Personalizing the NFT Marketplace: the Role played by the Marlin Network

Helen Imah
5 min readFeb 28, 2022

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Digitization of money and properties has been the trend for quite a while now and it appears to be the future.

The ownership of physical and digital assets has until recently been overseen by paper-based or centralized institutions, many of which are inefficient and prone to fraud.

Today, this trend has extended into the digitization of collectibles like art, autographs, trading cards, etc.

In 2017, a project named Dapper Labs launched a decentralized application called CryptoKitties on the Ethereum blockchain. This project turned out to be a groundbreaking innovation as it showed how beneficial it would be to digitally verify and transfer non-fungible tokens. Today, CryptoKitties’ invention of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) is being applied to a wide range of use cases, from digital art and in-game items to digital identity credentials.

Non-Fungible Token (NFT)

More than a year has gone by since NFTs entered mainstream culture. Non-fungible-token (NFT) is a unique data component that uses technology to log and authenticate digital content — from images to songs to videos — on cryptocurrency blockchains, such as Ethereum, Polygon, Fantom, etc. When this content is registered on the blockchain, every transaction, from transfers to sales, would be recorded on-chain, resulting in a searchable ledger of authenticity and price history. This is in contrast to fungible tokens, such as cryptocurrencies, which are identical to one another and can thus be used as a medium for commercial transactions.

How it Works

Artists or digital content creators will mint their work on an NFT marketplace, such as OpenSea, Artion, Rarible, etc. Minting is the process of creating a smart contract that contains a lot of important information on the blockchain. This information contains the list of a particular item’s creator and ensures that the creator, or other parties, receive royalties each time the NFT is sold.

The biggest impact of NFTs is that they make it simple to own and sell digital content. Previously, digital artists could amass large social media followings and attract freelance commercial work, but they struggled to monetize digital art effectively.

NFT Marketplace

Blockchain technology and NFTs can provide the ideal opportunity for artists and content creators to receive financial compensation for their work. Artists no longer have to rely on auction houses, galleries, or any other physical intermediary to sell their work. Now, an artist could easily sell their work to a buyer via NFT. This also helps the artists get a better value for their work.

NFT marketplaces help oversee the sales of digital content. They offer the necessary platform and tools needed for artists to list, buy and sell their content. Most blockchains have their own NFT marketplace. Some specialize in a specific niche, while others accept any type of NFT. Interacting with an NFT marketplace requires the use of a Web3 wallet, whereas purchasing (and sometimes listing) an NFT requires the use of the blockchain’s base currency.”

As with every invention in life, imperfection surrounds the NFT business. NFT Marketplaces continue to put in work to correct the visible and undiscovered flaws in their system and several other digital platforms are lending a helping hand to ease development and better NFT users’ experience. One of such platforms is the Marlin Network.

Marlin Network

Marlin is an open collection of protocols and related components that provides Decentralized Finance (DeFi) and Web 3.0 with a high-performance network infrastructure. The Marlin network’s nodes, known as Metanodes, run the MarlinVM, which offers a virtual router interface for developers to dispatch customized overlays and carry out the necessary edge computations.

Notable overlays that can be built with MarlinVM include:

● Low-latency block multicast to scale blockchains

● Low-latency mempool sync for arbitrageurs

● Mesh networks

Key Features of Marlin Network

Speed

The Marlin Network can achieve global latencies of <150milliseconds. As a result, developers can create high-performance, responsive distributed systems.

Scalability

The Marlin Network can support a large number of nodes while maintaining high performance.

Benefits of the Marlin Network to NFT Marketplaces — Marlin Cache

The Marlin Network is on a mission to improve the state of peer-to-peer communication systems in order to power the next generation of blockchain platforms, protocols, and applications. They aim to enhance the privacy and performance of all blockchains by developing a technology that guarantees efficient network protocols with top-level privacy and anonymity. The Marlin Cache is a portion of the Marlin Network that improves the performances of NFT Marketplaces.

Marlin Cache

Marlin Cache is a distributed event-driven caching system for Decentralized Applications (DApps) based on the observation that a small portion of contracts and addresses account for the majority of on-chain activity and queries to the blockchain APIs. Therefore, by maintaining a small cache of frequently accessed data, a significant portion of the queries can be fulfilled locally instead of querying the blockchain.

The Marlin Cache enables faster response times. This directly or indirectly enables several unique features that enhance web 3.0 experiences.

Features

Caching: DApps can lighten the burden on the origin and costs associated with querying the blockchain while also increasing responsiveness for users.

Consistency: With global low latency connections, dApps and API providers can be confident that their responses will be consistent across channels and users.

Device Optimization: NFT marketplaces, games, and IPFS-based dApps, in general, can optimize content for users in real-time. For example, serving devices with lower resolution images consume less bandwidth.

Personalization: Tailoring content based on geography and history (for example, not displaying culturally inappropriate art in specific regions) could boost engagement and conversion in Web 3 marketplaces.

DDoS protection: Cache servers that are distributed globally can absorb requests more efficiently while also being able to detect malicious attacks.

Real-time analytics: Artists, developers, and marketplace owners can gain a better understanding of user activity and engagement through real-time analytics.

Conclusion

The Marlin Network steps right in the center of solving major problems facing digital platforms. The Marlin Cache through the help of other Marlin Network attributes facilitates a major plan to personalize the NFT Marketplace and provide enhanced performance to Web 3.0 DApps by caching data right next to users.

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Helen Imah

I’m a TECH Lover, Blockchain Enthusiast, Strategic Digital Marketer, Data Scientist, Crypto Investor & Trader…