Towards supporting 1000s of projects

Our goal is to provide transparency and a detailed vision of the entire NFT market! Due to the nature of non-fungible tokens, this isn’t as simple without taking a more generalized approach. We can measure “unique addresses”, “transaction volume”, and “USD or Ethereum spent” for many projects quite easily, as we do with our weekly statistics but, our statistics and delivery provide a much more comprehensive view of every single asset sold!

How can we balance providing a better project discovery platform without compromising the quality of the data we provide?

The evolution of listing on NonFungible.com

NonFungible’s journey started in early 2018 with only 1 project listed: Decentraland. A year later, we are listing 17 NFT projects and we are preparing to add new ones in the coming weeks.

Our goal within the crypto-gaming and blockchain ecosystem has always been and still is, to shed light on market trends and developments of non-fungible tokens. Driven by this mindset, we have been working from the beginning by regularly adding new projects, allowing you to follow news, trends, and better understand the evolution of related markets.

One of the biggest asked questions on social media is “When will you support project X?”. 

Until recently, this process of adding projects was mostly a manual one. Evaluate each application or project that seemed relevant, after which followed a necessary period to scan the Ethereum blockchain history to identify and then treat all transactions related to this project. However, we were constrained by the processing times, getting in touch with project leaders, and building out the full project profile with support for the appropriate meta attributes. Often we are required to do complete project evaluations manually when we cannot get adequate and complete information.

Following standard practices, building for open communities

Building tools to support a large number of projects heavily relies on common practices and technological development standards (ERC721). We cannot stress enough that, utilizing common and standard practices is one of the single best ways to promote your project.

Use common libraries to build non-fungible, ERC721, tokens such as:

• 0xcert’s Non-fungible token implementation for Ethereum-based blockchains.
• OpenZeppelin’s ERC721 implementation

Typically projects do follow the ERC721 standard – even if a project doesn’t provide the source code, we can detect this pattern and take advantage of it.

The next-biggest challenge is collecting and presenting project-specific meta attributes for each project’s NFT assets. This is due to the flexibility and loosely defined specification of how token metadata should be stored and presented, or in some cases, lack of transparency or lack of development time. There are indeed standard proposals around this that are widely accepted and utilized, and we can take advantage here as well but this is seen as much less “mission-critical” by many projects.

• EIP 1047: Token Metadata JSON Schema

Projects who follow the above standards and proposals will have a much easier time being listed on NonFungible.com, OpenSea.io, and any other non-fungible token service. These are the building blocks of the ecosystem.

Next-generation listings on NonFungible.com

We have spent several months on what we call our “NFT radar” – allowing us to track the blockchain automatically and offer you better tools and vision of NFT markets. Along with crowdsourcing, we believe we can identify and collect data for a larger set of projects, providing a more accurate and complete overview of blockchain items while not compromising on the quality and level of detail of the data we present.

Our “NFT radar” is almost finalized! Once live, it will allow us to:

• Considerably increase our capacity to list new projects
• Offer you new and always more exclusive analysis
• Bring transparency to thousands of NFT markets
• Identify and highlight a more complete picture in our Weekly Stats on social media

In addition, we will build the web-management tools allowing collaboration building complete project profiles for enhanced listing status. We will ask our community to deliver the content they wish to see the most in a Wikipedia-style format, a much more open and inclusive network of projects, with the most active, conformant, and legitimate projects featured and separated from “incomplete” profiles.

Our first step, which you will see in the coming weeks, is to upgrade our weekly statistics on social media. We will begin to scan and identify thousands of ERC721-compliant tokens and including volume, unique addresses, and currency transacted for these projects.

We look forward to building a more collaborative and inclusive community with you!

Thank you for being part of our vibrant community!