🌑The journey

Selling NFTs on Cardano: The SpaceBudz Journey

Cardano's transition into the Mary era on March 1st 2021 brought about the possibility of creating native tokens. SpaceBudz faced the challenge of leveraging this capability without the advantage of smart contracts. This article dives deep into the technical journey, challenges faced, and solutions devised by SpaceBudz.

Introduction

Cardano, now in its Mary era, has unlocked the potential of creating native tokens. Yet, the absence of smart contracts posed significant challenges. This narrative walks through how SpaceBudz innovatively addressed these challenges.

The Challenges

• Minting and Distributing 10,000 NFTs: Doing this manually after each payment was not only slow but prone to errors.

• High ADA Requirements: Pre-minting tokens required holding a substantial amount of ADA due to the minValue parameter.

Devising Solutions

Creating Tokens on-the-fly

By understanding that tokens could be minted during transactions and sent directly to the target address, we allowed buyers to cover the minValue during their payment.

Encoding Information in ADA Amounts

SpaceBudz's unique approach involved encoding information directly in the ADA amount sent. This simulated a smart contract but centralized the process.

The Implementation

The Raspberry Pi Solution

List of ADA amounts mapping to ids

Using a Raspberry Pi, the Cardano node and a wallet were run. The UTxO set was consistently scanned. When the wallet found a UTxO matching the mapping, a mint transaction was triggered. If a UTxO did not match, a refund was initiated.

The Randomized Distribution System

Different ADA amounts were assigned to different IDs to ensure randomness and fairness in distribution. A reservation list system was implemented to manage concurrent requests.

The User Experience

Thanks to Cardano's UTxO model, transactions could occur in parallel. Each buyer was treated as a unique UTxO, leading to a near-instant response for users.

Conclusion and Reflection

The sale was successful, with minor hiccups. While this method proved efficient, the future for NFT sales on Cardano lies in Smart Contracts. The cardanocli-js library was invaluable for seamless server and cardano-node operations.