Author: 0xadventurer
Summary
OPIncubator Round 5 - Layer2 NFT Education & Tooling, Infrastructure DAO: This is a proposal to the Layer2DAO community to create a new DAO focused exclusively on educational and tooling solutions for L2 NFT creators, artists and owners. In addition to education; the new DAO would have a clear focus on connecting the new knowledge gained by creators/artists/owners to easily accessible infrastructure leading to pragmatic results and the proliferation of NFT development on Layer2 Ethereum. This initiative is to revive and support active NFTs creation (and thus trading) on L2 chains, which have a lot of benefits “by design” vs. Mainnet. NFTEarth is focusing on trading, however, without active creators/projects, there will be no trading; 2. If you are not having huge funding (to be able to develop everything on your own), as a creator/project, you need to use certain tools to create and promote your collections. Unfortunately, most of the tools available in the market as well information are not “tailored” to L2 and are scattered around. Most needed tools are – NFT Generator, Allow/WL list/raffles tool, Launchpad and specific in this case: tool to migrate NFTs from L1 -> L2. Those are the ones we will focus first, and the aim is to get those up and running within 3 month (latest) after positive vote. Meanwhile more detailed roadmap for wider creators/project owner’s ecosystem on L2 and steps needed will be worked out and developed as well as execution started if supported. 3. If approved - funds will be sent to multi-sig controlled by current L2DAO leaders, for them to oversee fund distribution. Moreover – here is my promise that I personally will not "take" any penny from this initial LTIP-7 funding. I’m not doing this for short term benefit, I’m doing this for L2 and way too bigger aims/goals! With this new initiative, we would like to support NFTEarth focus on the Layer2 NFTs market development as well as grow the L2 NFT ecosystem in general!






Background
Since the announcement of the impending shutdown of then leading Optimism NFT marketplace, Quix, the Optimism NFT landscape has been severely damaged. The current state of L2 NFTs is still negatively impacting Layer2DAO and other projects that launched on Optimism and are now left without a marketplace that is focused on L2. As an example as to how bad things currently are; one of the top collections on Optimism, OptiChads, cannot get OpenSea to even verify that their collection is legitimate on OpenSea. This demonstrates how little interest other exchanges have to see Layer2 do well; and also the need for exclusive L2 support immediately. A first and still developing attempt to rectify the situation has been underway by the team and community at NFTEarth. It already has a working team, community moderators and ambassadors, and over 30 Contributors already are part of the DAO through the Wonderverse integration; showing there is a clear demand for a solution here. However, there is still a long way to go for the L2 NFT markets to be as alive and growing at the rate of Mainnet. We see that quite a lot of the future fate of L2 NFTs depends on knowledge of L2 benefits as well as simplicity of on-boarding both new creators + migrating existing ones.
Details
Within only a few weeks since the launch, NFTEarth community is already nearly at 6,000 new followers on Twitter and almost 3,000 members in Discord! This clearly shows that interest about NFTs on L2 is absolutely there. While starting off with the development of new L2 NFT marketplace NFTEarth community already has identified a huge need to fill a gap of absence of both knowledge base and infrastructure exclusively focused on L2 NFTs advantages and benefits. With this new proposal we would like to make a serious attempt to fill this gap - and at the same time, boost value creation on L2, as well as continue to support decentralized governance. The ambition here is to create a unique one-stop-shop tooling platform for L2 NFT creation, launch & community management accompanied with proper education and support for NFT creators! The platform will be based on 3 interlinked main pillars and called “LFGrow Hub”. First pillar is education & information. Although L2 NFT from the surface looks fairly similar to the ones on Mainnet…many still do not understand this; and the solution begins with education. The most obvious benefit being low cost of transactions while maintaining Mainnet security goes overlooked by many. Although quite trivial, it opens a lot of opportunities for smaller, lower priced NFT projects to implement functionality (to name a few: attached yield auto-compounding, trait rotation, staking, community benefits distribution, PAOPs, AI integration) which on Mainnet are reachable only to big, high-priced NFTs/well established creators. Facilitating knowledge about such possibilities together with in-depth learning about L2 benefits - as well as mastering NFT creation - will be the first pillar of the new platform. Humans have immense creativity; we need to facilitate knowledge about non-expensive ways of experimentation available with L2 NFTs and creators will come! Second pillar will be ready made tooling and infrastructure for project owners and creators to be able to realize their ideas fast, smoothly and without need to know technical, infra side of L2 (e.g. launchpad). We do recognize that there are many different tools out there already, however, none of them are focused exclusively to fully utilize L2 NFT benefits described above as well as are very scattered. Having said that, we will need to make choices there what type of tools we would create ourselves, what white label and for which functionality it’s more logical to partner with existing tools owners. The idea is also that this platform should have “knowledge gated” and tiered access -> based on information & education provided in the first pillar, potential users would be required to show their knowledge before accessing full scope of tools. We will also look deeper into whether and how to implement “reputation based system“ (e.g. based on Optimism Attestation Station) to filter out potential low quality projects/creators. In this pillar we also should establish an easy to manage and clear process as well as tools for migration of already established NFT projects from other chains to L2. Third pillar – platform of tools for NFT projects to raise awareness, manage allow lists & launch campaigns as well for interactive community management. This is perhaps most developed area on the market right now (e.g. Layer3 for Crypto, however, not for NFTs!, Galxe, Quest3, different bots etc), however, again – there is no one which is truly focused on L2 as well as there are a lot to improve there! For example – NFTEarth itself was able to find only one and far from perfect platform for own bounty system management which is working together with Optimism chain. Still, we will need to make clear and considerate decisions where it makes sense to develop something there on our own and where most reasonable is to partner with existing solutions (for example – providing exclusive discounts to our Hub members).One of the first jobs to do would be to decide upon ownership structure of this platform. Current idea is to set it up based on both tired NFTs access as well as own token ($LFGROW). There is no lack of options and ideas, we would need to choose most beneficial one for platform goals! The initial grant from the Layer2DAO will serve 1 and only 1 purpose - to attempt to bootstrap the MVP of the platform and test interest and ability to attract creators. When we will be able to demonstrate demand for our proof-of-concept, the plan is to pursue larger funding.
Number of OP tokens awarded
27,500
OP tokens Proposal for token distribution
12,000 OP for development of internal tools and architecture; 9,000 OP for – community management, outreach and own marketing initiatives; 6,500 OP for incentives to creators. This split is subject to change while we proceed in building MVP and will be properly communicated if decided so.
Grant utilization and implementation
The expectation would be to fully exhaust this grant by the end of May, 2023. If LTIP-7 is approved Layer2DAO and LFGROW Hub will execute the initiatives discussed herein.
Copyright
Copyright and related rights waived via CC0
