No metadata in the metaverse
Duo’s policy ID closed on the 30th of March, and as expected, everything broke and it was a mad rush to make sure everyone got their cards. Here is a breakdown of the good and bad.
If you don’t know what Duo is yet, click here and check it out! Duo is the flagship game being built on Revelar, the NFT Gaming Engine.
First, some context
Duo, being an NFT game, relies heavily on a system that processes user payment and responds by minting NFTs. This system currently operates under the Vending Machine Model. I have previously written an engineering breakdown of the vending machine model and all its nuances, click here to read that. The long and short of it is, the vending machine model kind-of sucks but also works well.
At Revelar, we have been devoting a significant amount of our time to create the Revelar Minting Engine. Our goal is to re-engineer the entire process from the client’s perspective and work backwards to create the systems needed to provide the ideal experience. Now it is important to clarify that by client, we mean the NFT creator selling the NFT to end-users.
For fear of selling the sun and delivering a flashlight, I will not divulge too many details about the system just yet as we are not quite ready, but I will provide some high level info. Based on our initial prototype’s performance, we are seeing up to a 90% reduction in both minting fees to the client and time-to-mint to the end-user. Most of these savings can be attributed to our roll-up mechanism which parses and manages multiple transactions into larger transactions with maximum efficiency for Cardano’s transaction sizes.
What does this have to do with Duo?
During the week of the closing of our policy ID, an upstream parameter change from one of our third-party service providers, caused our minting fees to almost double. Seeing that we had a number of very large minting tasks to chunk through before the close of the policy ID, a decision was made to put the Revelar Minting Engine prototype into production.
However, being that this system still very much a prototype (we quite literally were running coding for parts of the system manually), we ended up making a couple of mistakes.
No metadata
The first of these mistakes was that we had transactions that contained NFTs with no metadata. We traced this very quickly to a logic leak in the transaction parsing section that removed metadata before submitting to the Cardano chain. The result is tokens that exist only as a name on the chain.
Duplicates
Yes I said it…that dreaded word nobody ever wants to hear. There are duplicate NFTs that came into being the day our policy ID closed. The result of this is that there are a set of Duo cards that exist as fungible tokens and not NFTs.
FFS…So what are you going to do about it?
Prior to alpha launch we plan to create a smart contract that can be used to swap the broken assets for fixed versions plus an extra card.That means that for every broken asset you exchange in, we will give you two fixed NFTs of the same denomination.
These new fixed cards will carry the same benefits as the cards they replace and will be minted under a policy id specifically created for these kind of fixes. These NFTs will also be considered part of the Genesis deck and we will work with the popular marketplaces to make sure they are treated as such.
Next Steps
Many of our experiences in launching Duo with the current NFT minting services has reinforced the need we see for dedicated NFT Gaming infrastructure. Projects and games launching more than the standard 10k drop, or are managing multiple drops over time, don’t have access to reliable solutions currently to generate, mint, and manage NFTs & FTs for their game economies. This is exactly why we decided to build our own NFT minting infrastructure with Revelar, focused on games and their high-end demands. Revelar and Duo put in a number of Project Catalyst Proposals as part of our way to engage what the Cardano community believes will be valuable to growing the entire dApp ecosystem. You can go and check them out here, remember to vote for the ones you want to see us build. You can even down-vote the ones you don’t want us to build.
Benjamin (KarooSeun)
Blockchain Engineer
About the author
Benjamin is a Computer, Electronic and Industrial engineer. He has a passion for engineering, video games, and blockchain technology. He currently serves as the Blockchain Engineer for both Revelar & Duo.
Benjamin is still actively involved in research in Industrial Engineering with his key focus areas being blockchain technology, trust & integrity management, and supply chain engineering. His prior expertise is in the creation of near real-time decision support systems, having worked with a racing team to design and create a race strategy optimization system.
