Overview
The Enterprise Digital Assets Platform
Last updated
The Enterprise Digital Assets Platform
Last updated
Instamint is a B2B platform for enterprises (think: companies and organizations) for minting, managing, auctioning, staking, fractionalizing and trading digital fungible and non-fungible business assets. The platform works with multiple chains and has a growing library of types of assets it can handle. It is a B2B platform, and thus a platform to/for other platforms and not ideal for retail users. It combines extensive off-chain value propositions and capabilities with on-chain token management. The goal of Instamint is to help enterprises go to market with tokean applications faster, easier and with integration tools out of the box.
In all enterprise use cases, privacy, security and integration-readiness is critical. Instamint layers on top of decentralized platforms a set of services that driver deeper value propositions and let enterprises adopt blockchain, tokens and DeFi more seamlessly.
Instamint is not just another NFT API but a suite of enterprise-grade tools that deliver to the most demanding enterprise requirements and SLAs. Currently, Instamint is not open to the public and only available to early access users.
An asset is minted by posting a rich set of parameters to the Instamint minting service API, as shown below.
Although Instamint is a hybrid of centralized and decentralized technology, the roadmap for Instamint is to push more and more assets on-chain as it becomes feasible from a technical and business point of view. The core value proposition of Instamint is to allow more rapid time-to-market for enterprise business applications that happen to use, at least in part, tokens.
Currently, Instamint consists of three sets of APIs, each serving a specific purpose for clients. They are:
API | Description |
---|---|
Meta | Manage digital assets across chains |
Disburse | Manage royalties, fractionalization, auctions, portfolios and payment settlement |
Yield | Integration with best-of-breed DeFi protocols |
In addition to the APIs, Instamint includes Console, a dashboard application where clients and delegated users can track their inventory of assets, visually design new assets, move funds, manage API keys and view analytics.
Console includes an emerging feature called Designer. Designer allows the visual construction of asset metadata using taxonomies like ACTUS and others, allowing business analysts to create new asset types with no technical knowledge prerequisites.
The Instamint asset template library is a library of the types and templates of assets that can be minted in turnkey fashion. For example, a municipal bond may be in the asset library and any entity in the US that wishes to mint a municipal bond can simply use the template if it meets their requirements.
Slated for Q1 2023, integration of Tableau to query and graph analytic data will be released for Ethereum and Algorand assets. Currently, a Tableau integration is available for test users.
Within the context of Instamint, a token represents a business asset. Each token has a unique token identifier or asset id and typically points to rich data that describes and defines that asset. The asset may be an image, a video, a municipal bond, shipping container or an award badge. Instamint provides the tools to manage these type of assets via an API. Each asset also has an Instamint-based unique identifier that correlates to the on-chain asset or token ID. An Instamint asset is synonymous with a token although the Instamint asset may have richer data, where the token is a portion of that.
A client is an enterprise user of Instamint that typically has multiple delegated users. For example, ABC Corp. would be such a client. John Smith, in the accounting department of ABC, may be tasked with tokenizing and factoring invoices while Rita Khan in legal uses Instamint to mint DAOs to hold assets, much like LLCs are done today. John and Rita would be delegated users of ABC Corp, delegated usage rights by the client ABC Corp.
Instamint parties are entities, human or corporate, that have relationships with business assets. The three type of parties typically associated with an asset are issuers or creators, owners and custodians. Parties are created and registered in Instamint as simply a named entity with an Ethereum and Algorand address generated for them.
When a new client account is created, an associated 1:1 party entity is created. The same is for delegated users, each delegated user is also a party that can hold and trade assets. Delegated users are typically associated with the idea of a login and username, or a human. Parties can be created that are not affiliated with a delegated user, but all parties are affiliated with some client.
Each party has a unique party ID and each party can be associated with one or more blockchain accounts or wallets. A party can be tracked via a cross reference tag, meaningful only to the partner or client that supplies it.
A Party has a 1:1 correlation with a Stripe Customer. When a Party is created, a customer in Stripe is created and a balance is maintained in two currencies. Currently, Stripe supports payouts in USDC and Instamint defaults to USD as the trading currency. To accelerate development, integration with Stripe is currently done in parallel with simulated balances including Stripe test balances.
An Instamint asset has at least three types of parties associated with it - issuer, owner and custodian. All of these parties roll up to a client. Initially, a new asset's issuer is the client or a delegated user of the client. For example, Rita that issues a token under an enterprise Ethereum or Algorand address that rolls up to the client. By default, when issued, a token is also owned by the issuer and can only be sold by the owner.
Instamint acts as custodian of the token. The option to move the token outside of the custody of Instamint will be released Q1 2023, a release where self-custodied tokens and smart contracts would be possible.
Usage of the API is metered via consumption of ops, akin to gas (but not gas), is a point system that is weighted against the amount of effort it takes to execute the call. For example, minting may cost 100 ops and getting the status of a minting request may cost 5 ops.
Clients purchase ops and consume them when consuming APIs. Clients can allocate ops to their delegated users and reload their accounts with more ops.
Currently, Instamint supports only two currencies - USD and USDC. Settlement occurs with either of these two currencies. Additional currencies are being explored, including DAI, USDT and potentially a future CBDC.
Instamint is multichain, meaning that tokens can be minted across a number of blockchains, currently Ethereum and Algorand (testing). Additional chains are planned to be supported and come online over the coming quarters.
Chain | Support Level | Contract Types |
---|---|---|
Ethereum | Mainnet | ERC721, ERC1155 |
Algorand | Testnet | ARC3 |