NFTCDN is an end-to-end service to display NFT media content at lower costs & minimal development. Budget constraints limit projects leveraging our capabilities, stifling Cardano's adoption & growth.
Make NFTCDN’s APIs free for all to use enabling projects to display NFT media content effortlessly & efficiently on their websites/apps, returning an ROI of 20x & driving Cardano’s adoption & growth.
This is the total amount allocated to Make NFTCDN Free To Use.
Smaug (Rémi LEFEVRE)
No dependencies.
Our commitment is to provide free-of-charge usage of NFTCDN’s APIs ("open access") for the duration of the proposal’s funding period, enabling existing and nascent projects to capitalise on our capabilities with no impact on their budget.
That said, the underlying infrastructure will remain under the proprietary ownership of NFTCDN due to commercial (sustainability and intellectual property ownership & licencing rights), legal (regulatory compliance, trademarks & copyrights and liability of existing contracts) and security (cybersecurity audit and vulnerability-proofing) reasons which must be comprehensively addressed ahead of any open sourcing endeavour.
NFTCDN uses a number of open source components, including those built for Cardano for which we contribute patches and/or issue reports on GitHub repository. Feedback from mass-usage as a result of this proposal being funded is expected to deliver a direct benefit to these open source components.
Introduction - What is NFTCDN?
NFTCDN is a SaaS provider that was created as a result of Catalyst funding in Fund 8 under the Developer Ecosystem challenge to mitigate the substantial up-front cost and development time/effort required to display NFT media content on websites/apps with the objective of driving adoption of Cardano as the “Blockchain of Choice for NFTs”.
After securing funding in F8, a 6-month development effort was undertaken, successfully launching the NFTCDN service in December-2022 which is presently being used by a number of products (NFT marketplaces, NFT wallets and other bespoke projects) within the Cardano ecosystem.
Our solution has made it possible to display NFT images on websites/apps in a matter of minutes from signing up, resulting in improved productivity of project development teams by enabling them to focus on their core product development and helping them achieve sustainable growth through our consumption-based and discounted tier pricing model, allowing them to scale as their products grow.
The Problem - Financial Uncertainty & Restrictive Budgets for Projects
A vast number of projects in the Cardano ecosystem have expressed interest in integrating NFTCDN within their products and services. And while they have acknowledged the value delivered by us in the form of a high-quality user experience (high-speeds, substantially shorter loading times and high reliability) for their end-users and cost savings for the project on development time (c. 6 - 8 months) of an end-to-end solution to display NFTs media content, development cost (c. $90,000 - $120,000) of a high-performing service and elimination of on-going operational and maintenance expenses (c. $10,000 up to $30,000 per month), 70% of these prospective projects were unable to proceed owing to financial uncertainties and budget constraints resulting in a missed opportunity of productivity improvement and value-add features for the project, a missed opportunity for improved end-user experience and therefore a lost opportunity of value-add products and services to be introduced into the Cardano ecosystem.
The Solution – Make NFTCDN usage free of charge
We seek to secure the support of the community in acquiring Catalyst funds to finance the usage-related costs of NFTCDN services for 12 months, that would otherwise have been borne by projects directly, resulting in a direct benefit to Cardano by increasing throughput and delivery of innovative products and services, paving the way for potential breakthroughs and making Cardano the blockchain of choice for NFTs while also delivering an ROI of c. 20x the project proposal amount.
After securing funding our API endpoints would then be free for all to use for the duration of the proposal’s funding period (12 months) allowing innovators to experiment with their new product ideas and existing products to substantially reduce costs and/or redirect them towards the development of their own products while their end-users benefit from an improved user experience of their products.
NB. We have displayed the 20x return on investment of this proposal (ROI) at the bottom of this proposal in the “Resource & Value For Money” section.
Who the Projects will engage:
Projects who will benefit from our service include our existing customers and developers who have expressed their desire to test/use NFTCDN for their products and services such as:
Justification for our approach
NFTCDN is the only provider of NFT media content display capabilities dedicated solely to Cardano. In our previous proposal, we went beyond our designated scope by creating open-access endpoints to NFTCDN’s capabilities for the preview and preprod networks, which we have been able to sustain owing to the relatively low volumes. However, as a commercial entity and in order to remain a financially sustainable business, we are unable to offer free usage to every project within the Cardano ecosystem on the mainnet at our own expense.
Furthermore, asking select projects to approach Catalyst on an individual basis creates a substantial overhead for the project and Catalyst itself, consequently introducing a new barrier - speed to market - which alongside the uncertainty of success, hinders new projects to develop, build and test their products rapidly.
As a result of the above and taking into account the feedback received from 70% of the projects who we have engaged, who were unable to progress owing to financial restrictions, we have opted to finance the infrastructure, operational and support costs of NFTCDN through Catalyst enabling us to open our doors to developers from within and outside the community.
By funding this proposal;
The proposal will be measured against the following five drivers:
Adoption – Number of projects using NFTCDN Services
This is a quantitative measure of the total number of developers who have signed up to use NFTCDN’s services. A positive trend of this metric would be indicative of an increased need for and highlights the importance of NFT media content delivery services in the ecosystem such as NFTCDN, owing to the value and benefits we offer to their products and services.
Usage – Number of NFT images displayed through NFTCDN
This is a quantitative measure of the number of API endpoint calls made to NFTCDN. A positive trend of this metric would represent an increased usage of our services and would be indicative of the growing use of NFTs in the ecosystem, a growth in the user base of the ecosystem and would consequently also represent a volumetric increase in the number of end-users benefiting from the provision of our services.
Growth – Return on Investment
This is a quantitative measure of the cost benefits achieved by this proposal wherein we compare the cost developers have successfully avoided paying (Cost-to-Make & Cost-to-Use) by virtue of Catalyst financing NFTCDN’s service provision for the duration of 12 months. Furthermore, a positive ROI will successfully show how Catalyst has delivered financial and tangible value to the developer ecosystem by supporting a high-performing end-to-end infrastructure solution that is easy to use and enables adoption, usage and growth of Cardano as the blockchain of choice for NFTs.
Performance - NFTCDN Availability
This is a quantitative measure of the up-time of our service. The provision for operational maintenance within this proposal covers the continued maintenance of our infrastructure to sustain demand and keep our systems up to date. We aim to maintain NFTCDN’s availability at 100%, proving the robustness of our service under extreme network conditions and our capability to serve NFT media content under heavy demand.
Feedback – Developer Testimonials
This will be a qualitative measure wherein we will conduct two surveys over the course of the proposal seeking feedback from NFTCDN’s users on aspects such as performance, ease of use, quality of service and support and also enquire about future feature developments that they would like to see in the NFT content delivery space.
We intend to primarily provide two major outputs on the project.
Monthly Project Reporting
Survey Feedback
NFTCDN - Service Capabilities, Features & Performance
NFTCDN was created to deliver value to its users and their end-users by providing a service responsible for the end-to-end delivery of NFT media content, with performance at the heart of everything we build and abstraction of all the intricacies and complexities involved in displaying NFTs, streamlining the process of displaying NFT media content and allowing developers to focus on the success of their core products. We deliver on these objectives through the following core capabilities:
Since our launch in December-2022, these endpoints are being used by our paying customers and we serve on average over 1,700,000 NFT images per day. Additionally, in a survey conducted recently by NFTCDN, 100% of our customers have rated NFTCDN 5 stars in terms of performance.
Our capabilities are all-encompassing in the ability to display NFT images. Our infrastructure is built and run on industrial-grade setups to serve high volumes of NFT media content at high speeds worldwide through our Content Delivery Network (CDN). Furthermore, our services are backed with multiple redundancies at every point in the value chain to ensure continuity of service and we have an uptime of 100% since launch.
As we already have a working service in place, we believe that we are best positioned to deliver the solution within this proposal to the wider developer community of Cardano.
NFTCDN - Proposal Delivery Capability
NFTCDN was created as a result of Catalyst funding in Fund 8, wherein we were granted a budget of $76,886 and as per our F8 proposal milestones, the team had delivered a working product on time, to cost and at the scope we had defined and is presently being used by NFT marketplaces, wallets and bespoke projects without issue. We have saved thousands of hours of development time (c. 13,867 hours) for our present user base and also returned a value to Catalyst and the Cardano ecosystem to the tune of $2,206,000 (ADA 8,709,288) in OPEX/CAPEX cost-avoidance for projects, underscoring the effectiveness and success of our proposal, service and team members.
The team comprises Smaug and Rocky - two individuals with decades of experience in their respective domains of technical development and management with a proven track record of successfully delivering on complex large-scale cross-functional projects that seek to deliver value to the end user and community as a whole.
In contrast, this proposal is much less complex and as such holds limited technical risk to deliver - namely the potential for misuse by malicious actors resulting in degraded performance at best or loss of service at worst. To address this risk, on top of the standard monitoring we have in place, we will be ascribing a $1.00 nominal monthly fee for the developer(s) signing up with us to secure a licence (reduced from $79.99 per month by virtue of this proposal) to use NFTCDN when registering an account with us. This nominal fee will establish a legally binding agreement, whereby service provision is contingent on abiding by our Terms of Service.
Non-adherence, particularly in the form of abuse with the intent to disrupt our service, will result in appropriate actions being taken by us to safeguard the provision of our service as per our Terms of Service and NFTCDN reserves the right to modify service provisions at its discretion without notice to ensure the availability of its services.
Our proposal has three main objectives that will be tracked against the success measures (drivers) we have detailed in this proposal.
#1 – Make NFTCDN free to use for everyone
By securing funding for this proposal, we would gain the financial capacity to scale up our infrastructure for 12 months to support a multi-fold increase in the usage of our services.
By achieving this objective, we aim to make Cardano the blockchain of choice for NFT applications by improving the developers’ experience when it comes to deploying the capability to display NFT media content on their products and services and consequently provide an experience that their end-users would love and remember.
#2 – Increase adoption and usage of NFTCDN and the overall growth of application of NFTs on Cardano
Upon successfully enabling the free-to-use NFTCDN services, we intend to ramp up our marketing (through social media posts and meetings) and engagement efforts (directly through one-on-one meetings with products and service owners and indirectly through onward referrals and recommendations).
Our aim is to increase awareness of our capabilities and the free-to-use opportunity in order to secure adoption and subsequent usage of NFTCDN within new and existing products and services on Cardano, resulting in a net positive growth for NFTCDN through the network effect and user testimonials and also for Cardano in the application of NFTs within various domains such as decentralised finance, gaming, music and real-world utility tooling applications.
#3 – Generate net positive Return on Investment for Catalyst
By Catalyst funding this proposal, developers who sign-up to use NFTCDN during the funding period benefit from the removal of a major obstacle - financial limitations - to progress in the development, growth and performance improvement of their products and services.
As such, we aim to deliver a net positive return on Catalyst’s investment by reporting on the total costs saved by the users of NFTCDN and thus the benefit returned to Catalyst and therefore Cardano.
Project Milestones
Milestone #1 (1st Quarter) – Marketing and New User Acquisitions
Duration: 3 months
Budget: 25% of the project budget
Tasks:
Acceptance Criterion: Marketing and engagements conducted regularly, new users signing up without issues, operational maintenance ongoing with zero downtime and support services provided through the official medium as required.
Milestone #2 (2nd Quarter) – Marketing + New User Acquisitions + User Survey
Duration: 3 months
Budget: 25% of the project budget
Tasks:
Acceptance Criterion: Marketing and engagements conducted regularly, new users signing up without issues, operational maintenance ongoing with zero downtime, support services provided through the official medium as required, user survey created, conducted and feedback collated for publication.
Milestone #3 (3rd Quarter) – Marketing and New User Acquisitions
Duration: 3 months
Budget: 25% of the project budget
Tasks:
Acceptance Criterion: Marketing and engagements conducted regularly, new users signing up without issues, operational maintenance ongoing with zero downtime and support services provided through the official medium as required.
Milestone #4 (4th Quarter) – Marketing + New User Acquisitions + User Survey
Duration: 3 months
Budget: 25% of the project budget
Tasks:
Acceptance Criterion: Marketing and engagements conducted regularly, new users signing up without issues, operational maintenance ongoing with zero downtime, support services provided through the official medium as required, user survey created, conducted and feedback collated for publication, communication of final month of free-to-use services (totalling 12 months of free-to-use promotion as funded by Catalyst) made to existing user base and preparation to transition to original paid-plans.
Project Management Approach
Milestone Deliverables
Milestone #1 (1st Quarter) – Marketing and New User Acquisitions
Deliverables:
Milestone #2 (2nd Quarter) – Marketing + New User Acquisitions + User Survey
Deliverables:
Milestone #3 (3rd Quarter) – Marketing and New User Acquisitions
Deliverables:
Milestone #4 (4th Quarter) – Marketing + New User Acquisitions + User Survey
Deliverables:
Milestone Measures
For milestones #1 to #4, we will measure our performance against our 5 success measures:
Total Infrastructure Cost (12 months)
Total Labour Cost for Operational/Support (12 months)
Total Labour Cost for Project Management (12 months)
Total Labour Cost for Marketing (12 months)
ADA Slippage Tolerance (4.28%) = € 6,526.90 ($7,271.26)
Total Proposal Budget (EUR) = € 158,926.90
Total Proposal Budget (USD) = $ 177,051.67
Total Proposal Budget (ADA) = ₳ 699,000
Exchange Rates Baseline (13/07/2023):
Our proposal seeks to justify our expenses against a value-for-money (VFM) analysis - displaying the Return on Investment (ROI) to Cardano over the course of the proposal’s lifetime. This is done by totalling two components of costs that projects have to bear:
The above two components are classed as savings delivered to the project owing to the free usage as funded by this proposal. We intend to display the ROI as a ratio of the total savings achieved to the expenses of this project per month.
Calculation & Analysis – Cost to Make
For the purposes of ROI calculations, we provide the following line items and the cost estimates associated with building a high-performance, secure and reliable end-to-end infrastructure to display NFT Media Content.
Therefore, for every project on-boarded to NFTCDN, we return a lump sum one-off value of at least $100,000 and a recurring cost savings of $10,000 per month to them, excluding NFTCDN usage expenses.
These savings are returned to Catalyst by virtue of the negation of the need for proposals to support green-field development of a project’s capability to display NFT media content for their products and services and redirection and/or a reduction in spending of self-funded projects allowing them to focus on the success of their core product’s growth and development.
Calculation & Analysis – Cost to Use
For context, we provide the following real-world examples of costs projects would incur using NFTCDN’s service capabilities:
In the above 3 examples, we display the costs of the API usage that a project would incur in the use of NFTCDN. In addition to the above usage components, we will also count the licensing fees ($79.99 per month) and bandwidth fees ($0.15/GB) that are paid for by this proposal.
And while these costs are substantially lower than making a bespoke solution from scratch, the effects are nonetheless impactful to the products and services they seek to bring to Cardano and these tangible savings above are also returned to Catalyst by funding this proposal.
Calculation – Value returned to Catalyst and Cardano (ROI)
Above, we detail the Cost-to-Make, and the Cost-to-Use NFTCDN. In this section, we display the estimated cost-benefit we intend to deliver to Catalyst and therefore Cardano through this proposal.
For information to the reader, we provide below the costs incurred for using NFTCDN across various volume segments:
Assuming our proposal is funded and we secure 1x High-Volume users, 3x Medium-Volume users, 5x Low-Volume users and 7x Hobby-Volume users (a total of 16 new users onboarded for the 12-month free-usage period), for the duration of this proposal we would achieve an estimated:
The estimated values above yield an ROI of c. 20x ($3,598,300 or ADA 14,393,200) as a result of cost savings delivered to the developers in the Cardano ecosystem through this Catalyst proposal.
Smaug
Founder of NFTCDN
Owner & creator of pool.pm
Blockchain Dev, Full Stack Dev and System, Network & Security Engineer
19+ years Tech Lead experience
Proposal Role: Technical, Support, Marketing
Rocky
Founder of NFTCDN
Owner & creator of BlockchainArt.Works
Strategy development, execution & operational delivery
14+ years Project Management experience
Proposal Role: Project Management, Support, Marketing