Paima Studios, the developer of L2 frameworks, has introduced a groundbreaking method to access transaction metadata directly from Cardano’s smart contracts language, Plutus. The newly developed Aiken smart contract enables access to the transaction hash, which contains the metadata. This breakthrough opens up exciting possibilities for NFT AMMs, on-chain gaming, interoperability, and more.
As Cardano continues to expand its decentralized ecosystem, one of the challenges it has faced is the inability of Plutus, the native smart contracts language, to access transaction metadata. This limitation has hindered the development of NFTs, on-chain games, and other applications on the network. However, Paima Studios, a Web3 application engine firm, has successfully addressed this challenge.
Sebastien Guillemot, co-founder of Paima, announced the new update over the weekend, stating, “We managed to get a Cardano Plutus script to validate CIP25 metadata. This has significant implications and enables many new use-cases, including NFT AMMs, new interoperability standards, and on-chain games. Furthermore, we have made it open-source.”
Cardano NFTs, which have gained increasing popularity, are issued under the token standard CIP25. This standard, similar to Ethereum’s ERC-721, defines how NFT issuers specify attributes such as image, name, URL, and more in the transaction metadata.
Previously, Cardano developers faced challenges due to Plutus’ inability to access this metadata. This limitation prevented dApps built on Cardano from utilizing this data effectively and restricted the full potential of NFTs on the network.
It’s important to note that this issue is not unique to Cardano. Even Ethereum, a more advanced blockchain, faces similar challenges. Ethereum developers have addressed this problem by using oracles that link to off-chain data or implementing complex mechanisms.
Cardano developers have also attempted to solve this challenge, with the most common solution being the introduction of a new improvement proposal, CIP68. However, this solution created new challenges. Many tools built on Cardano still support the previous standard, CIP25, and it is costlier due to the use of datums, which require twice as many UTXOs.
To tackle Cardano’s NFT transaction metadata challenge, Guillemot and his team at Paima propose a new approach that allows direct access to metadata through Plutus, regardless of the token standard. They achieve this by utilizing Plutus to access the transaction hash, which contains the metadata.
Under this proposal, a Plutus smart contract is equipped with the final transaction hash and verifies that all the other fields match the hash. Guillemot explained the mechanics behind this approach, stating, “We built an Aiken smart contract that reconstructs the transaction binary data in Aiken and checks if it matches the hash. This answers the questions of feasibility and efficiency.”
Through their research, Guillemot’s team discovered that this new approach costs half as much as the existing CIP68 standard, as it reduces the number of UTXOs required.
In other news, ADA, the native cryptocurrency of Cardano, is currently trading at $0.3744, experiencing a 2.36% gain in the past day. It briefly dropped to a 24-hour low of $0.3335 before recovering.
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