PaintSwap AMA Sept 2021 — Hosted by FTM Community Alerts
Full AMA here: https://discord.gg/r5xfgJXX
Please welcome CheeseKnight, Samwitch, and Paintoshi from PaintSwap! We spoke to the team previously, for those who missed the previous AMA, tell us about PaintSwap and what you guys do?
- Sam: Hey guys! So I’m the lead backend developer, I do most of the smart contracts, APIs & subgraph, and occasionally when CheeseKnight is slacking some UI
- Cheese: UI lead over here, I’m the one pushing UI updates in the middle of the night!
- Paintoshi: Hello! I’m the newest dev added to the team. Currently mostly doing UI improvements on the frontend
Congrats on the NFT marketplace! You are the first marketplace on fantom to implement ERC-2981 NFT royalties. Are royalties earned if the NFT is sold within the Paintswap Market? Can you describe how $BRUSH holders benefit from the Marketplace?
- Sam: Always innovating here! The beauty of ERC-2981 is that it is marketplace agnostic, but the marketplace does need to implement specific support for it, which we have done. We also have collection royalties for existing contracts who weren’t aware of this standard, it was only finalized a few weeks ago. I would love to create a new ERC standard for NFT Marketplaces, there’s a lot of traps we ended up coming across and I’m sure other marketplaces will have these holes if not careful BRUSH holders benefit because everything is currently paid for in BRUSH so no need to convert. We will be adding support for other currencies soon through our exchange
- Cheese: We also promised BRUSH utility in the last AMA and now we have the marketplace I’m sure holders benefited a lot
True to your word!
It seems like you have accomplished this with just your original team, and that’s amazing. If the NFT boom continues on Fantom, do you see yourself expanding your team to provide dedicated support/devs to focus on marketplace quality/improvement?
I can see that has already started with Paintoshi!
- Cheese: Currently we are managing everything very well with our team and mods. We have already been announcing daily improvements to the marketplace! If it does continue to expand further beyond our limits then yes we will look to increase our workforce, we hired Paintoshi a month ago and he has been an amazing addition, would love to hire more people like him! We also significantly streamlined the marketplace listing approval process for community collections which has helped a lot with the load.
Speaking of community collections and listings, how does one have their collection verified? Is there a specific process or set of requirements the collection must meet before it becomes verified? And for regular NFT listings?
- Paintoshi: Yes we have a process, it’s on our docs page and nft-faq channel on our discord. We need from the authors of a collection:
- Contract address
- Imagery for the site:
- 1024x256px banner for your page
- 512x768px poster for the featured collections page
- 64x64px thumbnail for the collections card shown on all your assets/sales
- Royalty amount (maximum 7.5%) and an address to pay this to you. If you require multiple royalty addresses then you can use a splitting contract and get the funds sent there. This royalty is for every sale of an NFT from your contract on our marketplace. Let us know if it has erc2981 support already.
- Send the DAO (0x3b99636439FBA6314C0F52D35FEd2fF442191407) a small amount of BRUSH (any will do), from either the owner or creator of the NFT contract to prove ownership. Then send us the ftmscan transaction.
- Send us a Twitter handle
- Link to the Featured collection form
- Sam: For the regular listings we have a streamlined workflow we follow, a custom UI for approvers, we generally try and get them approved within 30 minutes. We won’t censor anything unless it’s illegal or copyrighted material (that we can reasonably know about) or just a plain forgery of existing NFTs
With the imminent launch of Artion, how will Paintswap coexist and stay competitive within the NFT market?
- Sam: We love competition, we thrive on it! We launched an AMM in fantom when there are established and amazing DEXes already and when bitcoin tanked 50% a few days earlier. But that didn’t stop us, and look where we are now! We have grit and determination unseen in the crypto space, many of the top community members can vouch for us. I’d argue we have the sexiest looking DEX in not just fantom but all of crypto.
- Sam: For Artion specifically, I can’t really comment too much, I had a glimpse of the site when a test link got leaked and it had some nice features. But it looked just like OpenSea, which I’m not saying is a bad thing but I never found their UI to be very impressive and was actually saddened by the lack of originality. Simone said on the FTMAlerts AMA that Artion would help projects like PaintSwap so we will have to see. For more context we built our marketplace from the ground up, contracts/UI are 100% original and we understand every single intimate detail about them, this allows us to make extremely fast updates, as you’ve seen! It looks amazing, some might say the best-looking marketplace in the whole of crypto and is constantly improving. We also aren’t just a marketplace, we are much more and we have many exciting new features planned that exist nowhere else (and we currently have some already!), and we always deliver!
- Sam: Artion claims no commission fees, but it costs 10 FTM to list, create collection and mint which is 10–15x more expensive than us, so our sales fee (which is pretty standard!) averages out a lot closer than you think. Competition is healthy and needed, having a monopoly means you can charge what you want and people have no choice, and there’s no reason to innovate, so I see it as a good thing in the grand scheme of things. There will be some things the Foundation will not be able to do from a legal/compliance view or just too risky to do, so we will shine by having no conflicts of interest. Also, we have just released something else unique, check our twitter!
This is wonderful to read! You guys are a solid team, and as they say cream does rise to the top! Checks twitter… https://twitter.com/paint_swap/status/1435980892888047624
In your article you mention an NFT launchpad, I feel like this is something that could really benefit the community. A lot of people have ideas/concepts they would like to bring to life!
- Cheese: Yes this is different, actually EverGrind mentioned it to us after he had the idea in the middle of the night. Won’t share too many details, but it’s an exciting way for artists to launch a collection with custom functionality with very little effort and no need for any technical details. Right now to add new collections we have to get the contract from the devs, index it, and add the collection. You can imagine that process being way more streamlined with something like a launchpad.
This would be great for the community and those that need help with their NFT projects!
- Cheese: For sure, since the marketplace launch I’ve been in contact with many artists and projects. We’re adding updates every day to help them out
- Sam: We are pretty involved in the community, everyone seems to love us so, that gives us the motivation to bring awesome things to Fantom! We are completely open to everyone.
How does it work if a user was to list an NFT for sale on multiple platforms at the same time including Paintswaps?
- Cheese: It’s not possible due to how the marketplace contract works. When you list an NFT for sale the contract takes custody of your NFT. After the NFT is sold though you are free to sell it wherever you want.
- Cheese: The benefit of this is that you will always receive the NFT, the seller can’t pull out at the last minute. Same as bids and offers, when you make them the marketplace takes custody of that amount of brush to ensure the seller receives the correct amount.
Is the NFT launchpad a separate item from the ICO Project launchpad in your documentation’s roadmap?
- Sam: Yes it’s separate, the NFT launchpad is designed to help artists who know nothing about the smart contract side build a way to launch customized smart contract NFTs. A lot of existing NFT projects have to redo this step each time or struggle to find developers. We want to help eliminate the need for this redundancy and provide a consistent workflow for people to launch unique NFT projects directly onto PaintSwap and provide collections immediately hassle-free.
- Sam: Also our marketplace is also completely decentralized atm we don’t store any data. The minting process uses ipfs and our tracking process uses TheGraph for indexing + ipfs. Just thought I’d mention that.
This is awesome! Wonderful initiative! Are $BRUSH holders able to get in on a piece of the pie?
- Sam: Sure, we are still finalizing details of this, it will come at a later stage
Paintswap’s NFT marketplace was released missing some ui/ux features. However, with constant updates, the usability of the marketplace has significantly improved. Any reason, in particular, you released the marketplace early as opposed to polishing it further? Or did you guys want a user’s perspective before making changes?
- Cheese: We saw the immense demand for an Open Marketplace in Fantom so we stripped a lot of planned features to be able to release something functional. We alpha tested for about a week(shout out to those guys!) until we got something functional enough to use. Now adding the stripped features has been our top priority with constant updates.
- Paintoshi: All inputs from our community have turned out to be very valuable! We have implemented a lot of suggestions already. Sometimes you don’t know what the users want until they want it.
Almost every CEX in existence have a referral system of some kind that helps influencers, community leaders and regular folks make money by referring people to these exchanges. In addition, the exchanges that have good systems tend to be advertised on social media the most. Why have I yet to see referral systems on DEXs? Are there fundamentals that make this difficult? Is this something PaintSwap would consider?
- Paintoshi: This sounds like it would be very easy to game without some sort of identification system, and whales would just create a lot of accounts with bots and refer each other. So in theory creating it is not hard and I like the premise as you said people love referral rewards, but I’m just not sure right now how we would execute that effectively without it being abused, would need to think some more.
Yeah on a DEX this would not be practical! It gives me scam vibes!
With the planned releases of V2 and V3, can you give us more of a look at the timeline and the exact features that are being discussed for the NFT marketplace?
- Cheese: We should have all planned features complete by the end of the month (but as always this is just a rough estimate). At the rate we are pushing stuff out it might end up being sooner!
Are there any close partnerships with other FTM projects that you may have on the horizon?
- Sam: We have connections with a lot of different projects, even ones you would consider competitors. We’ve helped Zoo in the past and vice versa, I like that they innovate a lot. We’re in talks with StrangeBrew, BitGem & Fractal Studios quite regularly trying to think of ways to collaborate so there’s bound to be some news coming out soon, a lot of things flying about. Just a few days ago StrangeBrew & PaintSwap helped a TombHeads fundraiser for the Tomb community and donated all our marketplace fees for that day, we love giving back and making partnerships with this awesome community!
Straight alpha in this AMA!
From your first AMA you guys said you chose the FTM network to build on for various reasons such as speed and cheap fees. It’s great as a user, how has it been developing a project on FTM for the FTM community? Would you recommend it to other developers?
- Sam: So we haven’t had many issues tbh and deployments have been easy. I would like to have the TheGraph on Fantom TestNet as it makes testing on the testnet very difficult so after local dev testing we generally just go straight to live. With the price increasing, this has made it a bit more expensive but still a lot cheaper than other chains. I would recommend starting in Fantom over Ethereum yeh, just because right now the fees are just absurd. The community is pretty awesome, but we haven’t received any support from the Fantom Foundation, so if that’s something you require I would weigh that up, but yeh community we love you guys!
When do you plan to list on CMC and Coingecko?
- Cheese: We are in direct talks with Coingecko now, but now that you mention coin trackers, maybe check our latest tweet! We have not yet reached out to CMC, they require 60 days of trading data which we have now, but have been too busy with the marketplace to apply as it’s not as trivial as the others.
Checks twitter again! https://twitter.com/paint_swap/status/1435989636241821699
You guys are killing it! More and more alpha!!! Looks like an ATH!
Before we wrap things up, do you guys have anything else to add?
- Cheese: Well I just want to let the community know that as of next week I’ll be working full time on PaintSwap! Imagine the number of updates that we’ll be able to release!
- Paintoshi: Thanks for hosting an amazing AMA with lots of thoughtful questions! We have a very interesting time ahead of us, together with the whole Fantom ecosystem!
- Sam: Just wanted to say thanks again to all the NFT artists who chose to launch their NFTs on PaintSwap we have been overwhelmed with responses and positive feedback. Thanks for your awesome questions, keep kicking ass everyone. Thanks again for having us!
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