How Whatnot is Building the Future of NFT Live Shopping
Rob Olsthoorn | NFTs
Whatnot, as a live-shopping marketplace, is a powerful primitive. As it grows, any product will be able to be bought and sold on Whatnot, and NFTs are the digital entrant.
NFTs represent on-chain ownership. For collectibles (and the communities around them) individuals are able to leverage permissionless data to build stronger pieces of fandom. On-chain transactions prove who owned an asset at what time, making rewards (airdrops) and other derivative projects possible in a way that any enthusiast can build.
This post covers our team’s guiding principles, strategy, and the future of live shopping + NFTs.
Guiding Principles
Execute as fast as possible
For a new team, speed is everything.
We built on web2 infrastructure, which also mitigated smart contact risk. Underneath was a single custodied wallet where user ownership was tracked off-chain (an ETL-like process). Airdrops are somewhat complicated in this model, so we added an internal replay + configurable mapping mechanism to ensure airdrops are handled properly. This decision also supported gasless transfers and simpler trading.
This decision was important to get off the ground, but won’t serve us longer term.
Build for physical collectors first
Focusing on Funko collectors first helped sharpen our initial product and immediate distribution meant one less failure mode.
We built a no wallet needed onboarding experience. Because trust is built with the seller, we used a Fiat-based purchase flow. Additionally, we launched on a non-obvious blockchain, WAX, because they had a collector-first NFT product (Funko).
Unlock seller creativity
Whatnot is nothing without its sellers, and their passion pushes boundaries. The product needs to work reliably behind the scenes, and flexibly during a live sale.
For NFTs, sellers can view NFT galleries from buyers (which lets them see how a user collects), transfer NFTs with two clicks, and build their own packs with custom graphics (and rip them open on stream). We’re on V0 of seller creativity with significant updates in the works
Engineering challenges
A flexible data model
There are four core tables associated with digital products (not limited to only NFTs) at Whatnot:
products
- Products represent a distinct image, name, and characteristics. Some NFT projects issue 100s of NFTs based off of a template where the only thing that varies is mint_num
unique_items
- Unique Items represent a distinct NFT, where we specifically store the mint number. In the case of many PFP projects, the mapping of products to unique_items is 1:1. For `templated, it’s 1:many
entitlements
- Entitlements store who an NFT belongs to at a given time.
unique_item_events
- UniqueItemEvents represent transactions on the blockchain, where state-history can be replayed in order to support airdrops and a ledger of what happened when
A separation of responsibilities
We added an internally networked nodeJS service to call ABIs* whenever interacting with a blockchain. This was critical from a security perspective, and additionally let us leverage existing libraries in the ecosystem (many of which are built first for JavaScript, where most of our backend runs in a Python/Flask/Postgres environment).
Pioneering new tech at Whatnot
NFTs are currently a web-first experience. Within Whatnot, we pioneered buying/selling from the web and from mobile-web (working with Safari is always a challenge). Only able to move quickly due to the incredible backend foundation built by other teams here
Is it working?
Yes. Thousands of new buyers have purchased their first NFT ever through Whatnot, and about 30% continue on to become collectors. Over time, many of these new collectors deeply understand the blockchain/NFT mechanics.
Live shows provide a rallying moment for a community. Several best-in-class Discord (steadybreaks, pugwash, shockette) communities feature selling on Whatnot as a core part of their community engagement.
The elephant in the room
NFTs have a lot of fair criticism, Ponzis, scams, and fraud. That’s not sustainable. We’ve cautiously added NFT projects (and stayed away from primary mints) to protect new buyers coming into the NFT space. Long term, we believe NFTs will be far more transparent. The era of NFT flipping is coming to an end, and in its place are projects with intrinsic value.
Where we’re going (and future roadmap)
Live shopping is the future of NFT mints and community engagement. In crypto, it’s a “trustless” environment, but what that really means is that trust is established at the smart-contract layer or at the brand level. For the first jump into the space, a trusted contact introduces you, and in the case of Whatnot, the seller + community provides a high level of trust and safety.
Long-term, we’re investing in a platform that lets a seller stream / engage / launch / reward members of their existing community, and introduce new fans to the space.
On top of our existing product we plan to build:
- Tooling for web3 sellers to offer features/rewards on top of transaction or ownership data
- Cross-chain NFT support
- Vaulted physical redemptions
- Token-gating support
While it’s still early today, the vision is that ultimately creators (artists, influencers, anyone) will be able to sell and creatively engage with digital items on Whatnot, and collectors will be able to buy, collect, show off, trade, re-sell, and interact with these digital items. Whatnot can provide a collector-focused experience for NFTs with the interface already known and loved by so many sellers. It’ll be a place digital artists love to come and sell their work to a broad audience, through an experience that’s easy for everyone from experts to NFT newcomers.
Join us to bring crypto to the next 10M+ wallets!
*ABIs — an encoded request to call functions on the blockchain
