Non-fungible tokens have been the talk of the town this past month. From the sale of Beeple’s “Everydays: The First 5000 Days” for $69.3MM to NBA Top Shot surpassing $500MM in sales, to EulerBeats already generating over $2MM in royalties, interest in NFTs continues to rise. While it may be too early to say whether NFTs will radically disrupt the world of media, this movement is undeniably forcing us to reconsider deeply held notions of value. Provable scarcity, verified authenticity, and decentralized ownership rights open up a world of possibilities for a new virtual economy and we’ve only just begun to scratch the surface.


Can NFTs Crack Royalties And Give More Value To Artists?

NFTs are changing the way we understand ownership on the internet. The ERC-721 standard that led to the booming market of NFTs is now being revised to allow for a more dynamic standard for paying out royalties, no matter the platform that mints the NFT. EulerBeats, a project from Treum, represents a new way of storing a verifiably unique piece of audio on Ethereum, where future sales are automatically paid out to the original owner, already facilitating over $2 million worth of royalties.

How Barter Built a Direct NFT Trading Interface for Real-time Negotiation

Barter, a project built by ConsenSys Academy student Robert Clark, is specifically engineered for a future where video game assets are tradeable and where the Metaverse begins to emerge as a social phenomenon. With Barter, a direct trading interface between two people allows for real-time negotiation as well as new item discovery. We walk you through how this developer built Barter from the ground up, using Infura and Truffle.

The Financialization of NFTs

Many projects are looking to bring liquidity to NFTs, allowing the holders to earn yield. We examine three of the leading projects looking to financialize NFTs: NFTX, Charged Particles, and Aavegotchi. NFTX allows users to create funds of NFTs that they can then trade on decentralized exchanges like Uniswap, while Charged Particles allows users to add interest bearing tokens to their NFTs. Finally, Aavegotchi introduces some interesting game theory to interest bearing NFTs so that the user must decide between the interest and the NFT itself.

Introducing Palm NFT Studio

This past week, ConsenSys, HENI Group, and Heyday Films launched Palm, a new token-powered ecosystem for NFTs, which is connected to Ethereum, and features low gas costs, fast transaction finality, and 99% more energy efficiency than PoW systems. We are very excited to help power the Palm project alongside notable partners like Uniswap, $MEME, Nifty’s, Protocol Labs, and MetaMask, and the legendary artist Damien Hirst. More details coming soon 👀


Chainlink Hackathon 2021 is in full swing, and we are thrilled to sponsor this years event. The hackathon runs from March 15 - April 11, so you still have time to jump in and hack on some bounties from Infura and Codefi! Our very own EG from Infura will be judging the bounties as well. So jump in and let’s build!

Infura Bounty: We have recently released Infura Transaction Service (ITX). It is a high-throughput relayer that is optimized to reliably send transactions to the Ethereum mainnet in a timely manner while ensuring all transactions do not needlessly overpay the network fee. It is a simple API that is easy to plug-and-play for most projects. Our bounty focuses on integrating ITX with the Chainlink Oracle system (node). The final solution should allow node operators to activate ITX via a config file (or an additional parameter) at the command line. Once it is turned on, all transactions for the oracle will be sent via the ITX service. We hope this integration will help Chainlink fall from the Top 25 Leaderboard for services that pay the most Ethereum network fees and thus reduce the cost of being a Chainlink operator. $1,500 goes to the Infura Project Winner!


Customer Spotlight: ParaSwap

The DEX aggregator ParaSwap used to rely on their own in-house infrastructure, which quickly proved to be very challenging to maintain and scale. Learn why ParaSwap chose to scale their infrastructure with Infura.


Introducing Ethereum Request Packs

Unlock greater request volumes and right-size your account for your daily usage with Ethereum Request Packs: 1,000,000 additional daily requests for only $200 per month!


Deprecation Notice

With the launch of our Eth2 API public beta, we will be deprecating the sharing of project IDs between the Eth1 and Eth2 APIs on April 1, 2021. Here’s what you need to do.


Signal Podcast: Episode 1 with Joe Lubin

Why are financial systems broken? What was it like to launch Ethereum? What is the relationship between collectivism and open-source? How can the banking world mesh with the next generation of financial infrastructure? Check out the first episode of SIGNAL, where Lex Sokolin sits down for an interview with Ethereum Co-founder and ConsenSys CEO, Joe Lubin, to learn about the beginnings of the crypto ecosystem, his experience with AI at Princeton, what he learned at Goldman Sachs, and how all these adventures shaped his vision today. The episode is available on Spotify, Apple, and RSS.


New Developer Resources

  • 100+ Ethereum Apps You Can Use Right Now. As crypto mixes with culture, dapp offerings continue to diversify and mature. Many visionary projects dissolved into the ether during the long, cold bear market, yet we can feel their traces in brilliant apps we love and use today.
  • How To Safely Migrate Your Ethereum 2.0 Validator Client. Coogan’s last installment of “My Journey to Becoming a Validator on Eth2,” teaches you how to safely migrate your validator from one virtual service provider (AWS) to another (Digital Ocean). Having the same validator keys on two different instances could result in the slashing and freezing of my staked ether, but luckily there exists slashing protection in the form of EIP-3076, a JSON file with a list of all the blocks and attestations the client has made.
  • The ConsenSys Product Suite. We revamped our product page to help people get started with our suite of products: Codefi, Diligence, Infura, MetaMask, Quorum, and Truffle. Six products. One mission. To empower developers, enterprises, and people worldwide to access and build on Ethereum.

Want instant, scalable, and reliable API access to the Ethereum, Eth2, IPFS, and Filecoin networks? Sign up to start building for free today. Need more request volume and direct support? Just like our infrastructure, our pricing scales to fit your application.

Twitter | Newsletter | Community | Docs | Contact | We're Hiring!