Introducing OriginByte

OriginByte provides tools, standards and smart contracts designed to make life easier for both NFT creators and Web-3 game developers.

What is OriginByte?

OriginByte is a collection of NFT smart contracts and toolsets designed for creating, launching and displaying NFTs with ease. We pride ourselves in having close contact with the Sui community -- and are constantly building and adjusting our development standards based on the feedback and needs of Creators.

When NFTs were initially proposed, the need for having on-chain abstractions of non-divisible assets was clear. As the ecosystem progressed, it coalesced around a set of standards that allowed for NFTs to represent not only novel forms of assets but also novel forms of human expression, such as digital art. While standards such as the ERC721, ERC1151 or Solana's Metaplex Standard galvanised the ecosystem and bootstrapped the initial wave of progress, they relied on a rigid framework that reduced NFTs to limited use cases. Now, the challenge is no longer one of non-divisibility, but one of versatility.

Our ambition is to take NFTs to the next level, with the belief that true advancement in this field of technology can only occur if those in this space push the boundaries of what has been built currently. Our NFT protocol was created specifically with this in mind - as a developer framework - on which anyone can build off.

With this in mind, our core intention with our Protocol is to bring both programmability and interoperability into NFTs and therefore expand the space of possibilities of what NFTs can become. Art, gaming assets, tokenised real estate, software licenses, digitally-native patents - you name it. Our protocol aims to bring all of these concepts on-chain, all in a single framework.

To achieve this goal, we have recognised the importance of both dynamism and composability - and use these two fundamental concepts as the foundation of our Protocol. In composing NFTs together and creating bespoke and dynamic behaviour, a new NFT type can be born - one with more emergent and complex traits.

Let's jump into some tangible examples:

Example 1

You are the Creator of a gaming-orientated NFT collection. Using our Protocol you'll be able to create in-game assets of different taxonomies, such as Avatars, Weapons, Clothes, and Personal Items. Within each category you can create subcategories and hence create custom composability rules such as "1 Avatar can only carry 1 Weapon at a time" or "Avatars of type Warrior can carry Swords as a Weapon type but not Wands".

Example 2

You are a Name Service in Sui, and will implement Domain Name NFTs, with a pull strategy for minting (i.e. the users are the ones making the initial function call for minting), where all the NFTs minted are unique - thus guaranteeing that every domain name is different from each other. You can use a distributed bloom filter on top of our Collection object that acts a Regulator object and verifies that each mint is unique.

Example 3

You are the creator of a very well-established NFT collection, and you're striking a partnership with a big brand. You want to airdrop some digital merchandise to the owners of your NFT collection, but you do not own the NFTs. You can simply create new domains in each NFT and drop the digital merchandise. Depending on the read/write settings of your collections, you can make it such that:

  • You can seamlessly drop new items to the NFTs of your collections;

  • You will only drop these items if the owners accept; or

  • You will have the NFT collection frozen and therefore no direct drop is possible

In other words, you have full programmability of the read/write access of the collection, and therefore you're able to come up with custom mutability and dynamism rules.

Origin Byte Standards

In positioning our Protocol as a developer framework, it is our belief that the most technical projects are likely to venture into building domain-specific code on top of our NFT library. However, the more likely outcome is that the industry will converge around a set of widely adopted standards.

With this in mind, we are looking to provide standards on areas including:

  • Composability: how can NFTs be configured together

  • Extendibility: who/why/when can new fields be added

  • Lifetime: how long are NFTs active and what are the expiry rules

  • Mutability: who/why/when can existing fields be mutated

  • Supply: who can mint them and how

To add to this list, given recent events in the NFT space concerning royalties, we have brought forward a standard for royalty enforcement, one which aims to guarantee royalty enforcement if the Creator wishes to do so, but also allows for a more laissez-faire approach if the Creator wishes otherwise.

Royalty Enforcement

At its core, Creators should determine the level of freedom users get to enjoy with their NFTs. Users can make educated choices based on whether the given collection is too restrictive in terms of ownership transfers for them. However, creators must be given a mechanism to enforce royalties strongly should they wish to.

Following the technical discussions we had during the 2022 Sui Builder House in Lisbon, we have conjectured the following:

"The module that defines the royalty calculation logic cannot identity if it is interacting with a benign or malicious oracle, to get the input execution price, which the royalty calculation relies on."

This is a mouthful, but what it means is that anyone can build a trading smart contract that lies and provides the wrong price information to the royalty calculator.

To counter this conjecture, our Protocol allows NFT Creators to decide which trading smart contracts they trust, and therefore allow their NFT collections to be traded in those, all the while allowing their NFTs to interoperate with non-trading smart contracts. You can find out more about royalty enforcement here.

Our Tech-stack in a Nutshell

Here, you can find a list of our current Github repositories which all integrate the aforementioned solutions:

If you are a developer, do not forget to check out our developer documentation for the Move Protocol.

Why Sui?

Choosing Sui as our home is akin to the reasons why many creators and developers also choose it as theirs - it's extremely well-designed. Sui is horizontally scalable and is thus able to support a wide range of application development, all with an unrivalled speed at a low cost. With such unique design architecture and a particular focus in gaming, Sui is positioning itself as the next blockchain to onboard the next billion users into Web-3. When working with Sui, you'll find that smart contracts are written in the Move programming language. Move is an open source language for writing safe and expressive smart contracts, originally developed at Facebook to power the Diem blockchain. Since then, Move has become a platform-agnostic language, enabling common libraries, tooling, and developer communities across different blockchains with vastly different data and execution models.

You can read more about Sui and the Move language here.

Our Community

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