HashAxis is a global NFT marketplace for crypto collectible non-fungible tokens (NFTs). Buy, sell, and discover exclusive digital assets. HashAxis required a cost-effective, scalable, and carbon-negative network to underpin its NFT marketplace to provide participants with a best-in-class experience.

HashAxis uses Hedera for fast, scalable, and low-cost NFTs

HashAxis utilizes the Hedera Token Service — combined with native atomic swap and royalty functionalities on Hedera — to mint, manage, and trade NFTs. Hedera’s low and predictable fees, fast performance, and carbon-negative transactions bolster adoption, retention, and usage by artists and NFT projects alike on the platform.

Native NFT royalties for secondary sales

HashAxis takes advantage of Hedera’s native NFT royalty functionality, making it simple for NFT creators to incorporate royalty fees into a token. This ensures payment to the creator for any secondary sales where cryptocurrency is swapped for an NFT. Native royalties on Hedera avoid configuration of complex smart contracts and performs this complex operation more efficiently.

The platform also allows for a fallback royalty if an NFT is only transferred and not swapped for cryptocurrency — in this scenario, a cited minimum amount of HBAR will need to be paid by the sender to the creator in order to successfully transfer the token.

Scalable token transfers (10,000 tps)

Benchmarks for the Hedera Token Service point to token transfer performance on the Hedera mainnet at an estimated 9,997 transfers per second (with a throttle of 10k TPS) and settlement time of 2 - 3 seconds with transaction finality. This level of scalability ensures that both senders and receives of NFTs on the HashAxis marketplace experience the fastest settlement times and no network congestion.

Low, predictable fees for NFTs

Hedera's fee schedule is set by the Hedera Governing Council and always based in USD, but paid in HBAR — making HashAxis’ development costs easy to predict and estimate. Below is a simplified version of the fee schedule for the most used API calls related to non-fungible tokens on Hedera:

For more information on fee estimation for non-fungible tokens, please visit the fee estimator.

Carbon negative footprint

For a majority of artists and creators using HashAxis, it’s important that their work doesn’t burden the environment — NFTs on proof-of-work networks such as Ethereum are infamous for their environmental impact. Hedera has adopted environmental sustainability as a core value and is officially committed to carbon-negative network operations by purchasing carbon offsets quarterly.

Not only are NFTs on Hedera minted and transferred with the lowest carbon footprint of any public network, according to a recent report by the University College London, but Hedera’s purchasing of carbon offsets on a quarterly basis ensures a negative footprint for any developer or end user utilizing the network.

Filecoin decentralized storage for Hedera NFT content and metadata

Hedera brings highly-efficient capabilities for NFT minting, issuance, and transfer, while Filecoin’s IPFS network offers a publicly accessible robust, flexible large-scale storage layer. Combining Hedera with Filecoin delivers a truly decentralized NFT experience for users of the HashAxis platform. Filecoin acts as a decentralized storage layer for both digital media content and metadata of NFTs on the Hedera network. This ensures a maximum amount of trust and potentially life-long persistence of in-game assets, art, music, and any other types of digital media.

HashAxis utilizes the Filecoin network (IPFS) via Estuary for storing Hedera NFT media and, separately, metadata in a JSON format. Through Estuary, it’s guaranteed (for now) that any content pinned to Filecoin will permanently persist.

When uploaded to the Filecoin network, a CID (content identifier) is created listed within each HashAxis listing for pinning to IPFS on Filecoin’s network. Pinning is the mechanism that allows you to tell IPFS to always keep a given object somewhere on the network. Anyone can pay into that CID to ensure that an object (in this case, media for an NFT) will continue to persist on the Filecoin network — this ensures that NFT holders are not bound to any centralized storage mechanism, such as AWS or Google Cloud, for the associated media and metadata to persist.

Pictured: (1. IPFS CID Link for Filecoin Pinning)