How many times have you spent weeks awaiting what could potentially be the next ‘Blue Chip’ NFT release? The day arrives and you sit patiently, perched on the edge of your seat for the word ‘Mint’ to appear on the respective website. However, despite your patience and intense readiness, you almost immediately discover that you can’t get an order in, and before you know it the series is sold out. The problem is that NFT sales get overwhelmed by bots, congesting the chain and denying legitimate enthusiasts the chance to get their hands on the prize. We need a solution to this problem.
The Solution may be at Hand
Fortunately, a company by the name of Ada Handle is here to offer a solution. By creating an authentication mechanism that requires staked wallets, they will be able to create a natural bot protection method, as the minimum 10 ADA staked creates two safeguards. First, it makes bot purchases inefficient. Secondly, it ensures that the user is holding the minimum 10 ADA required to stake, eliminating random bots. The code to this will also be completely open source, meaning other projects can leverage Handle’s proposed solution. Other projects that adopt this solution will also have the option of not requiring that a wallet be staked in order to allow for purchasing.
Measuring Blockchain Congestion
One of the primary goals of the dAPP wallet integration is to help both Handle and other projects fight bots. Their Beta sale is scheduled for sometime after the TestNet, and they will use the numbers detected from their MainNet as the baseline. Essentially, they will compare the number of bots that managed to bypass their protection mechanisms before and after the dApp wallet integration.
Meet the Team
The team has nearly 40 years of combined software experience, ranging from small side projects to Fortune 500 Companies, including Facebook (now META). The software development team is composed of three senior-level engineers and one senior-level IT specialist. Every member of the team has been working on dynamic websites and applications for at least a decade. Check out their credentials here.
How Much Will it Cost?
Development is estimated to take 160 hours x 125 = $20K USD
UI/UX: 100 hours x 125 = $12.5k USD
Code Verification: 100 hours x 125 = $12.5k USD
Total: 360 hours x 125 = $ 45k USD
The team expects to launch wallet authentication sometime during the first quarter of 2022. If the launch is successful, it will allow users to authenticate with dAPP-ready wallets and access the Minting Portal. Email verification will be removed in favour of this new and more secure flow.
The Mission Statement
In essence, ADA Handle’s mission is to simplify the crypto experience, encouraging and basically ensuring mass adoption of the Cardano blockchain. In order to achieve this goal, they’ve created the ‘Handle Standard’, which is a defined mechanism for associating wallet addresses to custom Handle names. This will be achieved by issuing each Handle as a unique NFT to the buyer, this then acts as a marker for their address. The said NFT can be moved or sold, and as such, the associated address is also dynamically updated.
In light of their solution being open-source, they plan on tracking progress and metrics via GitHub Projects. You can see the initial setup of the flow and open to-dos here. Unsatisfied with stopping there, the team has also committed to bi-weekly technical updates via their Medium blog. This is in order to keep in line with the transparency of communication, which is a huge part of the ethos behind their project.
If you’d like to know more, or have any questions/comments about the project, simply click here.
