Center: Baidu for the NFT industry｜Project Introduction

Original author: Crescent, Rhythm BlockBeats

Responsible editor: 0x29

How to To ensure the practicality of NFT, Center has built two basic NFT tools, one is a multi-chain, high-performance NFT API built to improve the speed and productivity of developers, and the other is for users to search for NFT on each chain NFT search engine.

NFT Search Engine

In daily life, people are used to quickly find the data they want through search engines, but in the Web3 world, the data is more diverse, how do we search for the data we need?

Taking NFT as an example, it is difficult for ordinary users to search for NFT as they usually search for information, to understand its specific conditions, such as viewing ownership history , number of transactions, searching and discovering its attributes, what assets have similar attributes, people may know which specific NFTs someone owns, but it is difficult to see what these NFTs represent (example: NFTs of vouchers). Moreover, most of the current NFT assets are distributed in multiple chains, and it is still very difficult to achieve interoperability.

NFT search Engine

And Center is trying to index and organize the NFT on each chain (similar to indexing the web) to do This allows ordinary users to easily search and discover NFT through center.app. So far, at least 135,000,000 NFTs on 12 chains including Ethereum, Polygon, Fantom, Avalanche, BSC, Solana Mainet, Optimism, Harmony, Starknet, Arbitrum, and Celo have been sorted out for the Center.

Example: Search ape, display all Ape related NFT

The emergence of NFT search engine allows people to find themselves quickly Required NFT related data. The above figure shows that after users search for ape, all related NFTs on different chains will be displayed. Take Prime Ape Planet in the upper left corner of the picture as an example. After clicking on it, you can view its total number, and you can also filter attributes to search.

Center search Prime Ape Planet

Still take #1 in the upper left corner as an example, after clicking it, you can View the specific details of the NFT, from which you can learn about its attribution blockchain, attributes, transaction history and other information. The page will also recommend similar assets for users to understand.

Prime Ape Planet #1 Details

NFT API

More than that, Center wants to make these NFT data useful to both individuals and developers. In addition to the NFT index for individuals, Center has launched another businesscenter.dev to help developers.

Building NFT applications is extremely costly for developers. If you want to build an extended NFT application, you have to start your own ISP (Internet Service Provider), and building a complete application requires too much effort that you don't need to pay.

Just like in the world of Web2, builders build an application, do they need to index every web page, or start from scratch What about writing drivers? Does every builder need to know which BGP gateways a packet has passed through, and how to handle congestion on the master switch?

Of course not, if every builder starts by building the underlying infrastructure, there is little time for innovation, let alone If time carefully builds product content, the number of products entering the market will also decline sharply, and the usefulness of the Internet will also be greatly reduced.

Center hopes to liberate builders from these low-level details, allowing them to focus on more important things, more Efficiently complete your own proof of concept. Project builders don't need to consider the underlying technical details, they only need to focus on user needs and carefully polish the product, and focus on building applications.

Regardless of Web2 or Web3, the use of relevant APIs can prevent builders from writing Web pages from scratch and various interact. The Center hopes to help power the nascent ecosystem of NFT applications, create an important foundation for NFTs to expand their utility, and allow builders to focus on building great NFT applications. The system that powers its NFT index is then exposed and made available as an API product for other builders to use. The high-performance API constructed by the current Center can provide many metadata such as NFT collections, users, and previous transactions.

Center API construction page

Project Background

Center by Omar Bohsali at Founded last year, Omar Bohsali not only worked at Paradigm, but also served as the engineering manager of Coinbase's new asset group, specializing in software engineering, product planning, technical architecture, technical expansion and data analysis. He has invested in Clearbit, HVMN, Dv01, TryRamp, Flourish.tech and other companies.

In addition, the current team has four members, including software engineers who have worked in WhatsApp and Google, and Thrive Partner, co-founder of Imprint, and developer from Facebook, Celo.

Recently, the Center has completed a project led by Thrive Capital, Founders Fund, Protofund, Volt, Alliance DAO, SV Angel, Quiet Capital, Anti. Fund, Lattice Capital and other institutions invested $11 million in seed round financing, among which individual investors include Balaji Srinivasan, Emilie Choi, Dan Romero, Amjad Masad, Gordon Wintrob, Mike Dudas, etc.

Construction purposes

A few months ago, Center launched an NFT rendering API. The team focused on making NFT vector thumbnails while retaining the alpha transparent layer, allowing builders to display any NFT in their applications with just a few lines of code. With NFT on the chain, builders no longer have to think about how to make NFT preview thumbnails. The API is now in public beta, and builders can try out most of the API endpoints.

The embedded NFT search API provided by Center allows builders to use the same free-form text as its NFT search engine search. According to him, the build process is very simple and can be completed in 5 minutes.

Center's development team is extremely With strength, Center itself has also proposed cooperation with 0x, Astaria and many other projects. In order to ensure the practicality of NFT, accelerate the construction of NFT ecology, and facilitate the flexible use of NFT by individual users and developers, the construction of such NFT infrastructure is essential few.

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