Minting the ISPO NFTs on CardaHub: an update

Dear Genius community, we are acutely aware that for some of you the ISPO NFT minting experience has not been easy. We thank you for your patience.

We listened to your feedback. But first of all let’s go back to the choices that were made.

NFT minting through smart contracts in CardaHub.

Minting an NFT through a smart contract is 100% decentralized, meaning that there is no middle-man between you and the blockchain. The whole process is handled by the code itself. This is in theory the “safest” way to mint an NFT because your funds cannot be diverted.
CardaHub is a Genius X onboarded protocol and to show our support to their project we decided to work with them for this ISPO NFTs mint. Also the way they chose to make their distributions though smart contracts is aligned with our vision of Decentralized Finance and Protocols.

Our vision of Decentralized protocols

Genius Yield aims to be at the forefront of innovation and smart contract interaction. All the protocols we are building are done through smart contracts and Dr. Lars Brünjes designed 100% of them for the Genius DEX and the Genius X launchpad. For any interaction with our protocol, people must use a wallet with a Dapp Connector.
That’s why we believe requesting people to use a Dapp Connector compatible wallet in order to mint their NFT is aligned with our goal to democratize smart contract interactions. Also, in order to unlock the NFTs utilities people will have to use a Dapp Connector compatible wallet to stake their NFT.

Feedback

Many users were able to mint their NFT without issue but we also had others who struggled with the claiming process:

• Restoring their staking wallet in a Dapp connector compatible wallet was concerning regarding possible security issues.
• Several different error messages when attempting to mint the NFT. Most of them are due to big wallets with lots of “dust” UTXOs that will make the transaction bigger and eventually cause it to fail. We shared in our previous medium article the main issues and the way to solve them but this is certainly not a good user experience.

Solutions and improvements

Being pioneers at the forefront of technology implies that some adjustments must be made. No solution is ideal or perfect from the start.

CardaHub already improved their coin algorithm selection in order to reduce the failed transactions risk. Dr. Lars has recently mentored them in order to review and improve their code, switching to another version of Plutus for future distributions.

Regarding users using a Ledger Cold wallet: those users got a pretty scary message requesting them to send all their funds while interacting with the smart contract, this very likely a display error from Ledger itself which doesn’t take the change into account while processing the smart contract. Dr. Lars is currently in touch with the Ledger team to discuss this and maybe have this improved for the good of all the Cardano community!

The way we designed our bonus reward and NFT program implies that the NFT rewards are only claimable from the wallet delegators staked with in our ISPO. We understand security concerns about restoring a staking wallet in a Dapp Connector compatible one, that’s why we have decided in collaboration with CardaHub to implement an additional way to claim the NFT via a semi centralized minting process.

People will be able to claim their NFT by sending a small amount of ADA to a specific wallet address from the wallet they delegated with in the ISPO. They will then receive their NFT and their ADA back minus transaction fees. This is handled by a centralized wallet and was not our goal initially but it was requested by lots of our delegators and we heard their feedback.

We will make an announcement once this new solution is available, also, there is no particular deadline to claim the ISPO NFTs.

We hope this will make the whole minting process a better experience for everyone.