NFTs on Tezos — a Q&A with the core team behind Kalamint

For this week’s spotlight, we talked about creating NFTs on Tezos with Sandeep Sangli and Harsha Bakku — the core team behind Kalamint, a public marketplace for NFTs on Tezos which will go live later this month.

What is Kalamint?

Kalamint is the first public marketplace for NFTs on Tezos to go-live in the month of February 2021. The platform will let users create/mint NFTs native to Tezos using the FA2 token standard. It will also enable buying and selling NFTs. Kalamint will go onto Tezos testnet by 2nd week of February where we would invite users to give us feedback and also battle test the contracts and interface to make necessary changes to get ready for a mainnet launch. While we have ambitious plans for Kalamint, we will take baby steps and roll-out features in a phased manner. This helps us listen to our users on every step of the way and co-create a platform that is always relevant to our users.

What are Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) and why do they matter?

NFTs are tokens that represent an asset that is whole in nature. Assets that are not divisible. An NFT can represent collectibles, game items, digital art, event tickets, domain names, and also ownership records for physical assets. Non fungible assets are as integral to commerce as fungible assets, a lot of commercial activity happens around assets that aren’t divisible and hence a token representation of such assets are important to include ina blockchain based ecosystem.

What kind of NFTs do you think will be issued on Tezos? Anything that you’re particularly excited to see?

We will first start with tokenising art; that has gained a lot of traction in the last few months. We have received a lot of requests from creators who want to tokenise poetry, books and music. We also are speaking to a group who are working with copyright bodies in the EU to create an open standard copyrighting mechanism that can help creators add copyright metadata to their creations. Then there are other financial assets that can be tokenised such as invoices, insurance and contracts that can have a full life cycle built around them. The whole space is really exciting and we are happy to be building on Tezos with a lot features coming in Edo.

What sort of features should users expect to see on February 18th? Anything planned in product roadmap further down the line?

With Version 1 of Kalamint, we want a product that is comparable to any leading product in other ecosystems. We will have royalties, auctions, editions and collections that are standard across all platforms. We also will have artist drops that are themed collections. One more important thing we will have which isn’t very visible to the user of the platform is something called the NFT Registry, we are working with the ecosystem across chains to develop a standard that can help solve the ‘provably’ unique problem of NFTs across blockchains.

What three things are you most excited to see built on Tezos?

The three things that I’m really excited to see built on Tezos are Permits, Tickets and tezos.finance.