Welcome to Cardinal!
Welcome to Cardinal
The movement towards decentralization through blockchain has ushered in a new era of digital ownership that now extends far beyond currencies. Everything from art, collectibles and real estate title ownership to credentials, licenses, and event tickets can theoretically exist on-chain as a non-fungible token (NFT) that can be securely stored and validated in seconds.
2021 saw digital art and collectibles explode onto the seen as the first real-world use cases for NFTs. Ethereum paved the way with ERC-721 and dominated the flow before its gas costs became prohibitive and artists/creators began to look elsewhere. Insert Solana and Metaplex in June who together brought forth a cheap, fast, simple, and reliable solution for creators to share their work. Solana’s NFT volume skyrocketed, eclipsing Ethereum by several metrics in a very short period of time, and the network cemented itself as a premier minting platform.
The future for blockchain art and collectibles is undoubtedly bright, but what is perhaps more intriguing is that for all of the other potential NFT use cases. Ethereum has seen a small handful of additional token standards arise to support different NFT use cases that require more utility, but the deficiencies of the network will ultimately make fostering a transition to blockchain very difficult for the rest of the non-crypto native world of digital asset creators/issuers. Solana’s network, however, is well-suited to pioneer this transition, but doing so will require innovation to bolster the utility of its existing NFT standard.
This is the mission of Cardinal. We’re building protocols to enhance the utility of Solana NFTs to support issuance, ownership, and management of programmatically governed tokens to facilitate rental agreements, loans, tickets, domain names, gaming items, certifications, credentials, badges, and much more. The protocol achieves this by wrapping traditional Solana NFTs in a way that creates mechanisms for revocation, time, use, and data-based expiry, explosion, and selective/non-transferability.
Cardinal also provides open source implementations and fully-fledged products for an NFT marketplace, NFT reward centers, auctions, raffles and more.
Dive a little deeper and start exploring our docs to get an idea of everything that's possible with the protocol.
Continue reading for a higher level overview, or get started immediately by diving into the rest of the docs
Last modified 2mo ago