Chira Protect

Chira Protect gives power back to NFT creators and their communities where it rightfully belongs! The platform is beginning by solving three big problems that NFT communities face today, and will expand to solve other problems in the future.

1. NFT Communities can't enforce their royalties on exchanges. This is one of their core revenue streams, and just recently we saw it stripped away from NFT Communities on Solana as all the major market places ended their abiding by NFT royalties.
2. NFT Communities can't defend against mercenary whales who can disguise themselves through sybil attacks. These whales hoard large percentages of an NFT collection's supply at a great expense to that collection's community. It both limits the number of people who can participate in the community, and casts a cloud over it for fear of the whale dumping their NFTs. In the past we have seen a whale dump their share and tank a community by over 40% in an hour!
3. NFT Communities can't moderate the ownership of their NFTs without exposing private information about their members. For example, it's not possible for an NFT community to ensure that their NFTs are only held by those above the age of 18 without revealing private information.

One way to break it down for understanding is that there are two high-level components to Chira Protect:

1. An extension of the ERC721 standard (ERC5000) which adds more of an ability to moderate what the NFTs of a collection are used for. This is not proprietary to Chira and we encourage everybody to build on it and make it their own. Any NFT platform could support the creation of ERC5000 collections. The most important upgrade of ERC5000 is a protect-list hook functionality that executes arbitrary logic in order to determine whether or not to allow an NFT transfer.
2. A platform which makes it easy for the admin of an ERC5000 collection to unlock the full power of its extensions over ERC721. This technology is proprietary to Chira and works by customizing the logic of the protect hook function. While the ERC5000 is open-source, configuring it to make it the most valuable to an NFT community is difficult and so the platform provides a lot of value in this regard. The monetization plan is to take a freemium approach whereby NFT collections can empower their community using the free features, but in order to get access to the full functionality they need to pay a subscription fee.

A quick overview of the user flow for NFT Collections using Chira Protect is as follows:

• NFT Creators sign up and register their NFT collections on the Chira Protect platform.
• This grants them access to never before seen tooling for managing their NFT collections.
• This tooling enables the following benefits:
  • Enforce royalties and ensure a core revenue stream by restricting NFTs from trading on any exchange which doesn't abide by them.
  • Defend against mercenary whales by restricting the number of NFTs held per unique person using worldcoin.
  • Enable moderating the ownership of NFTs without exposing private information about members using zk proofs and Polygon ID.
  • And many more to come!

To better understand the problem that Chira Protect solves, it helps to provide some context on higher level patterns. The status quo for NFT creators has been for their NFT collections to go through two very different phases in terms of creator empowerment:

• Phase 1: The creator launches their NFT collection using some permissioned minting process in order to defend the community from bots and mercenaries.
• Phase 2: The creator forgoes all control of the NFT collection as it transitions to being entirely permissionless. They are no longer able to defend their community from bots and mercenaries. The NFTs are exposed to the pure forces of the market, often at the expense of the NFT community.

It's clear why it's so vital that the first phase be permissioned; It's necessary in order to prevent mercenaries from exploiting the mint and taking large percentages of the supply. What's interesting is that up till now there has been a significant lack in exploring the benefits of making the second phase less permissionless.

The sweet spot between permissioned and permissionless approaches is one which maximizes the benefits of both while minimizing their corresponding weaknesses. Phase 2 has not yet found this sweet spot. This is the niche which Chira Protect fills.

Chira Protect was a lot of fun to build and gave us an opportunity to experiment with many different technologies. It uses:

• Nextjs, wagmi, and rainbowkit for the frontend applications
• IPFS for storing protected collection configurations. This enables the applications to work without a centrally hosted database!
• Worldcoin unique verification for defending against mercenary whales disguising themselves with sybil attacks
• Polygon ID for enabling custom zero knowledge NFT membership conditions
• Open zeppelin smart contracts as a base for the ERC5000
• Polygon for deploying our smart contracts

For more technical detail, please see https://github.com/Ruborcalor/protect#readme