[nftcdn.io] Free high-speed & optimised NFT image & file API for developers

[GENERAL] Name and surname of main applicant

[GENERAL] Are you delivering this project as an individual or as an entity (whether formally incorporated or not)

[GENERAL] Please specify how many months you expect your project to last (from 2-12 months)

[GENERAL] Please indicate if your proposal has been auto-translated into English from another language

[GENERAL] Summarize your solution to the problem (200-character limit including spaces)

Make NFTCDN API free for 1 year 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.

[GENERAL] Does your project have any dependencies on other organizations, technical or otherwise?

[GENERAL] If YES, please describe what the dependency is and why you believe it is essential for your project’s delivery. If NO, please write “No dependencies.”

No dependencies

[GENERAL] Will your project’s output/s be fully open source?

[GENERAL] Please provide here more information on the open source status of your project outputs

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.

[SOLUTION] Please describe your proposed solution

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:

• pool.pm
• BlockchainArt.Works
• Plutus.Art
• Eternl Wallet
• NEWM
• VESPR Wallet
• The Ape Society
• Levvy Finance
• Cur8
• Hazel
• Buffy Bot
• Trading Tent
• The Art Bank
• Iceberglabs
• eutxo.org
• pixl.page
• Venster GenArt
• KWIC
• Tokeo
• CSWAP
• Poki
• ADA-Anvil
• Venster Publishing
• ChainLobby
• Artifct
• FluidTokens
• nftio.io
• Gingerbread Squad
• CNFT Folio
• And many more we have yet to reach out to…

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.

[IMPACT] Please define the positive impact your project will have on the wider Cardano community

• We amplify the ecosystem’s capability by equipping developers with an efficient, reliable, high-quality, high-performance enterprise-grade solution for displaying NFT media content on their products and services, making Cardano the blockchain of choice in the application of NFTs for existing and emerging use-case domains.
• We remove barriers to entry by alleviating budget concerns and financial uncertainty by financing the provision of NFTCDN’s services through Catalyst, broadening the accessibility of all of our existing capabilities to developers on Cardano.
• We boost adoption, fuel innovation and drive growth on Cardano by empowering existing and nascent projects with a working solution for the display of NFT media content, eliminating the need for them to build this capability from the ground up, allowing them to focus on their core product’s growth and development.
• We accelerate product development on Cardano with NFTCDN’s easy-to-use plug-and-play solution, facilitating rapid prototyping, iterative development cycles and market feasibility tests for newer products and services, encouraging creativity and experimentation thereby supporting the strategic goal of attracting innovative projects on Cardano from within and outside of the ecosystem.
• We benefit from the network effect from the collaborative efforts of a diverse and extensive community of developers who would contribute valuable feedback to NFTCDN. Any updates and upgrades implemented are then enjoyed collectively through the provision of ubiquitous and free access to NFTCDN.
• We respond to the calls of developers who have shown strong interest in the integration of NFTCDN within their products and services, enabling them to utilise and unlock the potential of native assets in emerging areas such as Decentralised Finance (DeFi), gaming, music and real-world utility tooling applications (e.g. ticketing, Decentralised Identifiers (DIDs), proof-of-asset-ownership and many more)
• We aim to deliver an ROI of c. 20x the proposal budget. More details on this can be found at the bottom of this proposal within the Resource & Value For Money section.

[CAPABILITY & FEASIBILITY] What is your capability to deliver your project with high levels of trust and accountability? How do you intend to validate if your approach is feasible?

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:

• NFT Image API Endpoint Capability:
• This capability features the return of an optimised version of the NFT image at various predefined resolutions (64x64, 128x128, 256x256, 512x512 and 1024x1024) in WEBP file format.
• The capability features compatibility with all image media types (raster, vector and animated) and on-chain images.
• The capability features compatibility with all sources of NFT media content, including IPFS, Arweave, HTTP and on-chain. 
• This feature is compatible with all official NFT standards on Cardano, including CIP-25 v1 & v2, CIP-68 and historical standards such as NFT v0.01 standard.
• NFT metadata API endpoint Capability
• This feature returns the normalised NFT metadata in JSON format for display and onward processing.
• NFT Files API endpoint Capability
• This capability features the return of additional optional files from CIP25 or CIP68 tokens.
• The capability enables the use of all Cardano token file types, including audio files, videos, HTML/Javascript files, GLT 3D models, PDFs, etc.

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 and files. 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.

[PROJECT MILESTONES] What are the key milestones you need to achieve in order to complete your project successfully?

Milestone #1 (Month 0 - 2) – Marketing and New User Acquisitions

Milestone Outputs:

• Infrastructure budget allocation for on-demand scale-up w/ vendors
• Marketing on social media
• Engagements with potential projects and users on social media
• Onboarding of new users on NFTCDN
• Support services provided to users as required
• Operational maintenance of infrastructure as required

Acceptance Criterion:

• Webpage to subscribe to NFTCDN’s services for free using Catalyst Fund 12 promotion
• Delivery of 1x Twitter spaces to announce NFTCDN free service
• Successful onboarding of new users into NFTCDN

Evidence of Milestone Completion:

• Recording of 1x Twitter space
• Evidence of engagements with users on social media and outcomes
• Count of new subscribers to NFTCDN service & usage statistics

Milestone #2 (Month 2 - 4) – Marketing + New User Acquisitions

Deliverables:

• Periodical marketing on social media and other forums
• Engagements with potential projects and users
• On-boarding of new users on NFTCDN
• Support services provided to users as required
• Operational maintenance of infrastructure as required

Acceptance Criterion:

• Engagements with potential projects and users on social media
• Successful onboarding of new users into NFTCDN using Catalyst Fund 12 promotion

Evidence of Milestone Completion:

• Evidence of engagements with users on social media and outcomes
• Count of new subscribers to NFTCDN service & usage statistics

Milestone #3 (Month 4 - 6) – Marketing and New User Acquisitions + User Survey

Deliverables:

• Periodical marketing on social media and other forums
• Engagements with potential projects and users
• On-boarding of new users on NFTCDN
• Support services provided to users as required
• Operational maintenance of infrastructure as required
• Compilation of user initial survey outcomes for publication

Acceptance Criterion:

• Engagements with potential projects and users on social media
• Successful onboarding of new users into NFTCDN using Catalyst Fund 12 promotion
• User base surveyed in month 5 on service performance, quality and value

Evidence of Milestone Completion:

• Evidence of engagements with users on social media and outcomes
• Count of new subscribers to NFTCDN service & usage statistics
• Publication of user base survey results

Milestone #4 (Month 6 - 8) – Marketing and New User Acquisitions

Deliverables:

• Periodical marketing on social media and other forums
• Engagements with potential projects and users
• On-boarding of new users on NFTCDN
• Support services provided to users as required
• Operational maintenance of infrastructure as required

Acceptance Criterion:

• Engagements with potential projects and users on social media
• Successful onboarding of new users into NFTCDN using Catalyst Fund 12 promotion

Evidence of Milestone Completion:

• Evidence of engagements with users on social media and outcomes
• Count of new subscribers to NFTCDN service & usage statistics

Milestone #5 (Month 8 - 10) – Marketing and New User Acquisitions

Deliverables:

• Periodical marketing on social media and other forums
• Engagements with potential projects and users
• On-boarding of new users on NFTCDN
• Support services provided to users as required
• Operational maintenance of infrastructure as required

Acceptance Criterion:

• Engagements with potential projects and users on social media
• Successful onboarding of new users into NFTCDN using Catalyst Fund 12 promotion

Evidence of Milestone Completion:

• Evidence of engagements with users on social media and outcomes
• Count of new subscribers to NFTCDN service & usage statistics

Milestone #6 (Month 10 - 12) – Marketing and New User Acquisitions + Final Survey + Close Out Report

Deliverables:

• Periodical marketing on social media and other forums
• Engagements with potential projects and users
• On-boarding of new users on NFTCDN
• Support services provided to users as required
• Operational maintenance of infrastructure as required
• Winding down of Free period in month 11 & Twitter spaces announcement
• Submission of close out report

Acceptance Criterion:

• Engagements with potential projects and users on social media
• 1x Twitter space to announce closure of promotional period
• Successful onboarding of new users into NFTCDN using Catalyst Fund 12 promotion
• User base surveyed in month 11 on service performance, quality and value, plus benefits from making NFTCDN Free to Use

Evidence of Milestone Completion:

• Recording of 1x Twitter space
• Evidence of engagements with users on social media and outcomes
• Count of new subscribers to NFTCDN service & usage statistics
• Publication of user base survey results
• Publication of close out report

[RESOURCES] Who is in the project team and what are their roles?

Smaug

Founder of NFTCDN

Owner & creator of pool.pm

Blockchain Dev, Full Stack Dev and System, Network & Security Engineer

20+ years Tech Lead experience

Proposal Role: Technical, Support, Marketing

Rocky

Founder of NFTCDN

Owner & creator of BlockchainArt.Works

Strategy development, execution & operational delivery

15+ years Project Management experience

Proposal Role: Project Management, Support, Marketing

[BUDGET & COSTS] Please provide a cost breakdown of the proposed work and resources

Total Infrastructure Cost (12 months)

• €2,000 per month x 12 = €24,000 ($25,920)
• Includes present baseline infrastructure costs
• Includes on-demand scaling costs to support free-usage volumes

Total Labour Cost for Operational/Support (12 months)

• €2,500 x 12 = €30,000 ($32,400)
• Includes user support services through official medium
• Includes operational maintenance services
• Includes security and monitoring services

Total Labour Cost for Project Management (12 months)

• €2,500 x 12 = €30,000 ($32,400)
• Includes proposal management services
• Includes delivery management services

Total Labour Cost for Marketing (12 months)

• €1,000 x 12 = €12,000 ($12.960)
• Includes marketing services on social media and other forums
• Includes marketing video creation services

Total Proposal Budget (EUR) = € 96,000

Total Proposal Budget (USD) = $ 103,680

Total Proposal Budget (ADA) = ₳ 241,116.28

Exchange Rates Baseline (11/05/2024):

• 1 ADA = 0.43 USD
• 1 EUR = 1.08 USD

[VALUE FOR MONEY] How does the cost of the project represent value for money for the Cardano ecosystem?

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:

• #1 Costs-to-Make – This is the cost to build an end-to-end infrastructure to display NFT media content if NFTCDN did not exist and; 
• #2 Costs-to-Use – This is the cost of using NFTCDN based on usage volumes, egress bandwidth and licencing costs

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.

• Lump Sum Labour Costs for Development = $90,000
• Monthly OPEX/CAPEX Costs = $10,000

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:

• An NFT Marketplace such as jpg.store had 2.6m visits in June-2023, with an average browsing time of 12 minutes. Assuming a total of 5 NFTs are viewed per minute, this would result in a bill of $5,225 for 156m API calls per month or $62,700 per annum. While a commercial entity such as jpg.store may be solvent enough to fund such an endeavour, funding our proposal would allow services such as these to save on costs and/or redirect their funds towards the growth and development of their core products.
• A bespoke product such as eutxo.org had c. 11k visits in June-2023, with an average browsing time of 1.5 minutes. Assuming a total of 30 NFTs are viewed per minute, this would result in a bill of $270 for 490k API calls per month or $3,240 per year. This project cannot afford this capability as it is a non-revenue-generating project created to enable the community to visualise the flow of transactions on the Cardano blockchain, including N/FTs within the transactions. By funding our proposal, we encourage the development of bespoke projects such as these enriching the Cardano ecosystem.
• Another bespoke product such as pool.pm had 241k visits in June-2023, with an average browsing time of 5.5 minutes. Assuming a total of 15 NFTs are viewed per minute, this would result in a bill of $1,694 for 19.8m views per month or $20,329 per annum. This is an example of another project which is non-revenue-generating, and as such if NFTCDN’s capabilities were not adopted, would result in a loss of benefit to the end-user’s experience when viewing large volumes of NFT media content on the product.

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:

• Commercial-Volume (100m API calls per month) = $3,825 per month
• High-Volume (25m API calls per month) = $1,950 per month
• Medium-Volume (5m API calls per month) = $950 per month
• Low-Volume (500k API calls per month) = $275 per month
• Hobbyist-Volume (50k API calls per month) = $50 per month

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:

• Cost-to-Use Savings of $78,300 (ADA 313,200)
• Cost-to-Make Savings of $3,520,000 (ADA 14,080,000)

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.