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Ourkive

Ourkive

Music is Art, Music as Art

Created on 30th June 2024

Ourkive

Ourkive

Music is Art, Music as Art

The problem Ourkive solves

Music has become all about numbers and clout, with streaming platforms and social media grossly undervaluing musicians. We aim to change this by creating a music ownership market that appreciates music for its artistic value and cultural significance. By enabling direct ownership of music through NFTs, we ensure artists receive fair value for their work, and collectors can easily and securely support and appreciate their favorite music.

Since Day 1, we’ve strived to bring non-crypto people onchain, making an easy UX an essential component of our platform. Many of our classical and jazz artists were new to crypto, making it difficult for them to interact with EOAs. Users also faced frequent stuck transactions on Polygon due to inaccurate gas price estimations.

To address these issues, we adopted Base as our primary blockchain. The Base network offers incredibly low gas fees and blazing-fast transaction speeds, which are highly appreciated by everyone.

We also integrated Smart Wallet, enhancing the user experience by enabling batch transactions and simplifying processes for users. Additionally, gas sponsorship covers transaction fees, eliminating the need for users to hold native tokens. This is particularly beneficial for artists unfamiliar with the onchain world, allowing them to focus solely on publishing their music.

In our ongoing efforts to improve UX, we identified a key problem: artists often lack the necessary artwork to accompany their music releases, and collectors struggle to understand digital asset ownership, especially about music.

We enable collaboration between musicians and visual artists, achieving multiple goals: musicians can easily acquire high-quality artwork for their releases, and collectors gain a clearer understanding of music NFT ownership through digital art.

By addressing these pain points, we make it easier for artists to release visually appealing music NFTs and for collectors to recognize the value of owning digital assets.

Challenges we ran into

Integrating Smart Wallet into our platform presented several notable challenges since it was launched recently.

Firstly, the integration was complex because the Smart Wallet signature functions differently from EOAs. Our platform uses Sign In With Ethereum (SIWE) to authenticate users, but the siwe package does not yet support EIP-6492, making signature validation impossible solely with it. Fortunately, a GitHub issue highlighted this problem, leading us to an alternative package that supports both EIP-6492 and EIP-1271.

A similar challenge arose during NFT purchases. We used EIP-2612 (aka ERC20 Permit Extension) to allow collectors to approve and transfer ERC20 tokens in a single transaction, but USDC contracts did not support smart wallet signature validation. As a workaround, we split the process into two transactions (approve and transfer) and then batched them, leveraging one of Smart Wallet’s features. Although this requires EOAs to perform two transactions, we believe the trade-off is acceptable.

Additionally, we faced an issue with gas-sponsored batched transactions. For instance, when artists mint and list their music on our marketplace, we use transaction batching and gas fee sponsorship. However, the gas fee sponsorship failed when a Smart Wallet popup appeared after clicking the music release button. We added logs to various points in our backend, suspecting that our custom paymaster API might be incorrectly implemented, but no errors were found. Our next suspect was the wallet capabilities returned by the wagmi hook useCapabilities. After numerous trials and errors, we discovered that filtering out auxiliary funds from the wallet capabilities was essential for both batching and gas sponsorship to function correctly. We'll need to revisit this issue once Magic Spend supports USDC, but for now, it functions without any issues.

Tracks Applied (2)

Coinbase Smart Wallet

Due to many of our artists encountering difficulties with setting up EOAs and interacting with traditional wallets, we d...Read More

Creator Track

For this buildathon, we focused on two key areas: enhancing UI/UX with Smart Wallet and developing better tools for musi...Read More

CREATOR with Zora

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