# Cardahub - Services hub for NFT on Cardano blockchain

## Introduction

Blockchain technology has evolved and played an important role in the undergoing fourth industrial revolution, i.e., Industry 4.0.
It unfolds various innovative opportunities for the digitalization of business, company, or even artistic assets. The ecosystem of blockchains does not need centralized management or leading organizations. All transactions on blockchains are validated and processed against various constrained, by the majority of the participated nodes in a fully distributed fashion.

Back then in the 1990s, the term of smart contract was introduced by Nick Szabo referring to "a set of promises, specified in digital form, including protocols within which the parties perform on these promises". The definition is close to what we know about smart contracts today. But at the moment, it is just a conceptual term among academics.

After the launch of Etherum Blockchain in 2015, smart contract - by its definition, a self-executing program that is stored and executed on blockchain nodes - has come to life. With smart contracts, blockchain technology has become more viable than just a virtual currency as it was originally created for. The smart contract is also the core idea behind many other buzzed and hyped technologies such as Defi and Dapps.

Unlike their predecessor, Bitcoin, third-generation blockchains focus on building decentralized platforms to run smart contracts thus allowing the creation of Dapps and digital assets.

Cardano is one of those so-called third-generation blockchain technology that was created using peer-reviewed research and evidence-based approaches. It is the result of thousands of hours of research and development. With the release of the Alonzo era, Cardano has enabled the development of decentralized applications with its Plutus smart contract platform.

## The problems of Cardano Dapps development

At the time of this article, Cardano has officially supported smart contracts on their blockchain for two months, yet there are very few Dapps that have been successfully deployed on the Cardano blockchain. By 2nd Nov 2021, there are only 246 Plutus smart contracts scripts on the blockchain (https://smartcontracts.vercel.app/, data by https://adapools.org/sc).

What is the reason for this pullback? In the following sections, we will try to answer this question

### The unknown release date of PAB

Plutus application backend (PAB) is a key component of the Plutus Application Framework. PAB plays an important role in the recommended architecture by Cardano Foundation. It allows Dapp developers/vendors to interact with Plutus smart contracts from their off-chain code. However, PAB at the current state only supports emulated environments. The release of the mainnet support for PAB is yet an unknown factor.

### The lacking of Wallet connector

Wallet connector refers to a protocol that allows a user's web wallet to interact with the blockchain via Dapps, like signing or submitting transactions prepared by the Dapps. The discussion under the proposal of Wallet-connector for Cardano has been going on for a while (https://github.com/cardano-foundation/CIPs/pull/88). Without the wallet connectors, users who use web wallet virtually has no way to make the transaction with Dapp. This is one of the largest barriers between Cardano's user and Cardano's Dapps.

## The problems of the current approaches

**There are too many centralized factors in "decentralized apps"**

Because of the aforementioned problems with Cardano, some teams have released their products with a workaround, that does not require the interaction of users with the smart contracts. Those solutions are either too centralized or too risky for the users.

- Users have to create accounts on Dapps with their credentials, in order to use services provided by those Dapps.
- Users are asked to send their tokens/coins to addresses that they do not have control over. For instance, sellers on a marketplace have to send their assets to the market accounts; buyers also need to send their purchasing money to the market.
- By sending funds to the centralized service, users have to trust the service/product that they are using. This goes again the idea of blockchain where there should be no centralized entity.

## Cardahub

Understanding the problems of Dapps development on the Cardano blockchain, and the problems of the other products in the market, the Cardahub team sets the target to solve those problems and provide our users with a series of services. The technical details of our solutions will be revealed in later posts.

### NFT Minting

To the best of our knowledge, Cardahub is the very first service on the Cardano blockchain that provides a truly decentralized, smart contract-based minting service. The minting script of Cardahub is carefully designed, implemented, and tested on the Plutus platform, which allows us to enforce some special minting rules so that the content creator could protect their intellectual property properly.

Our On-chain/Off-chain smart contract enforces the following rules to all the assets that are minted by our platform:

- Unique asset: there is one and only one version of an asset that is allowed to be minted by our minting policy. For instance, if a photo has been minted once on our platform by a user, it can not be minted again on the same policy.
- Unique name: similarly, names are unique in our system. There are no two assets that have the same name coexist in the same policy.

We don't charge any fee for minting NFT on our platform or embed any hidden cost in the contract. All the minting fee is paid to the network to execute the minting transaction. Thus we could provide a service with the cheapest minting fee at 0.4 ADA.

### NFT Marketplace

Cardahub provides a liquidity marketplace where content creators, investors, or digital assets collectors could list their NFTs for sell, or purchase the ones that they love. Users can use our platform to browse the NFTs that are sitting in their wallets and decide if they want to sell the assets on our marketplace.

Cardahub marketplace is powered by Plutus Smart Contract.
The smart contract of Cardahub is open for all types of NFT, which means that users could buy any NFT on other marketplaces, and still be able to sell it on Cardahub.
On the other hand, all the assets on Cardahub are EIP-721/CIP-25 compliant (https://cips.cardano.org/cips/cip25/), thus one could bring assets they collect on Cardahub and listing on other marketplaces.

### Launchpad

Minting and distributing NFT on the Cardano blockchain is not trivial, especially when there are thousands of assets that need to be digitalized. On Cardano, the job gets more challenges. Understand the problem, Cardahub has brought along a launchpad program that helps content creators with all distribution jobs. Our platform provides the vendors with powerful tools to systematically distribute their NFT based on their rules, with minimal cost.

We are collaborating with an Australian studio to release the first contract-based NFT drops on Cardano. Stay tuned for more updates.

Our channels:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/cardahub
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/cardahub/
Telegram ANN: https://t.me/cardahub_channel
Telegram Discussion: https://t.me/cardahub
Discord: https://discord.gg/M5HwubjH
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Cardahub-104062732085053/
Medium: https://medium.com/@cardahub
Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/cardahub/
Youtube: https://youtu.be/mPryJZHs2EI