Cosmos Special Research Five: Stargaze is an NFT platform that combines first-mover advantages and development problems
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1. What is Stargaze
Stargaze is a zone developed by the Cosmos SDK that serves NFT (the Cosmos ecosystem supports developers to build special application chains for their own Dapps, called zones), which is a decentralized NFT market on the Cosmos Ecosystem.
In addition to taking on the functions of an NFT trading market similar to OpenSea, Stargaze is also committed to becoming a creator economy platform, supporting creators to earn income by turning their creative content into NFT.
Using the Cosmos SDK, Stargaze Zone tries to solve the problem of non-existence scalability. Compared with the existing NFT market built on $ETH, $SOL and other competing chains, Stargaze puts more emphasis on security, decentralization, transparency and flexibility sex.
Through IBC (inter-blockchain communication) and Gravity Bridge (a bridge between Cosmos and Ethereum), Stargaze is able to interoperate with all other blockchains including Terra, Ethereum and its L2.
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IBC (Inter-blockchain communication) can be considered as the TCP/IP of blockchain. IBC draws on the cross-chain protocol of TCP/IP design concept, which is Cosmos' inter-blockchain communication protocol, which is used for message transmission and asset transfer between Hub and Zone, so as to achieve the purpose of cross-chain. IBC is also one of the modules in the Cosmos SDK. 42 active zones have been connected to IBC.
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2. Features of Stargaze
1. Decentralized curation
A centralized platform like Open Sea in the NFT platform has the right to authenticate the project party and mark the blue V, and has the right to impose sanctions on certain personal accounts, and there are insider trading people or mechanisms that may potentially lead to insider trading. These characteristics weaken the credibility of the platform to a certain extent.
Stargaze's solution is to facilitate decentralized curation, and Stargaze's Curation DAO will be responsible for selecting artworks for listing on the market. And this Curation DAO is driven by membership and governance, which can better ensure that there is an open and transparent system when selecting artworks in the market. At the same time, this DAO can bring better project due diligence and reduce fraud. possibility.
Although Stargaze has a plan for Curation DAO, the Vote module currently on its official website does not include votes on the art projects on the shelves. Most of them are proposals on project development, more like the content of the "Stargaze DAO" proposal.
The project’s medium on Curation DAO planning was released in September 2021, and most of the relevant reports and analysis are based on this medium. It is reasonable to speculate that their strategy at the DAO level may be adjusted.
Nevertheless, the NFT platform jointly governed by the community still brings advantages to the advancement of the project, which makes users have a stronger sense of participation and belonging, and also helps to increase user stickiness.
2. Better security
There are many precedents for centralized NFT platforms being stolen, and Ethereum re-entry attacks often occur, and Stargaze uses the Cosmos SDK to reduce possible loopholes in the execution layer by using the least privilege.
Stargaze's security benefits from having its own sovereign chain, with 100 validators fully committed to securing its zone, so it can react quickly to upgrading the network to improve its performance and/or security, while based on Competitors to Ethereum or Solana lack such authority, and platforms such as Opensea rely on external validators.
3. 0 gas fees
Additionally, the Stargaze NFT marketplace is built using CosmWasm, a project that enables the WebAssembly (WASM) virtual machine (VM) in the Cosmos SDK, which is orders of magnitude more secure than the Ethereum virtual machine (EVM).
Stargaze is a 0 Gas NFT platform.
4. Simplified project upload workflow
Stargaze provides the project side with a customized offering strategy function, which makes it easier for the project side to use different offering prices and quantities for the whitelist and public sale.
On the basis of pow, Stargaze also passed a community governance proposal on 4/21/2022. The platform will use the Regen Network to purchase one-year carbon credits according to the worst-case forecast, so as to realize the platform's complete zero carbon emission.
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1. Open Sea：
3. Stargaze’s competitors
2. Looks Rare：
As the leading NFT trading platform, Open Sea is still in the leading position. As of April 27, Opensea still accounted for 55.7% of the market share. At the operational level, Stargaze is several orders of magnitude behind Opensea in terms of the number of projects and users; at the functional level, Stargaze integrates mint functions and can set different prices for different buyers. There is no NFT online yet As a secondary market trading platform, the Beta version of its Marketplace will be launched in the near future, and the development of the platform will be further observed; as an NFT market governed by the community, Stargaze’s advantage over Opensea lies in the security brought by its Layer1 attribute , but the platform ecology is still immature; Stargaze's 0 handling fee and block rewards share are more attractive than Opensea's 2.5% handling fee.
Like Stargaze, it is a community-driven NFT platform, and 100% of the transaction fees are earned by LOOKS token holders, that is, 0 transaction fees. In addition, Looks Rare’s platform has some good functions such as one-click quotation function, mixed payment, etc., which Stargaze does not have for the time being. The common point of both is community autonomy through community tokens. Although Looks Rare’s transaction volume and Opensea is only about 13%, and the number of real users is not high. There is a lot of moisture in the huge transaction volume of Looks Rare. With a limited number of users, many people have no real transaction needs, but repeatedly buy and sell the same NFT in order to increase their personal transaction volume, so as to share more mining Rewards, it can be seen that Looks Rare, as the most powerful competitor, is still struggling with how to retain creators.
3. Genie aggregator:
To sum up, as Opensea joins Solana, ape and other tokens for transactions, purchases price gems, cooperates with art creators, and gives traffic tilts, etc., this mountain that cannot be avoided if you want to be an NFT platform has become more and more popular. With the addition of monopoly, Stargaze has a lot of room for development in terms of function and ecology.
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4. Operation
(until May 5)
Number of Twitter fans: 38,000 fans, only 8 people participated in the last AMA before posting
Number of Discord followers: 11,000 followers
Number of online projects: 36 projects, 7 of the nearly 10 projects have not been sold out
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5. Token Economy
5. Token Economy"The issuance of STARS is designed to be pre-loaded with inflation to bootstrap the growth of the network. This is a release schedule similar to Bitcoin. However, instead of halving, the circulation is cut by 1/3 every year (by multiplying the current circulation by a 2/3 reduction factor). Osmosis was the first to use"cut in half
The protocol for the token issuance schedule and largely inspired the design of Stargaze."Stargaze will start with an initial supply of 1 billion STARS. In the first year, an additional 1 billion STARS will be issued. according to this"Phase III
Total Supply Formula:
It is planned that the second year's circulation will be 667 million stars. This infinite sequence is a geometric sequence that results in a fixed progressive maximum supply of 4 billion STARS.
Distribution of Tokens:
After 5 years, with an initial distribution of only 27.6% of the entire token supply, this release schedule allows Stargaze to grow and adapt its ownership to new creators, curators, validators, delegators and other stakeholders.
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6. Airdrop
ATOM staker: 5 ATOM minimum staked
OSMO staker: 50 OSMO minimum staked
Stargaze has formulated some minimum rules for claiming airdrops, which require a certain amount of tokens to be staked to prevent large-scale use of robots for airdrops.
After four months, it begins to decrease linearly. After the airdrop claim period ends, unclaimed STARS are sent to the community pool:
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7. Reward distribution
The distribution of new token rewards will be optimized to facilitate the operation of the NFT market, and the initial breakdown of each block will be:
1. NFT Incentives
45% of block rewards are reserved for NFT bidding and staking rewards. Token holders will be able to earn income by bidding on and staking NFTs for a certain period of time.
2. Staking Rewards
Under proof-of-stake, validators (node operators) are rewarded for keeping the network secure. They also accept commissions from token holders and charge a commission of 5% or more for providing services. Nearly 100 validators were selected to join the mainnet after 3 testnets, 2 of which were incentivized, and they will receive 35% of all block rewards.
3. Developer Incentives
Initially, 15% of block rewards will be used to fund teams that contribute to the development of Stargaze. Each account will get a specific weight set by the governance layer. When a developer no longer contributes, governance can choose to modify their weight or remove their allocation.
The community pool is the main DAO that operates the network. It is responsible for voting on parameter changes, software upgrades, community matters, and more. It will receive 5% of all block rewards.
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Public Awesome8. Team
As the core team of the project, the core members include:
Shane Vitarana, Jake Hartnell, and Jorge, the three founders have all done construction and research in cosmos.https://www.linkedin.com/in/shanevitarana/
Shane Vitarana, graduated from Illinois Institute of Technology. Before Stargaze, Shane worked on several applications in the App Store, including: TED Conferences, Drum Kit (later defeated by apple's garage band), Anthem Music Videos and other products. In 2017, he began to participate in the construction of cosmos. In the early stage, he was studying how to connect Ethereum and Bitcoin's lightning network through atomic swap. Link:https://www.f6s.com/jakehartnell
Jake Hartnell, graduated from UC Berkeley Information Science and Management, participated in the construction of JunoNetwork, JunoNetwork is L1 in the cosmos ecosystem; also participated in the construction of DA0_DA0, A DAO that builds DAO tooling, which provides currency issuance, proposals, and voting panel and other functions. Link:https://twitter.com/jhernandezb_
Attachment: Juno is promoted and developed by the community. It is a layer 1 public chain created by Cosmos SDK. It uses the Tendermint consensus module and is connected to the IBC protocol. It is the first smart contract platform public chain in the Cosmos ecosystem, and developers can freely develop dApps just like on Ethereum.
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9. Opinion
1. Creator level
Generally speaking, in order to develop the ecological environment on the chain, the platform will have a certain resource preference for creators, such as setting up its own Grant project or tilting the traffic on the homepage to attract creators.
In addition to collecting royalties, publishing NFT on the Stargaze platform also adds a part of the Block Rewards commission, which is more attractive to the project party. However, due to the small user base of the platform itself, it is far from Opensea in terms of traffic.
In terms of artistic style, the number of projects currently launched is about 10, and low-quality pfp projects of the "replica" type account for about 30%, which makes it difficult for the platform to become owned by platforms such as super rare and foundation. A unique artistic style that can attract artists to settle in.
The relatively competitive point of Stargaze lies in its security, but under the premise that there are no blue-chip projects online on the platform, individual cases of theft lead to low unit price NFT holders' consideration of security is not the primary consideration, but for small and medium-sized creations For those, the most important thing is to follow the traffic.
Stargaze integrates the functions of mint, which are more efficient for creators and conducive to the construction of its ecology. On a certain level, relatively decentralized uploads and transactions are more in line with the spirit of web3, which may be why Stargaze has launched many NFT projects with cosmos labels, such as IBC Baby Apes Club, Baby atom, etc.
2. Consumer level
The needs of NFT consumers (investors) have not been well addressed on Stargaze, and the platform is not sufficiently differentiated.
Consumers (investors) tend to have lower handling fees, and this has become a routine method brought about by involutional competition on platforms such as x2y2 (No market fee for seller, No gas fee for buyer).
Consumers (investors) have unmet market needs, such as directly contacting sellers with DM or directly using NFT-enabled related tools on the platform, but these functions are not implemented on Stargaze.
Consumers (investors) want to participate in community governance, but the premise of governance is that the community has an ecological environment with upward development and potential, and this ecological environment is built by a large number of creators, otherwise users have no motivation to participate in governance Nor is it necessary.
After the project was launched, without good data support, the project party released the token prematurely, which has overdrawn the ecology, resulting in poor reviews of the platform from users who have participated in secondary market transactions, and drove away some The first batch of community eco-builders, as consumers, will remain cautious if exposed to negative news on other platforms.
3. Team level
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Summarize
Summarize
The team members are from top universities such as University of Chicago, Columbia University, University of Washington, Carnegie Mellon University, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Nanyang Technological University, and have served Morgan Stanley, Barclays Bank, Ernst & Young, KPMG, HNA Group , Bank of America and other well-known international companies.
References:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5COVIaZntWs
https://twitter.com/DougieDeLuca/status/1495803278122426368
https://mirror.xyz/stargazezone.eth/h9Bc7jODUrYB1Jw4mve3QEGVkBwBsyVebN6NP7tRl_Y
https://mirror.xyz/0x633653A579959D7e2C0331A4d0Ef0D114Fd47aA4/yc69ysalEVT9tSs9OriRbG1RNq1XktvXoZeLH25TdSE
https://nftgo.io/analytics/marketplace
https://m.defidaonews.com/article/6746404
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JZL Capital is a professional organization registered overseas, focusing on blockchain ecological research and investment. The founder has rich experience in the industry. He has served as the CEO and executive director of many overseas listed companies, and has led and participated in eToro's global investment.
The team members are from top universities such as University of Chicago, Columbia University, University of Washington, Carnegie Mellon University, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Nanyang Technological University, and have served Morgan Stanley, Barclays Bank, Ernst & Young, KPMG, HNA Group , Bank of America and other well-known international companies.
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If there are obvious facts, understandings or data errors in the above content, welcome to give us feedback, and we will correct the report.
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