If you aren't familiar with what a smart contract is, it is a piece of software deployed to the blockchain that enables NFTs and provenance. Every NFT requires a smart contract and we believe that creators should have full ownership of their smart contracts rather than trust a third party. In The Lab, all contracts are creator owned and Transient Labs cannot do anything to stop you from using the contracts as you wish.
Our Creator Contracts are full of innovations that we think you will truly love. This article goes into these innovations for all our different contract types.
Common Functionality
Common Functionality
All Transient Labs have the following functionality in common.
Admin Access Control
All Creator Contracts give you the option to add admins (one or many) to your contract. This can be especially useful if you want to use multiple wallets for wallet security reasons. Or it can be used with trusted business partners. The possibilities are endless!
Admins can perform the following actions on Creator Contracts:
Mint tokens
Approve sales contracts (so you can sell your tokens in different ways)
Propose or update metadata, as applicable with different contract types
Inscribe creator stories
The following actions are restricted only to the owner of the contract
Updating royalties
Changing the Royalty Guard
Story Inscriptions
Transient Labs has developed a protocol that allows you to add any text you want to a token you have created as another form of provenance. Sometimes descriptions only get you so far or you want to add where the piece has been displayed. Rather than update the metadata, this information can be added as a Story to the token!
We have also built this so that collectors of your tokens can add their own stories to the tokens they collect. This in itself adds a lot of provenance and history to the creation.
Of course, not everyone wants this and we let the creator decide whether to enable or disable.
On-Chain Royalties
All Creator Contracts follow EIP-2981 and the Royalty Registry which allows for royalties to be configured on-chain for all marketplaces to read. This is standard across the industry and allows for your royalties to be automatically imported and enforced without you having to do anything.
Royalty Guard / BlockList
Marketplaces, like OpenSea, have enforced a policy on Ethereum Mainnet that you must block non-royalty paying marketplaces in order for them to enforce royalties on their platform. Transient Labs BlockList technology acts as a Royalty Guard since the creator can choose to block trading from any marketplace they want. This can also be turned off, as desired by the creator.
Transient Labs offers a default BlockList that is CORI compliant and plan to offer creators a way to make their own sovereign BlockLists too.
Here are some resources for background on this:
ERC-721 Contracts
ERC-721 Contracts
The ERC-721 standard is really the first token standard that defined NFTs. It is simple in that each token only has one owner at any given time. This makes it very useful for things like 1/1 art, membership tokens, unique editions, and more.
ERC721TL
ERC721TL
This is our standard creator contract that adheres to the ERC-721 standard.
Airdrops
This feature allows you to mint/airdrop tokens to any address you want, making it a very convenient way to reward collectors or mint something on demand for someone else.
Batch Minting
This feature allows you to mint multiple tokens to the same address (this is the big difference to airdrop) for the cost of just a single token. This is market leading and makes use of EIP-2309 and some Transient Labs magic.
Batch Mint Cost Comparison
Synergy
Synergy is a Transient Labs mechanism to ensure collectors are protected against metadata changes. It is evident that metadata updates are needed in certain cases, although not that often. When needed, the feature is very useful, but could be abused and typically deters traditional art collectors.
To combat this, we have come up with a propose-commit scheme. In the event an update is needed, the creator proposes a metadata update. The collector can then visualize the change and approve or reject. Once approved, the metadata is updated, but only then.
Synergy flowchart
Burn
Burning a token means that the owner is giving up ownership and the token will technically no longer exist moving forward. It is quite similar to burning a physical piece of art.
This contract allows for any collector to burn tokens. This is intended to be used by creators with burn and redeem contracts in the future, but nothing stops collectors from burning tokens as they wish.
ERC-1155 Contracts
ERC-1155 Contracts
The ERC-1155 standard is another token standard offered in The Lab. This standard allows for multiple people to own the same token. This is very different to the ERC-721 standard but does offer a better way to view editioned creations and has some cost savings when minting.
ERC1155TL
ERC1155TL
Batch Token Creation
With our implementation of ERC-1155 tokens, creators must always create a token. This allows for a unique metadata URI per token and for checking if a token exists in the contract. Minting a newly created token to a wallet can happen in the same transaction, but what if a creator wants to create 10 tokens, would they need 10 different transactions?
Well you can do this and distribute the tokens in a single transaction!
Note: this feature has not been implemented in The Lab yet but is planned very shortly.
Batch Burn
ERC1155TL allows for ultra-efficient token burning. A single collector can burn a batch of tokens (different token ids and amounts) in a single transaction!
The burn feature is open to the collector or any operators approved by the collector.
This is useful for burn and redeem contracts. This allows burn and redeem contracts to be configurable and determined at a later time.
Updating Metadata
Synergy is not possible with the ERC-1155 specification, since there are technically more than one owner of a token. We recognize that metadata updates may be needed so we have included a method to do this. But we encourage artists to avoid updating unless necessary and such caution artists about this in The Lab.