideas and appears to have a great team behind the project. Looking forward to seeing what you guys can build.

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You have Angel Protocols support! Welcome to Terra, looking forward to this!

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Sounds great!

You said Marx Bailey co-author of erc721, why is this name is not mentioned here

“EIP-721: ERC-721 Non-Fungible Token Standard
Author William Entriken, Dieter Shirley, Jacob Evans, Nastassia Sachs”

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I’m mentioned there (search) and all over the ERC conversation/channels we used. Github, etc.

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What happens after 4 months WHEN things will not go as expected? $130,000 for a 4 months MVP is a lot of money, but at the same time, it is nothing if you want to kickstart with a 40k$ / month team with 2 business developer and no designer.

Do you have some spec/design/mockup to present to the community to give more details about the product?

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Youpi, thanks for the question. You’re absolutely right that things will not go as expected. I’ve been writing software for almost 25 years, eek, make that 27 years and no project ever goes smoothly. We’ve accounted for that by trying to keep the deliverables realistic. $40k is a lot of money and it’s also not a lot of money. Engineers doing this kind of work can fetch 3x the amount we’re making on this.

We are not launching a polished product for the masses. We’re putting the majority of the work into the protocol/structure itself. We’ll have an MVP web interface, but it will largely be functional and not super beautiful. We are trying to focus on the hardest parts in this MVP, which is the Rust engineering and architecture side.

That being said, we do have a PoC, with working CosmWasm code + interface that runs on testnet. Connor is working on getting that up so you guys can see it. We presented it to the Terraform Labs guys to get their feedback and they were blown away. (See William’s tweet about NFTs from last week).

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Glad to hear that you already are working on it!

Imho, giving us some more details about the existing PoC can reassure the community by showing some skin in the game, and any Lunatic would be glad to support an ambitious team with skin in the game.

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Hi SuperPhly,

Can you describe a simple situation where Andromeda would bring value to a creator or users and compare it to:

  • Current NFT solutions
  • Traditional solutions

It would help a lot of us understand where you want to go!

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Youpi,

Absolutely and I appreciate the critical questions you’re raising. These are funds that the community can direct towards projects that can provide more value to the Terra ecosystem. We should all be curious about the hows, whats, whens and whys. That being said, I appreciate this kind of discourse.

So the PoC we have now allows for someone to mint and NFT, assign royalties, taxes and whitelists to the NFT itself. The parameters for who is on the whitelist, the taxation rate and multi-party royalties (individually set %).

Once it’s created, there’s a two transaction process for “selling” the NFT. The owner proposes as sell price to the buyer. So, lets say in this instance the seller (A) wants to sell to (B) the NFT for $100 UST.

The recipient can then go and “fulfill” the sell offer + taxes (auto calculated). The buyer then has the option to send the $100 + <% taxes> through the NFT itself as the NFT is what handles the taxes and royalty payments. There’s no need to have an “OpenSea” in this mix.

The NFT has the programmable logic that will send the <% tax> to the tax agent, take the different royalties out of the $100 and pass the remainder to the seller.

It’s actually really cool. We’ll have a demo soon.

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Read my comment above, I sorta explain how our NFT scheme is very different than current NFT implementations.

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Yeah but i’m a simple man and your comments do not make a lot of sense to me. So to rephrase my question: what can i concretely do with Andromeda?