Introducing the Nifty Wallet
Lets get 1 billion people collecting NFTs
Today, we’re extremely excited to announce the most important product we’ve launched since Nifty Gateway began — the Nifty Gateway wallet.
The Nifty Gateway wallet is the first product that makes collecting NFTs a process simple enough for anyone to understand.
The current state of NFT user experience
Everyone agrees that user experience is preventing nifties from fulfilling their true potential. But good solutions on how to solve this have been scarce so far.
Some NFT projects are resorting to kicking the can down the road — allowing user to get started without requiring them to create a wallet or call a transaction.
Postponing or ignoring the complexity of crypto has lead to many incremental improvements. But users still have to deal with crypto at some point, so drop off rates remain very high.
Instead of simply managing the complexity of NFTs, we have to reduce the complexity of NFTs so that they can truly go mainstream.
How to reduce complexity?
We haven’t seen any product make a real impact on reducing the complexity of NFTs.
There are a few different wallet products that make private key management easier — allowing you access your wallet anywhere, or allowing users to recover a private key if a user loses their seed phrase.
But these products haven’t made much of a dent in adoption, because users still find them deeply confusing.
Most of the complexity of NFTs arises from the fact that you have to get crypto currency, transfer it to your wallet, and then use that crypto currency to call transactions from your wallet.
The Nifty Gateway wallet is a new approach
We decided to approach the problem differently.
We started off by thinking ‘what would make collecting NFTs simple enough for a regular person to understand?’
We decided that if there existed a fully featured wallet that allowed you to access NFTs with just a credit card + an email & password signup, then the user experience would be simple enough for regular people to access.
So we decided to figure out a way to make that happen.
The Nifty Gateway wallet is a fully featured wallet that allows users to collect NFTs without ever acquiring crypto currency.
Users can do anything they can do with a normal wallet such as Metamask — transfer NFTs, put them up for sale, breed them — without crypto currency.
It is a smart contract wallet that is attached to a users Nifty Gateway account, so users just have to sign up for a Nifty Gateway account to use it.
In order to access the decentralized gaming world with the Nifty Gateway wallet, and call any on chain function, users simply have to:
- Sign up for a Nifty Gateway account
- Add a credit card
Thats it!
No more Coinbase account, no more transaction hashes, no more neurotically checking Etherscan, no more Metamask, no more confusing private key management, no more seed phrases, no more gas, no more picking gas prices, no more wondering ‘is it even working?’
0 -> Nifty in 3 minutes and 15 seconds
We tested the wallet by showing our demo game to a few people. We simply showed them the website and then timed how long it took them to get a wallet and buy a pack of NFTs.
On average, the new users we asked to try this out were able to buy NFTs in an average of 3 minutes and 15 seconds.
For comparison, it took the Planet Money podcast 1 hour to get from 0 -> nifty when they did an episode where they bought a Cryptokitty.
You should try it out!
We encourage you to read on, but the best way to see how the Nifty Gateway wallet works is to look at our example game, which is called Rinkeby Legends. Click here!
It is a pretty fun game (we’ve enjoyed playing it) where you collect people from technology history as trading cards. It is also the clearest possible demonstration of how simple you simple NFT games can be if they are built on top of the Nifty Gateway wallet.
Bring your game mainstream
The goal of Nifty Gateway is to get 1 billion people collecting NFTs. If you are building a game or an NFT project, we would be honored to have you build it on top of the Nifty Gateway wallet.
We’ve worked with many of the top NFT projects (including Axie Infinity, OpenSea and Neon District) to make their projects more accessible to regular people, and if you are building something we would be honored to help you make your game more accessible as well.
If you build on top of the Nifty Gateway wallet, you will be able to market your game/NFT project to the entire human population instead of just to crypto people (well, at least the human population who has access to the internet and a credit card).
You don’t need our permission to start building, you just need to get a developer key. Check out our docs or sign up for a developer key to get started.
We’re doing everything we can to make the Nifty Gateway wallet developer friendly and easy to build on top of, so please give us your feedback.
When can I integrate the Nifty Gateway wallet with my NFT project?
The wallet is live on Rinkeby, but not on the mainnet. We’re completing a security audit on our smart contract and finalizing our system.
You can get started building your app by integrating on Rinkeby. We should be ready for you to go live in a few weeks, but we are flexible and can work with you.
Reach out to duncan@niftygateway.com or griffin@niftygateway.com for more information on this.
How does it work?
How is it possible to have a wallet that doesn’t require crypto currency to use?
The dilemma is that an Ethereum wallet must have ether in it in order to submit a transaction to the blockchain.
We’ve gotten around this by instead giving users a smart contract wallet. All transactions are submitted to the blockchain by secure wallets we control, which means that the users smart contract wallet doesn’t have to have crypto currency in it to do something like transfer a NFT or put a NFT up for sale.
When collecting NFTs or playing crypto games, users need to perform two basic kinds of transactions — transactions that involve a transfer of value, and transactions that do not. We call these purchasing transactions and regular transactions.
We let users pay for purchasing transactions using a credit card (and soon, many other types of payment methods). For regular transactions, we simply let them purchase transaction credit, which will get spent every time they call a transaction. We’re going to start every user off with $3.00 of free transaction credit.
Purchasing transactions work using our purchaseFor functionality that has been live for months now and has enabled thousands of NFT purchases for tens of thousands of dollars.
Regular transactions work as meta transactions which communicate details about the transaction to be performed to the users smart contract wallet.
If you want a deeper dive technical explanation of how the Nifty Gateway wallet works, you should read our docs — they have the detail that this article doesn’t have space for.
Security
Whenever you’re building any kind of hosted wallet, security is a primary concern.
The Nifty Gateway wallet is a smart contract wallet, which means we can use a security model that doesn’t rely on keeping a hot private key safe.
Each Nifty Gateway wallet is double HSM backed — meaning that two separate HSMs would have to be compromised for a users wallet to be compromised. We’ve eliminated any single points of failure from our design. Hacking one HSM is exceedingly difficult. Hacking a Nifty Gateway wallet would require hacking two of them.
We are completing a security review of our smart contract wallet design. If you want more details on how it works to ensure it is secure, please reach out to us and we can provide them.
Selling
What happens when a user sells a NFT in their Nifty Gateway wallet? We’re aiming to make this as simple as possible as well.
Although it isn’t live yet, soon we will have add a function to the Javascript package that will allow users to put a NFT up for sale on OpenSea from anywhere.
Users will be able to sell for any currency they want, including stablecoins.
Stay tuned for more on this subject as we figure out the details.
Other payment methods
We are also hard at work on expanding the payment methods that users will be able to use to pay with their Nifty Gateway account.
Because of how Nifty Gateway is set up, we can basically accept payment from users in any currency, crypto or fiat. We will soon let users pay in many different ways, which will greatly increase the accessibility of projects that integrate the Nifty Gateway wallet.
Conclusion
We are incredibly excited to unveil this project that we have been hard on for months.
The mission of Nifty Gateway is to get 1 billion people collecting NFTs, and we won’t rest until it is accomplished.
If you’re building a NFT project that you want to market to the general public, get in touch. Together, we can bring this amazing technology mainstream.
The Nifty Gateway Team
