Arweave – Darkblock

Darkblock Partners with Pianity to Offer Decentralized Unlockable Music

darkblock — Tue, 31 May 2022 18:15:47 +0000

We are thrilled to announce our most recent partnership with Pianity, a music NFT platform that encourages community engagement through creation, sharing, trading, and collecting of limited-edition tracks.

Pianity has been a friend of Darkblock’s since the very beginning. They participated in the Arweave hackathon with us back in April of 2021. Their platform has taken off alongside Darkblock and we are thrilled to finally be teaming up.

Both Darkblock and Pianity share a common mission to offer creators new ways to monetize their work and regain independent control. While Pianity already has access to unlockable content, Darkblock’s protocol will allow Pianity users to store their content permanently on Arweave.

Unlockable content in music allows artists to connect deeper with their fans and offer privileged experiences such as meeting with the artists, backstage access to shows, exclusive bonus content, and direct access to private group discussions. The use-cases are endless and will only strengthen musical experience in web3.

Keep your eyes peeled for announcements on when this functionality is available and stay up to date on Darkblock news on our discord at chat.darkblock.io.

About Pianity:

Pianity is a music NFT platform — built on environmentally-conscious Arweave technology — where musicians and their community gather to create, sell, buy and collect songs in limited editions. Pianity’s pioneering approach, which includes free listening for all, enables deeper connections between artists and their audience. Because Pianity treats music as fine art, artists gain a new source of independent revenue while simultaneously enabling fans to grow and showcase their music collections.

Website | Discord | Twitter | Medium

About Darkblock:

Darkblock gives creators more control over the distribution of their content. Comics, ebooks, podcasts, music, movies, journalism, pay-per-view, YouTube, OnlyFans, Patreon, influencer content, metaverse assets — and more — will all require access control to become viable NFT markets. Whether it’s through sales, ad revenue or rentals, we aim to guarantee the flow of income to creators by letting them hold the keys to their content.

Website | Discord | YouTube | Medium | Twitter

Darkblock Partners with SolSea to bring Decentralized Unlockables to Solana

Gillian — Tue, 24 May 2022 19:07:38 +0000

It has been a long time coming, but the wait is finally over; Darkblock is officially live on SolSea. With the undeniable growth of Solana, this collaboration has been a priority for Darkblock for months.

To integrate on SolSea, Darkblock provided the NFT marketplace with an API and implementation suggestions for the frontend. Additionally, Darkblock provided web delivery (Javascript widget) so Solsea could easily add unlockable content to their feature list.

Darkblock’s integration with SolSea will allow Solana creators to attach an encrypted asset to an existing NFT. On the “Create NFT” page on SolSea, users will see a checkbox for unlockable content. Creators can check whether they wish to make the NFT content protected or accessible for all. The NFT displayed on SolSea will act as a “preview” to the underlying asset (jpg, mp4, gif, etc.) protected in a Darkblock. Only the true owner of the NFT (or owners, if fractionalized), is able to decrypt and view the original NFT.

With the added security of Darkblock, mediums previously limited by copyright issues like comics, full-length movies, and music, are now all viable use-cases for NFTs on Solana. Darkblock also facilitates larger file uploads (350MB) and permanent, decentralized, censor resistant, free storage on Arweave.

It is Darkblock’s mission to continue to add blockchains to our protocol to offer protection of NFTs and provide the necessary tools for creators to publish their NFTs, regardless of where they choose to publish. Stay tuned for more blockchain support news on our website/twitter!

Still have questions? Our team is available 24/7 to help on discord.

“The NFTization of all digital content is coming, and with it various models of monetization. Darkblock is the key to establishing a decentralized creator economy.” –Darkblock Manifesto

Darkblock Partners with Kalamint to Bring Unlockable Content to Tezos NFT Marketplace

Gillian — Fri, 18 Feb 2022 19:32:45 +0000

Kalamint has officially partnered with Darkblock to support unlockable content. We are thrilled to partner with a marketplace that shares our decentralized mission! The collaboration was the natural next step as Darkblock offers one of the only decentralized protocol layers for unlockables.

Tezos creators will finally be able to mint and sell their NFTs with Darkblock content attached on the Kalamint marketplace.

We have been working closely for a while with the talented Kalamint team in preparation of this partnership and we can’t wait for it to go live.

The launch date of this feature has not been announced so be on the lookout on our social media accounts for more details.

About Kalamint:

Kalamint, a leader of the Clean NFT movement, is one of the first marketplaces on Tezos, an LPoS blockchain that consumes a fraction of the energy compared to its power-hungry counterparts. Backed by Tim Draper’s Draper Goren Holm Ventures, Amesten Capital, Moonwhale Ventures among others, Kalamint is one of the only NFT marketplaces which is truly on-chain, meaning that the data on the chain can never be altered or lost.

Website | Discord | Medium | Twitter

About Darkblock:

Website | Discord | YouTube | Medium | Twitter

Partner Marketplace Integration

Gillian — Fri, 11 Feb 2022 19:35:50 +0000

ATTN Marketplaces: Integrating Darkblock has never been easier!

If you haven’t already heard of Darkblock, we are a decentralized NFT unlockables protocol. Our mission is to give creators and collectors more control and new ways to monetize their NFTs.

NFT users want unlockables. Why are our unlockables so desirable?

Because Darkblock is:

decentralized
multi-chain (Now: ETH, Solana) (Next: Tezos, Polygon, Binance, Arweave etc.)
gives creators more control
but most importantly…

Darkblock is EASY to integrate thanks to our REST API and Darkblock Viewer.

In addition to our protocol, Darkblock built a REST API and Viewer to make our protocol easy to integrate into marketplaces, metaverses, games and other NFT platforms.

We have a two-pronged product offering that makes it possible to incorporate decentralized, encrypted unlockables.

The Darkblock API

The Darkblock REST API makes it incredibly simple to create a Darkblock during the NFT minting process, or later as an upgrade. With one simple REST call, we take care of the heavy lifting; we encrypt, store the content permanently on Arweave, and handshake with our protocol.

How-to API video:

The Darkblock Viewer

The Darkblock Viewer makes consuming Darkblocks simple. The Viewer is a compact, javascript widget that can be embedded easily into any web page. Simply pass the details of the NFT to the Viewer via a few javascript parameters, and the Viewer takes care of the rest. It will enable users to authenticate their NFT ownership within the widget, and view (or listen to!) the unlocked content. We also have full screen modes for appropriate content types.

How-to Embed the Viewer:

How-to use the Viewer:

The Viewer supports many formats, and will continually be upgraded to support new file types, including epub, 3d assets, interactive content, and much more.

Future

We have a lot in store for the Viewer, including consumption of multiple Darkblocks per NFT, music and movie playlists, and content rental. Owners of NFTs with Darkblocks will be able to embed our widget into their site, monetize their content, and collect a portion of the proceeds that connect back to the marketplace where the Darkblock originated. FOREVER.

We are dedicated to working with any marketplace that wants to enable creators to monetize content of all types and we plan to continue to make our protocol integration as easy as possible for marketplaces.

Partnerships

Darkblock recently partnered with ALL.ART to bring unlockables to the SolSea marketplace. Read the press-release here to learn more about how our missions align.

Announcing the release of Darkblock’s apps and pre-seed round

Gillian — Wed, 10 Nov 2021 20:14:01 +0000

Release the Apps!

Darkblock has launched a web and tv-app to enable creators to upgrade existing NFTs to include an exclusive piece of content reserved for the NFT owner.

The decentralized protocol layer works by attaching an encrypted asset to an existing NFT. The NFT displayed on a marketplace acts as a “preview” to the underlying asset (jpg, mp4, gif, etc.) protected in a Darkblock. Only the true owner of the NFT (or owners, if fractionalized), is able to decrypt and view the original NFT.

Artists and creators can upgrade their NFTs for free using Darkblock’s web app (app.darkblock.io). The web app allows for large file uploads (350MB), greater protection from copying, and new ways to monetize and add true scarcity to NFTs.

To view the encrypted NFTs, Darkblock has also released a TV app. The app displays your NFTs while also decrypting those protected with Darkblock. Although still under soft launch, the Darkblock TV app is accessible to anyone with a metamask wallet and a compatible Amazon Fire TV or Android TV device (Download here on the Amazon app Store and here for Google Play).

Pre-Seed Round Closed

We are also excited to announce that we have successfully closed a $1.7M pre-seed round, led by Greenfield One, co-lead by A&T Capital and composed of other notable investors, including leading crypto funds Smape Capital and Unpopular Ventures. Last, but not least, an investment from our favorite blockchain network, Arweave and its Open Web Foundry. We wouldn’t be where we are today without them!

What’s next?

Darkblock is partnering with existing NFT marketplaces to provide our services. Integration for marketplaces is straightforward: Darkblock has an API and implementation suggestions for the frontend of the marketplace. Darkblock will also provide web delivery, allowing marketplaces to easily add decentralized unlockable content to their feature list.

The web delivery is a Javascript widget that can be dropped into a web page. It integrates with popular crypto wallets (MetaMask, for example) to verify ownership of the NFT, unlock the content, and display the Darkblock (images, video, music, pdfs, etc.).

Darkblock’s goal is to encourage new types of content to enter the NFT space. Examples include mediums that have rejected NFTs as being too open, such as comic books, ebooks, and even full length movies. Darkblock also stores all content permanently, decentralized, and censor resistant on Arweave.

Darkblock currently supports Ethereum based NFT standards ERC-721 and ERC-1155, but plans to support all major NFT standards (Palm, Flow, Tezos, etc) and provide token support for partners on a case-by-case basis. The next feature the organization is working on is enabling the rental of NFTs to enable new business models around NFT content.

For further information, please send us a line.

“The NFTization of all digital content is coming, and with it various models of monetization. Darkblock is the key to establishing a decentralized creator economy.” –Darkblock Manifesto

Intro to Arweave

Gillian — Mon, 24 May 2021 20:23:49 +0000

Darkblock participated in the Arweave hackathon in March/April 2021, and it was a great experience. The community is very helpful and open, but there was a bit of a learning curve for us how best to leverage Arweave, and also trying to understand just what the heck this Arweave thing is exactly. Hopefully this helps you ramp up quickly.

What is Arweave?

Arweave is a native blockchain technology to permanently store data. It uses an endowment to continually pay miners to prove they have access to the data stored, and it uses it’s own native currency to facilitate the storage of data. That means it is NOT an ERC-20 token. With Arweave, you create a transaction and sign it with your wallet, which may or may not include a file to store. You are given a cost to store that data, and you execute that transaction, which transfers AR out of your wallet for the privilege. The file and metadata with the transaction are then available via HTTP GET and via GraphQL queries. You can store small files or very large files, and it is very cost effective compared to Ethereum (pennies per megabyte).

Darkblock is all about creating exclusivity for NFTs using a decentralized encryption protocol to control access to content. We want to give creators the ability to create NFTs with a preview image while locking up the high resolution original so that only the NFT owner has access. We want to give that NFT owner something truly unique.

NFTs are forever, but the data that many NFTs currently point to is not. Enter Arweave, the best data storage solution for the permaweb.

Darkblock on Arweave

During the Arweave Hackathon we created a handful of NFTs with associated Darkblocks. We stored a preview version of each piece of art as a jpg, and then we encrypted the high resolution image using AES-256 and placed that into a “Darkblock”, a separate Arweave transaction that is referenced by the NFT metadata.

Here is one such example for “Donut Volcano”:

Here is the preview image we pushed to Arweave, accessed via HTTP using an Arweave gateway:
https://arweave.net/Dlo-QPuyxlJFr_hpAinXUzhpQA6f9cc4DiPpAc7Qldk

Here is the transaction data on the arweave block viewer:
https://viewblock.io/arweave/address/Dlo-QPuyxlJFr_hpAinXUzhpQA6f9cc4DiPpAc7Qldk
Here is the smart contract for this NFT:
https://viewblock.io/arweave/address/Dlo-QPuyxlJFr_hpAinXUzhpQA6f9cc4DiPpAc7Qldk?tab=code
Which is just a javascript file also uploaded to Arweave!

Here is the smart contract transaction:
https://viewblock.io/arweave/tx/ngMml4jmlxu0umpiQCsHgPX2pb_Yz6YDB8f7G6j-tpI
And here is the actual javascript file:
https://arweave.net/ngMml4jmlxu0umpiQCsHgPX2pb_Yz6YDB8f7G6j-tpI

Here is the state of this NFT:
https://viewblock.io/arweave/address/Dlo-QPuyxlJFr_hpAinXUzhpQA6f9cc4DiPpAc7Qldk?tab=state

Here is the transaction data for that NFT using the GraphQL interface:
https://arweave.net/graphql?query=query…
(Hit play!)
You can also construct other queries in GraphQL to use Arweave as a permanent database of sorts. There are endless possibilities using this feature to create dapps on top of Arweave.

Here is the NFT from above on Verto’s Space (more on that below!):
https://space.verto.exchange/asset/Dlo-QPuyxlJFr_hpAinXUzhpQA6f9cc4DiPpAc7Qldk

Notice all of these refer to the same transaction id. You can go look up the transaction data using that id, or refer to the files within that transaction very easily by using a gateway, such as arweave.net.

Pretty simple, right? And that’s it! Well, no, not exactly. There is actually much more to Arweave.

Arweave also has smart contracts!

But, they are much different from the smart contracts you are used to. The smart contracts in Arweave are actually a logical layer built on top of the data transactions. Smartweave, the logical layer that executes these contracts, typically runs in the browser and executes these smart contracts by taking a series of inputs (just Arweave transactions) to the smart contract and calculating the end state.

This is great for NFTs because it allows you to store the data AND the smart contract to act as the certificate of ownership using a singular transaction, something that has been dubbed Atomic NFTs. We created our very first Darkblocks using an NFT spec devised by the Verto team when we built a prototype during the Arweave hackathon.

We think this is the future. But, unfortunately, it is not quite the present. Much of the initial demand for NFTs has been around Ethereum standards, for better or for worse (we think worse!). Darkblock will go where the NFT action is, but we will continue to create associated Darkblocks in Arweave for their efficiency and permanence. It is by far the best way to store data permanently.

We also urge you to check out PSTs, which is another logical construct that the Arweave community has embraced. The impacts of PSTs will be massive, we think it will change business models for all companies forever.

Arweave is full of these standards that promote composability. If you haven’t checked out Arweave we encourage you to jump in with both feet. Do it now!

Helpful links:
You can create an Arweave wallet here.
You can buy AR on gate.io.
You can get started creating transactions with arweave-js here.
You can use this permaweb dropper to do one-off uploads with no code.
For Arweave smart contracts go here.
Go here to view Arweave transaction data.
Check out the first NFT spec for Arweave devised by Verto, then head to Verto’s FT marketplace (alpha!) at https://space.verto.exchange.
Arweave is also very active on Discord.

Then go participate in the next Arweave hackathon! Or, just get to buidling.

Why wait?