Stellar Community Fund

By Litemint

Litemint

SCF #19

$103.1K

Legacy v4.0 Award

Awarded

Gives creators the power to distribute their work directly to their fans, no middleman allowed!

Products & Services

NFT Royalties

Royalties play a pivotal role in digital economies. The industry has encountered numerous obstacles in achieving decentralized payment enforcements (as we discussed in Meridian 2022, see video excerpt here). Presently, most marketplaces retain significant control over enforcing royalty payments (see this Tweet from OpenSea), which poses challenges to creators and businesses. Royalty smart contracts adopting a restrictive approach by controlling trade execution can also have adverse effects, significantly narrowing the sales funnel for creators. While Litemint is working on incorporating support for such contracts, we recognize that it is just one aspect of the solution. These contracts are decentralized in principle, however they might not offer the openness required for general use cases. To address these challenges, we have identified a unique combination of Soroban smart contracts, a dedicated Oracle, and Stellar classic primitives (pre-auth transactions). These present an exceptional opportunity to implement the first comprehensive solution for decentralized NFT royalty payment enforcements. In this implementation, smart contracts are not used to control trade execution flow but rather to offer creators the assurance that they can revoke ownership if specific conditions are met (such as missed royalty payments). Concurrently, current owners are guaranteed that their ownership remains irrevocable as long as those conditions are not met. We are also working on making these features as accessible as possible to creators (including mobile and desktop), please check our video or the screenshots attached.

Advanced Auctions

We have been providing decentralized, no escrow, time-limited auctions, with full SDEX execution (aka Live Auctions) on our platform since September 2021. Check this blog for technical details. These live auctions account for 35% of NFT sales on Litemint. Yet there are unavoidable limits (e.g. preventing auction sniping or implementing advanced models like second price auctions…). With the advent of Soroban smart contracts, we have the opportunity to extend our auction system for publishers. Besides our in-house solution which should cover common use cases, we will be incorporating support for third-party contracts, like for royalties.

Real-time and Historical Price Indexer

One of the most expected features on Litemint is the ability to track, filter and search assets by interest (bids/offers across all markets), collections, creators and provide some essential charting tools. We currently run a price indexer to provide cross-market history for sales, however it is currently not fit for real-time data queries (several hours latency over blockchain activity). As part of V2, our existing search engine has undergone refactoring using Azure Search. We intend to utilize this infrastructure to support the historical price indexer. This work is also a needed component for our Oracle-based solution for royalties.