Please describe your proposed solution

The Problem

The crypto world in general, and the Cardano digital assets (NFTs) in particular, are not widely understood / adopted. Given the heterogeneous semantics of digital assets on blockchains (art, land plots, books, diamonds, provenance certificates, real-world assets, etc.) and the evolving landscape of search systems, we lack a modern NFT search engine which provides easy discovery, wallet explorer, exhaustive global search.

Reasons for approaching it in this way

We can alleviate the current situation by offering tools that cover the entire NFT space, are friendly and self-explanatory, safe, and not biased towards specific curated projects.

A prototype is already available at https://nftio.io, but a major UI/UX refactoring will be implemented. Our explorer will be designed to navigate the complex and diverse nature of blockchain-based digital assets, encompassing cryptocurrencies, NFTs, utility tokens, and more.

By integrating the latest advancements in search technologies—including lexical search, embeddings-based search, and the capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) such as contextual understanding and retrieval-augmented generation—our proposed explorer aims to provide a semantic lens, offering insights and access with precision and relevance. This approach anticipates the future demands of a rapidly evolving digital asset ecosystem.

Engagement

Our application will be accessible to the entire Cardano community as well as other blockchain communities.

We are already being used and engagement will only increase after fully implementing our open and free search engine and offering multiple search modalities:

• by uploading an existing image and finding similar ones
• by starting with an asset in the user's wallet
• text queries

We will also offer P2P asset swaps with the lowest possible fees, without losing custody (not even to a smart contract).

We will be very active on all the main media channels such as Twitter (X), Discord, etc. to rapidly increase engagement.

How you will demonstrate or prove your impact

Our daily number of users and API calls statistics will be reliable indicators to visualize our impact.

Explain what is unique about your solution, and why this is important to Cardano.

• Our approach is eliminating the bias around specific curated NFT collections and offers a global knowledge tool.
• Eliminating necessity for central NFT marketplaces - direct P2P swaps will be possible.
• Leveraging the widespread familiarity with search engines such as Google or Bing.

Please define the positive impact your project will have on the wider Cardano community

Value

Having a free, unbiased search engine, similar to Google or Bing in the Web2 world, but with enhanced digital identity protection features, safety, and utility (such as direct swaps) will be an excellent feature for Cardano users.

Our search engine will be user-friendly and convenient for the masses.

• The ability to inspect the NFTs in the users personal wallets in a protected environment.
• The ability to search by example offers the opportunity to attract a whole new customer base from other blockchains.
• Offering search APIs would make our tool interesting for integrations with any other Cardano DApp.

We will gather anonymized, publicly accessible statistics on our usage. These statistics will help us further tailor the service to meet user needs and offer customers. Regular publication of these statistics, once the service is available to the public, will provide ongoing insights into the service and its usage patterns.

What is your capability to deliver your project with high levels of trust and accountability? How do you intend to validate if your approach is feasible?

We possess the necessary research and development resources to successfully implement the proposed project. Our existing prototype, available at https://nftio.io, has been developed in our spare time and has already demonstrated significant interest in this type of tools.

We are experienced developers, are familiarized with the Information Retrieval domain: https://scholar.google.pt/citations?user=dDOCff8AAAAJ&hl=en

What are the key milestones you need to achieve in order to complete your project successfully?

Milestone 1: Milestone outputs: NFT Processing

Blockchain monitoring ensures minted NFTs are processed promptly, typically within a few seconds. Being complex digital assets,, various media types (text, image, audio, video) will be processed, generating corresponding vector embeddings, extracting and structuring metadata, building knowledge graphs. A few examples from the vast array of formats and encodings include: JPEG (JPG), PNG, GIF, TIFF, BMP, WebP, SVG for Images, MP3, WAV, AIFF, FLAC, AAC, OGG, MIDI for Audio, MP4, AVI, MKV, MOV, WMV, FLV, WebM, MPEG for Video, TXT, PDF, DOCX, HTML, XML, JSON, Markdown for Text, Base64 encoding and Binary data formats.

Acceptance criteria

After having completed the processing of each NFTs, the outcomes are verifiable in measurable ways: vector embeddings existence, dimensionality checks, metadata presence.

Evidence of milestone completion

When precise unique attributes are used for searching, the processed NFT will appear in the search results.

Milestone 2: Milestone outputs: Data Repository And Search

NFTIO will support cutting-edge embeddings extraction capabilities. A promising future direction for embedding models is to provide multiple optional representations (see https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.03216). By combining several vector representations NFTIO will decipher the essence of each NFT, enabling seamless exploration based on similarity, relevance, and context.

Pluggable search-engines:

The current prototype https://nftio.io integrates RocksDB and Lucene, creating a robust foundation for excellent search performance. While Lucene has excellent lexical search capabilities and has recently introduced vector-based search, there are other interesting projects in the search-space which are worth being considered, such as: ElasticSearch(based on Lucene), Vespa https://vespa.ai/, LanceDB https://lancedb.com/. As NFTIO evolves, it will embrace a pluggable search engine architecture, ensuring adaptability and scalability for future advancements.

Acceptance criteria

The search engine is up and running and it provides search results from the entire dataset.

Evidence of milestone completion

The data repository and and indexed versions of it will be materialized at a public location.

Milestone 3: Milestone outputs: Search User Interface and APIs

Our goal of designing and implementing an improved search interface requires careful consideration of usability, comprehension, and contextual relevance. We list below the main concepts we are considering:

Semantic Contextualization: Incorporate semantic context into the interface to provide users with a deeper understanding of the search results. For example, visually represent relationships between search queries and results, highlight relevant metadata, and provide contextual explanations.

Design: Implement a clean and intuitive user interface that prioritizes ease of use and navigation. Utilize familiar design patterns and intuitive controls to ensure that users can effortlessly interact with the search interface.

Customized Layouts: Design dedicated layouts tailored to the semantic domain of digital assets. For instance, for multimedia assets, create immersive gallery views with thumbnail previews and multimedia playback options. For textual assets like books or articles, offer a clean and structured layout optimized for reading.

Conversational Features: Leverage LLMs to enhance semantic understanding and context. Implement features such as auto-suggestions, entity recognition, and sentiment analysis to refine search queries and provide relevant results based on semantic meaning.

Acceptance criteria

The user interface and the API endpoints are deployed.

Evidence of milestone completion

The NFTIO user interface and search APIs will be publicly available.

Final Milestone: Milestone outputs: Direct Assets Swap

Real-time direct Assets Swaps between two wallets without the risks of loosing custody, without even deploying the assets into a smart contract are possible on Cardano. By offering a contextualized UI/UX users will easily trade/swap NFT books, land plots, and many other valuable NFTs discovered via our search engine.

Acceptance criteria

Once the users connect their wallets they are able to directly swap assets in the most transparent way.

Evidence of milestone completion

The peer-to-peer swap UI will be publicly available.

Who is in the project team and what are their roles?

Catalin Calistru

Research and Development - Founder of https://nftio.io

https://www.linkedin.com/in/catalin-calistru-3456a7173/

Eduard Caslariu

Research and Development - Founder of https://nftio.io

https://www.linkedin.com/in/eduard-caslariu

Please provide a cost breakdown of the proposed work and resources

As of the beginning of May, the price of 1 ADA is $0.45. Our funding request of ADA 200,000 is allocated over the next 12 months and is broken down as follows:

Development:

Cost: $7,000 per month (Approx. 185,000 ADA)

Purpose: To ensure the full steam development of our platform, which is critical for NFTIO.

Contract Work:

Cost: $20,000 to $30,000 (Approx. 66,000 ADA)

Purpose: NFTIO needs an excellent user experience. To achieve this we need the help of designers and UX experts.

Note: We will cover part of the cost

Server & Services:

Cost: 350$ per month

Note: We cover the cost

For a period of 12 months: 200,000 ADA

The are no dependencies on external factors.

How does the cost of the project represent value for money for the Cardano ecosystem?

NFTIO's budget is planned to ensure value for the Cardano ecosystem. The costs breakdown show that we also support part of it, we have 'skin in the game', therefore what we ask is below industry standards. But the requested budget is essential for delivering a high-quality, secure, and user-friendly search engine for the entire Cardano community:

Alignment with Industry Standards:

Development: The budget asked for development is significantly below industry rates because we have started the project and invested our own resources.

Return on Investment for the Cardano Ecosystem:

A global search engine with direct real time asset swaps will offer visibility to Cardano beyond its community and will help towards mass adoption.

Cost-Effectiveness and Efficiency:

Efficient Budget: Given that we have already started the development with our own resources we are cautious with effectiveness and efficiency.

We want to deliver value, ensuring that every ADA spent contributes significantly to the development, and growth of the Cardano ecosystem. The project not only aligns with industry standards in terms of costs but also promises substantial returns in terms of technological advancement and user growth.

Future plans:

After the successful completion we plan to collaborate/integrate with complementary projects in Cardano.