Open source NFT infrastructure for developers and businesses that build on Tezos

by James · April 20, 2023

walt.id built an open source NFT infrastructure layer for the Tezos ecosystem. As a result, developers now benefit from holistic tools to build applications and use cases with NFTs – quickly and easily.

At their core, these open source tools enable four functions:

Mint NFTs
View NFTs (in an app/wallet)
Verify NFTs (ownership, metadata)
Unlock NFTs for web2 apps

These properties can be used to build a wide variety of uses, from collections, memberships or public profiles to tools, access management and more.

Let’s dive in!

Why this project? Why NFTs?

NFTs are a cornerstone technology for enabling digital property rights and ownership mapping of digital assets. As a result, weld.id sees a growing need for solutions that make it easy for developers to build products with NFTs.

First, asset tokenization is a hot topic across industries, and a growing number of people are realizing that NFTs are the way to go.

As a result, there is a clear need to enable tokenization of assets for different use cases such as collectibles, tickets or public profiles.

Let’s call this the “NFT Offer Page”.

Second (as the “NFT supply side” increases), there is a growing need to realize the utility functions of NFTs, for example in connection with access management.

Tokenizing assets is one thing, but building utility and new types of user experiences around those assets is quite another.

Projects by global brands such as Starbucks (“Odyssey”) reveal that the market is hungry for the use of NFTs that go beyond simple tokenization.

Let’s call this the “NFT Demand Side” (along with the next point).

Third, weld.id is seeing more and more businesses incorporating NFTs into their applications – including dapps and wallets, but also traditional web2 applications. For example, they use NFTs as avatars, usernames or public profiles.

The open source developer tools built by walt.id and Tezos let you do all these things and more!

Mint NFTs

The Weld.id NFT infrastructure makes it easy for developers to create NFTs on Tezos based on the Financial Application 2 (FA2) standard, either using Single or Multiple implementations.

See a full list of supported token types at the end of this section. The functionality can also be integrated into applications based on a permissive open source license (Apache 2).

More specifically, these open source tools enable developers to easily create, deploy, and manage smart contracts, as well as configure their features (such as metadata storage, supply size, dynamic NFTs, and metadata updates).

This component also includes transaction capabilities (coining).

Supported token types through the FA2 standard:

fungible (eq ERC-20 on Ethereum)
non-fungible (eq ERC-721 on Ethereum)
not transferable (eq ERC-1238 on Ethereum)
multi-asset contracts (equivalent to ERC-1155 on Ethereum)

Show NFTs

Apart from minting NFTs, developers can use the provided open source tools to find out which NFTs are associated with a particular wallet and to retrieve all the data associated with those NFTs.

This feature allows dapps or wallets as well as traditional web2 applications to display NFTs and metadata to their users.

At the end of the day, this functionality can be used to provide users with more information about NFTs, as well as build interesting features such as using NFTs for avatars or profiles.

Verify NFTs (“Token-gating”)

Apart from minting NFTs, the new open source NFT infrastructure enables developers to verify users’ (aka wallet holders’) ownership of NFTs as well as NFT’s metadata against customizable policies.

On top of that, developers can also verify users’ ownership of a wallet with an implementation of “Sign in with Tezos”.

Based on these capabilities, developers can build token gating into their applications to manage stakeholder access to different products, services, or communities.

In other words, dapps and DAOS can build their own token-gated solutions that leverage NFTs as “access tokens” for various services, websites and virtual spaces based on, for example, NFTs representing membership cards, avatars, tickets, etc.

NFTs can either be minted by a dapp or DAO itself – using the weld.id open source tool (see “mint NFTs”) – or by someone else. Access rights can be easily configured with customizable verification policies (based on REGO and Open Policy Agent).

Finally, given that more and more traditional businesses are using NFT’s tool capabilities, weld.id also built an “identity provider” (leveraging OpenID Connect) that integrates with traditional identity and access management tools like “KeyCloak”.

As a result, developers and enterprises benefit from backward compatibility as they can now easily implement token gating with these traditional access management tools.

Depending on your preference, start hands-on with a tutorial or dive into the functionality and overall architecture.

Tutorials

NFTs on Tezos – 5 modules explaining how to build an end-to-end NFT use cases (refresh, display, verify)
Builds on Tezos (webinar) – Learn how to create, display and verify NFTs

Deep dive