Exploring NFT Marketplaces — Versum
A closer look into one of the newer NFT marketplaces to spring up on Tezos, Versum.
The digital dogs have completely taken over the Tezos ecosystem as of late. With the increased level of awareness, more and more artists are beginning to enter and may be taken aback by where to start.
As NFT marketplaces on Tezos have begun to grow, there’s a variety of options out there apart from the main ones like OBJKT, H=N, etc. In this post, we’re going to take a closer look at one of the newer Tezos-based NFT marketplaces, Versum.
What is Versum?
Versum is a NFT marketplace and metaverse on the Tezos blockchain. With a focus on the art, UI, and scalability — their approach mirrors that of H=N in the sense of driving eye traffic to purely the art. This is particularly useful with their polished and clean UI in making it known that you’re using a marketplace, but you don’t really see it.
If you’re an artist or avid collector looking for a much more refined version of H=N with a plethora of features built into the platform, then look no further. Some notable features include boards, personalized feeds, web accessibility, contextual routes, and seamless transition from any other Tezos marketplace.
To learn more about all the exciting features on the platform, be sure to head over to Versum’s docs!
Key Insight
I had the chance to sit down with the Versum team to gain some color on why they chose to develop their marketplace on Tezos and their future plans for it moving forward.
Tell us a bit more about yourself, what was your crypto journey like and how did you first learn about Tezos?
André, Veqtor and Daniel met as volunteer collaborators on Hic Et Nunc, which they discovered in March 2021, as prominent artists and creative coders such as Mario Klingemann were tweeting about this new green platform. They contributed in web, backend and some of their most known work are the interactive NFTs.
André still has the most lines of code contributed to the hicetnunc2000/hicetnunc (web) repository.
What made you decide to create Versum? What issues did you see facing other marketplaces that Versum improves on?
Development of Versum began as Metaversum in April 2021, a metaverse for Hic Et Nunc Objkts that was started by Veqtor and Murat Atimtay. This project needed a new market revision that could accommodate both OBJKTs and the Metaversum parcels and the metaverse-optimized “ITEMs”. As André and Daniel joined in May 2021, the market and ITEMs contracts were revised to be a standalone platform, improving upon various short-comings and pain-points for developers we were aware of having worked on Hic Et Nunc.
The main improvements are:
*The ability to issue free NFTs while protecting from bots that would grab all of them and swap them automatically, ruining events such as OBJKT4OBJKT
* Multi-quality by default — When ITEMs are minted, multiple resolutions and quality levels are generated in the browser and uploaded to IPFS. This achieves the best of both worlds in terms of maintaining decentralization while achieving the best possible user-experience, which is crucial for the metaverse-aspect to work well, as large resolution assets would create nauseating frame-drops.
* Accessibility compliant design — The whole website was built with accessibility by default, including things such as epileptic hazard warnings, and ability to navigate using alternative interface devices.
Why did you choose to use Tezos as the platform of choice for versum?
Tezos was a natural choice for us since aside from being green and fork-free, it has garnered a big community of creators whose values align with ours. It is more art-focused and its community of developers is great and very helpful.
Since your recent launch of the marketplace, is there anything you’d like to share with the community that you have planned down the road?
We hope to soon bring you our own unique take on generative collections, as well as index nearly every existing FA2 (NFT) contract and collection on Tezos. And of course, we plan to launch our MVP client for our metaverse, Metaversum this summer, along with its star: planet and parcel minting.
We have some extremely interesting DAO-mechanics for this that we’ve discovered while researching and developing that we’re excited to share with the community as the specifics are worked out.
Where do you envision Versum’s role within the short — intermediate term as the NFT landscape starts to evolve?
Versum was always built with the vision of it being community governed through a DAO eventually. It was however crucial that in this initial phase, we would be lean and agile, but again, the obvious path forward long-term for any platform that wants to survive is to eliminate all forms of centralized control.
Furthermore, we’re also building our smart contract infrastructure to be usable and extensible by others. We hope to contribute to the idea of an “ecosystem-of-platforms” rather than “one-to-rule-them-all” which we think is a very web2 mindset that needs to be abandoned if we are to maintain decentralization and a healthy community in the Tezos NFT space.
We share this vision with many other platform creators and developers and have begun a strong and highly productive collaboration process creating new drafts and proposals for the Tezos ecosystem and are excited to continue doing this.
We’re very excited about the future of this space and love seeing new, highly-talented, developers and creators join it every day.
Looking Forward
As Tezos continues to evolve and grow, so has the infrastructure and NFT landscape. Drawing closer towards the further rapid digitization within this web3 world, platforms like Versum will help us achieve one small step closer towards a truly hyper connected world. For artists and collectors alike, it’s never been a better time to experiment and try out new alternatives.
