Trade? Step into The Tent — CNFT World

The following interview was originally published at https://cnftworld.io on January 11, 2022 by CNFTWorld

A recent tweet caught my eye, it looked like a new CNFT marketplace, only it was different.

On closer inspection, I found Trading Tent. A service that lets you swap NFTs, ADA, and other tokens with another user.

Essentially taking an escrow service and making it more automated and more efficient.

I thought it looked like a really cool development so I sent over a few questions to learn a little more.

What can you tell us about Trading Tent? Where did the idea come from?

We’ve been in the space for a while now, and all of us were collectors before venturing into creating our NFTs projects. We all have had all kinds of not-so-great experiences with buying, selling, and for the most part, also trading our assets.

This is why Tent was born: Tent allows 2 users to exchange any Native Cardano Asset in a single transaction: live and instantly. All happening in a secure environment made possible by Cardano’s eUTXO model and multi-signature transactions.

What does that mean? With Tent you can trade NFT, tokens, and/or ADA between 2 wallets in real-time, instantly, and automatically. Want to trade some $Hosky for a Yummi? Open a Tent. Want to exchange Fort Gotten Kidz to make up your squad? Open a Tent. Want to buy an Ore Ore Ore privately, without listing it up on a Marketplace? Open a Tent. Live, securely, automatically.

This idea, in particular, was born right after Nami was first released. Looking through the documentation we saw a boolean parameter called partialSign for the transaction signing function. That was basically the spark for this idea.

Here’s a video of two-way trade with a tent:

What problem does Trading Tent solve?

There is an opportunity with simple trades within the space. Not everything has to be through a marketplace, without knowing each other. Sometimes you just want to trade an NFT with a friend, and we should be able to do so.

Right now, most escrow services produce 3 or 4 transactions for a single trade. The blockchain size is increasing at a high pace already. We saw room for an improvement in this area and went for it. Tent reduces a trade to a single transaction and also automates the process, making it instant and live. We’ve traded up to 30 assets in one transaction, without any hassle, live, and instantly.

From a technical perspective, how does the service work? Is it built on Smart Contracts to execute the trades?

Not in a traditional smart contract sense. For a P2P trade, the transaction itself can act as a smart contract as it won’t happen unless both parties sign it. On Cardano a transaction can have multiple inputs and outputs. Tent harnesses this feature and crafts a transaction with outputs matching the desired outcome of a trade. Because the inputs (UTXOs) come from two distinct wallets, the transaction is considered valid only if it contains both signatures.

This also has a nice side-effect: when traditionally sending an asset using a wallet, the user needs to send along a certain amount of ADA. With Tent, the sender of an asset gets to keep the locked ADA and the receiver needs to lock some of his.

What wallet(s) are usable with Trading Tent?

As of now, Tent only works with Nami Wallet. We plan on adding support for wallets that implement the dApp-Wallet Web Bridge standard (CIP30) in a future update.

Looking at it from a business perspective obviously, the service has to generate an income to keep going. How will Trading Tent finance itself? If through transaction fees, do both sides of the trade share the fee? Is this something you can select in the trade options?

Tent charges a small flat fee on all trades. Currently, it’s set on 5₳ per user, per trade, regardless of the number of NFTs in the transaction. For the moment, we’re also giving a special 50% discount on trading fees if you hold a Fort Gotten Kid (our main NFT project).

The dust required to submit the transaction to the network is split between the two traders.

Are there any security features built in to protect users from being scammed? I’m thinking mainly from the point of auto-checking of policy ID’s for NFTs to ensure fakes or copies are not being traded? Or do users need to double-check all policy ids themselves before committing to a trade?

This is one of our main concerns, as we want to make Tent as secure as possible, without restricting users too much. For these early stages, we’ve verified the top 100 All-Time Projects on OpenCNFT and we are only allowing those to be traded.

As we move forward, we will be adding more and more projects and also allowing users to trade more freely while adding clear verification indicators with the ability to double-check the Policy ID for every asset.

In the end, we want to give the users all the freedom they need, without depending on us to verify a project.

What about royalties from project creators? If it is a straight swap, NFT for NFT I guess there are no royalties generated but what if there is ADA involved in a trade?

Royalties are honored, as intended by the creators of the trade is ADA 🔄 NFT. This works even for multiple assets belonging to a single policy.

Are there any plans to make this a mobile app?

Right now, we’re focusing on developing the ground floor for Tent. We have tons of ideas that we have coming up on the production lane but will be moving step by step!

It is stated that the project is developed by the Fort Gotten team. Is there any link to the Fort Gotten project or is this a standalone project?

This is an interesting question. Obviously Fort Gotten is what brought the team together, and we consider ourselves “The Fort Gotten Team”. When we as collectors noticed the opportunity and the need for a product like Tent, we immediately started developing the idea as if it existed in the Fort Gotten Universe… hence the name and the overall brand of the product: a Tent.

It’s a reference to Fort Gotten, to the forest, but it’s also an analogy for a private space for you to trade, to chat, to do business.

First and foremost, this is something we wanted for ourselves and our community, so being somewhat related to Fort Gotten happened naturally. Additionally, we also saw this as an opportunity to give Fort Gotten holders a new benefit, a 50% discount for this other project from our team. In the end, they will be developed as standalone products, but at heart (and a bit more) they will always share a special connection.

Thanks to the guys for answering our questions, join their Discord if you want to know any more about the project.

Originally published at https://cnftworld.io on January 11, 2022.