“When the tide turns, it goes slowly — but it can’t be stopped.”
-Louisa May Alcott
Winter was busy for the Seabug team: there were some setbacks and some changes. More importantly, there was substantial progress.
Despite challenges and countless late nights, we are happy to announce that we have begun the final leg of our initial journey. Our V1 product is coming to life, and our community is coming together. Naturally, we are endlessly excited as we add the finishing touches to our V1 marketplace.
For any newcomers, Seabug is a next-gen NFT marketplace powered by the Self-Governed NFT protocol. Developed by MLabs as part of the Plutus Pioneers Program, the underlying code of this protocol is publicly available and can be viewed here.
Check out our other docs — and a soon-to-be-published whitepaper — for technical details, and please see the sections below for an overview of our most recent milestones. Our growing community of artists, collectors, and CNFT aficionados is enthusiastic and welcoming, so connect with us on Discord and plug into platform news via our Twitter and Instagram while you’re at it!
Let’s dive in.
Calling All Artists
Over the past six months, we have partnered with numerous outstanding artists. Seabug will begin life as a curated marketplace — similar to SuperRare on Ethereum — with plans to open the platform to the extent possible moving forward.
Our creative partners are torchbearers, and we couldn’t be more thrilled to feature their talent upon launch. There are too many to highlight here; however, you can head to the Seabug Twitter and Instagram for a sneak peek of their style. Seabug is still accepting new partners, and interested artists can share their portfolios here.
Branding
We are also pleased to introduce Barbara Sam to the Seabug team. Barbara is the top-tier designer and marketer brought in to refresh the Seabug brand and introduce our community to the world. She is also an owner and SPO of AdaBerry Pi (ticker: 00000), a carbon-neutral, secure, and reliable Cardano stake pool based in the United States. You can find more information on her Adaberry Pi website.
Whitepaper and Podcast Feature
The Seabug team is also finishing a final review of our whitepaper. A portion of the information therein is already publicly available. Nevertheless, the document underlines the importance of Seabug’s NFT standard (The Self-Governed NFT protocol) for the Cardano community. Additionally, the piece gives an overview of:
- NFT standards on Ethereum versus Cardano
- How The Self-Governed NFT protocol builds and improves upon Cardano’s NFT standards (namely CIPs 25 and 27)
- Artist and collector protections built into our minting scheme
- How the protocol incorporates into DAOs and potential DAO use-cases
- An introduction to our artist partners and their work
For the impatient among us, Seabug was recently featured on Episode 01 of The Universal Joint, the first podcast series by MLabs. The episode touches on many of the same issues in detail.
Technical Updates: Tokenomics and Platform Dynamics
Tokenomics are vital to the success of any dApp, and we are taking extreme care to ensure we get them right while staying compliant. Recently, we partnered with a top-tier legal team in the crypto space and are currently being advised. We have identified what we believe is a winning economic structure that will guide Seabug to success over the years to come. This structure incentivizes artists, collectors, engaged community members, as well as the development team. Details will be announced as soon as they are finalized and Legal gives the go-ahead.
Testnet Deployment and the CTL
Fun fact: Seabug is already live…at least on the testnet. Sure enough, the development team has been testing and fine-tuning for a bit now. The backend application is successfully querying blockchain data, and its latency is improving and almost where it needs to be. Likewise, the frontend team is adding finishing touches, many of which are demoed here.
A major reason behind our time to market has been the challenge of constructing valid smart contract transactions — e.g., working with off-chain code. This is a common stumbling block on Cardano and one that several teams have struggled to address in a performant way.
Not to toot our own horn, but you may have noticed MLabs recently received Catalyst funding for the Cardano-Transaction-Library. The open source project supports vibrant web3 experiences on Cardano by streamlining smart contract transaction creation in the browser and on mobile, addressing this issue of transaction construction. Our developers have already accomplished the basic functionality covered in the grant — we couldn’t wait to start building 😅— and are now focused on supporting a greater number of wallets and other functionality improvements.
Tying the CTL together is likely the last major technical hurdle for the Seabug Marketplace V1. As you may imagine, seeing the library come together after so much hard work is exhilarating. It also hints at a handful of exciting developments just around the corner.
Be sure to head over to our Discord and keep an eye out on this Medium page for further updates coming soon!
