Infrastructure Funding for Polkadot Asset Hub #3 - Atomic swaps, Offers, Maintenance

Context

KodaDot has established itself as the leading NFT marketplace on Polkadot Asset Hub, successfully delivering over 40 generative art drops and processing nearly 9,000 NFT mints with a 95%+ success rate. Our infrastructure currently handles 40,000 daily unique requests and maintains over 75,000 NFT metadata entries. As an open-source public good, we've distributed over $400k in bounties to more than 130 contributors, building essential NFT infrastructure for the entire ecosystem.

The Problem

Despite our success, the Polkadot Asset Hub lacks two critical features needed for a thriving NFT ecosystem. First, users cannot perform trustless peer-to-peer NFT trades, forcing them to rely on intermediaries. Second, there's no way to make offers on NFTs that aren't listed for sale, limiting market liquidity and user engagement. Additionally, as platform usage grows, we need robust maintenance to ensure reliable performance and user satisfaction.

Our Objectives

We aim to solve these issues by implementing secure peer-to-peer NFT trading through atomic swaps, enabling a flexible offer system for any NFT, and maintaining robust infrastructure. These improvements will significantly enhance the NFT trading experience on Polkadot, making it more competitive with other blockchain ecosystems.

The Solution

We're proposing three major developments:

Atomic Swaps: A secure, trustless trading system allowing users to exchange NFTs directly without intermediaries. This includes multi-asset support and optimized pricing, ensuring safe and efficient trades.
Offers System: A comprehensive bidding system enabling users to make offers on any NFT, whether listed or not. This includes time-limited offers, counter-offers, and a notification system to keep users engaged.
Infrastructure Enhancement: Significant improvements to our backend systems, including optimized gateways processing, advanced caching, and enhanced IPFS pinning for reliable NFT metadata storage.

Technical Implementation

Our experienced team of five developers will build these features using our proven technical stack. We're extending our SubSquid indexing nodes, implementing new NFT pallet integrations, and enhancing our caching layer with Stellate. Performance targets include sub-3-second response times for offers, sub-5-second execution for swaps, and 99.9% system uptime.

Budget

The $280,000 budget breaks down into five focused milestones:

Offers Implementation: $40,000 (2 months)
Atomic Swaps: $40,000 (2 months)
Infrastructure Enhancement: $40,000 (2 months)
Community Features: $20,000 (1 month)
12-Month Maintenance: $140,000

Each milestone has clear deliverables and success metrics, with progress tracked publicly on our GitHub repository. The maintenance period ensures continuous support and optimization as these features scale.

Disclosure:

This funding will ensure KodaDot continues to serve as a public good for the Polkadot ecosystem, maintaining and expanding essential NFT infrastructure that benefits the entire community.

You can track our progress at: https://github.com/orgs/kodadot/projects/22/views/1

This infrastructure upgrade represents a crucial step forward for Polkadot's NFT ecosystem, enhancing trading capabilities while maintaining our commitment to being an open-source public good.