Interests for NFTs in the population exploded last year and became a world that companies and people want to jump into. NFTs are a tool that brings security especially for art with integration of all information into a blockchain. The way Cardano works makes it attractive for NFTs, but it lacks a minting feature available in open access for people to easily use it for their project development. Moreover, minting NFTs is an interesting feature in the crypto world, but without a protocol to easily link to servers containing the original file and then send the minted NFT to a wallet, this feature becomes hard to use for non highly skilled developers.
We found a protocol on the developers.cardano.org website for minting NFTs (https://developers.cardano.org/docs/native-tokens/minting-nfts/) but it is not complete and need to be linked to a wallet at some point. We propose to do it and to make it available for everyone in the Cardano community.
Our web system will pre-define the asset controller, provide pre-configuration and GUI for the NFT minting (Token Issuer) and wallet (Token User). To make the different development steps clear, we made the figure attached. In brief, we will first Define the Monetary Policy Script. This step will be required for the token issuers to lock the original file into the contract, their name and the number of tokens they want to create. Then, once the payment of minting fees from the issuer is done, the protocol will allow to mint the specific amounts of NFTs indicated by the issuer, crafting them into the Cardano blockchain and burning the requested amount of tokens. Once the script has validated the number of burned tokens, the NFTs will be sent and stored into a wallet. The issuer will then be able to use his/her tokens or redeem them.
The second stage of our project will be to test our protocol before allowing everyone to use it.
Being part of the Cardano community, we will develop the minting feature as open source to help the development of other projects/platforms from this challenge. We are going to use a written script already available for the Cardano community, perfect it and make it available and easy to use for everyone without high coding skills.
We believe that developing this feature will significantly help other projects from the community and indirectly expand ADA’s use-case. We believe it will also attract people from outside the community, willing to mint NFT and push them to use the Cardano blockchain, and so, to use ADA for their transactions.
The most obvious risk regarding NFT minting features in general concerns unauthorized parties who would mint an NFT using a digital file (Picture, audio track, video…) they do not own copyrights. Our project here is just the development of the minting feature easy to link to a server and a wallet. We plan to develop smart contracts to minimize this risk in another proposal for the Fund#9.
Non-developers may still be lost to use our feature. We plan to write a protocol or to make a video explaining how to use it. It will be interesting to have feedback from the community on it.