Our Approach to Decentralized Digital Art Curation
Cargo — the all-in-one platform to create, manage, and sell digital collectibles (NFTs) — recently introduced a new mechanism which enables community curation of the Cargo NFT marketplace. It’s similar to many content rating systems (ex. Reddit), but it’s backed by the blockchain. What makes it unique is that an individual’s voting power is weighted and it is weighted based on the amount of Cargo Gems that individual holds, or has staked within NFTs. Cargo Gems are ERC-20 tokens that can be used in different ways on the Cargo platform — one way being automated marketplace curation.
Why Did We Do This?
One of the core principals of blockchain technology is decentralization of power. Prior to this rating system the Cargo team was selecting weekly NFTs to feature. This was all based on our personal preference and taste. Why should we have this power? Shouldn’t it be the artists, creators, and collectors who determine which NFTs rise to the top of the marketplace and gain most visibility? This would be like Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s CEO, and team curating weekly what appears at the top of your Twitter feed based on what they like.
We feel that community curation is imperative to the success of an open platform. Not only do we want to provide the best technology and experience to creators, but we want it to be fair and open to all. We feel this implementation of community curation helps to take us in that direction.
How Does it Work?
When you rate an NFT by clicking on the heart or cancel button displayed on individual NFTs in the marketplace your vote is recorded and is weighted by your current holdings of Cargo Gems. Cargo also recently unveiled a unique staking mechanism which turns individual NFTs into yield-bearing vaults. Gems locked within NFTs are also added to your voting weight.
One may think that you could simply scam the system by voting on an NFT, transferring your Gems to another account, and voting again. This is not the case. If you transfer Gems from your account all your previous votes will be updated to reflect your new vote weight.
Individuals don’t need to buy more Gems from decentralized exchanges in order to earn more voting weight. They can lock Gems within NFTs using Cargo’s Gem Mining Portal to earn more Gems.
Where We Are. Where We Are Going.
Currently we’ve rolled out two of our planned Cargo Gem utilities — marketplace curation and Gem mining. Currently there’s 1,092,446 Gems locked within NFTs earning rewards in both Gems and Cargo Credits (which are used to mint NFTs on the platform). Cargo’s marketplace launched in early August and is continuing to gain traction in the NFT space.
This is just the beginning. We believe that Cargo’s minting technology is the best in the industry and we will be working hard to make the user experience easier to use so creators can better utilize this technology. We recently added filters and sorting to the marketplace and here are a few high level things we are working on:
- Making the marketplace easier to navigate.
- Adding search tools to find collections and creators you care about.
- Updated tools to display your creations.
- Gems as a payment option for NFTs.
- Gems to be used as a payment option for platform features at a discounted cost.
- Continued focus on Cargo’s JavaScript library to provide tools to power NFT web applications.
