Prefer to play than to read? No problem, try the demo here!

At Asset Layer, we’ve always been big believers in eating our own dogfood. In addition to building a number of our own games alongside developing the Asset Layer platform, we also try to spend a few weeks every year simply experimenting with our own products. This past year, a lot of that experimentation has involved combining AI tools with Asset Layer’s capabilities to create unique gaming experiences.

A Story-Driven AI Sandbox Game

The generative AI revolution will enable anyone to create games
- Joshua Lu, Investor at A16Z

With his latest project, Jan Veit, our lead game developer and the creator of our Unity integration, set out to explore how he could use Asset Layer to create AI characters that could be dropped into different environments and interact with their surroundings. By using Asset Layer, a player could create a single character that can interact with hundreds or thousands of environments from different creators. Taken as a whole, it represents the start of something like a Story-Driven AI Sandbox Game.

AI-powered, story-driven games are not a new concept. Rimworld is one of the most beloved indie games of all time, with 10/10 stars on 154,000 Steam reviews. It’s described on Steam as “A sci-fi colony sim driven by an intelligent AI storyteller. Generates stories by simulating psychology, ecology, gunplay, melee combat, climate, biomes, diplomacy, interpersonal relationships, art, medicine, trade, and more.” The game’s beauty comes in part from striking a great balance between what’s in the player’s control vs what isn’t. It’s almost a hybrid between watching a drama and playing a game. Plus, the game is highly moddable, with over 21,000 mods in the Steam workshop.

Unlike Rimworld where the player’s job is to direct the efforts of the colonists and the world is viewed from a top-down perspective, in Jan’s game, the player’s job is to create an avatar and provide a description of their character that is used to program an LLM. Then, the player simply sits back and watches their new character interact with the world.

Here’s what an MVP version of the concept looks like. The character is named Jack Harlow, and the description given to the LLM is “Exudes confidence with a dash of arrogance and quite frankly being very rude. He’s the guy who never backs down from a challenge, especially if it involves hunting treasures or battling monsters.“

How It Works

Jan built this MVP version in a couple of days using GPT-4 Vision, Unity, and Asset Layer. For assets, he used avatars from Ready Player Me, some free assets from Unity, and some assets from our game Rolltopia. Again, you can try it for yourself here!

To play, you start by logging in and creating an avatar. When you press “Save Avatar”, we add your avatar’s 3D model to an Asset Layer asset and transfer that asset to your account so it is associated with you as a player.

The next step is to choose your avatar’s voice and give your avatar a description. You can either enter a manual description, or have the AI generate a description. To generate the description, the AI takes a snapshot of your avatar and uses its appearance as inspiration. Below is a description generated for the avatar pictured above.

“Gerald Gearloose, 45, an eccentric inventor from the steampunk realm who wears a distinctive plague doctor mask and top hat adorned with tiny gears and cogs. His speech is a humorous mix of archaic phrases and technological jargon, often baffling listeners. He’s perpetually afraid of being outdone by modern technology, driving him to concoct bizarre gadgets. His ultimate goal is to invent a device that can brew the perfect cup of tea instantly”

Once you are happy with your avatar and its description, you press play and then sit back and watch. Your avatar is dropped into a scene Jan created in Unity. The scene includes a number of NPCs with their own LLM prompts as well as objects that the player character can interact with. You can follow along with the log of all decisions your player makes and the dialog from your avatar and the NPCs it interacts with. The whole scene is coordinated by a controller script that communicates with GPT-4 in order to determine what the player character will say and do, and how the NPCs will respond. The controller script has the ability to move the player character and trigger animations as well.

What’s the Point?

Ok, yes, a few days’ work has probably not yielded a story-generator that can quite compete with Netflix or Twitch, but it’s easy to see how with a little TLC, this concept could start generating some extremely compelling storylines. Some might argue that an AI-generated story is never going to compete with content from trained writers with lived experience, but I think that overlooks what’s really happening here. AI is what’s controlling the actual gameplay, but the setting for the story was created jointly by the player who designed their character, as well as the environment builder who created the seeds of conflict and intrigue (e.g. Sarah, who’s afraid of spiders, potentially encountering a giant spider). So, the story is being generated by two human agents and one AI-agent — a hybrid similar to Rimworld.

With Asset Layer’s ability to make rich game assets ownable and portable, this type of concept has the potential to be supercharged by UGC and a creator economy. By enabling a player’s characters to be ported from game to game, players can enjoy an ever-growing, evolving, dynamic ecosystem of environments and stories. Further, by enabling apps to communicate between one another through a portable asset, a rich history of a character developed across many different applications can emerge, providing a unique form of character development unlike what you can get from scripted entertainment. Finally, by sharing more than just characters, but also equipables, consumables, and game currencies between games, these generated stories can take advantage of more than just the character’s look and prompt description, but also the items, traits, and anything else a character has acquired on its journey.

If you’re interested in this concept, please get in touch. For us, this is just an experiment for now, but for a creative developer, we believe this could be an intriguing opportunity to leverage the latest in both UGC and AI technologies. And, if you want to learn more about how Asset Layer can help turn your hit game into a creator driven ecosystem, please reach out using this contact form.

Building A Story-Driven AI Sandbox Game was originally published in Asset Layer on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

We are proud to be launching a number of game-changing products today — Asset Layer 2.0, our Unity integration, our new game, Rolltopia, and Asset Layer GPT. We are also happy to announce that Asset Layer 1.0 will live on, rebranded to Asset Layer OnChain. If you want to dive right into the new and improved Asset Layer, head to assetlayer.com/dashboard and start playing Rolltopia at rolltopia.games.

Introducing Asset Layer 2.0

Asset Layer is a backend solution for games and apps. In addition to providing basic features like digital asset and account management, Asset Layer makes it simple to add powerful creator economy features like application interoperability, user generated content, and player-to-player marketplaces to games for studios of any size.

With Asset Layer 2.0, our goal was to make Asset Layer a more complete and accessible solution for game developers. Asset Layer 2.0 includes the following new features and upgrades to help us accomplish this.

Switching to Magic Auth

In Asset Layer 2.0, we are using Magic to power a universal login solution for games that allows users to take their assets across applications seamlessly. All users need is their email address. By logging in with the same email, they can access their in-game assets and currencies across apps. Games and apps can share assets using Asset Layer’s permissioned platform, and users are able to access these assets by signing into apps with a one-time-password or social logins. It’s the easiest possible way to enable interoperability for users across apps.

Magic also comes with Web3 features which can be used to create blockchain integrations across multiple ecosystems. Right now, we are using these features to add additional security to our API, and in the future we can use this to create a signed blockchain record of all digital asset transactions on Asset Layer.

Now Powering In-App Currencies

Asset Layer now allows games and apps to create new currencies which can be used across applications and in marketplaces. Using our no-code tools, SDK, or API, games and apps can create new currencies, manage user balances, initiate transfers, and allow players to use their currencies in player-to-player marketplaces to trade assets. Apps stay in control, as they are able to make currencies fully transferable and tradable between players, or use currencies as a resource bound to a specific player.

We are also offering real money currencies in the marketplace which apps can choose to use as well. Right now, we are offering BSV through an integration with HandCash. We are excited to be able to offer additional real money solutions soon. If you are building a game and are interested in an integration with a specific Web3 wallet and crypto currency, please let us know and we will work with you to explore integrating that wallet and crypto into Asset Layer.

New SDKs + Asset Layer GPT

In addition to offering a REST JSON-based API, Asset Layer now also has an NPM JavaScript SDK as well as a C# SDK for Unity developers. Integrating Asset Layer into apps has never been easier.

To take things even further, we are releasing Asset Layer GPT. This custom GPT is trained on Asset Layer documentation. It’s able to answer questions about how to integrate Asset Layer into your application and how to use the Asset Layer no-code tools. We’ll be continuing to add more resources to Asset Layer GPT to make it the ultimate resource for building your apps with Asset Layer.

Unity Integration

We want Asset Layer to be accessible for game developers, and the best place to meet game developers where they are already at is Unity, the most used game engine in the world. Our Unity integration allows developers and creators to create new Asset Layer assets directly from the Unity editor. This allows assets to contain all types of different 3d models, meshes, textures, shaders, scripts, and other components. Asset Layer then acts like a glue between Unity apps, enabling them to easily share assets that can be imported into games at run-time and work out of the box.

Our Unity Integration also offers tools to import assets into games using our AssetlayerGameObject. We also offer an inventory prefab to make it easy for your players to select the assets they want to use. There is also a C# SDK which allows you to build any custom Asset Layer logic into your game.

Our Unity integration is expanding quickly. We are interested in working hands-on with Unity developers and we can offer you extra support and other goodies. If you are a Unity developer interested in building with Asset Layer, please reach out to us at info@assetlayer.com.

Introducing Rolltopia

To help us show the world what is possible with Asset Layer, we built a new game called Rolltopia, a hyper-casual gaming universe powered by Asset Layer and built with our Unity integration. Rolltopia combines the gameplay and feature set of several category defining games including Roblox, Neopets, Helix Jump, and more to deliver a rich and immersive gaming experience previously impossible for small to medium size game studios like Asset Layer.

If you want to see Asset Layer in action, we recommend trying out the game for yourself. Also, we are offering cash prizes and other goodies for alpha testers. To learn more about the Rolltopia Alpha Challenge rules and prizes, check out this blog post.

Asset Layer OnChain

There’s a lot to be excited about with the Asset Layer 2.0 launch, but building all these new features as rapidly as we have comes with a cost. In this case, Asset Layer 2.0 does not have the same level of blockchain integration as Asset Layer 1.0. Specifically, unlike Asset Layer 1.0, the assets created in Asset Layer 2.0 do not have a blockchain based record.

We are extremely proud of Asset Layer 1.0. It’s arguably the world’s most efficient and reliable blockchain-based digital asset solution. It supports some of the world’s largest digital asset collections such as Duro Dogs which boasts millions of assets including over 1 million in a single collection.

Asset Layer 2.0 is designed to make adoption for game developers simple. It’s also an easier architecture for us to iterate quickly to better and better achieve product market fit. But, we still want developers who are interested in building directly on chain to be able to do so using Asset Layer. So, we are keeping Asset Layer 1.0 online, rebranded as Asset Layer OnChain. If you are interested in using Asset Layer to build powerful blockchain-based digital asset applications, check out onchain.assetlayer.com.

Over time, we hope to reunify Asset Layer with Asset Layer OnChain. And, when we do so, we plan to have millions of players and thousands of game developers coming with us to put their assets on-chain where they ultimately belong.

Asset Layer 2.0 Is Live and Ready to Change the Game was originally published in Asset Layer on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Hey there Duro Dogs trainers! We are excited to share some big news about the Duro Dogs ecosystem. First off, thank you for your continued support of Duro Dogs and Asset Layer! We love our Duro Dogs community and are excited to see it rejuvenated with new energy. Let’s dig in!

DigAgain Partnership

If you are a regular in the Duro Dogs Discord, on Duro Dogs Twitter, or even just a dedicated trainer, you are already familiar with the DigAgain team. Their participation in the creator dig set included some of our all-time favorite items and their 3rd party wallet, available at digagain.com, adds a whole new experience for Duro Dogs trainers looking to sort their inventory and trade items with their friends.

We are excited to announce that the DigAgain team is going to be taking a leading role in adding new items and games to Duro Dogs as well as incorporating new design elements and features into the existing game. We can’t imagine a better team to take on this role and we are excited to see what they come up with to improve the Duro Dogs ecosystem. Duro Dogs was always intended to be a creator driven gaming ecosystem, and under DigAgain’s stewardship, the future is brighter than ever!

Roadmap

So what types of improvements does the DigAgain team have in mind? Here are some teasers to get you excited for what’s to come!

World Map

Duro Dogs love their backyards but there is so much to explore around the world. The upcoming Duro Dogs World Map will enable trainers to travel to different locations around the world, each with their own active dig sets. The ability to move around the map and dig simultaneously active dig sets will both increase rarity of items and empower trainers to focus on the items they most want to discover!

Dog House

The winter months are rapidly approaching and your dogs are going to need a warm place to sleep. The upcoming Duro Dog Houses feature will provide the perfect cozy home for your pups and open up exciting social gameplay as well. Customize your Dog House with new items like furniture or decorate your walls with newly added trophies and achievements you earn from gameplay. Maybe most exciting, invite your friends into your Dog House and enjoy chat functionality as you show them around your customized pad.

Challenges

How are you going to get trophies and achievements to decorate your Dog House? Challenges! This upcoming competitive element of Duro Dogs will include leaderboards and allow you to compete with your friends with your favorite dogs. May the best dog win!

These features are just a taste of what the DigAgain team has in store for the future of Duro Dogs. We can’t wait to start rolling these out in the new year!

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If you are an artist interested in working with the DigAgain team to create future dig sets, reach out to support@digagain.com or contact Kris or Skilli in the Duro Dogs Discord.

Ancient Egypt Dig Set is Live!

Can’t wait to start experiencing the changes to Duro Dogs? Good news. You don’t have to wait! Head to durodogs.com now and start digging to discover a brand new dig set made by the DigAgain team! Some of the items buried deep under the ancient ruins are among the rarest ever released in Duro Dogs. Good luck and happy digging!

Announcing our Partnership with DigAgain was originally published in Asset Layer on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Asset Layer is excited to announce our new integration into Unity, the world’s largest game development platform! This powerful integration, available in our forthcoming Asset Layer v2 update, makes it simple for developers to offer game changing creator economy features to the hundreds of millions of gamers around the world playing Unity developed games. The v2 update includes several other major improvements for developers catering to the large and massively growing gaming vertical including: email-based login, interoperable cross-game currencies, and an expanded toolset for creating in-game storefronts and P2P marketplaces. Check out our Unity Integration launch video below to see it in action!

We are so exited about this launch! The Unity integration makes building games with Asset Layer easier than ever. Assets can now be created and uploaded to Asset Layer directly from inside the Unity editor. What’s so cool is that these assets aren’t just 3D models or sprites, they include all of the logic and scripts used to give the assets their needed behavior in games. This means that games can seamlessly load interoperable, ready-to-play assets directly from the Asset Layer CDN into their game scenes, opening up an entirely new paradigm for interoperable gaming.

Welcome to Rolltopia

So how does this affect game development? After all, developer tools are cool, but the really exciting things are the games they are used to create. On that front, we are thrilled to announce a new hyper casual gaming universe built with Asset Layer 2.0 called Rolltopia.

Rolltopia has the gameplay of a mix between Neopets and Angry Birds with the creator economy elements of Roblox and is built on our open platform to allow the Rolltopia universe to grow into so much more! Rolltopia is being built in Unity leveraging Asset Layer v2 meaning all of the cute digital pet Rollies, their skins, and the currencies and rewards they earn are ownable digital assets able to seamlessly move across games and apps.

The Unity integration makes building Rolltopia extension games simple since all asset creation and integration can be done from directly inside the Unity editor and assets can be loaded from Asset Layer’s CDN during gameplay. The combination of Asset Layer’s powerful feature set and monetization methods with Unity’s more than 4.5 million developers sets Rolltopia up to be an entirely new type of online game, pushing the boundaries of some of the most popular features in gaming today.

Building Upon Duro Dogs

Duro Dogs, the first game we built alongside v1 of the Asset Layer platform, proved core aspects of the model we are now honing with Rolltopia. With Duro Dogs, we created a vibrant grassroots community, enabled third party content creation and game/app development, and generated over $50k revenue on a small but highly engaged user base. The learnings we drew from Duro Dogs were enormously valuable and we love our Duro Dogs community (more exciting Duro Dogs related announcements coming soon by the way)!

With Duro Dogs, we confirmed our assumptions that 1) gamers like to own and trade their game items, 2) the ability to bring characters and cosmetics into an ever growing list of games generates more engagement than when confined to a single title, and 3) as both the user base and developer base grow, in-game items become more meaningful and the ecosystem as a whole improves.

Asset Layer v2 Transforms Gaming

Asset Layer v2’s feature set was designed with exactly these lessons learned from Duro Dogs in mind. By integrating into Unity, 3rd party developers and creators can more easily build new experiences for gamers and contribute original content to the ecosystem. By enabling cross-app currencies, new storefront API endpoints, and our C# SDK, developers and creators can better monetize these efforts further incentivizing participation in the creator economy. We are confident these platform features will supercharge the successes from Duro Dogs from the POV of creators.

On the user front, more creators means more fun, which typically leads to more users. To amplify this flywheel, we also completely reworked the onboarding process for all Asset Layer powered apps, massively reducing friction with email-based sign-in, a familiar process for the vast majority of gamers who do not currently have web3 wallets. Now with Asset Layer v2, Rolltopia and all future Asset Layer powered games can meet the hundreds of millions of gamers where they are and more easily grow their user bases, transforming the experience in multiplayer games or through social elements and communities like Discord.

Calling All Creators

We are really excited to start rolling out Rolltopia gameplay in the coming weeks! Both Asset Layer v2 and Rolltopia are expected to launch mid November. If you are a Unity developer interested in getting early access, either for Rolltopia development or your own Asset Layer powered game or app, please reach out to info@assetlayer.com.

Introducing Asset Layer v2 with Unity was originally published in Asset Layer on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

TLDR; we are developing a kick-ass new version of our API which will launch in August, but without a blockchain integration. We will continue supporting the existing API, and the new API will still support blockchain payments. The timing of the development of a blockchain integration for the new API will be dependent on factors like customer demand, available resources, and ease of implementation.

—

Today, we are announcing that we have begun developing an updated version of the Asset Layer API containing changes designed to help us to provide the ultimate platform for creating and managing interoperable digital assets. The most important, but also bittersweet change is that we will be replacing HandCash with a service called Magic as the foundation of Asset Layer’s login method and wallet solution.

The initial release is planned for this August and will include the updated API, SDK, and a demo app which will serve as the foundation of an integration with Unity, the world’s most used game development platform. We will continue to support the current version of our API after the release of the new API. Below, we are sharing the details of these changes as well as some of the factors behind our decision process.

Asset Layer API Changes

Our current API has two limitations which are deal breakers for most customers.

1. To use an Asset Layer app, you must have a HandCash wallet
2. To buy an NFT in an Asset Layer powered marketplace, you must use BSV

Neither of these are HandCash’s fault, and their team is already addressing these challenges. But, as we sought the right solution for Asset Layer, we decided to go in a different direction.

To address problem one, we are turning to Magic, one of the most widely adopted Web3-auth solutions. They provide a passwordless, email-based login method where an authenticated user has secure access to a public-private keypair, enabling the user to sign API requests and Bitcoin transactions. This fantastic combination of Web3 security and Web2 UX provides the right foundation for us to build a login and wallet solution for Asset Layer.

We are solving our second problem in two ways — in-app currencies and payment wallets. In-app currencies will have no max supply, with apps able to issue new units at their discretion. While there is no supply cap, well-designed games and apps will give these currencies real utility and value, providing an easy way to bootstrap an in-app economy with zero crypto onboarding. Through Asset Layer, these in-app currencies will also be shareable across apps, enabling cross-app economies.

We will also allow apps to add payment wallets to a user’s account, enabling assets to be traded for crypto in Asset Layer powered marketplaces. To start, we will support HandCash and BSV payments. Based on customer demand, we can add support for other popular wallets like Metamask, Phantom, or Ordinals Wallet, and the cryptos they support.

What’s the catch?

Hopefully these sound like fantastic changes delivered on a swift timeline! We agree, but there is an important catch.

Asset Layer’s goal is to provide the ultimate platform for creating and managing interoperable digital assets. In order to do so, we’ve strived to do each of the following:

1. Develop a framework for digital assets that maximizes utility
2. Provide unparalleled simplicity for users, devs, and creators
3. Create a blockchain record for all assets to maximize transparency, security, and interoperability

These are all important, but in the short term they conflict. Expanding our framework can add complexity for devs. Blockchain can make delivering new features expensive.

In the blockchain world, blockchain is almost always given priority. It’s either “on-chain”, or it’s pointless. We don’t look at Asset Layer this way. We believe Asset Layer is a game-changing digital asset platform with or without blockchain.

Along with our partners, we’ve built a blockchain integration with unparalleled efficiency and reliability. But, even a blockchain integration as successful as ours creates risks and limitations. For example, our token protocol RUN is no longer supported by the team that created it. 1Sat Ordinals is a promising alternative, but it is still new and unproven, and switching has a high cost.

We’ve decided to release the new version of Asset Layer without a blockchain integration. This will allow us to prioritize new features like in-app currencies, integrations with Unity and Discord, and improving UX. We think these features are what will create the most immediate value for customers. In the future, we will reintroduce blockchain. The timing will be determined by customer demand, ease of implementation, and available resources.

Additionally, we will be migrating Duro Dogs to our updated API, allowing us to remove onboarding friction, to turn “Treats” into an interoperable in-app currency, and to utilize our Unity integration to accelerate game development. However, this also means that Duro Dogs users, as well as the users of other apps that decide to migrate to the new API, will see their assets go off-chain temporarily. The function of these assets within apps will be unchanged, but they won’t have a blockchain record.

This decision strikes at the heart of an essential question — what makes an NFT valuable, the blockchain or the apps? Of course, the answer is both, but we’ve always felt that apps play the primary role. This gave us clarity when deciding which features to prioritize. For anyone who has additional questions about these changes, we recommend jumping into the Asset Layer or Duro Dogs discord to ask our team directly.

The Blockchain Builders Dilemma

Web3 is both a feature-set and a tech stack. The features include P2P marketplaces, application interoperability, and “data-ownership”. The tech stack is blockchain, layer two protocols, wallets, etc. While these features and technology are promising, if we set the standard for a killer app to things like Google search, Netflix, or Chat-GPT, then there is no blockchain equivalent. Web3 is still looking for product market fit.

This means blockchain builders are sandwiched between two moving targets: finding product market fit, and building on the right blockchain architecture. Finding product market fit is always hard, but what makes building on blockchain extremely challenging is the volatility of the underlying infrastructure.

Innovation in blockchain technology is great, but the constant pressure to build on an ever-shifting “current thing” can be crippling for builders. This pressure comes from the prevalence of speculators in today’s blockchain user-base. Speculators are very future oriented rather than present oriented. It’s all about what could be instead of what is.

We’ve experienced this dynamic firsthand at Asset Layer. When we initially built Asset Layer, RUN was the most adopted token solution on BSV, a blockchain with the feature-set we were seeking. We used RUN to build an extremely high-functioning token platform which now powers dozens of apps and millions of NFTs. Even so, our use of RUN has turned into a liability. We began losing customers who otherwise preferred our product simply because we were on “the wrong protocol”. Ultimately, some of our closest partners ended or diminished their relationships with us because we wouldn’t switch to the new, hot thing fast enough.

This experience, while frustrating, helped us to consider new possibilities. We were forced to ask ourselves whether we need blockchain at all? Could we deliver Web3 features without its tech stack? Our experience abstracting blockchain’s complexity placed us in a unique position to see that we could deliver features like P2P marketplaces, application interoperability, and data ownership without blockchain.

Our team are still blockchain believers, but we realized that we need to prioritize the things that get us product market fit first, and then figure out the blockchain integration once we have a product we know our customers love. We know this is the right choice for Asset Layer. We can’t say how other builders should deal with the challenges that come from simultaneously trying to use blockchain and also bring Web3 features to market. But, we hope our perspective will help builders better consider their options.

Major Asset Layer Update Coming This Summer was originally published in Asset Layer on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

NFT Photo Contest is an app we created for the London Blockchain Conference (LBC) to help demonstrate NFTs ability to drive engagement. In this post, we will show how we were able to build this app in just two days leveraging Asset Layer’s existing toolset.

In this post we will describe the process of creating NFT Photo Contest in detail, but first, here is a quick overview of how we used Asset Layer to build the app in a few simple steps.

1. Created a new Asset Layer app using our no-code creator tool at assetlayer.com/dashboard
2. Configured Asset Layer’s sample app with the new app details and deployed locally
3. Created example entries (NFT collections) for testing using the no-code creator tool
4. Modified the sample app to achieve the desired functionality
5. Bought a domain and deployed the modified sample app using GitHub + Netlify
6. Created collections and minted NFTs for new entries on-site at the conference using the no-code creator tool

The only step that required writing code was step 4. With the help of ChatGPT, our team’s worst engineer, CEO Jack Laskey, was able to complete all 6 steps in just about 20 hours of development time across a single work week.

If you want to create your own powerful NFT application in days or less, check out the rest of this post, our docs, or just head to assetlayer.com/dashboard and get started today!

What is NFT Photo Contest?

As the name suggests, the app was created to facilitate a contest. LBC attendees can enter by taking a picture at the conference, and then minting the picture as an NFT at the Asset Layer booth. Once an entry is minted, it can be viewed at nftphotocontest.com. There, anyone, whether they are a conference attendee or not, can vote on their favorite entries through the app.

The entries with the most votes receive prizes, and those prizes are distributed to the holders of the NFTs containing the winning entries. The entrants receive all of the NFTs to start, and they can share with friends, trade, or sell the NFTs at their discretion by sending them through the app. Entrants are encouraged to share links to their entries on social media, helping drive interest in the conference and in Asset Layer.

Building NFT Photo Contest

Step One: Set up a new Asset Layer app using our no-code creator tool at assetlayer.com/dashboard

In order to build a new Web3 app using Asset Layer, the first step is to create a new Asset Layer app. Apps on Asset Layer are used to create NFTs and manage access to NFTs. Each app has its own API credentials which determine which resources can be accessed through the Asset Layer API.

Setting up a new app only takes a few minutes. For a more detailed explanation of how to set up a new app on Asset Layer, check out this section from our docs.

Step Two: Configured Asset Layer’s Sample App with the new app details and deployed locally

Once our new app was created, we deployed the app locally using Asset Layer’s Sample App. Sample App is a ready-to-deploy next.js app that provides out of the box functionality for Web3 apps. It does so by having Asset Layer’s API already integrated. Further, it is designed to work without needing to manage a server or a database, making it easy to launch scalable apps fast. You can check out a live version of the Sample App here.

Today, Sample App comes already equipped with a NFT explorer and inventory manager. Soon, it will also come with a built-in marketplace out of the box as well as a storefront which can integrate with existing ecommerce solutions.

All you have to do to use Sample App is to fork the open-source repository on GitHub, and then input your API credentials. We have an entire video tutorial on how to create a new app and deploy it locally using Sample App which you can check out below. You can also get the same information directly from our docs.

Step Three: Create example entries (NFT collections) using Asset Layer’s no-code creator tool

After steps one and two, we had a working Web3 app already set up able to access our app’s NFTs. However, we still didn’t have any NFTs in our app after steps 1 and 2, and we’d need some to help us build out the rest of our app’s functionality in step 4. So, we used our no-code tool to create a few example collections for testing. These test collections were then deactivated before launch.

Before creating new collections, we had to define slots for our app. Slots are used to help organize NFTs within apps. They do so by grouping NFTs by functionality. You can read more about slots in the core concepts section in our docs.

For NFT Photo Contest, we only needed one slot, entries. The entries slot would contain collections, with each collection representing a specific entry into the contest. We also needed to define expressions for our slot. Expressions are used to add files to NFTs contained within a slot. By default, every slot in Asset Layer comes with a “Menu View” expression which accepts 500x500 image used within marketplaces and other menus. For the entries slot, we created an additional expression called “Full Image” which will be used to store the full sized, high-resolution image for the entry. You can read more about expressions in the core concepts section in our docs.

Once our slot and its expressions were defined, we were able to mint the test collections we needed. I decided to use an awesome picture of a gecko that I snapped on a recent trip to St. Simon’s Island in Georgia’s Golden Isles. Asset Layer has an easy no-code tool for creating collections and minting NFTs.

As soon as the collections are created and NFTs are minted, they are accessible inside of our deployment of Sample App. This is because these NFTs are a part of our Asset Layer app, and we are using our app’s API credentials to access Asset Layer. Asset Layer is designed to provide all of and only the NFTs relevant to your app based on your application’s set up through the no-code creator tool.

Step Four: Modified Sample App to achieve the desired functionality

Admittedly, this step took the longest and is the only step that required actual development work. Sample App provided a lot of the needed functionality out of the box, but there were a few things that needed to be changed.

• Needed a voting mechanism
• Added the ability to send NFTs to other users through the app
• Made the entries viewable even if a user isn’t logged in
• Changed navigation links to go directly to entries

Some of these features are things that we will take and add into the existing Sample App so future projects won’t have to redo this work. Adding these features may have been able to turn NFT Photo Contest into a one day project. Other features, such as voting are more specific to NFT Photo Contest, and there will almost always be at least some development work for creating a new app.

One feature worth highlighting is the voting mechanism. One of the great things about Sample App is that it is designed to work without a server or a database. By recording votes within the collections themselves, NFT Photo Contest could keep track of how many votes a collection had and who voted for what without needing to record that information in a database or running a server.

Step 5: Buy a domain and deploy the modified sample app using GitHub + Netlify

To be fully transparent, buying nftphotocontest.com was actually the first thing we did. But, deploying NFT Photo Contest to nftphotocontest.com was the last step in the process.

To do so, we utilized Netlify and GitHub. Netlify works extremely well with next.js apps like Sample App. All you have to do to deploy your app to your domain is to create a Netlify site, link it to your domain by adding a few nameservers to your domain, and then link your GitHub repository to your Netlify site. You can also add the app to an existing site with the same process by using a subdomain.

Netlify handles the scaling of your site, making it extremely easy to go live fast without managing servers. And, by storing information inside of NFTs, you don’t need a database either. We think that leveraging Asset Layer, Sample App, and Netlify together is the easiest way to create powerful Web3 applications like NFT Photo Contest. Here’s a section from our docs about how to deploy with Netlify.

Step 6: Create collections and mint NFTs for new entries using the no-code creator tool

Now, this step hasn’t actually happened yet, but once the contest begins, we will be creating collections and minting NFTs on-site at the conference using the no-code creator tool. Contestants will come to the booth, send us their picture over email, and then we will show them how to create a new collection and mint NFTs using Asset Layer. The collection creation and minting process only takes a few minutes, so everyone who wants to enter will be able to.

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We only developed the idea for NFT Photo Contest a few weeks ago. It was extremely exciting for us to see how all of the work we’ve done building the Asset Layer platform made it unbelievably easy to implement this idea and turn it into a reality.

If you are at the London Blockchain Conference, please come say hi at our booth and take an awesome photo to enter the contest. For those of you not in person with us in London, check out the entries at nftphotocontest.com to get a better feel for the conference and vote on your favorites.

Interested in creating your own NFT application? Make sure you check out our docs, and then head to assetlayer.com/dashboard to get started. If you want to get in touch with us to learn more and get support, you can also join our discord.

How We Built NFT Photo Contest in Under a Week was originally published in Asset Layer on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Last week Asset Layer launched one of our biggest updates in platform history when we introduced the ability to create and manage collections through our no-code tool, enabling users to quickly and easily create powerful web3 NFT collections which can interoperate across apps. This launch wrapped up ‘Phase B’ of our no-code tool, but we are just getting started!

In this post we will outline some of the most exciting parts of this year’s Asset Layer roadmap to give our rapidly growing community of devs and creators a better sense of what to expect over the next several months as they build cutting-edge web3 apps. Highlights include:

• Finish our no-code tool
• Interoperable marketplace with cross-app liquidity
• Expanded login options (additional web3 wallets + popular web2 options)
• Migration from RUN to 1Sat Ordinals

If you are reading this after our initial publication, visit this page on our website for an up to date version of our detailed roadmap. Let’s dive in!

Finish Our No-Code Tool

The Asset Layer API has been live for several months. During that time it has been busy minting, updating, and sending NFTs more than 10 million times for various web3 apps, most notably our own NFT powered digital pet game, Duro Dogs. Duro Dogs alone has created, issued, and manages close to 2 million NFTs all through the Asset Layer API.

Asset Layer’s no-code tool provides a huge upgrade to the web3 app development experience by making interfacing directly with our powerful Asset Layer API optional. Now, developers or non-technical creators can create, issue, and manage their app’s NFTs without writing a single line of code.

Asset Layer on Twitter: "Minting interoperable web3 NFTs has never been so easy! You don't need to write a single line of code.Collection creation and management through the Asset Layer no-code tool is live now. Sign up and start minting your collections today for free at https://t.co/pkdCdbkKkm!#NFT... pic.twitter.com/C81LFb5tE7 / Twitter"

Minting interoperable web3 NFTs has never been so easy! You don't need to write a single line of code.Collection creation and management through the Asset Layer no-code tool is live now. Sign up and start minting your collections today for free at https://t.co/pkdCdbkKkm!#NFT... pic.twitter.com/C81LFb5tE7

We’ve already launched the ability to create apps, collections, and mint NFTs all without writing code. In subsequent launches, we’ll be expanding on the types of collections that can be created, as well as adding support for submitting collections to third party apps enabling powerful creator economies. Asset Layer’s no-code tool is already the most powerful in the industry, and we cannot wait to see what our incredible community uses it to build as it continues to grow!

Interoperable Marketplace with Cross-App Liquidity

Asset Layer is all about interoperability, which is the foundation of web3. Later this year, we will release our marketplace where users can easily buy and sell Asset Layer powered NFTs. What’s so exciting about web3 marketplaces is that they share liquidity, meaning if many different apps use the same collection of NFTs (eg. a Duro Dog) a user can list one’s items for sale in one app and a different user can buy it in a different app. When a shared listing is sold, it is immediately removed from all of the marketplaces where it was listed. For developers, tapping into the next-gen Asset Layer marketplace will be a breeze by using the marketplace API endpoints.

We are really excited about this feature of Asset Layer. A truly web3 marketplace will make the experience of using legacy, siloed marketplaces feel old fashioned. Tired of scrolling through Ticketmaster, Stubhub, Seatgeek, AXS, etc, etc, etc to find the best concert ticket available at the best price? So are we. Welcome to the web3 marketplace powered by Asset Layer which solves that headache!

Expanded Login Options

At the core of web3 are wallets. Wallets store users’ funds, items, and, over time, become core to their identities. The only problem with wallets today is that relatively few people online have them. And those that do have them probably don’t have BSV wallets (yet). Many of our customers have highlighted this as a major pain point of the existing Asset Layer developer experience as they build powerful new web3 apps.

We are working on two solutions, both of which rapidly expand login and identity options for future users of Assert Layer powered apps, first to tens of millions and then to billions of newly accessible users.

1. Non-HandCash Web3 Wallet Support
2. Email & Social Login Support

We love HandCash! It’s the best web3 wallet in the world and we expect it to eventually have hundreds of millions or even billions of users! Today, however, requiring users of Asset Layer powered apps to have a HandCash wallet significantly increases the drop-off rate during onboarding, simply because most users don’t already have one. Luckily, Asset Layer is able to add support for today’s most popular web3 wallets like Metamask and provide users leveraging these options as an identity solution the same scalable and efficient Asset Layer experience.

If Metamask and other web3 wallets increase the reach of Asset Layer powered apps by tens of millions, the world’s most popular online identity solution, an email address, will expand that by the billions. The Asset Layer team is currently working on a solution to allow users to create accounts with only a verified email address which will be tied to Asset Layer powered web3 wallets invisible to the end user. In addition to email addresses, our web2 login options will also include popular social platforms like Twitter, Meta, Google, and more. Expect both of these major upgrades to the user and developer experience sometime in Q3 of this year!

Migration to 1Sat Ordinals

When we launched Asset Layer, RUN was by far the most widely used and high functioning token protocol available. Choosing to use it as Asset Layer’s token solution was a no brainer. To date, this decision has proven the right one, as our implementation of RUN enabled us to mint millions of NFTs and process tens of millions of transactions all without end users ever waiting for confirmations or paying a single penny in network transaction fees.

Over the last few months there has been an incredible buzz across the entire blockchain industry with the introduction of Ordinals. The 1Sat Ordinals implementation on Bitcoin SV supercharges Ordinals even further making it the most efficient and flexible token protocol available today. The emergence of this promising tech, coupled with the atrophy of the RUN protocol which is no longer maintained by its founding team, makes transitioning to 1Sat Ordinals another no-brainer for the Asset Layer platform.

Perhaps most exciting, the transition to 1Sat Ordinals allows us to make a major upgrade to the Asset Layer UX and demonstrate one of its existing superpowers.

The Upgrade

NFT lock-in has been a common criticism of the Asset Layer platform. Devs and creators love its interoperability, simplicity, and affordability, but they often don’t want to require their users to keep their NFTs in Asset Layer connected wallets. By moving to 1Sat Ordinals, we will be able to vastly improve the portability of Asset Layer NFTs, enabling users to move them to their own wallets and back into Asset Layer powered applications with ease.

Our Superpower

Asset Layer is a platform built on top of a token protocol built on top of a blockchain. 99% of future web3 application devs will not know any blockchain jargon or the details of specific token protocol implementations. This is all plumbing. Let Asset Layer do your plumbing! This is one of Asset Layer’s superpowers: our ability to improve our backend without requiring our customers to make any adjustments to their apps. For example, when we migrate from RUN to the new best-available solution, 1Sat Ordinals, devs and creators who have built Asset Layer powered apps won’t have to make any changes to their app logic or NFTs. Most likely won’t even notice we transitioned. If you are a web3 app developer we want you to focus on creating the best apps possible, leave the infrastructure management to us. And, importantly, don’t build your apps in such a way that every time a new infrastructure improvement comes along you are forced to either stay on the old, inferior tech OR rearchitect your app. By building with Asset Layer you can have your cake and eat it too!

Build With Us!

The Asset Layer team couldn’t be more excited to roll out these upgrades to our platform. If you are new to Asset Layer or haven’t checked it out recently, please do so today at assetlayer.com! Sign up and start building your first web3 app without spending a penny! We cover all blockchain transaction fees and have a generous free tier!

For a more detailed version of our 2023 roadmap, visit the page on our website. If you have any questions please join our discord and get in touch!

What’s Next For Asset Layer? was originally published in Asset Layer on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

We are extremely excited to announce that we are planning to migrate Asset Layer from RUN to the new 1Sat Ordinals protocol. At Asset Layer, we place a huge priority on simplicity and interoperability, and we think this aligns well with the ethos of 1Sat Ordinals. Through this migration, Asset Layer apps and users will be able to experience unprecedented degrees of interoperability and benefit from the growing number of talented developers supporting the 1Sat Ordinals protocol in various ways.

When will this migration happen and what does this all mean for current Asset Layer apps and users? For the answers to all of your questions and more, please read the FAQs below. If you have any other questions, please join our Discord where you can find answers for all things Asset Layer and connect with other Asset Layer builders!

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Q: Why is Asset Layer migrating to 1Sat Ordinals?

A: When we chose RUN for Asset Layer, it was the token protocol on BSV with the most support and adoption. For better or worse, this is no longer the case. Given how early the BSV ecosystem was in its development when we started working on Asset Layer, we anticipated the gold standard of token protocol might change over time, so we built Asset Layer to be flexible enough to seamlessly switch protocols if/when it was needed.

After the launch and rapid adoption of 1Sat Ordinals, and considering the dedicated team behind 1Sat Ordinals, we feel as though 1Sat Ordinals will be the token protocol on BSV with the most support and adoption if it isn’t already. This means both Asset Layer and our users will be able to benefit from products and services developed by other community members, accelerating our development and accessing greater utility.

Importantly, adopting 1Sat Ordinals will also improve the interoperability of Asset Layer. Asset Layer is already a pioneer in application interoperability. By migrating to 1Sat Ordinals, it will be easier for users and apps to bring their NFTs into and out of the Asset Layer ecosystem. While we are more excited about users and apps coming into the Asset Layer ecosystem, we also recognize that it’s important that we don’t impose unnecessary platform lock-in onto our customers. Using a well supported protocol like 1Sat Ordinals will ensure that our customers have options.

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Q: When will Asset Layer be migrating to 1Sat Ordinals?

A: We are projecting the completion of our migration in Q4 of this year. Fortunately, the RUN protocol is still working extremely well for us. We also want to give the 1Sat Ordinals team more time to work out the kinks before we migrate the 5M+ and growing Asset Layer NFTs. For those reasons, we will continue to prioritize other elements of our existing roadmap, such as launching our marketplace, before we begin working on the Ordinals migration. We’ll be sharing more about our vision for Asset Layer and publishing our roadmap shortly.

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Q: Will current Asset Layer apps and users have to do anything for this migration?

A: No! We designed Asset Layer to work the same way regardless of the underlying token protocol. Our API and data model will be unchanged, so all of your application code will work the same before and after the migration. As a part of the migration, we will also remint all NFTs in the background and distribute them to their proper owners, meaning application users will have a totally consistent experience before and after the migration. This is something we have already done in the past as part of Asset Layer upgrades. Even better, we will do our best to do the migration with zero time offline.

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Q: Will NFTs be transferable from Asset Layer to other 1Sat Ordinals wallets and platforms?

A: Yes, but we most likely will not be able to provide the same level of service for NFTs that are outside of the Asset Layer ecosystem. There are some features we offer that simply require NFTs to be in wallets managed by Asset Layer. So, if NFTs are sent to wallets outside of the Asset Layer ecosystem, they may be inaccessible to apps using the Asset Layer API, or may be accessible but without the same set of features and level of performance. Stay tuned for our upcoming roadmap announcement to learn more about how we are greatly expanding the scope of the Asset Layer ecosystem.

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Q: Will NFTs be transferable from 1Sat Ordinals wallets and platforms into Asset Layer?

A: Yes! There may be a delay between the initial migration and launching some of these features, but we will provide ways of easily porting collections on 1Sat Ordinals into the Asset Layer ecosystem to be able to leverage our powerful features and easy-to-use toolset. However, if you are considering building on 1Sat Ordinals now and migrating to Asset Layer later, we would recommend building on Asset Layer now. We are confident that you can build more faster using Asset Layer today, and then take advantage of the 1Sat Ordinals protocol and ecosystem through our upcoming migration.

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Q: Why build with Asset Layer instead of directly on 1Sat Ordinals?

A: Put simply, we think that Asset Layer is the right layer for most developers and creators rather than working directly with 1Sat Ordinals or any other token protocol. Building with 1Sat Ordinals or any other token protocol requires creating and indexing transactions, managing wallets, managing crypto to pay fees or requiring one’s users to pay fees, and a host of other complexities that are only magnified by scale. Early BSV adopters may find this to be an exciting challenge, but we believe that most builders will prefer a solution like Asset Layer which abstracts away these complexities through an easy to use toolset.

In addition to making the basics like minting and sending simple, Asset Layer opens up a world of advanced functionality. Asset Layer makes it easy to create NFTs with many different files, edit NFT files and data, share NFTs across apps, equip NFTs to one another to create NFT structures, permission access to NFTs, and much more. There is no NFT platform as feature rich as Asset Layer today.

Our migration to 1Sat Ordinals reveals another benefit to building with a solution like Asset Layer instead of directly at the token protocol layer. Like 1Sat Ordinals became a better choice than RUN, it is possible another token protocol comes along which is a better option than 1Sat Ordinals. Like we are switching from RUN to 1Sat Ordinals today, we can migrate again if needed or diversify our support. In this way, building on Asset Layer is a “future-proof” solution relative to building directly on a specific token protocol.

1Sat Ordinals Are Coming to Asset Layer was originally published in Asset Layer on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

In the late 2010s, the business world began to see the potential of blockchain to provide transformative efficiency, transparency, and interoperability to business processes across a wide range of verticals. But, blockchain’s newness and complexity introduced significant costs and risks to businesses that would want to try to leverage its benefits.

Blockchain-as-a-Service was quickly adopted as the answer for gun-shy enterprises seeking to take their first steps into the blockchain world. By wrapping blockchain essentials into an API and throwing in significant technical support resources, businesses were sure to be building their own dApps in no time. Not only were blockchain startups throwing their hats into the BaaS ring, but major cloud providers like AWS, Azure, Oracle, Alibaba, and more joined in on the party, launching their own hosted BaaS solutions, often leveraging the newer, private blockchain technologies like IBM’s Hyperledger. Five years later, blockchain is adopted by businesses worldwide bringing significant cost savings and new features across an increasingly connected global economy. Just kidding!

Why BaaS Hasn’t Worked

BaaS has failed to make much of a dent in the business world. AWS, Oracle, and others are languishing with few customers in general and even fewer to no truly successful applications. Azure actually called it quits and closed shop on its blockchain offerings. Blockchain startups haven’t fared much better. Plenty of promising proofs of concepts have been announced, ceremonially bringing a number of enterprise names into the “blockchain era”, but very few if any non-blockchain native businesses are using blockchain at scale today.

Why hasn’t BaaS worked? We’ve identified three main reasons. First, BaaS solutions are often not well designed and lack essential blockchain functionality or can’t scale in a cost effective manner. Second, BaaS is still far too complex. Generally speaking, BaaS solutions don’t actually tackle the problem of making blockchain simpler — they just host services like node infrastructure on behalf of clients and then wrap the node’s API which is usually extremely low-level and complex. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, BaaS is simply the wrong product. BaaS assumes that enterprises want to build blockchain applications. At Asset Layer, we have a different view. We don’t think enterprises want to build blockchain applications. What they need are better digital assets.

Better Digital Assets are what Businesses are Seeking from Blockchain

Blockchain technology is often referred to as DLT, distributed ledger technology. The key word there is ledger. Blockchain is basically the world’s most advanced ledger technology. And what do ledgers do? They track assets. So, if blockchain is the tool, digital assets are what that tool is used for. Better digital assets which are secure, efficient, auditable, programmable, and interoperable is the real benefit of blockchain to enterprise.

Blockchain use cases further corroborate the centrality of better digital assets. Supply-chain is one of the most touted and explored blockchain use cases. The key benefit being sought is greater interoperability and transparency to bring efficiency to the supply-chain and provide visibility to the consumer. This is achieved by creating digital assets to represent goods in a supply-chain. By having better digital assets, we can get better supply-chains.

Commercial records are another enterprise (and Government) use case which depends on better digital assets. Records for things like licenses, deeds, stock certificates, and even concert tickets can all benefit through the use of better digital assets to provide greater transparency, more efficient transfer, and easy interoperability across applications where these records are needed. Even more complex records like legal documents, invoices, and more can start to benefit from greater automation due to the security, efficiency, and transparency of digital assets on a blockchain.

Payments are just a special case of digital asset transfers, something at which blockchain excels. Not only are blockchain payments more efficient, but by being on a central ledger with other digital assets, automating payments across a supply chain, as part of a legal contract, and more can help bring a huge amount of efficiency to the business world.

Gaming and the Metaverse are other verticals which have recognized the power of better digital assets, in particular for their interoperability. Billions of dollars in venture capital as well as major in-house investments at companies like Meta have been directed at making everything from characters, skins, and weapons down to lower level features like sprites, animations, and sounds interoperable between games. Better digital assets make their contents interoperable, and they can become the basis of next-gen applications like the Metaverse.

Digital-Assets-as-a-Service is what Businesses Need

At Asset Layer, we saw the failure of BaaS companies and realized a new approach was needed. Businesses don’t need to build blockchain apps. They need better digital assets. Accordingly, we have built the first Digital-Assets-as-a-Service product to make it fast, easy, and affordable to create and manage better digital assets. Asset Layer’s API and no-code tools truly remove the complexity of blockchain for business. Because our customers are creating and managing digital assets, not building blockchain apps, the complexity of blockchain is truly irrelevant. We use blockchain so our customers don’t have to.

Unlike BaaS companies, we don’t ask our customers to build their own private blockchain, write smart contracts, create blockchain transactions, run nodes, learn new coding languages, manage cryptocurrency, choose a blockchain, query blockchains, deploy blockchain applications, learn about sidechains, layer-twos or zero-knowledge proofs, manage keys and addresses, or make their customers manage keys and addresses. Instead, we make it simple for our customers to create the digital assets they need, and use them how they want.

While we don’t want our customers dealing with blockchain, we do recognize that it’s blockchain’s ability to securely and efficiently manage better digital assets that has allowed us to build a product which we think can ultimately unify the world’s digital assets. The blockchain revolution so many have predicted will come to pass, but it won’t be from businesses building blockchain apps. It will be from businesses leveraging better digital assets.

Digital-Assets-as-a-Service Delivers What Blockchain-as-a-Service Started was originally published in Asset Layer on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Asset Layer is a platform that empowers bold creators and app developers to build amazing new experiences leveraging digital assets. Digital assets combine files and data with a mechanism for ownership, and Asset Layer is the simplest, most affordable way to create and manage digital assets. Asset Layer uses blockchain to manage the ownership of digital assets. Blockchain is an amazing tool for digital assets, enabling far greater security, ownability, transferability, auditability, programmability, and interoperability of digital assets. Asset Layer is unique in that it is the first product which truly handles all of the blockchain complexity for our customers, making it simple and affordable to create applications which leverage these better, blockchain-powered digital assets.

What is the Asset Layer platform?

Our platform is a complete solution to create and manage digital assets, containing the following components

API + SDK: The foundation of the platform is our digital asset API. This API handles the creation and management of digital assets. What makes the API special is that it removes ALL of the blockchain complexity. No dealing smart contracts, paying fees, managing keys or transactions — we take care of all of that so builders can focus on creating apps.

No-code tool: Our dashboard + no-code tool will make it easy for builders, technical or non-technical, to create and manage digital assets. Whether you are creating digital assets for a game or app, or just want to sell collectibles in our marketplace, you can do so without writing a line of code.

Marketplace: In addition to providing a marketplace which apps and creators can use to sell digital assets and allow their users to trade those assets, our API also provides tools for apps to build their own marketplace and to connect that marketplace to other marketplaces connected to our API in order to share listings and get maximum reach for your tradable digital assets.

Cloud storage: Digital assets for games and other apps can involve a lot of data. Apps can store files for digital assets using Asset Layer to make them easily accessible to other apps that want to use those digital assets.

Wallet: Together with our partner HandCash, we’ve created a fantastic wallet solution for digital assets. The HandCash wallet makes it easy for your customers to sign into apps and be able to access their digital assets wherever they go. The wallet is the best feature of Web3, and Asset Layer is delivering the best wallet experience in the business.

Who is Asset Layer for?

Verticals from gaming, to supply chain, to healthcare all make use of digital assets, and Asset Layer is for any business leveraging digital assets. But, we really created Asset Layer for apps and creators that are looking to take advantage of the types of features made uniquely possible by blockchain-powered digital assets which are easily tradable and interoperable.

In particular, Asset Layer today is a solution that is especially well suited to games and other B2C apps that are seeking to create tradable digital assets or form creator economies. We built Asset Layer as a solution to the problems we were having building games which leveraged blockchain-based digital assets. Our game Duro Dogs has used over 2,000,000 digital assets and been responsible for over 5,000,000 digital asset transactions. We built Asset Layer to be applicable across verticals, but we know firsthand how powerful Asset Layer is to help creator economies form around interoperable digital assets in games.

Speaking of creators, Asset Layer is built for you too. We know how important non-technical creators are to making beautiful games and apps across the web. Asset Layer is a great place for non-technical creators to contribute assets to games or other apps, or sell digital art or collectibles directly to your audience using our no-code tools and marketplace.

If you aren’t sure if Asset Layer is a fit for your goals as an app or as a creator, reach out to us here and we can help you evaluate whether or not Asset Layer is a good fit and help you get the most out of Asset Layer.

What is Asset Layer? was originally published in Asset Layer on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.