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Executive Summary
SeleneNet is a permissionless, protocol based distributed sales network settlement system built on the Theta blockchain.
It provides standards which can be used to allow for project discoverability and allows projects to incentivize NFT sales.
When a NFT smart contract implements the SeleneNet standard protocols, that NFT project is immediately available to mint by anyone in the network.
Inspiration
When trying to develop a very specialized NFT project, I realized that the centralized sales organizations didn’t reach people in the types of markets that are needed in order to find the right customers to buy my product. The fieldwork suggested that no matter how much I paid, standard advertising would be unlikely to find the customers.
Yet, when I look on social media, I find lots of influencers that would probably be interested if they were incentivized in a meaningful way and if it was technically simple to do.
Basically, the people that would do the best advertising are the people that are already interested in the topic that I want to sell.
The challenge was to design a system that was easy for these people to use and when they participated in growing the network, they would be rewarded for doing so.
What it does
SeleneNet lowers the bar of entry for content creators and incentivizes a broader set of people to raise awareness of the offering while also rewarding sustainable technical support.
Creators
When a creator launches a SeleneNet protocol supporting NFT (smart contract), minting of that contract is immediately available to the creator by using a simple parameter-based URL.
This project has a couple demo projects that are open source which can be copied or modified slightly in order to get standard ERC-721 like projects up and running.
In order to mint, the creator must define, ahead of time, what the payout is for the mint. Upon mint, the cuts are reserved for the appropriate players.
Agents
There is a little gamification to signing up as an Agent to the network. The idea is that the overall network wants Agents that are active or interested in promoting more than one project. Also, in order to make the reward pool large enough, the number of agents needs to be a limited resource. Yet the resource must be able to grow as the network grows.
In order to help find ‘the right’ sales Agents, only the people that buy and own an Agent NFT can register new Agents. And, when they do, each NFT is limited to registering a limited number. NFT holders are Founding Agents. Anyone that is registered is a Partner Agent.
To incentivize Founding Agents to find the best Agents, any Partner Agent that they register will share 10% of their sales with the Founder Agent. And, because there is a limited number of Partner Agents that can be registered, it is in the best interest of the Founding Agent to find the best influencers.
The minting of Agent NFTs is also limited and proportional to the number of people registered to use the network (count of Participant NFTs). Thus, as the network grows, more Agent NFTs will be available to mint.
Website NFTs
Because there is a non-trivial amount of technical functionality that is needed to support the network, it has the built-in idea of rewarding websites that offer access to the contracts.
It is expected that any website that wants to offer access to the contracts on the network mint a Website NFT. This functionality is enforced in the smart contract during the mint where the website Id is resolved via the Website NFT project.
Anyone can mint a Website NFT.
How I built it
Creating end-to-end solutions that allow people to interact with blockchain pretty much means that you’ve got to be a jack of all trades to make it happen. It’s not as easy as just installing a ‘hello world’ sample program and then making changes.
Over the years, I have developed a rough background in WordPress website development where I learned the basics for writing and testing any server-based code. Using online resources, there are manuals for PHP, JavaScript, HTML, CSS and MySQL which gives the basics, but it still takes time to really learn how to put it together.
With this project, building Solidity code involved having to learn both Solidity and Remix. Because there were multiple smart contracts, managing the files in this system was a bit challenging, but doable. As it turns out, ThetaScan.io is a really helpful tool that not only allows contracts to be launched, but allows you to interact with them.
Because writing to a smart contract it critical for minting, the MetaMask documentation was referenced and sample JavaScript code was brought in where needed. This code, along with some ThetaScan.io sample code, was the basic framework for the JavaScript solution.
Also, I work using Windows as the OS. Having a background in windows development means that I have a standard IDE for building windows applications. A while ago, I created a private tool that allows me to parse and write JSON files which I use for building the NFT projects that are SeleneNet compatible. This tool generates the file structure that is needed for a website server to host a project. It helps in making it time efficient to launch a NFT project. You can build it too With this project, every NFT demo is fully published to the server and discoverable by the curious.
For instance, if you want to review the ‘Hack it 2024’ NFT demo, you read the projectDataCurrent() function on the smart contract and it will return the URL, File and Hash where the project JSON file information can be found (hint: https://amorstyle.com/nfts/hackathonv1/hackathonv1.json). Within that file, you’ll find references to all the source files and information needed to build the project.
I also have a few posts on my blog that help explain the sales networking in more detail.
Challenges
The biggest challenge is the amount of time and experimentation that it takes to figure how to connect all the pieces for an end-to-end solution. Only the most successful technologies are (semi) documented, thus you’ve got to be good at just trying in order to figure out what works.
Accomplishments
What I’m most excited about is that I’ve figured out how to deliver end-to-end functionality from a server to the blockchain. And, in doing this I’ve developed tools to make me be more efficient.
This is particularly important with regards to SeleneNet which is dependent upon having trusted NFT projects that agents can sell.
What I learned
I have always known that creating software is an art. While some people will like it, others will not. Yet everyone seems to have an option as to how it could be done better.
What's next for SeleneNet - A Distributed Sales Network
The most important thing to do now is to raise awareness that this SeleneNet infrastructure exists so people can opt-in.
By ThetaCon 2024, I’d like to see:
- At least 6 NFT projects use the network in some way
- At least a dozen significant influencers register as Agents
- At least 200 Participants in the network
In order to help make this happen, I’m offering to help explain how the system works and even offer the building of simple NFT projects in order to ‘get the ball rolling’.
The ultimate test is – can the system be used to make money. If so, selling participation to people should be easy.
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