Build a Custom Marketplace

I’m super excited about this! Just two questions:

  1. Can we still hide our assets same with what we can do in OS?

  2. Is the auction same in Ronin marketplace where you set the starting price, end price, and duration?

Hello!

  1. We didn’t have any feature planned to hide assets on your personal profile, but that does seem like a great quality of life feature that we should be able to fit in. We don’t have any plans to let you hide anything from other users searches.

  2. The auction format is still TBD. It may be that there are specific lengths of time you can chose from or it may be an open time selection.

Thank you for the proposal, great first draft and hopefully you can answer some questions and amend your proposal to continue to build confidence in the community.

Some questions:

  1. You claim to have delivered this kind of thing before.

We have deep experience in building these types of real-time data ingestion > processing > storing > queering pipelines. Our tools have served projects that have scaled up to hundreds of thousands of transactions per minute.

a) Can you go into more detail on what this project was and provide a link to it if it was public?
b) Who was the lead dev/architect on this project and are they the same person working on the CU marketplace
ba) - if not who will be leading the CU Marketplace development and what is their experience delivering similarly complex projects?
c) Is the dev team that delivered your example the same team working on the CU bespoke marketplace?

  1. Has your company built an NFT marketplace before, if so how much of this previous marketplace will be implemented into the CU?

  2. Can we see a portfolio of work your organisation has achieved already and do you have any testimonies from happy customers? Delivering on time and to budget ideally?

  3. Why build a custodial marketplace. Why not Peer to Peer?

  4. Can you expand the time frames on delivery of the full Marketplace PRD

  5. For this kind of compensation, what standards of presentation are you prepared to commit to? Reiteration until complete customer satisfaction?

That is enough questions for now, thank you in advance for answering :slight_smile:

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Thanks @BroccDaRock for the great questions. I’m going to try to go through them all here.

Who will have ownership of the work proposed here? Will Laguna Games have legal rights and ownership of the website, data, tools, and resources created by MerkleRoot inc. under the direction and compensation agreement laid out before us? I ask because I evaluate the value and cost of things like this differently if the LG and the community are able to change course over time compared to ‘Vendor Lock In’.

The ownership model here is joint. LG will have full legal ownership, code access, and data access. We strive to build software to the latest industry standards and documentation practices. This is mostly for our own sanity when it comes to working on products, but it also means it is easy for a client/partner to move to another developer. These technical details are subject to change, but right now we are looking at using micro-services in Go for all the observers, Elasticsearch for the data store, and React for the front-end.

Can you elaborate on the maintenance fee part of the proposal?

This is at least one full time devops engineer. They will be responsible for uptime, security patches, addressing bugs or other issues that can come up in production. This person is already lurking in the community :wink:

Elastic Licences → $375/mo
Elastic Nodes → $0.0496 per GB/hr (40GB) * 3 Nodes (High Availability) → $4,285.44/mo
Kubernetes for DB and Observers → ~$400/mo
Misc → $200/mo

One of the reasons a custom market place is needed is because self custody of NFTs isn’t really compatible with the likes of OpenSea and projects that have some form of Locking requirement. LG / CU made a distinction in how in game NFTs are handled to ensure self custody of assets. This proposal is contrary to that concept / ideal. I can write may words on this subject as well, starting off with: Who is legally liable for loss of NFTs not in players custody?

We chose to go with a custodial model two main reasons. The first is time, we wanted the initial version of this marketplace to come online quickly so the community could start seeing progress and resolving some of their issues with OS. The second was security, this also relates back to time, a single contract in a well known and tested custodial model is much faster to secure and to audit. With all that said. We do know that the community likes to keep full custody of the assets. With that in mind we are planning to see if we can find a way to keep the assets in your wallet. This will require the meta data observer to be fast enough to detect a meta change and de-list the item, or prevent the completion of a transaction, before a transaction can go through. The meta can change in a single tick of the chain then the transaction in the second tick, so this is an abuse vector that needs to be closed. We may be looking to the community for guidance on what is an acceptable time frame. In the mean time, while we have custody, we can ensure you are getting what you payed for. (please forgive any grammar / runons, I’m still working on my first cup of coffee :coffee:)

Will a new custody contract be written from scratch or do you have an existing contract as a starting point that has had some real world testing behind it?

We will be working off of the Open Zeplin ERC 721/1155 pausable contract. The marketplace functionality will be written as new work. We will be employing a 3rd party security auditing firm to audit the contract.

Shadowcorns, lootboxes, and badges are absent from the proposal. How experience is your team in creating expandable platforms? In the CU discord @sonolumin mentioned shadowcorns where left out due to time constraints. While I am far from a NFT expert my understanding is there are two broad feature sets. At a minimum it should be easy for such a market place to list and display the standard features of an ERC-721 token collection, much like OS currently does. Understandably decoding the ‘DNA’ of unicorns and lands is outside of that scope and would require enhanced functionally to be coded. I hope LG is able to offer code examples of how they mange this so your team is not revers engineering such things.

To slightly toot our own horn, we have lots of experience. The plan is to deploy the project using the diamond design pattern that also runs the main game. This gives us the ability to upgrade contracts without data loss (diamond storage). Secure deployment keys outside the digital world. And to allow an observer service separate of the blockchain cut off operation 24/7 if it detects any funny business (without having to give said service the super private deployment keys).

Its a fun topic to read up on if you haven’t: ERC-2535: Diamonds, Multi-Facet Proxy
EIP-2535: Diamonds · Issue #2535 · ethereum/EIPs · GitHub

Will an API be available the access the data used for filtering and or general sales and listing data?

Not in this PRD. We are not opposed to doing so, but would need to figure out some anti abuse mechanisms b/c the hosting costs is very much based on query volume.

What is the reasoning behind using weth as the transaction token?

Is it possible to support Matic as well? It really is a lot easier to get Matic on an exchange and avoid the eth / weth / weth on polygon education requirements.

This is what was requested in the PRD

All digital goods was mentioned, will that include buying and selling of RBW and UNIM tokens?

Yes! We are including swapping RBW-wETH and UNM-wETH within the market. We are also looking to incorporating MoonPayNFT pending feasibility and approval by LG.

It is a bit concerning the website registration is just a bit over a year old and there is no cooperate mailing address or phone number.

We do need to get those up on our website. The site has been a bit of a low priority thus far as we are staying busy on projects.

Merkle Root, Inc.
548 Market St PMB 53174
San Francisco, California 94104-5401 US

We are a fully remote team so this is an Earth Class Mail address. We are registered in Delaware. Please feel free to do some digital snooping.

We are a spin-off of First Foundry setup to focus on a fully remote team and to pursue more specific blockchain opportunities.

We do already work through a normal fee for service contract with LG on lots of the web products you probably use.

To the community, please keep in mind we are talking about giving the CEO of an unknown company half a Million real U.S. dollars and a guaranteed monthly income of $25,000 dollars with no parameters on Service Level guarantee in addition to the RBW discussed.

I think this is an important point, and I would like everyone to take a look at who we are, and feel comfortable both with giving us this grant and with having us be the steward of your marketplace.

Could we see a budget for this proposal? I mean, 500k usdc (not taking rbw into the consideration for now) for 5 people to work for 6 months is a lot, plus royalties on top of that.

To propose those kind of numbers with this little backing up of the financials is just absolutely silly to me. There’s not even a doxxing of the team, so for all we know it could be 1 guy having like 10k in expenses and taking a nice paycheck of 490k for 6 months of work.

I might sound harsh here but I’m a little tired of the low bar on many of these proposals.

We’re happy to be as open as possible about how we priced this project. We are a team of around 25 engineers, project manages, and engineering managers. We are slightly profitable on the USDC if we hit the six month deadline, but very near our cost-rate before the RBW. (Cost rate is rounded up to the nearest thousand to keep salary’s slightly private)

image

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My concern is that shadowcorns and all other assets will soon be locked into the game as well as soon as possibly the next update from team. Once these are locked into the game I fear the same issues we have had with unicorns and lands will be presented with shadowcorns and keystones and loot boxes etc. Which means we may still be living with these issues well into the future of 6 months until phase 3 is here.

Something to consider here is that OS won’t be shut off when the new CU marketplace comes online. We hope that most players will migrate their activity to the new marketplace, and we have set the fees to incentivize it, but trading will most likely still happen on OS for all assets.

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We plan to work closely with the LG team, especially Mathew, to make sure the design is something awesome. You should take a look at the proof of concept we built, its very much “developer designed”: https://youtu.be/z__6DzBdNeo

I don’t think the final product will be anything like these early prototypes in terms of design.

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Thank you Chris. I appreciate the quick and detailed response. I enjoyed reading it over my first :coffee: of the day. I hope this was as informative for the community as it was for me.

I would like to follow up on additional l questions and ideas but for now will sit back and take notes as you respond to other peoples posts.

Thanks again, personally I do feel better about the direction this is heading after you responses.

For the community’s understanding: Matthew is Laguna Games’ web designer and developer and is in charge of CU’s web interface.

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Hey! Thanks for the encouragement!

We didn’t have Shadowcorns or Keystones in phase one because they were not in the PRD so they were placed at a lower priority. With both being a very similar type of asset I think we could add them into the phase one.

I am looking at making an updated draft that also has payments tied to milestones, so I will work to update this also.

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We added this to the post (July 26, 2022 @ 1900 ET) to expand the payment terms to be upon completion of the milestones.

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The feeling is that the same Moonstreem can do the same work qualitatively and much cheaper. Especially since they have long started it.

Incorrect - moonsteams percentage of 1.5% of all sales was going to make them way more expensive overall. I assume the reason they stopped is because they wouldn’t be able to compete on percentage when they would be eating more of your profits than MerkleRoot.

the price should be in the region of 100k dollars,

The Average software developer in the US is paid $104k a year. This company is a US based company with US resident employees. This is also niche blockchain work and therefore these devs would be much higher than that. 6 months of work with 4 devs and a devops engineer would be well over 200k in salary alone. $100k might cut it in a developing nation but I have extensive experience outsourcing work to developing countries and have had issues with scope, delivery timelines and actually delivering what is required. One of the reasons I am leaning towards supporting this proposal is because it’s being built by Americans in America.

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Hi @sonolumin,

Could you provide an estimate timeline for Phase 2 and Phase 3? what are your early foreseen verticals for Phase 2 and 3?

while we have custody, we can ensure you are getting what you payed for.

Which means if the assets were potentially stolen from your custody you are liable to compensate correct?

We didn’t have Shadowcorns or Keystones in phase one because they were not in the PRD so they were placed at a lower priority. With both being a very similar type of asset I think we could add them into the phase one.

Please do confirm and update the proposal, I believe if you added this on Phase 1 you’ll more likely to have support for approval.

Phase Three Deliverables
As a Crypto Unicorns player, I would like to be able to
* buy/sell all CU assets,

This means including the in-game soft items yes? non-nft’s like Crystal Berries, Seeds, Boosters, Crafting items. etc.

can price history also be included for soft items and and other assets?

Thanks!
-KeizerMc

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  1. The current OS pain points and the functions we desperately want at this stage are listed in the proposal, but it does not seem to include other items in the future. With the opening of Racing, Jousting, and Raids, are there other options?

  2. Is this demo interface serious? Just a picture, not a prototype, I hope the author can provide additions;

  3. In addition, I pay more attention to security and the compensation plan in case of loss. Once there is a loophole, it may not be the loss of a single nft. I like to see more in this regard; does the developer have the ability to compensate for the loss? If the cold winter continues, can it continue to operate and maintain the update of the market?

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friend

  1. Phase 3 mentioned all CU Assets. so i also would like to confirm that. would be happy include approval if they can include that in the proposal.

  2. this UX is not final. they will have someone from LG to assist them so we can have the same look and feel of the interface. lgMatt i believe.

  3. looking for them to answer that too. we can also pitched in that if an asset is hacked they can lock the asset from their end. until a dispute is over.

This might have been covered already, but why make it a custodial marketplace? I can give dozens of examples of where things like that have gone terribly wrong, and I see absolutely no reason for it.

Also, what stops people from just using opensea? (if it is a custodial marketplace, i will personally continue to use opensea)

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I think completion of these milestones should be decided on by the current acting council and not by the CU team.

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Where is this 25 person team coming from? because according to your website, you have 19 people and 14 engineers. Are you talking about your parent company, firstfoundry? If so, why are we is that company not the one making this proposal?

I would love to see examples of this work. And to know what you have done for Laguna games in the past, as I see them listed on both websites.

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I read the sentence
I have read every post in this thread
You know, I get the impression that unknown individuals who have ties to the Laguna team just decided to saw off the stash money that was collected over time by Laguna.
The affiliation between the Contractor and the Client (they are not hiding it).
Lack of a portfolio for the Contractor
3. Doubts about having experience in the field
4. I don’t quite understand what prevents you from engaging developers from the same Asia?

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OS wont unlist all the nfts, so people still manipulate on OS the floorprice, im not in favor

Hi Keizer. CU Assets pertain to CU NFT Assets. Soft items are not included in the PRD in that they don’t have metadata. From LG’s perspective, we cannot give Merkle Root special access to soft item data either.

This is an entirely different thing that should be covered in the RMP Analytics instead.

You may refer to the PRD again to check what the full picture looks like in Phase 3.