The road to EVM
Details about Scalp Empire’s expansion to Polygon and Ethereum blockchains and our new Polygon mint.
WEN Polygon ?
Some of our users have been asking us about a potential expansion into the realm of EVM blockchains (Ethereum, Polygon, BSC etc.), with Polygon being the centre of attention lately since some of the biggest collections on Solana decided to either migrate or expand to Polygon or Ethereum.
While we take this hype with a grain of salt, we started looking into how we can leverage our Solana experience to build Scalp Empire on other chains as well. But we don’t want to repeat the same mistake we did with our Aptos version where after an insane 10 day marathon to get everything up and running, all the hype of the initial launch died and the chain continues to have very little usage. This time, we are taking things slow.
We’ve spent the last week researching Polygon and Ethereum (since they have basically the same functionality and APIs), trying to understand how they work, how transactions are structured, how to get past data, how NFTs are represented as ERC721 and ERC1155 tokens etc.
There is a lot of new information to process and plan for and not everything is as straight forward as it is on Solana or Aptos. Luckily there are plenty of service providers out there (think the equivalent of RPCs for Solana) that offer more advanced indexing functionality making it easy to bootstrap the development. After all, we don’t have to reinvent the wheel.
Of course, this kind of services don’t come cheap, which brings us to our 4 step plan (subject to change):
▶️ Low supply lifetime access mint
▶ Development of Polygon version
▶ Pay per use or subscription based pricing model
▶ Ethereum version
Why a new mint ?
As previously stated, RPCs and indexing services on EVM chains are not cheap. Besides the monthly running costs for monitoring the realtime activity, there is also the initial data collection that we need to do in order to add existing NFTs and past transactions to our platform. On Solana we were lucky enough to have GenesysGo offer their free RPC services that we used to get historical data, but unfortunately this is not the case for Polygon and Ethereum.
With this new Polygon mint we want to cover the infrastructure cost required during the initial development (4–6 weeks) and also the next 5-6 month of recurring costs in order to ensure enough time for the platform to become self-sustained via either pay per use or subscription model.
By current estimates there will be a 350–500 item collection with a mint price of about $50 (equivalent in Matic)
Notice that we only included infrastructure/providers costs in our calculation and no salaries.
It is still very early and the estimates are pretty rough based on tests we did with free tier APIs on several providers as well as usage data from our Solana app. We still don’t have the complete accurate picture (and it’s pretty hard to have one until everything is fully up and running) but we should have sufficient headroom to expand.
What if the mint does not sell out ?
In case we don’t manage to get the required funding, we will most likely do a full refund (transaction fees excluded) depending on how close we are to our target.
WEN mint ?
There are still many things to consider before announcing an exact mint date such as:
- Offering WL/OG to Solana Nestor holders (potentially discounted)
- Mint windows for WL/OG and public (we are in no rush so it will probably be a slow mint)
- If trading will be allowed during mint or not
- How will we process refunds in case we don’t sell out
All this decisions add complexity to the contract and mint site and we’re looking to find a balance between the features we’d like to implement and the time required to do it. Nevertheless we want to be prepared for all scenarios.
Luckily we already have a cute little collection prepared that was supposed to be minted on Aptos but given the low activity we decided not to do it.
From a technical point of view we estimate that we will be ready to mint in about 2–3 weeks, and this fits well with the Easter holidays schedule while also leaving some room for raising some awareness.
What happens when we sell out ?
Even during our mint preparation we will be developing most of the tools required for our collection indexing and realtime data feeds since we will need them for the mint site so we will be ready to start scraping historical data, run our realtime activity monitoring and start working on the UI which will be accessible in a BETA state until fully developed.
We will focus first on the functionality of the app on Polygon. The pay per use or subscription system (whichever we will decide to use) will be developed after the app will be fully functional and access will not be gated until then.
After everything will be well established on Polygon we will be able to easily create an Ethereum version as well (or maybe combine both into the same platform).
Website: https://www.scalp-empire.com/
Discord: https://discord.gg/scalpempire
Royalties PoC: https://pay-royalties.scalp-empire.com/
Royalties API: https://github.com/kind3r/scalp-royalties-sdk
Snapshot & Airdrop: https://snapshot.scalp-empire.com/
