DID YOU KNOW……..??
Did you know that in August 2020, Interchain Foundation awarded Persistence a grant to develop Interchain Standards for NFTs and Metadata, and the byproduct of this endeavor was Asset Mantle? Let’s talk about it…….
Persistence One received a grant from the Interchain Foundation to develop Interchain Standards for NFTs and Metadata. The Persistence team were ecstatic to announce that they had been awarded this grant by the Interchain Foundation (ICF), a pioneer in decentralised technologies, to establish Interchain Standards (ICS) for Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) and Metadata.
Persistence One of course had been and continues to be one of the most active contributors to the Cosmos ecosystem, thanks to its great competence in developing interchain workable technology. The Interchain Foundation as well had been and still remains positioned in the forefront of efforts to enhance interoperability, which had recently (at the time) emerged as a major catalyst for the cryptocurrency industry's rapid growth.
Persistence One's objective was (still remains) to bring real-world assets onto the Blockchain to bridge the gap between DeFi and traditional banking. Since NFTs had been used to tokenize real-world assets, they could subsequently be used as security for cryptoasset loans (stablecoins). One of the first teams to develop a native interchain NFT transfer was Persistence One.
The Persistence One team were to collaborate closely with the Interchain Foundation and Ixo in the coming months (at the time) to discover NFT and Metadata use-cases and develop Interchain Standards.
The team led by Persistence CTO, Deepanshu Tripathi, were to join resources with multiple projects in the Cosmos ecosystem to discover their requirements around NFT and Metadata use cases while deriving native definitions of NFT.
What was the significance of this endeavor?
It was understood that with more than 50 million active users (Source: Statista) around the world, the cryptocurrency ecosystem had seen a major spike in innovation and popularity. Despite this, the industry's collective market valuation remained less than 0.01% of the traditional economy, owing to the chain's low exposure to real-world assets.
Therefore divide between the traditional and digital economies needed to be overcome if the cryptocurrency business was to grow considerably and attain widespread adoption. Non-fungible Tokens (NFTs) were (still remains) the catalyst for bridging this gap since they had inherent qualities including ownership rights, verifiability, and authenticity.
Comdex, the first dApp in the Persistence ecosystem, was created entirely with the Persistence SDK (Software Development Kit) and is a physical commodities exchange with a trade volume of over $30 million. To bring institutional money into the cryptocurrency business, Comdex was designed to employs NFTs to tokenize real-world assets like invoices and trade receivables.
Motivation behind this……
The NFT definition by ERC721 standards at the time had a number of drawbacks:
1. They favored NFT definitions based on smart contracts.
2. A common native wallet that could hold multiple types of NFTs was not considered in the smart contract-based approach to NFT implementation.
3. Only allowed a single NFT transaction with a single definition.
These limits made cross-chain implementations extremely challenging, and the ERC721 interface definitions lacked the flexibility of app chain-based native implementations.
Persistence’s answer to these issues was native NFTs, which were not skewed towards smart contracts like the ERC721 standards and strived to simplify the interface, resulting in an increase in the number of use-cases/implementations of NFTs and metadata.
What was Persistence hoping to accomplish with this grant?
1. Create a very basic NFT interface that all data structures must implement in order to be classified as an NFT, as well as an NFT wallet interface that could store the ownership of all such NFT implements for a given account.
2. Create a base implementation of the NFT and NFT wallet interfaces as modules, complete with mint, mutate metadata, and burn transactions for base NFT and transfer ownership transactions for base NFT wallet.
3. Create a metadata module to keep track of the metadata kvStore used to store NFT metadata. This module could also be used to store metadata for objects created by other modules.
4. Extend the base NFT wallet implementation's transfer NFT functionality by defining packet data structure, app logic, and encoding for interchain NFT ownership transfers, as well as the ICS specification.
5. Create tutorials and documentation to demonstrate how to use the interfaces and base modules, as well as how to compose with other modules and extend/implement the definitions.
How was it to benefit the Ecosystem?
All projects in the Cosmos ecosystem were going to be able to:
1. Custom mint, mutation, and burn transaction logic is retained at their app chain, allowing them to define their own implementation of NFT structures.
2. Create a universal wallet for all NFT implementations that could store ownership information for multiple types of NFTs from multiple chains in a single wallet for an account.
3. Use Inter-Blockchain Communication (IBC) to send the ownership of the NFT across chains without the need for permissioned bridges or token transformation/pegging.
In what ways was Persistence going to make use of Interchain standards?
Persistence’s purpose was (and is) to enable seamless value exchange around the world in order to improve the speed and efficiency of cross-border trade and financing in order to close the $1.5 trillion financial gap.
As we know already, Persistence is a platform that powers Debt Marketplaces, which connect companies with excess money (lenders) with entities in need of capital (borrowers).
To make this easier, Persistence had to use a three-step process:
1. Asset tokenization — Tokenization of real-world assets using invoice fingerprinting and NFTs to capture all unique metadata.
2. Asset Exchange (NFT Marketplace/DEX) — trading and exchanging tokenized real-world assets for Stablecoins.
3. Financing / Liquidity Pools — Using NFT assets (invoices) as collateral to borrow/lend Stablecoins through Stablecoin liquidity pools.
Once a real-world asset had been tokenized into an NFT, it became possible to be traded or used as collateral to fund business needs quickly, easily, and globally.
You can participate in the NFT and Metadata Working Group to contribute to the creation of Interchain Standards for NFT and Metadata.
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