A Journey Completed: Announcing Our Open Source Release
We are thrilled to announce the culmination of a journey that has spanned over 2.5 years. What began as a project to deliver tooling for NFTs, tokens, and reputation on the IOTA and Shimmer L1s has now reached a significant milestone: we are open-sourcing the entire platform.
Throughout this journey, we have remained independent of venture capitalists and private entities. Our focus has always been on building a product that didn’t exist on the IOTA and Shimmer L1s, and we have done so without the financial backing of any external benefactors outside of the community. For the past several months, our team has worked full-time without salaries, driven by the vision of creating an open-source platform that anyone can modify and build upon.
All of our intellectual property (IP) is now in the hands of the community. We have retained nothing privately for ourselves. This decision underscores our commitment to community-driven development and the open-source ethos. While the adoption and success of the IOTA and Shimmer L1s may be uncertain, that is a separate discussion from the open-source technology we are now offering to the community.
What We Are Open Sourcing
We are not just open-sourcing Soonaverse; we are releasing an open platform designed to manage digital twins, NFTs, reputation, tokens, token exchanges, real-world assets (RWA), and much more. This comprehensive framework includes both frontend and backend tooling, software development kits (SDKs), and automated test frameworks for on-chain and off-chain use cases. It is a complete suite of products that can be deployed within days, if not hours, at minimal cost.
Our platform is delivered as a multichain product. It currently integrates with IOTA and Shimmer, but it can easily be adapted to work with IOTA 2.0 and other chains, including Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) chains. While some aspects may need to be expanded or modified for certain use cases, that is the nature of open-source development. Importantly, this is a tested product that has been in production for two years, handling nearly $20 million in value and successfully withstanding high traffic and attempted hacks.
The Journey
Our journey was far from ideal, and it’s important to acknowledge that. We started by building a reputation system, then launched an NFT marketplace to secure funding. Encouraged by leadership within the IOTA Foundation, we took on the challenge of building necessary tooling on L1. This initial phase led us to develop an NFT marketplace, not as an end in itself, but as a means to continue funding our broader goals.
As our NFT marketplace gained traction, we expanded our focus to include token management and exchanges on L1. However, these early efforts were centralized, and we faced criticism for that. At the time, we were working with limited functionality at the protocol level and did not yet have Shimmer. We knew we needed to build up assets, communities, and a user base to launch into Shimmer and kickstart its ecosystem, which we achieved.
By mid-2022, amidst a massive market crash, we lost a significant amount of funding. Nonetheless, we transitioned our entire suite to be Shimmer-native, migrating assets from our centralized system using immature Shimmer’s SDKs without established testing frameworks or tooling. This effort enabled our NFT modules, token exchanges, token migrations, and reputation systems to be Shimmer-native.
Throughout 2022 and 2023, 99% of assets on Shimmer originated from Soonaverse. Despite the shrinking user IOTA community, we transformed our platform into a generic one that anyone could use to create their own marketplace, APIs, and projects. This shift towards a SaaS model was a significant effort, accomplished under continuous resource constraints.
In 2023, we focused on removing proprietary technology and migrating from Firebase to PostgreSQL. This massive effort, undertaken by a small team, was completed earlier this year. We cleaned up our SDKs, improved documentation, and now, while acknowledging that more work is needed, we feel ready to open this project to the community for further development.
The Road Ahead
The transition to open source marks not the end, but a new beginning. We recognize that our work is far from complete. There is still much to be done, and we invite the community to join us in refining and expanding this project. We encourage everyone to explore our GitHub repository, review our commit history, and contribute to this collective endeavor.
In conclusion, we are immensely proud of what we have achieved and are excited to see how the community will build upon our work. Together, we can continue to innovate and drive the adoption of Layer 1 technology, creating a more decentralized and inclusive digital future.
