The next chain to build on?

We may need to build NFTDEX on another chain in parallel with, or immediately after, our work on Ethereum. NB: this decision will partly be driven by internal developer resources.

1. What's up with Ethereum? NFTDEX is currently being built on Ethereum. However, ETH gas fees are an enormous hurdle to the continued success of ERC-721's as the NFT standard. The largest value transactions are actually not directly occurring on Ethereum: (1) Nifty is centralized, and (2) NBA Top Shot is on Flow. Ethereum is a freight train heading straight towards a 2017/Cryptokitties-style breakdown (if not already broken down).

2. Flow: Flow was purpose built to solve for 2017/Cryptokitties. It also has the largest volume of any NFT market (in the past 2-3 weeks, Flow has seen over $40M in NBA Top Shot volume). It is getting the attention from traditional trading card investors like Gary Vee. NFT Protocol partner co Blockparty has an indicative partnership with Flow that would see Blockparty integrate its primary platform into Flow, allowing the primary sale of Flow NFT assets. The Flow team has also indicated that it is not creating its own DEX (although technically NBA top shot is a DEX, it is not designed like a Uniswap). In order for NFTDEX to capture NBA Top Shot (and other future Dapper Labs products), we should be building on Flow. The challenge is that it's built in a new language, Cadence, and needs a dedicated resource / research and development effort.

3. Avalanche: AVAX is live, its wallet works well and the NFTP dev team has been provided access to test it from the AVAX team, who are highly supportive. While it is a newly launched chain, it is Ethereum Virtual Machine-compatible and the development timeline to transfer existing NFT Protocol Solidity contracts onto AVAX is negligible.

4. Cosmos: The community has been strongly in support of Cosmos. The new developer relations team at Cosmos has been particularly supportive. Their cross-chain model would work well as more chains start to adopt and build NFT communities. They are relatively early in their development of capabilities focused on NFT's. Also, the challenge is that it's it needs a dedicated internal developer resource / research and development effort.

5. Binance Smart Chain, Near Protocol, MATIC and other options: Relatively little info has been gathered so far by the team on this but they have been proposed by the community at various junctures. Any of these options will require a dedicated internal developer resource / research and development effort.