NFTX Round-up #35
It’s been a while since we last posted an official update on the blog about what we’ve been working on and the direction of NFTX as a marketplace and a protocol. A lot has happened in that time so let’s take a quick run through some of the changes.
NFTX 2022 Updates
January
In the new year NFTX released the ability for users to stake their NFTs on NFTX without the need to also pair them with ETH. We call this inventory staking (as opposed to liquidity staking) and it enables yield generation without the risk of impermanent loss. Like liquidity stakers, inventory stakers earn fees in the vault token itself (e.g. PUNK). During the process of staking, inventory stakers are likely to end up with different NFTs from the vault than they started with, but their balance of redeemable NFTs (i.e. vault tokens) will only ever go up, regardless of price action against ETH. Think of it like depositing NFTs and earning interest on that collection.
February
In February we saw the launch of FloorDAO that NFTX provided a 500 ETH loan to get started (this has already been paid back in full). FloorDAO sweeps the floor of NFT projects through governance vote with the proviso that there is an existing vault on NFTX or one would be created. Those NFTs are then added into the vault along with the relevant ETH and the liquidity is staked, earning FloorDAO valuable yield as income for their DAO. As part of the loan, NFTX received a pFloor token allocation.
March
In March we expanded across chains (other than our Rinkeby testnet) and deployed the NFTX Contracts on to the Arbitrum One chain and added support on the NFTX Marketplace App.
Along with the deployment we also added support for Arbitrum across our NFTX subgraphs.
One of the knock-on impacts of expanding across chains is the increase in effort to bring new features to the protocol and into the marketplace. For the most part the same contracts work across the board, however the deployments, testing, and edgecase bug fixing tend to take longer as more chains are supported.
One recent example of a multichain challenge is that the Arbitrum-One RPC endpoints are not set up to handle the EIP721 Subgraph requirements when looking at UniV3 positions and this has resulted in responses timing out from the subgraph.
NFTX is still developing features on the protocol and marketplace so we have temporarily paused additional rollouts to other EVM chains (such as Optimism and Polygon). In the meantime, the most recent solidity dev hire, Twade, is making progress on improved tooling for tracking deployments and settings of similar contracts across multiple chains.
Product/Core Team Extension — has it been 12 months already? The team that worked on the original Gallery shortly after the launch of NFTX have been busy over the past 12 months positioning NFTX as one of the big players in the MetaFi community. To continue the upward trajectory of the NFTX product, the core team had their work contracts renewed for another 12 months. Along with the extension, we also welcomed Twade to the team as a part-time solidity developer to support Kiwi and Gaus.
April
Suspicious Activity Warnings — with NFTs becoming more mainstream and more valuable we are seeing an increase in the number of users who are mistakenly handing over control of their NFTs to scammers.
OpenSea is combating this challenge by managing a centralised list of NFTs which have been reported as stolen and flagging them as having “suspicious activity.” NFTX is following the precedent of other marketplaces by visually flagging assets within vaults that are not able to be sold on OpenSea, while still maintaining an open protocol on-chain.
Bypass Fees on Unstake — a new feature on NFTX now enables inventory stakers to bypass random redemption fees when unstaking their vault tokens, with the option to unstake to NFTs or vault tokens or a combination of both. This means that inventory stakers can always retrieve at least as many NFTs as they staked even if their position didn’t earn any yield. The new Unstaking Zap also accounts for small rounding errors which were occasionally a problem for stakers in the past.
Social Sharing — with Twitter being THE place for Crypto and NFTs the NFTX team has updated the preview image for vault URLs to be much more engaging. Now when you share a vault URL you will see the vault icon, name, $ticker, holdings, TVL, 30D volume, and lifetime rewards, as well as images of some assets currently in the vault. The preview data is cached every hour so that the stats are pretty accurate at the time of sharing.
Vault Snapshot — to help NFT projects understand who is holding vTokens for their project (or providing inventory and liquidity), the team has built a snapshot tool for viewing token balances at https://nftx.io/snapshot/. This tool allows anyone to input a vault’s name, ID, or contract address along with a block number to base balances on. The snapshot provides a table of addresses, token types, and balances of every holder and staker with an option to download in CSV format for additional processing.
A huge shout out to Quantummly who built the token holdings subgraph that allows us to maintain this data for use.
May — June
Along with updates on the Marketplace App most of May and June were dedicated to protocol work and the development of the new Yield App.
New Default Fees — As part of a governance proposal the DAO made an update to the default fees. The change was based on a review of the vault usage over the past six months that saw Target Redeem (buy), Mint (sell) and Target Swap generated the most fees.
The target swap was increased from 6% to 10% and as a result there has been an increase in the fees generated across vaults as a whole.
These new default fees are
- 6% Redeem
- 4% Random Redeem
- 10% Mint
- 10% Swap
- 4% Random Swap
Trail of Bits Audit — after two Code Arena audits the NFTX contracts went through an audit from Trail of Bits. Devs are happy to report that no major faults were found with the contracts, with the one notable finding being something that was a feature of the protocol (whereby Vault Managers can change the fees of a vault that hasn’t yet been published).
You can read more about the audit and all the findings here.
July
In July the yield section of the NFTX App was moved to its own product home, https://yield.nftx.io. This brand new web app creates a better bridge between DeFi and NFTs and is targeted at users who are utilising NFTX to earn yield through the NFT market rather than using the Marketplace App for selling, buying, or swapping their NFTs. Users can explore pools by yield, TVL, spread, and visualise their inventory and liquidity positions in a much more insightful and actionable manner. This release also includes ‘real time fees’ which shows users the exact amount of vToken that was earned with recent vault transactions.
Over the next few weeks we will transition the existing Dashboard/Rewards page on the NFTX Marketplace to redirect to the new Yield App by default and focus our attention on the new and improved marketplace experience (coming soon)
To help power this app we engaged with Graphica to develop a subgraph that tracked all users' fee earnings over time (going back to when fees were first introduced). This continues along our decentralised approach to provide our users with products powered directly from the blockchain (Web3 calls) or are available via decentralised SubGraph requests (TheGraph).
August
Easy, we’re only eight days in.
Fine, if you must know... This month Twade has been working on a new eligibility module for ENS domains that will allow something like the 10k ENS club to exist as a vault. It uses a Merkle Tree to check the name of the ENS domain, and the regular eligibility module to ensure that there is a minimum of 1 year left on its registration. It has not yet been decided how to handle renewing expired domains within the vault, however one idea is to take a 0.2/0.8% fee on all ENS vault transactions to the DAO which will fund the renewal of domains for 1 year when they reach a certain threshold (7 days).
Recent Vaults & Protocol Activity
There have been a few new vaults created over the past two weeks, and while you can see a full list of all the vaults here are a few select ones we’ve seen.
The Protocol currently has $40,875,260 in Total Value Locked, and over the past 30 days NFTX has distributed approximately $557k in fees to our liquidity providers.
NFTX celebrated 1k ETH in total fee distribution in our last newsletter, which has now grown to 3,424 ETH in fees to our liquidity providers.
Despite a crypto bear market and bleak macro conditions, the protocol is seeing 2,252 monthly active users.
Our most popular vaults in terms of pure volume have changed in the past month with All Starz topping the charts. The Top 5 vaults for volume include:
Growing the team
A huge welcome to the newest member(s) of the NFTX teams, @0xToes and @Twade.
In the last update back in November we talked about Toes and Aeto being added to the NFTX Crew, and after a few months Toes was put forward to become Business Development Lead. After Aeto had some great contributions to the NFTX governance calls he was instrumental in the launch of FloorDAO and is now one of the core team.
Twade comes on as a solidity dev to support Alex and Kiwi and is already doing an amazing job with 0x integration, Protocol Documentation, and improving on Eligibility Modules.
Update on Running our own Graph Node
Running our own node makes us less dependent on third-party nodes, improving the stability and performance of the nftx.io front-end, while also contributing back to the decentralised ethos that NFTX is built upon.
We are now contributing to the ecosystem through indexing the following SubGraphs
- NFTX v2
- NFTX Token Holdings
- NFTX Fee Tracker
- Sushi Exchange
- EIP721
- EIP1155
- ArtBlocks
- FloorDAO
If you have a subgraph that you think the DAO should be indexing, or if you want to put some of your GRT to use by allocating it to our indexer then reach out to Javery on the discord.
Vault Insight - Milady Maker
Milady stormed into the NFTX vaults after they won the FloorDAO governance vote to become one of the swept NFT projects.
There are currently more than 1,658 NFTs inside the Milady vault.
The TVL of the vault is sitting at $2,259,682 and has had more than 6.5k ETH in trading volume since the vault started in March. You can see by the lifetime turnover, 9251 Milady, that is a lot of selling, buying and swapping.
The vault has been great for Liquidity and Inventory Providers, particularly FloorDAO, generating 541.42 MILADY (that’s 387ETH!) in fees that have been distributed to stakers
The $MILADY vault has had a few spikes in value which kicked off in mid April with the price moving from 0.5 — 2+ ETH in a matter of days.
If you would like to learn more about how NFTX can be part of your NFT launch or provide an additional marketplace for your project and help secure a stable liquidity pool for the floor price then reach out at [email protected].
That's all for this update. If you have any questions, come and join in on the Discord channel, or you can learn more by checking out the NFTX Academy.