Swaps, Rare Pepe’s, and more Decentralization

Original Post: August 6th, 2021

News by the numbers

Over $1.3 Million in Vaults sold on Opensea in last 90 days
Record breaking RarePepe NFT “Nakamoto Card” sold for 48 Eth ($127,000) (see here)
2400 Vaults have been created across all networks
#1 position 6 days straight as top NFT project on Opensea for the Utility category.

Emblem holds the top spot on Opensea for category **Utility**

XCP NFT Collectors find utility

We would like to welcome all of the new Counterparty users to the platform. By utilizing Emblem Vault to bring XCP assets to the ethereum blockchain, users are able to introduce the larger NFT community to some of the original NFT’s “Rare Pepe’s”

@Fractional.art

Emblem vault has been used to fractionalize assets that until now were not compatible with fractionalization platforms.

Buy Fractions of “RAREPEPE Series 1 Card 1” (Counterparty NFT)
Buy fractions of “renaissance renaissance renaissance” (ERC1155)

Upgrades

Tor.us: We have had a few points on our roadmap for the past 6 months, one of which was secret network integration, and the other was Tor.us integration. After much research and an exhaustive development effort, we have decided to utilize Tor.us exclusively for decentralized key generation. This means we are no longer generating or storing private keys / seeds on Google Cloud, and no longer using Google HSM
Stay tuned for more details on this upgrade, including technical documentation and how we intend to expand this moving forward.
lazy minting: The minting process has been simplified to a single transaction, If for some reason you either choose not to submit the minting transaction, or some issue occurs, you can now mint these NFT’s at a later date/time of your choosing.
Counterparty Images: We have upgraded our API to correctly identify and display Counterparty images
Opensea filters: We have started including traits in vaults that reflect the projects assets within the vault, this should allow better discovery of types of vaults
Opensea Updates: Now the act of viewing a vault on Emblem.finance automatically updates the opensea metadata, this should make the addition of NFT’s on opensea more harmonious moving forward.

Project names are now included as “traits” allowing for filtering on storefronts

Audits

One point leading to the decision of choosing Tor.us over Secret network was the existence of multiple audits of their infrastructure that can be found here: https://github.com/torusresearch/audit

Marketplace

Everyone has been patiently waiting the arrival of Emblem Vault’s very own Swap Marketplace. Well your wait is almost over. By default our storefront will support every blockchain that emblem vault has been deployed to (6 networks to date) And will allow users to offer for sale/trade every NFT a user might have in their wallets, regardless of the network. There will be no whitelisting of NFT projects, making every NFT able to be traded.

Features: We will now list a few of the features that make our marketplace unique

Community: Users will be able to form clubs
- Clubs will be mini communities. Many NFT collections promote perks for owners of specific NFT’s exclusive drops and more
- Clubs will be able to make curated collections which will be featured within the storefront
Discoverability: Our storefront will have a heavy focus on Asset and Creator discovery. By enabling the following of users, assets, collections, coupled with the ability for users to attach tags to assets within the site, we aim to make it easier to find art/artists/collectibles to fit your tastes.
Trading: It’s always been one of our main focuses to enable non-custodial trades between assets. Users will be able to specify NFTs artists and more that they like, in a general list, or specific to an NFT they want to trade, making it easier for other users to understand how to fulfill the desires of other users interested in trades.
Selling: We decided to also allow offering any ERC20 token in exchange for any other NFT, since some users might not want to mess with trading NFT asset for NFT asset
Project White labeling: We have been approached by a handful of projects, some blockchain, some not, asking how they can have their own storefront. We decided to bake white labeling directly into the storefront.
- We will provide starter storefront software that will allow projects to decide their own style and feature set.
- White-label storefront owners will have control over fee structures, fee token(s), blockchains and even which NFT’s they want their store to support.
Cross Blockchain Minting: Since we also have the technology provided by Emblem Vault, we can bake this right into the storefront as well. Enabling a simple “Sell this NFT on ____ network” which will mint a new vault on the network of choice and transferring the asset(s) being sold to the vault. So for example, you might have some NFT’s on Polygon blockchain, and you might see an NFT you desire on Ethereum main network. By Minting and Moving your Polygon NFT into a vault, an Ethereum <> Ethereum NFT swap can be fulfilled which will trade an Ethereum NFT for a Polygon NFT as if all assets were contained within the same blockchain.

Design: Here are some screenshots of the overall design

Technology: Borrowing from lessons learned while building and scaling Emblem.finance we knew that we wanted to make our marketplace as decentralized as possible. Given this desire we have begun working with an innovative real-time decentralized database technology called GunDB. By splitting the backend operations away from the standard model of hosted servers and replacing with smart contracts and a decentralized database, we will have unprecedented uptime and availability. Users will be able to register and login to the storefront as simply as signing a message using MetaMask. Each authenticated user has the ability to manipulate their partitioned section of the database. GunDB is a graph database which means user data can be loosely coupled in rich and creative ways, while preventing users from interfering with other users’s listings. Anyone interested in more of the technical details behind GunDB watch this.

Transparency

Twitter bot has been created that announces Emblem Vault Opensea Sales
Many of our recent upgrades have helped nudge us toward cashflow neutral. (We used to shoulder a cost of between $20–$40 per vault) As part of this move toward sustainability, we have removed the “Burn” of $Coval upon Vault Creation.
Currently there is a 1% royalty fee applied to all vault purchases on Opensea — This shouldn’t change until we launch our own marketplace.
Funds will be used for business efforts, including but not limited to: API and hosting fees, marketing, press releases, promotions.

DYOR

A fake Emblem Vault storefront was discovered on Opensea which was quickly closed down thanks to the fast response of our community members and opensea’s rapid response.

Always research the contents of any Emblem Vaults being purchased or traded. We have included a few tools to help.

We include as “Traits” the contents of Emblem Vaults

Expanding “Levels” will let you verify vault contents

Some users have expressed confusion over our burn address, and we have addressed this concern by labeling this address appropriately within Opensea

We have also changed the default explorer link within the description to use XChain which will display Counterparty assets as well as BTC assets within a vault address.

Visit XChain explorer to verify assets within an address

Community member

DesktopCommando

has created a large number of instructional posts on how to use Emblem Vault that can be found here

Future

Soon after our store is launched, we will begin diligently finalizing our $Fuel token, including how to earn it by staking coval within Emblem Vaults. These plans aren’t ready for primetime yet and are likely to change, given that stay tuned for more details related to $Fuel and Staking