PanDAO: Focus on dDataStorage

[IMPACT]

The NFT market is booming. Most people who are active on social media have heard of NFTs, and more and more have a basic understanding of what they represent. NFTs on Cardano are growing fast too, and we are on track to become a blockchain of choice for NFT minting and trading. This means that now is a great time to perfect NFT standards on Cardano. The good news is that work has already started in this regard, such as the Cardano NFT Alliance.

As is customary with Cardano, we like to build things the right way. This ensures sustainability, and sustainability is what we have in mind for this proposal.

NFTs do not necessarily include data, but more often than not, they do, and data is prone to getting lost. This is far from ideal when an NFT, which might be valued expensively, represents a piece of data that is stored on some server somewhere, that has no guarantee of persistence. To be truly persistent, a piece of data should not rely on a single entity, and it should be immutable. Sounds familiar? Probably because properties are the backbone of blockchain tech!

Now let's look at the most popular decentralized storage solutions. We automatically think of the InterPlanetary File System or IPFS. Some other options include StorJ and Siacoin. None of those guarantee permanence by default. Interestingly enough, IPFS is thought of as a permanent storage solution, but is not necessarily so. It ultimately falls on the original user to keep the data alive. To our knowledge, the only decentralized technology that ensures permanence by design is Arweave, which is made possible through their perpetual endowment mechanism. I recommend this article for those interested in the differences between Arweave and IPFS/Filecoin: https://coinmarketcap.com/alexandria/article/the-decentralized-storage-war-filecoin-vs-arweave.

To go back to our question, how do we optimize NFTs for sustainability on Cardano? Essentially, we need 3 things:

1. A dominant standard for NFT tokens.
2. Sustainability through data persistence.
3. Ownership traceability.

The first point is already being addressed by many Cardano devs, but we failed to find any work addressing the other 2 points. Thus, the focus of this proposal will be to create and maintain cross-chain standards for NFT data.

We have already established how we want to ensure sustainability, but what about ownership traceability of NFT data? Establishing the ownership of an NFT on Cardano is simple: you look at who owns it; but how can we be sure that the underlying data has not been used more than once, say, to mint more than 1 NFT? It turns out that there is actually a standard to avoid this 'double-use' that uses SmartWeave, Arweave's native smart contracts, called the atomic NFT standard: https://atomicnft.com/. In short, it creates an NFT on Arweave that can get transferred to other blockchains ensuring traceability from both sides: the NFT and its corresponding data.

This proposal will create open-source components for a sustainable NFT minting standard.

Apart from our projects: PubWeave and Open Science NFT Marketplace from the current fund 8 and funds 6 and 7, there seems to be a growing interest in the solutions proposed herein. A proposal for a music NFT platform in dApps and Integrations in fund 8, Rythmeet (Perma-music rmNFT Marketplace) by Alan Hegron, has shown an interest in utilizing our future tools. Alan and I have discussed and agreed that persistent NFT data is essential for the long-term success of NFT marketplaces.

Interestingly, this proposal is cross-chain by necessity, not choice, and in our opinion fits extremely well within this category. NFTs will inevitably attract people to Cardano, and establishing a high-value cross-chain standard for the creation of NFTs on Cardano will ensure that these people stay on Cardano. More than that, Arweave is becoming the blockchain (or more correctly blockweave) of choice for storing NFT data, with a growing user-base and developers. Our team is already connected with the Arweave community and we have presented one of our projects during one of their events (we talk about it in our PubWeave proposal here: https://cardano.ideascale.com/c/idea/401104).

This kind of cross-chain collaboration is the kind we like to see, and so participating in it is something we're very excited to continue doing, and hopefully help both communities connect even more!

Due to their nature, cross-chain communications are tricky and exponentially accumulate risks of security breaches, as we have recently seen with the Wormhole breach worth $320M (https://www.cbsnews.com/news/wormhole-ether-cryptocurrency-320-million-hack/) and many others. By deconstructing our PanDAO toolset into smaller testable modules, we will make it easier to test individual functionalities and pinpoint potential security breaches before they appear.

A bit less on the technical side of things, one of the reasons we value open-source so much is because of the immense advantage of collaborations. We wish for PanDAO to be a hub for people to test out new functionalities and be able to collectively establish a set of tested and trusted functionalities for high-quality projects to use.

[FEASIBILITY]

1 month

• Persistent NFT minting standards established, usable and tested.
• We get to > 50 commits

3 months

• Growing collaborations between the Cardano and Arweave communities emanating from this project.
• More than 3 projects use our dDataStorage NFT-minting strategies.
• We get to > 200 commits

6 months

• Developers from both communities are actively using and maintaining PanDAO.
• More than 10 projects use our dDataStorage NFT-minting strategies.
• We get to > 500 commits

We have been fairly conservative in previous funds regarding our hourly wages. However, now that we have started collaborating with at least two software development companies we were made a bit more aware of the higher nature of the costs associated with this kind of development. We have thus increased the hourly rate by 10-15 % and reduced the number of weeks of work to keep the funds we ask for reasonable with regard to the challenge's available funds. We always aim not to exceed 10% of the challenge's funds.

• Senior blockchain developer

80$/hour x 40h/week x 6 weeks (1.5 months) = 19,200 $

• Junior smart contracts engineer

50$/hour x 40h/week x 8 weeks (2 months) = 16,000 $

Total = 35,200 $

Core team:

• Albert Feghaly: Project leader and blockchain developer (Plutus smart contracts).
• Louis Gendron: Web and blockchain developer (Arweave NFT data storage and permaweb hosting).
• Jordan Quenneville: Backend developer.
• Jack Bauer: Science and art communicator, osNFT and logo design.
• Yahya Benslimane: Networking coordinator within the academic world.

Advisors:

• Roger Palou: Academic advisor.
• Tariq Daouda: Infrastructure and AI expert.
• Maude Dumont-Lagacé: Scientific advisor and art/design expert.

More information about the team can be found at https://intellart.ca/#/team

[AUDITABILITY]

Development of PanDAO is just starting following the success of our Fund 7 proposal. Being an open-source modular project, it can be audited using the number of:

1. Commits made to the GitHub repo.
2. Number of developers actively working on the projects.
3. Forks.
4. Number of projects integrating components of PanDAO.

You can find/reach us at:

• https://intellart.ca
• https://github.com/PanDAOxIntellart

Weekly updates are and will continue to be pushed to https://intellart.ca/#/weeklyUpdate in a very succinct manner to allow for fast progress tracking and auditability. Moreover, we have started writing short blog articles on https://intellart.medium.com to let the community in on our successes, struggles and evolution.

Being modular and open-source is at the core of PanDAO, meaning that a major milestone for us is that other developers decide to embark on our journey to provide the much needed set of tools and protocols described above. Obviously, the end-goal would be a vast majority of projects using and developing PanDAO. As we've probably all witnessed with the evolution of Cardano, good open-source projects are ones that foster collaboration, excite and become time-tested the more they're used.

Our aim is to become the go-to infrastructure for sustainable NFT minting, secure treasury management, and DAO governance practices.

PanDAO is a modular suite of components for sustainable creation and minting of NFTs, governance and management of treasuries as well as minimal cross-chain interactions.

It aims at building the necessary infrastructure needed for the development of our decentralized academic platform: PubWeave, a Fund 8 proposal in dApps and Integrations: https://cardano.ideascale.com/c/idea/401104.

This PanDAO proposal is a continuation of our successful Fund7 proposal: PanDAO: Focus on interoperability: https://cardano.ideascale.com/c/idea/384816. Our previous proposal touched on many aspects of our toolset including the dDataStorage problem. This current proposal ensures that we focus on this aspect of PanDAO and successfully get to an NFT data standard that can be used by all.