Blockchain-based NFT community powered by Algorand

Vigee.Art – is a blockchain-based NFT marketplace for buying and trading artworks. The uniqueness of this platform is in the concept of creating a community where all the artists can propose and vote for different art initiatives to be funded.

Due to the pandemic, public spots and events such as concerts, galleries, and exhibitions became completely closed for attending. Multiple artists lost their primary source of income and were forced to search for an alternative way to sell their artworks. And that was the time when non-fungible tokens (now called shortened NFTs) began to gain popularity exponentially.

Intending to create the first community-based marketplace for artists with shared views, our client asked our team to help develop and launch the NFT platform.

The task for Quantum was to collaborate with the Vigee.Art team and develop not just a basic marketplace but a community for artists.

Vigee.Art platform was born with the idea of an ecosystem that is based on solidarity with the artist community. Members of the community are able not only to exhibit and sell their pieces of art at auction but also to support each other through various cultural initiatives.

Developing the platform, we worked with specific requirements:

• Low fees for tokenizing and publishing the artworks
• Fast and secure transactions
• Avoid potential NFT artwork duplication
• Sustainable blockchain technology that doesn’t require a massive amount of electricity for mining

Considering all our requirements, we decided to build the marketplace on the Algorand platform. The Algorand covered all our needs: it’s a fully carbon-neutral blockchain network, has the lowest transaction cost among blockchains, uses a pure proof-of-stake protocol that validates its security, and can make thousands of transactions per second with zero downtime.

For the Smart Contract integration, our team used the PyTeal Python library to simplify the implementation of more complex logic.

For developing a front-end part, we used JavaScript or its React.js library, to be exact. The back-end development was conducted based on the NodeJS framework NestJS using Typescript.

The marketplace is built on the Algorand blockchain network.

The other tools used in platform development were databases:

• NFT.Storage on IPFS (storing and addressing data for non-fungible tokens).
• Couchbase (storing transaction information, for instance: minting, listing, bidding, buying components).
• Cloudflare (storing a scaled-down version of a picture).