It’s been almost a year since the seeds for what would become Byzantion were sown. Before the business came an NFT collection on Stacks known as Mandelbrots. This was a just for fun generative art collection that just happened to be the first ever generative art collection on Stacks. The Byzantion co-founders were experimenting with building apps on Stacks and thought an NFT collection would be a great way to experiment.

Mandelbrots

Genesis launched on Byzantion

The launch of this NFT collection attracted the attention of artists in the ecosystem. They saw that it was now possible to find a market for their digital art on Stacks. To help meet the sudden demand for these artists wanting to release their collections, we began helping them with the technical side of launching their own projects. Before long, there was a thriving secondary market for NFTs on Stacks, so we began to build Byzantion as you’ve come to know it - an NFT infrastructure and trading platform.

As you may have heard from us, we have recently decided to expand to the NEAR Protocol. There are many reasons for this decision. First, and most importantly, we believe in a cross-chain world. We don’t think that there will be one chain to rule them all. We think different chains have different strengths and weaknesses.

These differences can be woven together to create a rock-solid foundation for our future. Second, just like Stacks, there is some really impressive developer talent that has flocked to NEAR and a thriving ecosystem of applications that has been built in a short time. Last, but definitely not least important, the prospect of massive scalability via sharding on NEAR is a real breakthrough that could really help bring crypto to a wider audience. We expect to see pros and cons like this on every chain we expand to, but believe that overall it will create a flourishing ecosystem of NFTs.

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What exactly does this expansion mean? First off, we’re not leaving Stacks, we’re just welcoming NEAR to the family! Both ecosystems are similar sizes in terms of active NFT users and volumes of top NFT projects. This should lead to a very symbiotic relationship between the two as both communities benefit from new members.

This expansion is twofold - we are extending our API infrastructure to cover both NEAR and Stacks and our NFT trading platform will also be cross-chain.

From the beginning, Byzantion has always aimed to help others build their dreams. At first, it was through helping artists launch NFT collections. Later, it evolved into providing API infrastructure for developers in the ecosystem building NFT applications, providing community tooling to NFT projects, and providing data that helps users and project owners understand the overall health of the NFT ecosystem. Our API infrastructure obviates the need for projects to spend months of work and hundreds of thousands of dollars indexing the chain and delivers it to developers in a standardized, easy-to-use format.

This is great for Stacks, but we see this as a larger problem across all chains that is holding developers back and impeding the progress of web3 applications. Keeping with our theme here at Byzantion of empowering builders, we want to help accelerate the adoption of web3. The best way for us to do this is to do what we did on Stacks everywhere. So, starting with NEAR, we’ve built a cross-chain API infrastructure that is both standardized and opinionated, so that developers can not only easily build NFT applications on Stacks or NEAR, but on BOTH with the same architecture. This is just the first of many chain integrations we have planned, but for now we’re excited about the possibilities this opens up for developers in both ecosystems.

On the trading platform side of the house, on Stacks we have strived to help serve traders with all the analytics they need to make informed trading decisions. We implemented features on our site such as rarity scores, trait floor values, estimated portfolio values, order book bidding, Trader View, and more. We had incredible reception on Stacks and became a leading platform because of that. Now with the API infrastructure built out cross-chain, we can also provide this trading platform to both Stacks and NEAR users!

This means that not only will both Stacks and NEAR users get to research and trade NFTs from their respective ecosystems on our platform, but they will be able to discover new collections from an ecosystem that is new to them. NEAR users will be able to discover Stacks collections on our platform and vice versa. We think this cross-pollination will help grow both ecosystems and create a vibrant trading ecosystem on our platform.

Overall, we’re excited to mix the NEAR and Stacks ecosystems at the developer level, with NFT project leads, and with traders. This just the beginning of our cross-chain journey and we’re excited to have you along for it!