NFT-Protocol
A new approach to NFTs.
Note: If you are a developer, do not forget to checkout our developer documentation, for a detailed write-up on our entrypoints, public functions and structs.
OriginByte is an ecosystem of tools, standards and smart contracts designed to make life easier for Web-3 game developers and NFT creators. Ranging from simple artwork to more complex gaming assets, OriginByte’s ethos centers around aiding builders in reaching the public and providing on-chain market infrastructure.
The Protocol is divided into three critical components:
- The NFT standard, encompassing the core
NFT
,Collection
, andSafe
types, controlling the lifecycle and properties of each NFT. - Primary markets, encompassing
Marketplace
,Listing
, and numerous markets which control the initial minting of NFTs. This section of our Protocol will be of particular interest to you if you are interested in setting up an NFT mint or want to purchase NFTs. - Secondary markets, encompassing our
Orderbook
, which allows you to trade existing NFTs.
In order to make the below concepts more digestible, we will use an example case of an NFT creator creating a collection called Suimarines.
In the spirit of the design philosophy presented in this RFC, NFTs of a given NFT Collection have their own type
C
which is expressed as:Nft<C>
Collection<C>
Where
C
is a One-Time Witness (OTW) created by the creator's NFT collection module.This not only allows us to link the
NFT
objects with the Collection
object via type association, but it guarantees that NFTs from the Creators collection can only be minted via the contract that Creator deploys.In our Suimarines case, this means that the NFT creator will deploy a Move contract called
suimarines.move
, which will contain the OTW Suimarine. With it, the Creator will create the Collection<Suimarines>
object and export a mint function meant to mint the Nft<Suimarines>
objects.
OriginByte’s NFT protocol brings dynamism, composability and extendability to NFTs. Our current design allows Creators to create NFTs with custom domain-specific fields, with their own bespoke behaviour.
OriginByte provides a set of standard domains which implement common NFT use-cases such as
DisplayDomain
which allows wallets and marketplaces to easily display your NFT.An
NFT
exclusively owns domains of different types, which can be dynamically acquired and lost over its lifetime. OriginByte NFTs are modelled after Entity Component Systems, and their domains are accessible by type.
Conceptually, we can think of NFTs as being organized into collections; a one-to-many relational data model that could, in a traditional database setup, be represented by two relational database tables -
collection
and NFTs
. In this iteration collection_id
would serve as a primary key for the collection
table and a foreign key to the NFTs
table. In our Protocol, the
Collection
object has two purposes:- 1.To centralise collection level information on one object and thus avoid redundancy (hence reducing storage costs).
- 2.To serve as a configuration object for its NFTs, as configurable behaviour can be injected into the object via the addition and removal of domains.
The
Collection
object leverages on the design pattern of Entity Component Systems. Creators can therefore add custom domains to Collection
to regulate certain aspects of the NFT collection. An example of this is using a supply domain to regulate how many NFTs can be minted in total.Domains are objects that are added to either
NFT
or Collection
objects. They essentially add new behaviour and data to each NFT or to the whole Collection itself.Our Protocol functions as a developer framework, and therefore anyone can create custom domains that incorporate any desired business logic.
Note: We are actively working on adding more standard domains - these include: Composability, Supply Policies, etc.

Domains allow you to add custom fields
When the creator deploys a contract (e.g.
suimarines.move
) it will export a token called MintCap<C>
which gives its owner the ability to mint NFTs for the Creator's collection (i.e. Nft<Suimarines>
).This object can be owned by a keypair - this may be the creator's keypair - or by a shared object. By making it a shared object we let users be the ones calling the minting function. This pattern is useful in certain applications (e.g. Sui Name Service where users are the ones minting the NFTs themselves).
Last modified 16d ago