NFTX Round-up #38

Welcome back to the latest update on NFTX product, protocol, and everything in between. A lot has been happening in the past few weeks in Crypto so it’s worth pointing out early that we are NFTX, which you could also think of as NotFTX.

NFTX Round-up #38

Welcome back to the latest update on NFTX product, protocol, and everything in between.

A lot has been happening in the past few weeks in Crypto so it’s worth pointing out early that we are NFTX, which you could also think of as NotFTX.

Our hearts go out to those that have funds caught up within FTX, and we wish you all the luck in the world that you claw back, if not all, at least part of your positions. If you haven’t already watched, it is worth checking out SBF’s first interview since the FTX collapse.

NFTX Updates

NFT.London

Last month the team made the trip to London for the annual onsite catch-up. While we spend almost every day on a constant discord call across European and North American time zones, it was a valuable opportunity to spend some time together in person to discuss NFTX and the wider NFT and DeFi landscape.

There were some exciting conversations and some important updates in the works for NFTX V2, and rumour has it an overhaul of the protocol to improve yield opportunities for liquidity and inventory providers with NFTX V3.

NFTX API

The team released the first iteration of the API last month which has had a huge impact on the Yield App as you can see from the performance figures below.

  • Fully loaded - 93% improvement
  • Visually complete - 80% improvement
  • Speed Index - 41% improvement

The API is an important step in ensuring that the user experience is fast and reliable so we are slowly rolling it out across sections of the site to ensure it can keep up with the load you put on it, and more importantly that it is delivering up to the block accurate data.

Warning — technical details to follow.

For those of you that are interested in how it works….

We are running an indexer that uses a combination of the NFTX Subgraph, on-chain lookups, and pricing data through 0x API, and stores the relevant data in a MongoDb. This data goes back 90 days and is presented through a node REST API.

The API is fronted with Cloudflare to monitor usage and implement rate limiting, and the API server is powered by express and Redis for caching. One of the next developments will be to ensure that if the centralised API data is unavailable there are fallbacks to requesting the data from the origins (either on-chain or via the subgraph).

The team will continue to support the NFTX Subgraphs as part of the decentralised Graph network and ensure teams can build upon that data, as well as provide keys to use our API key to any teams that would like to partner.

Next steps will be to continue to test and publish the documentation for anyone to use the API endpoints.

Create Vault Flow

The front-end team has been working on the finishing touches for the new Create Vault flow which will make the onboarding process quicker and make some of the more complex areas of creating a vault (like knowing how many items to start with and what to price the pool at) much easier to understand.

Here’s a quick example of what to expect shortly.

The team are still iterating on small bits of the flow as we get more user feedback so the actual release may look a bit different. The contracts are in the last stage of the audit and we expect to have it launched shortly after the new year.

Contract Audits

In the last newsletter, we talked about getting a competition setup through Code Arena for the next round of contract updates/releases. The team decided that due to the small size of the updates that a specific audit firm would be best for this audit, and the larger competitive audit done through Code Arena would be saved for the next major release of the protocol.

The contracts have gone through the initial review with some minor issues reported. These have been fixed and resent to the audit team to complete their final review and produce the findings.

We expect the process to be complete by 16th December and the deployments to happen in the new year.

NFTX Protocol Lead

The team are excited to welcome Apoorv to the core team following a successful governance vote on XIP#31.

Apoorv has been working with the team and contributing to the next phase of NFTX V2 along with leading the development and planning for an overhaul of NFTX to bring the protocol in line with the changing market conditions and the shifting user needs.

Original “source” added to the marketplace

There are multiple ways to interact with the NFTX protocol — buy, sell, swap, stake — and these transactions can take part from a variety of different locations — NFTX marketplace Zap, Gem, Genie, Bots etc.

Until recently the subgraph wasn’t able to capture the origin of the transactions, only that a transaction occurred, but with a recent change in the graph protocol, you are now able to pull the source of the transaction into the subgraph.

So we did.

As you can see from the screenshot of the activity page we’re now flagging where the transaction has taken place. From left to right we have some arbitrage from a bot, a swap on NFTX, two unstakes through NFTX, two sells on NFTX, and a buy on Gem.

With this data, we decided to do some digging into how the protocol has been used over the past 10,000 transactions.

Here is some initial insight into the data for you to see. The data was pulled looking at redeems only and was pulled halfway through November.  It only retrieved the past 10,000 transactions so June and November are not complete.

Transactions by Contract

The breakdown of transactions backs our thoughts that Aggregators are going to play a bit role in different protocol usage both now and into the future as well, and we expect that we will see the Genie numbers pick up over the next few months with the release of UniSwap NFTs marketplace aggregator.

We had assumed that the number of buys through NFTX itself would have dropped dramatically in favour of the aggregators, however, there are still solid numbers on the NFTX Marketplace. We also anticipate that this may increase once the 0xMarketplaceZap is deployed — as the best price for the NFT will be on NFTX until the aggregators also route their token buys through 0x as well (this will only be for tokens that are also paired on other DEX like Uniswap or Kyber).

This data was also plotted as a total of transactions across the whole series.

NFTs by Source

Similar to the graph above, this time looking specifically at the number of NFTs as a whole rather than individual transactions.

Again, this was also tracked across the entire time series to show the breakdown.

Aggregators only

Taking out the NFTX Marketplace altogether we wanted to review how popular NFTX was on the various aggregators. As you can see there are only two aggregators that are listed, and again we expect that UniSwaps/Genie will increase now that the NFT marketplace has been incorporated into the main Uniswap navigation.

Product Updates

NFT Rarity — you can now check the rarity in the NFTs in the pools (where they support the OpenRarity on OpenSea). The next step will be incorporating the rarity scores into the search index to allow for filtering as well. These are grouped into the top 25% and the top 50%.

Suspicious activity — when OpenSea flag an item as suspicious you are unable to sell it on their marketplace, however, it can still be traded on other marketplaces. These items are now visually flagged in the vault list view (previously they were only flagged when adding them to the basket). You can now also toggle these items on/off when viewing the vault.

Lowered Metadata Cache - Slightly related to the above feature, the cache control on the NGINX Proxy for Metadata API only caches for 12 hours, this is to ensure that items flagged as suspicious will be updated daily.

NFTX Graph Indexer

We have completed the migration of the NFTX Graph Indexer to the new infrastructure to allow for more subgraphs to be indexed. Since the update, we are now indexing the following

  • Uniswap V3 (Messari)
  • ArtBlocks
  • Snapshot
  • CryptoPunks
  • EIP721
  • EIP1155
  • SushiSwap
  • Sushi — Mainnet Exchange
  • FloorDAO
  • NFTX V2, NFTX Token Holdings, NFTX Fee Tracker

If you have a Subgraph that you would like to see indexed by NFTX reach out to @javery on Discord and let us know how it helps the wider community.



Recent Vaults & Protocol Activity

There have been a few new vaults created over the past two weeks, particularly over on the Arbitrum chain. Here are a few select ones we’ve seen.

The Protocol currently has $27,207,704 in Total Value Locked, and over the past 30 days, NFTX has distributed approximately $110k in fees to our liquidity/inventory providers.

The protocol is seeing 1,080 monthly active users.

The most popular vaults in terms of pure volume have changed in the past month with Super pool topping the charts. The Top 5 vaults for volume include:

  1. Phrogs
  2. Milady
  3. LIL
  4. AVASTR
  5. SUPER

Vault Insights - MoonCats $MOONCATS

MoonCats are certainly one of the OG NFTs and was in the top 25 vaults created on NFTX V2.  While the Inventory staking yield is 6.69%, the Liquidity returns are currently at 54.87%.

There are currently 376 NFTs inside the MOONCAT vault.

The TVL of the vault is sitting at $144,692 and has managed 376.28 ETH in trading volume since the vault creation. You can see by the lifetime turnover, 1454 MOONCAT, which is a lot of yield-generating activity spread out over time.

Liquidity and Inventory providers have shared more than 72 NFTs worth of fees so far, that’s more than 18.5ETH

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.