When a new NFT project starts to gain popularity in the community, how to seize the trading opportunity?
It is key to have an in-depth understanding of the basic situation of the project, such as the number of holders, distribution of positions, proportion of blue-chip holders, daily trading volume, floor price changes, etc. In particular, some projects do not support Opensea (such as Ordinals), and a suitable trading platform needs to be found. All these are not enough.
This is where NFTScan comes in. NFTScan's multi-chain NFT browser product mainly provides Web3 users with efficient and concise NFT asset search and query services. It supports query by address, project name, smart contract and other methods. It has currently expanded to 17 blockchain networks.
In order to expand commercial revenue, in addition to providing free query services to C-end users, NFTScan also launched the OpenAPI developer platform, which mainly provides professional NFT API data services and NFT data support for Web3 developers and new generation of financial technology companies. , currently has 4,600+ developer registered users, and cooperation cases include well-known projects and developer teams such as Binance NFT trading market, Coinmarketcap, imToken, Bybit, Kucoin, and Mask.
In the process of business development, the huge storage capacity and computing requests also had a great impact on the traditional MySQL database originally adopted by NFTScan, and the business growth once stagnated. In the end, NFTScan chose the distributed HTAP database TiDB as the core data architecture to replace the original database system, which effectively met the needs of high concurrency and low latency in various NFT scenarios, and also installed a growth gear for the development of new business for NFTScan.
Today, NFTScan has grown into the world's largest NFT data infrastructure provider. The experience of NFTScan can also provide reference for players in other Web3 tracks.
1. The path to advancement in multi-chain NFT browsers
When it comes to September 4th, many crypto players will think of the famous "September 4th Memorial Day". For Shier, the co-founder of NFTScan, this day has special meaning-on September 4, 2021, the official version of the NFTScan browser was launched online. Two years have passed in the past, and NFT has also experienced a bull and bear cycle along with the market, and the prices of various blue chips have continued to fall, which is sad.
2021 is the golden age of NFT. According to a report by market consulting firm L'Atelier, NFT sales reached US$17.6 billion that year, a month-on-month increase of approximately 21,000%. The growth of Opensea has also led many entrepreneurial teams to flock to the NFT trading market.
However, Shier and ZK, another founder of NFTScan, have different ideas. After conducting a comprehensive survey on NFT, they found that many entrepreneurial teams developing NFT-related applications find it difficult to directly obtain full-chain NFT data. The development threshold is high and the user experience is poor. "The most terrible thing is that there was no third-party blockchain infrastructure to support NFT data services at that time. Even if you have money, you can't buy NFT data services." Shi Er said that in the end the two came up with the idea of building NFT infrastructure and bought it. After purchasing the nftscan.com domain name, I officially entered the NFT track.
Before founding NFTScan, Shier worked in the DeFi oracle track for three years, while ZK worked in the crypto wallet track for four years. Both have technical backgrounds, and are relatively clear and sensitive to the underlying operating logic, which laid the technical foundation for NFTScan and allowed for faster product iterative development and more timely and efficient market capture.
In April of that year, the NFTScan project was officially established, the team started to prepare, and successfully received a seed round of financing of US$550,000, starting the early development work of NFTScan. Three months later, the first public beta version of the NFTScan browser was launched; on September 4 of the same year, the official version of NFTScan was officially launched; in December, NFTScan completed an angel round of financing of US$1.5 million, led by Mask. .
In 2022, a new situation will emerge in the NFT market, and new public chain ecosystems such as Solana and BSC will begin to develop rapidly. NFTScan has also begun to implement a multi-chain strategic layout and continues to expand more blockchain networks, from BSC, Polygon to Arbitrum, Optimism, Solana and Aptos, to this year's hot Bitcoin, zkSync, Linea and Base. In the past two years, the NFTScan browser has only supported one Ethereum chain at the beginning, and now supports 17 chains.
(NFTScan browser)
At the data level, NFTScan has currently analyzed and collected 2.82 million NFT Collections, 1.14 billion NFT assets, 1.69 billion on-chain records, 130 million NFT wallet addresses, more than 160 NFT Marketplaces, and more than 10 NFTfi-related data. And the scale of this data continues to grow, with an average of 6,000 NFT projects and 2 million NFT assets added every day. It should be noted that such a huge amount of data also has an impact on the platform's data architecture. For this reason, NFTScan has also been upgraded, and TiDB was finally selected as the core data architecture (detailed later).
What can NFTScan, supported by huge data, be used for? Its core functions include NFT asset information search query, NFT transaction record query, NFT asset real-time casting and transfer record display, as well as NFT asset position data and casting records, transaction records of wallet addresses, etc. Simply put, as long as you enter the NFT project you want to query, you can find all the on-chain transaction information related to it on NFTScan, and summarize it according to different dimensions to help users make investment decisions. For example, NFTScan's Minting list will display the latest casting status of popular projects in real time, allowing users to quickly follow up and seize the opportunity.
In addition, the NFTScan browser has also cooperated with the Etherscan team to add the Blockscan Chat function to the NFT asset details page and user profile page. Users can conduct point-to-point communication with any NFT holder on the NFTScan platform. In addition, NFTScan Portfolio also supports users to connect their wallet addresses to view and manage their NFT asset data on the EVM blockchain network in one stop, similar to Debank's data panel.
(Portfolio function)
According to official data, the current monthly active users of NFTScan browser are about 100,000. "The product positioning of NFTScan multi-chain browser is a bit like Etherscan, because it is a free browser tool, so we did not spend too much energy to promote the product. Basically, it is natural traffic and sticky users." Shi Er explained say.
2. Launch NFT API services to achieve commercial income generation
In the second half of 2021, the crypto market has entered a bear market. The most important thing for crypto companies is to "survive". Expanding new revenue channels to increase revenue has also become a core topic of NFTScan. Since it is difficult to generate revenue from free browser tools for C-side users, NFTScan has taken advantage of the situation and set its sights on B-side encryption companies. There are two main categories:
The first is NFTScan as a Service, which is a SaaS service launched for blockchain network developer teams (public chain/Layer 2, etc.). With the development of the NFT field, the NFT ecosystem has become an essential part of the blockchain network. Therefore, in order to support more blockchain networks, NFTScan has launched this service to provide new public chains with a complete set of infrastructure development work for NFTScan, including C-side NFTScan browser products and B-side NFT API data services. For example, if an NFT on a new public chain wants to expand its ecological visibility, you can choose the above services and access the NFTScan platform to let more users know more trends and guide ecological traffic.
According to the official introduction, the early NFTScan as a Service service fee will be comprehensively evaluated based on the developer scale of the blockchain ecosystem, ranging from tens of thousands of dollars. Currently, it has received support from 6 foundations including Polygon, Optimism, Aptos, PlatON, Cronos, and Moonbeam. financial support.
The second is the OpenAPI developer platform, which mainly provides professional multi-chain NFT API data services for blockchain projects and obtains NFT data sources. This is also the original intention of NFTScan. Using NFTScan's API, developers can aggregate NFT data on different chains to achieve unified access to cross-chain data, greatly simplifying development complexity. In addition, the rich data provided by the NFTScan API can support developers to build applications with richer functions. Compared with grabbing on-chain data by yourself, using the NFTScan API directly is more stable and reliable, providing important support for NFT application development. Developers can focus on product innovation without repeatedly solving the underlying data acquisition problem. By making good use of the NFTScan NFT API, the application of NFT technology in more vertical fields can be promoted faster and better.
In terms of fees, in order to price services more reasonably, NFTScan uses "Computing Units" (CU) to describe the cost of each API; CU is more fair than pricing based on the number of requests. NFTScan currently exports more than 60 NFT API interfaces to the outside world, which can meet most of developers' business scenarios. Each API has its own CU pricing. Because the resources consumed behind it are different, they must be priced separately. Some customized services require an independent environment and targeted analysis, so they consume more resources and charge higher fees. However, Shier also said that in the future, customized services will become public APIs, forming a scale advantage and reducing costs.
The current CU price of the NFTScan developer platform is: 1 million CU can be purchased for 1 US dollar. If the NFT basic data is obtained according to the conventional usage scenario, the average single API request of the NFTScan NFT API consumes 500 CU, then 1 million CU can request 2000 CU. times, that is, 1 dollar can request 2,000 times. Once purchased by the user, CU will be permanently stored in the account until used up.
According to official data, the API developer platform currently has 4,600+ registered developer users, has responded to a total of 5.5 billion external NFT API requests, and has served hundreds of high-quality Web3 projects and infrastructure, including: Binance NFT trading market , Well-known projects and developer teams such as Coinmarketcap, imToken, Bybit, Kucoin, Mask, OneKey, Coin 98, HashKey Group, and SlowMist Technology.
Relevant cooperation platforms have also given high praise to NFTScan's data quality and services. “Through this cooperation, NFTScan will work closely with Binance NFT to promote transparency, security and innovation in the NFT field. By providing comprehensive data insights and providing developers with NFTScan’s API services, NFTScan will bring more to the NFT industry. Development momentum.”
Shi Er revealed that the current revenue from API services can basically achieve break-even, and their next goal is to continue to expand more B-side enterprises. "At present, the scale of the NFT data track is relatively small, mainly concentrated in the NFT trading market, encryption wallets, blockchain big data analysis, Socialfi and other fields. Our estimate of the market is that the number of related projects is 1,500 It belongs to the big B-end data services. At present, the scale and volume are not large. But with the development of the entire blockchain and Web3 fields, we feel that the scale of this market will continue to expand."
3. Massive data impacts the underlying technical architecture, and NFTScan breaks through with TiDB
In the past two years, NFTScan has built a world-leading NFT data infrastructure from 0 to 1. It not only has C-side NFT browser products, but also the NFTScan developer platform that serves the blockchain developer team, providing a global platform for Web3 Developers provide multi-chain NFT data services.
Currently, the NFTScan database contains more than 2.82 million NFT contract addresses, more than 1 billion NFT asset data, and 1.7 billion multi-chain NFT chain interaction records, and this number is still increasing with 6,000 NFT contract addresses and 2 million daily The velocity of NFT assets is increasing.
Large increments and high activity are two major characteristics of the NFTScan business, which also determines its extremely high requirements for database technology architecture. It needs to have comprehensive, real-time, efficient and other characteristics, and meet the needs of high concurrency and low latency. Choosing an appropriate data storage system that can meet business needs is crucial to NFTScan.
Previously, NFTScan used MySQL and Elasticsearch on Amazon Web Services (AWS) as its core database solution. After half a year of use, the solution encountered many problems (poor scalability, high storage and maintenance costs, decreased usage, recurring accuracy errors, etc.) and was unable to meet the rapid growth of the business.
In the end, NFTScan finally chose a solution called TiDB as the core data architecture to replace the original database system, and it took two months to switch all the underlying database systems to TiDB.
TiDB is an open source distributed relational database independently designed and developed by PingCAP. It is a converged distributed database product that supports both online transaction processing and online analysis processing. The advantages of this solution are as follows. The NFTScan team was attracted by TiDB's MySQL compatibility, elastic scaling, integrated HTAP architecture, and high availability during the comparison and selection process:
(1) TiDB is highly compatible with MySQL in terms of transmission protocol and SQL syntax. NFTScan can easily migrate data to TiDB. MySQL compatibility greatly reduces the learning cost, time and energy of the R&D team in using the new database, and can also accelerate Database schema migration work.
(2) TiDB adopts a distributed architecture that separates computing and storage and a design mechanism for underlying distributed storage data. NFTScan can flexibly scale computing and storage resources according to real-time changes in read and write traffic, maximizing resource usage and significantly reducing cost. Taking the API service on the business side as an example, the average query time has dropped from 10-100 milliseconds to 10 milliseconds or less; even if 1,000 QPS is processed, such query speed can remain stable.
(3) TiDB’s HTAP capability can handle transaction and analysis workloads at the same time. One database can meet the needs of transaction databases and analytical databases. It not only perfectly meets the growing business needs of NFTScan, but also reduces the overall operating costs. .
(4) TiDB’s own data copy synchronization mechanism and built-in disaster recovery plan ensure the high availability of the overall database service.
Judging from the final effect, TiDB perfectly meets NFTScan's core requirements of high throughput and low latency.
"NFTScan relies on TiDB's powerful distributed storage computing capabilities to build a data storage system with high performance, elastic expansion, and support for high-speed computing of massive data. TiDB's excellent distributed storage mechanism design and flexible on-demand elastic horizontal scaling These features allow NFTScan to smoothly and efficiently handle various high-concurrency OLTP and OLAP scenarios as it continues to expand new blockchain networks and face the growing API service request traffic." Shi Er added.
As of November 2022, NFTScan's TiDB database stores approximately 6 TB of business data, QPS reaches 5000, and the average query time is 40 ms. Various applications run stably on TiDB.
Conclusion
In fact, NFTScan is not the only platform in the NFT market that focuses on data mining, but none of them has shown strong advantages and has even been slowly eliminated by the market. NFTScan is not without flaws. For example, Portfolio cannot filter spam NFTs and phishing projects, and it seems very complicated. Through feedback from various market demands, NFTScan has also become aware of this problem and is formulating relevant strategies to solve and optimize it. But the flaws outweighed the flaws. In the end, NFTscan relied on its own advantages to become the largest NFT data basic service provider.
"Our advantage is that we focus on the NFT data level, and we are focused and extreme." Shi Er explained that there is a lot of data on the chain, but NFTScan only solves one problem, which is the data analysis and standardization of NFT. "We have always developed and built around NFT data to maximize the value of the data and serve more people."