CAP is Live on Mainnet! 🚀 Transaction History & Provenance on the Internet Computer.

We’re excited to say that CAP as an open internet service is live on mainnet, and ready to be integrated into NFTs & Tokens to power trustless transaction histories for them.

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CAP — Certified Asset Provenance

4 min readNov 9, 2021

Last week we announced CAP 🚀 We’ve been overwhelmed by the community excitement, and are proud to say that today, CAP goes live on the Internet Computer mainnet!

What does this mean? 🤔 It means that CAP as an open internet service is fully usable! Anyone who wants to start generating their own transaction/activity history to their NFT/Token can do so.

Plus, since CAP is an open internet service, there are zero barriers to entry. Visit our docs to start implementing it yourself!

Feel kind of lost on the what, why and how of CAP? Read the announcement blog to get the full picture behind it!

Need a TL;DR Reminder?📰

What is CAP? An open internet service for NTF / Tokens to log transaction history and asset provenance on the Internet Computer.

How does it work? CAP can spawn histories for NFT/Token canisters, to which they can only send records to, giving them access to trustless transaction histories on the IC. It also acts a router for any UI/App that wants to consume and surface data from ANY of these histories.

Why CAP? Provenance and historic data on assets is a key component of trust on blockchains; it is something that users expect and a decision maker in terms of trust.

CAP on Mainnet — Start Integrating! 🚀

Now that CAP’s main canister is live on the Internet Computer any NFT or Token developer that wants to give their asset a trustless & low-maintenance transaction history can do so.

How? By integrating their NFT/Token canister to CAP. CAP will spawn a transaction history (Root Canister) for the NFT/Token , and start receiving/storing records from these assets with only a couple of lines of code using the SDK!

We’ve prepared a couple guides on our documentation to help everyone get started with it! The CAP SDK will be the main tool NFT/Token developers will need to use to integrate to CAP.

Integrating NFT/Tokens to CAP — CAP SDK 🧰

Where can you’ find what is necessary to integrate your NFT/Token canister with CAP, and start registering transactions?

Get started on our documentation for the CAP SDK.

You will need to:

Use the SDK to spawn your Token/NFTs history in CAP (root bucket).
Connect your canister’s transfer method to CAP and start sending records.

As easy as that. We’ve designed the SDK to make things as easy as possible, and we will continue to develop it to help smoothen migrations, and other use cases!

There’s also an example repository for an empty Rust project you can use to follow that same guide along! 👏

A cool thing to note is that you can still use your Token or NFTs native get_transaction method (or equivalent) to fetch its transactions! Using the SDK you’ll wrap it to query CAP and return the proper responses

Meanwhile Apps and UIs can easily query your Token or NFT’s history from CAP’s mainnet canister directly (the router), where they can also query any other project integrating CAP, instead of integrating them individually. Neat, right?

Consuming CAP Data from UIs/Apps — CAP-js 📡

What if your are an UI that wants to show transaction data for NFTs traded in your platform (that use CAP), or an app (a wallet like Plug!) that wants to show your user’s history of transactions for their assets?

For this, you will use the CAP-js library, which will allow you to query transactions data from CAP to:

Check all transactions of all projects using CAP
Check specific transactions (e.g. a user’s transactions, or a specific asset’s one)

Visit our documentation to get started and learn more about how to use CAP-js to do this.

The cool thing? Unlike before, where you needed to interact with each asset’s history individually, with CAP-js you can check ALL histories in CAP from one place.

CAP Ecosystem Update 🌈

We’re also happy to share that the ecosystem of projects who are integrating or plan to integrate CAP is growing! Since launch, we’ve partnered with the following NFTs to help them bring CAP to their projects soon:

PokedStudio’s Poked Bots: 3D Bots by PokedStudio.
ICPuppies: Project with highest selling NFT on the IC.
ICPunks: First self-minted NFT drop on the IC.
IC Cards: Bringing a forgeable NFT game to the IC.

Don’t see your favorite project? Send them this article and tell them to reach out to the CAP team! We’ll be happy to help integrate to give their asset provenance and history.

After all, transaction history isn’t something that should be optional. It’s an industry standard. It provides additional utility to any project that integrates it. It’s the way every other chain works.

That's A Wrap! 🌯

These are very early days for CAP but we are excited to bring blockchain-wide transaction history to everyone.

No more walled gardens of data, or black holes without information or provenance.

If you’re a project that is interested in implementing CAP or just want to come and jam out with the CAP team, join our Discord. We look forward to seeing you there! 👋