NFTs and Attention Rewards: Verto and Koi Spotlight

Product teams Verto and Koi are building the foundational apps for the Arweave ecosystem, including NFT redemptions, ETH — AR swaps, and exchanges.

The Arweave ecosystem is a burgeoning community of developers and entrepreneurs focused on building out the core applications and capabilities of the network. Two applications in particular have been at the forefront of providing critical functionality and user experience to the Arweave network: Verto and Koi.

Verto

Verto is a decentralized trading protocol built on Arweave. Verto allows anyone to buy or sell profit sharing tokens (PSTs) that have been minted on the network. PSTs are tokens on Arweave that distribute to their holders ongoing dividends accrued from dapp usage. When a user interacts with an Arweave application, they will spend a nominal amount of AR token for their actions. A portion of this nominal fee (known as the tip) is distributed to the individuals who own PSTs for that application in proportion to their ownership. PSTs are minted at the time of a dapp’s launch, and can be freely traded on an open market to other Arweave users who wish to be part of a dapp’s revenue stream.

Verto provides this open market. The Arweave ecosystem already has a number of PSTs that have been minted and are in use. Verto’s decentralized exchange allows anyone to trade PSTs for AR and vice versa, enabling an active and deeply liquid PST marketplace.

If you’re getting started with Arweave, Verto has launched an Ethereum bridge that lets anyone swap ETH and AR to start you on your journey into the permaweb.

Visit Verto.

Learn how to swap ETH for AR and trade PSTs on Verto with our Verto Exchange Tutorial. (Just getting started with Verto and/or Arweave? See below for more information about the ArConnect Wallet to start trading on Verto).

Verto is also the team behind ArConnect, a secure wallet for the Arweave network. ArConnect lets users store their assets in a central, non-custodial, in-browser wallet so they can begin interacting with Verto and other applications. ArConnect lets users:

• Monitor their AR and PST balances across multiple wallets.
• Discover community-specific information about the PSTs they hold, such as governance and profit-sharing information.
• Transfer AR and PSTs to other addresses, including Verto.
• Stay on top of inbound and outbound transactions to/from your wallets.

Download ArConnect and start your journey into the permaweb. 🕸

Open Koi

Open Koi is a protocol designed to incentivize participants to perform actions in favor of the network as a whole, in return for $KOI tokens. The Koi protocol adopts a mechanism of slow consensus which improves network efficiency, lowers costs, and ensures sustainability. One of Open Koi’s applications allows nodes to scrape the web and store it in the Arweave blockchain permanently.

Koi is also building out a suite of tools to supercharge Arweave’s NFT solutions, starting with NFT redemption and attention rewards. The majority of NFTs today live on Ethereum. As we have seen, however, the issue of permanent and trustless NFT storage is a nuanced and often overlooked one. Arweave’s architecture ensures permanent storage. Koi takes the opportunity of Arweave NFTs to the next level by enabling attention rewards in $KOI, powered by their network of Koi Task Nodes.

When your NFT is minted on Ethereum, you can “redeem” your NFT onto the Arweave blockchain using the Koi.Rocks web dapp. Through Koi.Rocks, the Open Koi protocol will store your NFT on Arweave and mint a unique Profit Sharing Token (PST) for your NFT. Once your NFT is redeemed Koi.Rocks and stored on Arweave, it is publicly viewable by anyone else using Koi, Verto, and other applications. Whenever your NFT is viewed by someone — regardless of whether or not they buy it — you will earn attention rewards in the form of $KOI. $KOI is distributed to network users once a day per Open Koi’s slow consensus architecture. If you own 100% of your NFT PSTs, then you will earn 100% of the attention rewards that your NFT deserves. If, after you redeemed your NFT and minted your PSTs, you chose to sell 50% of them to buyers on Verto, then you would receive 50% of the attention rewards for your NFTs. Koi.rocks is the first working application of PoRT, or Proofs of Real Traffic. Proofs of Real Traffic ensure that the gateway tracking and subsequent attention tracking enabled by the Koi protocol are not taken advantage of by bad actors.

Koi is supercharging Arweave’s NFT ecosystem by providing additional incentives for users to store their NFTs on Arweave. Not only is it ensured to last forever; it additionally can accrue attention rewards based on its popularity to other users on the network.

Get started with Open Koi — click here to begin importing your NFTs for permanent storage and a new revenue stream on Koi.Rocks.

-arweave-team