Artano - A Cardano NFT Marketplace

Artano - A Cardano NFT Marketplace
Cardano, get ready for a revolution within the NFT space that will bring a bottom-up, affordable approach to selling digital art online.
Today, many NFT marketplaces (such as Superrare) are selective with who can post and mint art on their platforms. Also due to the fact many of them are powered by Ethereum's blockchain the cost of minting and transactions are significantly high. For example, Superrare's fees and commissions are high for both the collector and the artist, 15% + gas fees, and 3% + gas fees respectively. We believe this defeats the purpose of the decentralisation movement of the crypto ecosystem as a whole. It takes rather then adds to the autonomy blockchain tech is suppose to help create. Artists, collectors, creatives and tech enthusiasts should have a space to share art freely with minimal barriers to entry where they can also benefit from it financially. Artano will allow this whilst opening up creatives to using blockchain technology to sell their art thus exposing the world to the use cases of NFTs.
In December 2020 NFT Art sales reached an all-time high of $8.2M. Currently the supermajority of NFT activity to date has taken place on Ethereum which suffers from scalability issues due to high gas fees. This is a barrier to entry to a clearly lucrative & growing market for artists, as they are faced with high NFT minting costs which Cardano could eradicate.
Artano, an NFT marketplace built upon Cardano, could be the place for people to auction, exchange and sell their art within a free market, without barriers to entry.
SO, What is Artano's current state?
We have already formed a team of six people. We are at the initial funding phase and we're currently constructing the main architecture for our DApp. We have acquired the domain for our website, which is under construction.
SO, What is Artano***?***
Artano is a digital art marketplace, a secondary market and exchange for Cardano-based NFTs. So far, there has not been a large-scale attempt to implement token-exchange on Cardano, and we believe we've found an ideal team for that. Our aim is to be as decentralized as possible, where the community dictates the art they see, not us.
We want our platform to be artist centric! There will be 0 fees until the artist reaches 1000$ in sales. The highest fees would be recurring 2.5% process fees, since the transaction fees on cardano are so low, we can afford this and still be profitable.
We want to have an approach that is the opposite of existing art platforms, both in the physical and digital world, where only a select few have the privilege of sharing thier art with the world.
SO, Who is Artano***?***
Artano is a team of artists and designers, developers, financial professionals and marketers. We are currently a team of 6 people from Ireland, Nigeria, Germany, Serbia and the Netherlands. We will be working with a variety of artists across the globe, including established and up and coming artists. We are committed to making the platform a welcoming environment for artists at all stages in their career. We've received multiple inquiries via Twitter and Telegram, and they are enthusiastic about the potential of such a marketplace and also interested in helping us however they can.
Matt is a software developer with years of experience in front and back-end development. He's also working on DeFi Authority, an art project of 25 pieces and is currently setting up a pool for Artano. He's the product owner, the brains behind the architecture, and a developer for the project.
Marija is our consultant for developing a financial model and a long-term business plan with several years of experience working in the finance and consulting sector, advising startups on growth and development strategies. She's responsible for figuring out our financial plan.
Ronald and Sandip are our partners from the Netherlands who are active within the Cardano ecosystem and have built multiple blockchain projects - specifically NFT projects. Their past experience and insight has already been of great use to us. Ronald is running the stake pool and is committed to the Cardano ecosystem since early 2017 and offered to assist Matt to get the stake pool for our project up and running.
Their team's experience consist of:

1. Full stack and blockchain development with a deep knowledge of devops, 5+ years experience.
2. Full stack developer with 3+ years experience
   **Whether Ronald and Sandip join the team depends on this funding! So your vote for our idea is super important and would be very much appreciated.**We're SO excited to have everyone on the team and believe we have all the skills we need to be successful. Also having such a diverse team helps with ensuring as many perspectives as possible are taken into account within our design and development process. If this is to be for all people we need views from all people.
   SO, how can I help?
   Funding is our top priority, so that we can build a dedicated development team that works on the delivery of the Dapp. Further funding is needed due to legal fees surrounding such a platform, which will take the bulk of our budget (up to 200k Euros!). We plan to seek this funding elsewhere. By applying for Fund 3 we wanted to ensure that there is a market for the Dapp and that it brings value to the Cardano ecosystem. It's important for us that we approached the Cardano community first, to ensure this platform is something that is wanted by the community, that it's value to the protocol is seen.
   We're open to experienced developers who'd like to contribute to realizing our idea. We are also looking for funding and advisors who would like to help us make our DApp come to life. We'd also like to collaborate with people who have created NFT marketplaces and/or NFT art on Ethereum.
   We are always interested in skilled people that like to contribute to our project, so feel free to reach out!
   SO Costly:
   We've tried to make our budget as low as possible, and have found amazing deals within this community!
   T****eam costs:

• We have already found a development team (see the "Who is Artano?" section). They are willing to work for 20,000 USD for the first 6 months of development.
• Marketing and Business development costs 3000 USD
• Financial Expert's fees to pay out (preparing the funding proposal): 1,500 USD
• Designer fees to pay out (Logo, Website Design, Branding): 1,500 USD
  Setup fees:
• Costs of registering a company €300 + VAT.Therefore, we'd propose 30,000 USD in Ada as a total cost for the first 6 months of Artano.

• SO, how will our business model work?
  We planned to use a model that has low fees and low barriers to entry. This means we will have many more users compared to other markets such as SuperRare, Niftygateway, MakersPlace, KnownOrigin and other similar platforms, who have a very limited group of artists and collectors in comparison to the number of artists in the world.
  The total number of artists on these platforms is ~4,073 , which we believe to be only a small fraction of the artists in the digital art world. Our platform can surpass that number in less than two years after we are fully operational. The current marketplaces are less favourable due to their exclusivity and higher transaction fees (while Cardano transaction fees are estimated at 0.16-0.17 ADA). Our goal is to create a platform where all digital artists can participate in this growing ecosystem, and eventually having a platform of 8,000+ users while charging a lower sales commission which will allow us to maintain and keep growing the platform.
  SO, what's the timeline?
  As these usually go, we are speculating how our development timeline will look like. Here's one possible timeline for our team.
  Funding Stage 1, Q2-Q3 2021:
• Gather data on user experience from artists and buyers in the NFT space.
• Create storyboards for the different actors in the system.
• Design the solution architecture. Security and scalability of the solution are playing a major role as well as the modularity of it.
• Preference here is to build the solution on the basis of microservices to create isolation and separation of concerns, achieve modularity and scalability and reduce downtime of the platform in case of maintenance and software updates.
• Setup of different environments and automatic pipelines (devops).
• Start working on an MVP. The majority of the work has to be done on the marketplace for NFT's
• Smart contracts are just a small part but an important part of the total solution. We will use the Plutus Playground in the MVP phase to build them.
• Once NFT functionality is released by Cardano on Mainnet >>>
  We will proof that the solution works and showcase the first transactions done by artists from various backgrounds
  Next we will apply for funding, incubators, accelerators EU-based funds (usually 50-100k for 5-10% equity)
• In case NFT functionality is not released on he Mainnet >>>
  Work on the Dapp in our test environment, prepare everything to be released as soon as NFTs are deployed to. production. Go to Stage 2 if not ready by Q3.
• All art is stored on our server at this stage.
  Funding Stage 2, Q3 2021 - Q2 2022:
• Apply for funding on Fund5/Fund6 and other funding's and accelerators
• Apply for regulatory bodies in the EU to allow us to host financial transactions that conform to legislation. Payments (in fiat or cryptocurrencies) and measures like KYC and Anti-money laundering should be an integral part of the solution to be compliant with legislation. Here we will be dependent on third party service providers. We will need to find the right partners to collaborate with to keep the costs of the platform acceptable. Costs for these services can be substantial and our business model has to cater for this. Estimated costs for these services are ≅ 200k and can become a magnitude of this depending on the volumes of NFTs being traded
• Support of hardware wallets to store NFTs safely
• Find a cloud service provider where we can safely store (preferably not at organizations with a lot of power to switch us off)
• Start working on an algorithm that will prioritize art based on popularity, but also add randomizers that display less known artists' work.
  Funding Stage 3 Q3 2022:
• Add a pro user subscription model (only if costs and salaries aren't covered by fees)
• Work on sustainable business model where we are independent from investors, we cover costs though transaction fees and different levels of user accounts (ex. pro users)
• Refine the front end to potentially host other types of NFT's
• Determine which NFT art is seen (example, the one with most likes/views/recommendations).
• Take 30% of the NFT market :)
  SO Conclusive!
  There is already evidence of how NFTs have helped drive user adoption, just look at the craze that came about from the Ethereum based CryptoKitties game that rocketed to popularity in late 2017, this project raised huge awareness of the concept of non-fungible tokens. This would be an opportunity for Cardano to do the same but better as the infrastructure to handle such volumes of transactions has already been thought about within the development of Cardano.
  Answer to @oleum question in our comments:
  **Q1: How will data be stored?**Due to the nature of what we'll be creating we'll be using a combination of different storage systems. Our developers @ron have made us aware that we'll be making use of an IPFS to store large amounts of data. IPFS is decentralized. For private information such as user registration we'll be making use of a centralised database which we'll ensure is encrypted and secure. We will use local storage for the test environment before the MVP's initial release later this year, and migrate to the production environment with upgraded, decentralized storage.
  Answer to @rich's question in our comments:
  Q2: Will Artano be an open source solution?
  @Matt and the devs have vouched to make everything as open-source as possible. We would like to make a solution that would be available for everyone. All interactions with the Cardano blockchain will be available as open source so others can leverage from our research and knowledge to build their own NFT DApps. People would be able to jump-start their NFT solutions using our code!
  Things that create value or help us monetize will have to remain closed source. Microservices that build a foundation for our security will also not be open to the public as that would be a security risk for us and our users. The idea here is that we don't want people to simply be able to copy-paste the code and become our competitor.
  Sources
  1. https://superrare.co/about
  2. https://cryptoartpulse.com
  3. Experience and wisdom :)

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