Aggregating NFT Smart Contracts on Cardano

Aggregating NFT Smart Contracts on Cardano

In recent weeks, many of us have read about DEX aggregators or NFT marketplace aggregators, and most likely, we will hear even more about them in the near future. But what does it really mean?

A simple definition of aggregating is to combine multiple individual items into a single unified whole.

What does aggregating mean on Cardano?

Cardano smart contracts are deployed directly on the blockchain. Having a website for a DEX or marketplace is essentially a user-friendly shortcut to interacting with the smart contract.

What this means is that anyone can utilize the smart contract on the blockchain and interact with it—that's decentralization!

On Cardano, as there are different DEXes and NFT marketplaces, and usually, each one has its own smart contracts. Aggregating on Cardano simply means you can interact with different platform's smart contracts from one place - marketplace, DEX aggregators or simply website!

And that's exactly what we are doing at JamOnBread.io - for the convenience of users. We don't just show NFTs listed in our smart contract, but also others, where others NFTs might be currently listed.

As a user, you can come to our marketplace and browse the majority of the NFT listings on Cardano - some are listed in JamOnBread's smart contract and some in others. This way, you don't have to visit different websites to find the best deals.

Current meta of marketplaces and aggregating

You might ask, "Why don't all marketplaces simply aggregate all the other smart contracts to have all the listings on their website?"

The answer is simple - when marketplaces aggregate listings from other smart contracts, and those listings sell on their marketplace, they simply don't generate any revenue from that.

That's weird, right? The sale happened on their marketplace, but they don't get any revenue? It's because every current NFT smart contract is designed to give the revenue from the service fees to the marketplace that deployed (created) the smart contract, no matter where it was sold.

Ultimately, this design does not motivate marketplaces enough to aggregate listings from others on their own marketplace - simply because it makes more sense from a business standpoint to promote, list, and sell only in their own smart contract.

JamOnBread's solution for making Cardano more decentralized

At JamOnBread.io, as an aggregator, we saw this design as unfair and against the idea of decentralization. Since one marketplace was used to list the NFT and a different marketplace was used to sell the NFT, shouldn't both of them get a part of the revenue?

Definitely, in our eyes. That's exactly why we are developing a smart contract that will finally be able to recognize both marketplaces in the selling process.

We designed our smart contract to recognize on which marketplace the NFT got listed and where it got sold and split the revenue accordingly. The design ultimately allows any existing or new marketplace to adopt our smart contract to list and sell all NFTs without the need for developing and auditing their own smart contract.

If both actions, listing and selling, happen on their marketplace - good, they keep both parts of the revenue. If their marketplace is used to list the NFT and the NFT sells on, for example, JamOnBread, both marketplaces share the revenue - all happening on-chain, in a decentralized manner.

And we are not forcing anyone to list NFTs on our smart contract. If other marketplaces simply aggregate our listings to just be available for sale on their marketplace, they will be fairly rewarded with a part of the service fee revenue if they sell these listings.

That's not everything our smart contract is capable of. We decided to build an NFT on-chain affiliate on top of that, but more on that in a separate article!

So why exactly is JamOnBread creating a smart contract that shares revenue they would normally get with others? And why are we developing a smart contract that competitors can freely use without the need to create their own smart contract?

The answer is simple - we didn't like that on essentially the most decentralized blockchain, there has always been one dominant platform where the majority of NFT sales happened. We believe this doesn't match the decentralized philosophy of Cardano, and we wanted to build a solution that helps us all make Cardano the blockchain of choice for NFTs, move the competition outside of the smart contracts realm, and simply create a solution that's fair for everyone!

You can read more details about who we are and what we are building in our GitBook!