SIGN Art NFTs bridge to Ethereum network
There is no better time to focus on building than a crypto winter. That’s exactly what we are doing at SIGN Art. The platform is improving significantly and quite some interesting partnerships are currently in negotiation… but for today, we will talk about a huge milestone for our project: the release of our very own NFT Gateway.
This new feature allows any SIGN Art NFT to be sent back and forth from / to Waves / Ethereum. By doing so, it gives anyone the opportunity to sell a NFT collected via SIGN Art, on marketplaces like Opensea or Rarible.
Why a Gateway?
It’s a legitimate question. Why would a project built on Waves wants its users to be able to get their NFTs out of the ecosystem it was originally created on?
Well, there are several reasons. We do believe that Waves offers the best technology. That’s why we’ve been able to build a wonderful marketplace on top of it with many underrated and uniques features (3D room, Certification of sources, anti plagiarism tool, Agent feature, Custom License etc) but the NFT Art market is still predominantly on the Ethereum blockchain where Opensea and Rarible still sit at the top-3 of the leading NFT marketplaces.
It is very difficult to move users from Ethereum to a new network and more importantly, they often do not wish to see their collection split over several networks.
With our gateway, an Ethereum collector could buy a SIGN Art NFT and send it to his Ethereum wallet with his current collection and set it for sale on Opensea, Rarible, etc. if he wants to. He could use it on Twitter or Instagram as NFT profile etc. This makes things a lot more convenient for her/him.
SIGN Art is a curated marketplace with a lot of very talented artists, some of them being exclusively on SIGN Art. Any collector could come to our marketplace to find still unknown talents, collect their artworks as NFTs and bring them to her/his favorite Ethereum marketplace to resell it there. Being the first to discover unknown talents is the holy grail of every NFT collector.
With upcoming Art School collaborations, we are working on currently, it will be even more accurate.
What was the main challenge to solve?
The main challenge for us, and it was not an option not to solve it, was to support cross chain royalties.
On SIGN Art, every creators get 10% commission on every resell of their NFT art works and this… indefinitely. On Waves side, the creator royalties are also supported by Puzzle Market, another important NFT marketplace in the Waves ecosystem. But when it comes to Ethereum, we needed to find a solution to maintain such royalties. Unlike an Ethereum <-> Layer 2 bridge (Bsc, Polygon etc) that is very easy to make, since it shares the exact same technology and account address, it’s another story, when it comes to Waves <-> Ethereum.
For this reason, we studied the Ethereum NFT market and technology as well as discussed with our community. Some of our artists did not want to allow their NFTs to be sent on Ethereum, through this gateway, as some of them did choose SIGN Art for its curated characteristic. They clearly did not want to end up on Opensea (among others), for several legit reasons (https://www.vice.com/en/article/wxdzb5/more-than-80-of-nfts-created-for-free-on-opensea-are-fraud-or-spam-company-says), we then had to come up with the following solution:
- On SIGN Art we added an option in the creator profile edit page to set an Ethereum address. By doing so, a creator allows any of his NFTs from SIGN Art to be sent to Ethereum and the future royalties from sales made there, will be paid directly to this address, on the Ethereum network (except for Opensea for now, which will be explained a bit further down)
- We adopted the EIP-2981 which will certainly become the standard on Ethereum when it comes to NFT royalty distribution. This EIP allows us to attach a percentage and an Ethereum address to every NFT we issue and any platform supporting this EIP to pay the royalties directly to this address. This is where we use the Ethereum address allowing cross-chain transfer, when it is turned on, in the creator profile.
- We made two dApps: one on the Waves side and another one on the Ethereum side, with a Lock & Mint/Release system where locking a SIGN Art NFT on the Waves side will mint (or release if previously minted) it on the Ethereum side with the same being valid in the other direction. An off-chain script synchronizing these two dApps.
- All NFTs, on the Ethereum side, are minted by our Gateway dApp address: 0xA01FF120769F4ee00e4FA4fF75A76Ccd74F8fF91 to ensure their legitimate provenance. This way we have a curated SIGN Art collection on a non-curated platform such as Opensea: https://opensea.io/collection/signartgateway
- When it comes to Opensea, since it’s still the most popular platform for NFT Art and they do not yet support the EIP-2981. But they will in future. We obtained their confirmation. For the time being, we did make a distribution script that will listen to all Opensea royalty payments related to a SIGN Art NFT sale and store them until there’s enough to distribute on the Waves network, in WETH, to their respective creators. In this situation, creators will receive 90% of their 10% royalties and the remaining 10% will be taken by the gateway to cover all distribution costs.
How to use the gateway?
It’s very easy! All you have to do is to go to gate.sign-art.app and you will see two tabs (SEND TO ETH and SEND TO WAVES).
From the SEND TO ETH tab, you can log in with your Waves account, using any of the login options (Waves Signer seed, Waves Signer email, Waves Keeper, ledger or even Metamask) and you will automatically see your current list of SIGN Art NFTs on the Waves side.
At first, most of the NFTs might display a small “lock” icon. This means that the artist did not set his NFTs to be used for cross chain transfer, yet.
As time passes, most artists will probably turn on this function. You also have the option to request it directly from them if you own or plan to buy some of their drops. If you don’t know how to contact them, join our telegram group https://t.me/SIGNArtApp and we will help you to get in touch.
Once logged in, you just have to select the NFT to send and enter the recipient Ethereum address. The total fee will then be calculated and displayed.
The transaction cost includes a 2$ gateway fee + the Ethereum gas cost to mint or transfer the NFT to the Ethereum Network. You may see different prices by selecting different NFTs. That’s because there are two possible actions. Either the NFT hasn’t been sent yet on the Ethereum Network. In that case we have to mint it and then transfer it. Or, if it has already been minted, it only has to be transferred, which costs less gas fee.
The gateway fee is fixed, regardless of the NFT state on Ethereum. The Ethereum gas fee is variable. It depends of the NFT states on Ethereum (already minted or not) and will adjust to gas price and market conditions.
Once you’ve confirmed the transfer of the NFT, there will be a confirmation delay before it’s actually transferred and/or minted. This is a security measure to prevent double minting in case of a reverted transaction. The delay is currently set to 5 minutes which is around 5 blocks on Waves and 20 blocks on Ethereum.
From the SEND TO WAVES tab, you have option to log in with Metamask directly or WalletConnect.
Out of this, it all works the same way as in the previous tab, except for one single difference. You only send 2$ gateway fee in ETH as attached payment and you are the one taking care of the Ethereum gas fee.
It’s also important to understand that Opensea, for example, works in a different way than SIGN Art. On SIGN Art, when you set a NFT for sale, it is escrowed on the dApp and therefore, not in your wallet anymore.
On Opensea, even when you set a NFT for sale, the NFT remains in your wallet and can be transferred without cancelling the sale on their marketplace. It’s important to get acquainted with this different process:
Platforms such as Opensea and Rarible also use a caching system and once you transferred a new NFT to the Ethereum Network, it may appear on these platforms without all data updated. You may need to use the “update metadata” button to queue the NFT into their next caching update.
All data will appear properly after a few minutes.
Does the new cross-chain feature add any change on the marketplace?
Aside of the new Ethereum address field, added on the profile edit page for creators:
we also added a new icon on their public page. It is therefore easy to quickly identify if an artist allows cross chain transfers before buying her/his NFT.
We also added a new filter on the primary and secondary markets to have the option to display cross-chain NFTs only.
In a future update, we may add an option to send a NFT to the Ethereum network directly from the marketplace, as well. But for now, all cross-chain transfers happen on gate.sign-art.app
Why does the gateway not use the SIGN token?
It actually does behind the scene!
To make things more convenient, instead of requesting the 2$ gateway fee in $SIGN and the Ethereum gas fee in WETH, we decided to request both combined in one currency: USDN.
As soon as a cross-chain transfer is initiated, the waves gateway dApp will automatically convert USDN, the gateway fee amount to $SIGN and the Ethereum gas amount into WETH. All those transactions being processed through swop.fi dapp to dapp calls.
In the other direction, since we do not have $SIGN token on Ethereum, we just request the gateway fee in ETH and we will convert it manually to SIGN when needed.
Conclusion
It’s very convenient now for an Ethereum network user to join SIGN Art, as a collector, an artist or both.
SIGN Art offers everything needed to use the marketplace without the need to go on any 3rd party website. You can now use the entire platform with Metamask. You can deposit ETH from the Ethereum network to the Waves Network directly on SIGN Art (through waves.exchange gateway in the backend). You can, then, swap ETH to Waves, USDN or SIGN, as well, from within the marketplace. We also have a very straightforward Visa/ Mastercard option to buy SIGN token.
From now on, and for the upcoming 12 months, our main focus will still be on adoption and we hope to be able to display more, in the coming months, about currently negotiated partnerships. Stay tuned for more updates.
