⚠️ Disclaimer: Privacy-preserving e.g. Secret NFTs are now live on mainnet! Check out our Secret NFTs page to learn all about them.
Hello to the community!
Today we are excited to announce that we have funded a new community grant proposal supporting the development of a non-fungible token (NFT) standard for Secret Network. We’ve posted many times in the past year about the potential power of privacy-preserving Secret NFTs, which can enable verifiable representation of unique items and events such that ownership and transactions are private by default.
This work will be foundational to the establishment and growth of NFTs native to the Secret universe. It will also unlock new and unique products and applications that rely on Secret NFTs and the protections afforded by Secret Network!
The original proposal from community contributor Baedrik can be found on the Secret Foundation Github.
SecretFoundation
Read on to learn more about this grant, Secret NFTs, and how this could impact you as a user or developer in our ecosystem!
Want to build new solutions on Secret Network? Apply for your own grant from our $60M ecosystem pool!
About This Grant
Discussion of this grant began on the Secret Forum, where many members of the community weighed in on the potential power of Secret NFTs and their own needs for a reference implementation and refined specifications.
baedrik
Non-fungible tokens are of great importance to the Secret Network ecosystem. While there has been a lot of vocalized interest in creating NFTs on Secret Network, there has been no starting point for anyone wanting to develop them.
Writing the SNIP-721 reference implementation will provide a base contract that other developers can use as-is to deploy NFTs on Secret Network, or as a starting point to add their app-specific functions/data. The toolkit package will allow developers to easily integrate SNIP-721 compliant NFTs into their apps (such as building an NFT marketplace, for example).
Expansions to this initial work could include: building a UI for non-developers to easily create and manage NFTs, building an NFT version of sealed-bid auctions to sell NFTs for SNIP-20 tokens, and providing functionality to trade NFTs.
We are excited to see how existing mainnet applications – such as SecretSwap and Secret Auctions – can be expanded with the development of Secret NFTs!
About Secret NFTs
NFTs have critical properties that make them powerful and differentiated:
- Uniquely identifiable so that instances cannot be duplicated or copied without detection
- Ownable with associated rights and capabilities which can only be transacted and transferred by the owner(s) of the asset
- Resolvable to enable discovery, validation, verification of assertions and linked resources
- Decentralized with no requirement for a central issuing agency
- Persistent to not be reliant on the custodianship or continued operation of impermanent organizations
- Cryptographically verifiable to prove assertions / resources have not been corrupted and to demonstrate control of authenticated resource identifiers
- Stateful to establish a sequential order in which a metadata and resources are recorded, for provenance as well as temporal and relational integrity
SecretNFTs have new innovative features that will provide additional security and usability to this new emerging ecosystem:
Private ownership: Since NFTs are rare, people in the community know who owns a certain NFT and can correlate addresses with individuals. Having private ownership of NFTs will ensure your assets and transactions do not need to be exposed to everyone by default.
Private metadata: In addition to public metadata, secretNFTs provide an optional private metadata field. Private metadata enables cool use-cases, such as:
- Lootboxes and private sealed decks of cards: Currently the concepts of a lootbox or decks of cards with different rarities are not possible in Ethereum games given the public nature of NFT metadata. We believe Secret NFTs will significantly improve gaming experiences and increase the use of NFTs within games.
- Private metadata can also be sealed even from the NFT owner. This would enable storing sensitive information in an NF, functioning like a vault.
To date, much of the adoption of NFTs has focused on art or digital collectibles. In addition to the gaming examples, there are many new use cases for NFTs which are unlocked through the introduction of programmable privacy, including the representation of a broad range of real-world assets, “cookies” for experiences that protect the identity of the experiencer, and much more!
We believe the introduction of Secret NFTs will represent a massive leap forward for the potential of non-fungible tokens. If you have your own ideas for what you could build with Secret NFTs or how to expand on this grant work, please share your thoughts on the Secret Forum – or get in touch with our teams and communities on the Secret Chat!
Join us, and help us build a more secure and more empowering internet.
Onwards and upwards!
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