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Interchain Jam Highlights — Stargaze: The Interchain NFT Hub
Interchain Jam Highlights — Stargaze: The Interchain Hub brings you the highlights from the live X session hosted by the ICF’s Robb Stack. Leveraging the composability and modularity of the Interchain Stack, Stargaze’s Launchpad, Marketplace, and playful, interactive NFT collections have made it a pivotal part of the interchain’s culture. In this edition, we find out how Stargaze rose to popularity, what it takes to build a cutting-edge NFT marketplace, and what’s coming up in the year ahead.
Getting to Know the Interchain — Stargaze
Stargaze is designed to empower creators, traders, and developers by offering a unique blend of sovereignty, security, and yield. Built with the Interchain Stack, Stargaze enforces on-chain royalties for creators and developers while providing real yield to stakers, offering a comprehensive suite of apps that cater to beginners and experienced users alike.
Newcomers can easily mint their first NFTs and more advanced traders can benefit from the platform’s trading tools and NFT AMM protocol. Stargaze leverages IBC to seamlessly transfer NFTs across different blockchain networks, pioneering ICS-721, the Interchain NFT transfer standard, making it easier to trade and manage digital assets across various blockchains.
Some of Stargaze’s standout features include:
- Real yield: Rewards stakers for protocol activity such as minting, trading, and securing the network in addition to traditional staking rewards.
- Zero gas minting and trading: Eliminates costly gas fees, making it easier for anyone to participate in the NFT market
- Chain-enforced royalties: Ensure creators are fairly compensated for their work.
Developers also earn royalties through Stargaze’s CosmWasm smart contracts support, incentivizing the creation of new and innovative applications on the platform.
Community-Led Development
With its popular collections like Bad Kids which became synonymous with interchain culture and Pixel Wizards, a magical collection of interactive, animated SVG magical characters, Stargaze has been instrumental in shaping the interchain’s culture. The founder of Stargaze, Shane Vitarana has been in the ecosystem since the early days and was on the founding team of CosmWasm, an integral component of the Interchain Stack. He turned his hand to developing Stargaze in 2020.
“Stargaze launched at the peak of the NFT hype cycle in 2021,” he says. “We did a very large airdrop and all these users just flooded into our Discord.” The team was initially building Stargaze as a decentralized social network like Farcaster or a decentralized Twitter, but after gathering community feedback, they realized the demand for interchain NFTs was high.
“NFTs weren’t really a thing at that time outside of Terra,” Shane says. “All these users were telling us the stuff they wanted, so we started building a marketplace, and an NFT launchpad… we just took in all this feedback and started building. That’s kind of how it happened.”
Stargaze was community-governed from the start, and it’s one of the aspects of the platform that Shane is most proud of. Even its airdrop was voted on through governance. He says, “Still, to this day, all the parameter changes and stuff like that go through governance.” The Stargaze Launchpad was released in March 2021 with a handful of Genesis collections, including Bad Kids, and the Marketplace came out in May. “Since then, Stargaze has become the canonical NFT platform in Cosmos and we’re not stopping there.”
Leveraging the Interchain Stack — CosmWasm’s Composability
One of the main factors that drove Shane to adopt CosmWasm was to make it easier and more accessible to developers to upload smart contracts to the chain, without having to make chain upgrades to add functionality. Unlike Cosmos SDK modules which are written in Go, CosmWasm uses Rust, which is “a very safe language for financial applications.” Shane says:
“CosmWasm enables you to iterate fast and ship really fast. The first version of Launchpad was built and shipped end-to-end in two months and the first version of Marketplace was also built in two months. Even with EVM and Solidity and all the tooling that Ethereum has, it would have been very hard for even a really great team to ship what we shipped in that short of a time.”
The main applications on Stargaze are built in CosmWasm, and complemented by Cosmos SDK core modules, like staking and chain governance. Shane explains:
“All the application-level stuff is in CosmWasm. It enables more composability and is really great for developers coming from Ethereum because the design patterns match a lot more with how it works in Solidity and EVM. So if a developer is used to building NFT contracts on Ethereum, they will feel very much at home with CosmWasm… it just enables a much richer developer environment.”
Let’s Talk About Bad Kids
Joe, also known as Cortlandt is a designer, artist, and the creator of the interchain’s most popular NFT collection Bad Kids. When asked what inspired him to create the collection, he responds, “Bad Kids came about in response to what I was seeing on Ethereum. Bored Apes became really popular and they inferred this sense of coolness on the person who had them. But then someone would get their wallet drained or be tweeting about getting the FBI involved to get their Bored Ape back… there was such a disconnect between what the image was saying and how the person was behaving. I wanted to make a collection that was much less serious.”
Joe believes kids’ art should be fun and says its “wonkiness” gives the collection a certain expressive quality. “It also allows you to see a lot of different faces in it… it was going against the grain for what was expected of PFP collections.” Unlike other NFT collections promising super-advanced capabilities like metaverse features or gaming, “Bad Kids was making absolutely zero promises. There was no roadmap, nothing like that. The community that came to Bad Kids was people who weren’t taking NFTs super seriously and could see the humor in it.”
Bad Kids launched on Stargaze right before the bear market began, amassing a strong community that supported each other and kept BUIDLing through the tough times. “I think as a result of just having people stick around through the bear market and adopt Bad Kids, it kind of grew through that,” he says. Are the characters based on personalities in the ecosystem? “I wasn’t necessarily trying to capture any real people with it,” Joe replies, “so if they did end up looking like someone, that’s good.”
Wizard-Themed Interactive NFTs
Berny is the “Headmaster” at Pixel Wizards and a Stargaze developer. “It’s been fun working in the NFT space so far,” he says. His initial inspirations came from Luna and Cardano and after minting his first NFT he was hooked. He wanted to add utility to NFTs and created a collection with a magical wizard theme that users can interact with. Each wizard is linked to a particular token it shares wisdom about, such as its current and historical price. “We made them interactive and animated through JavaScript and CSS animations,” he says.
Berny had been ready to launch his collection on Terra and almost abandoned the idea when the ecosystem collapsed. “I was like, I’m quitting crypto. I’m not going to do this anymore.” However, the collection was almost complete, and after doing some research, Berny heard about Stargaze. Pixel Wizards became one of the first interactive NFT collections and he worked hard with the Stargaze team to enable its functionality.
“Most NFTs are just really nice art,” he says, “but with Pixel Wizards, there are different types of interactions built into your wizard based on user input and events like certain dates and things… I thought, how far can I push innovation and interactions and fun into the NFT itself? And I think I went far beyond what I could imagine could be done.”
Pioneering ICS-721 Interchain NFT Standards
When it comes to interoperability, the interchain has always led the pack with IBC, but new standards had to be defined for transferring NFTs. “The Interchain NFT standard ICS-721 is pretty much the NFT version of ICS-20,” Shane explains. “It locks an NFT on one chain and then mints a synthetic version of it on the other chain. So this is very similar to transferring an ATOM from the Hub to Osmosis.”
Unlike other NFT interoperability standards, a standout feature of ICS-721 is that it includes the path of the NFT. “It tracks the history and all the transfers of the NFT,” he says, “so you can always trace it back to the original one.” Before ICS-721, many projects would burn and remint the NFTs to transfer them over but that caused them to lose their provenance and the history of the NFT. Shane points out:
“The main thing that ICS-721 provides is that it lets you keep track of the provenance of the NFT, which is one of the most important features that gives NFTs their value and one of the advantages for all the NFT marketplaces building with the Interchain Stack and sharing the value of NFTs to multiple chains.”
What’s Coming Next to Stargaze?
(N.B. This episode of the Interchain Jam went live on May 30. Some of the features mentioned below may be live already. Be sure to follow Stargaze on X to check in with the latest).
Stargaze has plenty of upcoming plans around interoperability with interchain projects and beyond. Shane enthuses, “Stargaze has to expand and it has to go multi-chain. The entire point of the interchain and its philosophy is to enable these sovereign chains and sovereign apps, and I always saw Stargaze as something that will eventually grow and be available in other ecosystems.”
Stargaze recently announced a partnership with Union to enable ICS-721 on Ethereum. “Soon you’ll be able to transfer Ethereum NFTs to Stargaze and Stargaze NFTs to Ethereum,” he says. The team is also keeping a close eye on Ordinals’ development in the Bitcoin ecosystem and would like to enable interoperability between the two ecosystems as well.
Additionally, Stargaze plans to expand through outposts enabling other chains to integrate the Stargaze Marketplace for their native NFTs. Shane says, “Building an NFT marketplace is actually a ton of work. There’s so much that’s involved and lots of stuff behind the scenes… it takes a considerable amount of time and resources to build an NFT platform. It’s actually more work than DeFi because of all the images.” Integrating the Stargaze Marketplace will help external protocols to bootstrap their NFT ecosystems and save time and resources.
Stargaze is also rolling out a loyalty program to reward stakers on the platform, with additional benefits for “people that have been using the chain of the platform for a long time.” He says, “We often hear from users that NFT holders get airdrops and all these benefits, and they’re like, what about stakers? So we wanted to build something for the people who’ve been staking since day one.”
Wrapping Up
Stargaze has truly become the Interchain NFT Hub and it’s exciting to watch the platform’s progress over the years. With plans for seamless NFT interoperability between ecosystems, marketplace integrations with other chains, and a loyalty program for stakers, among several more initiatives, be sure to keep an eye on Stargaze as it pushes the boundaries of innovation with the Interchain Stack.
Interchain Jam Highlights — Stargaze: The Interchain NFT Hub was originally published in Interchain Ecosystem Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
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