It has now been two months since our WAX Labs project for AtomicAssets hub we’re building has been approved by the WAX token holders. In this development update, we will be taking a closer look at a specific part of the AtomicAssets hub: The marketplace.
Read more about AtomicAssets in our article: “AtomicAssets — non fungible tokens done right”
Getting the work done
In the last month, we have kept our heads low and continued working on all the stuff that still needs to be done. That means continuing to make small improvements to the smart contracts, big progress on the Explorer API and finalizing the design.
Finishing up the design took a little longer than expected because our team as well as Dallas Rushing, the UI/UX designer we work together with, didn’t want to make compromises when it came to the quality. We changed a few small things and added a couple of new design elements that we believe will make the experience feel more intuitive, and now the design is 100% finished. We couldn’t be more excited about the result and are sure that you will love it as well.
Implementing the frontend
As outlined in our WAX Labs project, we are working together with a freelance developer to implement the frontend. Because of the slight delays in finishing up the design, this step of the process started later than we originally planned. We believe that we will likely still be able to keep the 3 month timeline we set, but we also want to be clear that we would rather miss the deadline by a week or two than to release an unfinished version.
We will be announcing a launch date for the AtomicAssets hub as we get closer to release.
The AtomicMarket
The marketplace will be an integral part of the AtomicAssets hub. It allows everyone to list their assets for sale or put them up for auction, and on the other side allows users to purchase and bid on assets of all sorts of dapps and collections. But there is more to the AtomicMarket than just that!
Sellers keep ownership until the asset is sold
If you put an asset up for sale, you actually don’t have to immediately send it over to a marketplace account, as it is the case for other NFT marketplaces. Instead, for sales the trade offer feature of AtomicAssets is used. When listing an asset for sale, a trade offer including the respective asset is sent to the marketplace contract. This offer is only accepted when somebody purchases the asset.
This means that you can list your assets for sale, and still continue to use it normally in dapps or use it for other trade offers.
For auctions, assets are transferred to the marketplace account, because once an auction starts the seller shouldn’t be able to cancel it anymore.
Dapps can choose to pay for all associated RAM costs
With the recent launch of the SimpleAssets (a different asset standard) based Garbage Pail Kids collection by Topps, one problem has become very clear: New users quickly run out of RAM. And especially for those coming from a more mainstream background, figuring out how to buy more RAM is not an easy task.
When developing AtomicAssets, making sure that all RAM would be paid for by the dapps and not by the users was very important to us. And we have the same priorities for the AtomicMarket. That’s why dapps (collections) will have the option to pay the RAM for all sales and auctions of their assets. We’re making sure that it isn’t possible to abuse this feature, so that dapps know ahead of time how much RAM will be needed to allow their users to never have to worry about RAM again.
Support for various tokens
In the beginning, WAX will be the only token that can be used to buy and sell assets on the marketplace. However, the marketplace is designed in a way that allows us to add any other token on the WAX blockchain to the marketplace, so that assets can also be bought and sold with this token.
We will be fairly conservative with adding new tokens, as we do not want to overload the market by supporting too many of them, but will add tokens when we see a demand for it.
Listing an asset for USD prices
On top of listing an asset for on chain tokens like WAX, users will also be able to list assets for USD prices. Those assets will still be paid for with WAX tokens, but the amount of WAX tokens is calculated at the time of purchase. This is made possible by the delphioracle, which provides a real time, decentralized price oracle.
Consider the following example:
- Paul lists his asset for sale for 10.00 USD
- Ryan sees this sale. The WAX price is $0.04 / WAX at that time, therefore he would have to pay 250 WAX to purchase the asset. He decides against it.
- Two days later, Lisa sees the sale as well. The WAX price rose to $0.05 / WAX. Lisa decides to buy the asset, and pays 200 WAX for it. Paul receives those 200 WAX (minus fees)
We believe that this feature will be especially interesting when selling tokenized real world items (like vIRL), where prices are usually based around fiat currencies rather than cryptocurrencies.
Low base fees, customizable dapp fees
The base fee for sales and auctions is only 2% (1% each for the maker and taker marketplace, more on that in the next section).
On top of that, each collection (dapp) can specify a cut that they want to receive from each sale. This provides an additional income stream for dapps an incentivizes them to embrace this secondary market for assets.
A collection author could for example specify a 5% market_fee in the AtomicAssets contract. Then for each asset of this collection sold a 7% fee would be taken from the sale price, 2% going to the marketplaces and 5% going to the collection.
Anyone can integrate the AtomicMarket in their app / dapp
We have listed this as the last point because from a user’s perspective, it probably sounds pretty boring. But it might actually be the most crucial aspect for the long term adoption of the AtomicMarket:
The marketplace is designed to be fully independent of us (pink.network). The 2% fee taken from each sale does not go to us — It goes to whichever marketplace facilitates the listing and the purchase of the sale.
This means that other teams can take our market API (or build their own of course) and use it to build their own marketplaces, where they get the fees. And we hope that happens!
All the marketplaces using the AtomicMarket contract share the same liquidity pool. So if someone lists an asset for sale on Marketplace A, it could still be shown and bought on Marketplace B (if that happens, both marketplaces would get 1% fees each). Therefore, rather than competing with each other, marketplaces benefit from each other.
And it allows for one more thing
A dapp might want to integrate a marketplace within their application, but only for the assets of their collection. They can still use the AtomicMarket for that. Within their application, they would simply only display sales and auctions for assets that belong to their dapp. The marketplace will look to be dapp exclusive, and the users might not even know that in the backend, the AtomicMarket is being used.
But by using the AtomicMarket, the sales and auctions also become available to display on other marketplaces like the AtomicAssets hub. Once again, by sharing a common liquidity pool, everyone benefits: The dapp is able to reach more potential buyers without losing any of the income generated within their application, and the marketplaces are able to offer their users a larger pool of sales and auctions to choose from.
What will happen in the next month
We will continue to work hard to bring you the best possible product at launch. That means finishing up the Explorer API, working together with the frontend developer on implementing the hub, further testing an refining the smart contracts and creating educational material (mostly for developers) to make getting started with AtomicAssets as easy as possible.
If you want to stay up to date with the project, you can follow us on twitter @pinknetworkx and join the AtomicAssets telegram group (t.me/atomicassets).
The promotion that we mentioned in the AtomicAssets announcement article is still active: Everyone who joins the telegram group before we release AtomicAssets 1.0 will receive a special asset. We’re working with an artist to create something that is unique and adequately represents how special of an asset this will be.
If AtomicAssets has tens of thousands of users in the future, will you be one of the <100 people that were there since the very beginning?
