Supercharging the Entrepot Marketplace Experience

Toniq Labs
5 min readNov 9, 2022

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We’ve been working hard to bring new features to Entrepot, and we’re excited to announce four major releases today:

  1. Volt smart wallets (live)
  2. Binding offers (live)
  3. English auctions (limited release)
  4. Marketplace interoperability (coming soon)

Volt Smart Wallets (now available)

Volt is our new smart contract wallet solution. Volt supercharges your existing main wallet, giving it new features and abilities. A Volt wallet uses your very own wallet canister, which means you own it and there is a small initial cost of 0.25 ICP to top up the canister with initial cycles. (see technical details below)

You can create a Volt wallet directly in Entrepot for your logged-in wallet. Once you create your Volt wallet, you’ll be able to access many advanced features including:

  • Binding Offers
  • Auctions
  • Secure transfers (approved by receiver)
  • Trading NFTs from other marketplaces (interoperability)

The Volt smart wallet shows up in Entrepot as an additional balance under your main wallet balance. ICP is loaded into your smart wallet in order to make offers on NFTs, bid on auctions, or list external NFTs on Entrepot.

Binding Offers (now available)

You can now make binding offers on NFTs in Entrepot! This means you can make an NFT offer and the seller can accept it to automatically initiate the sale. The offers interface will be the same as it has always been, but now the offers are binding instead of indicative 🎉

One benefit to offers in Entrepot is you don’t have to wrap ICP in order to make offers. Simply make sure you’ve topped up your Volt wallet with ICP and you are good to go!

You can make as many offers as you would like as long as each offer is less than the amount of ICP in your Volt wallet. If your Volt wallet ICP balance drops below your offer amount, your offers will be automatically canceled.

English Auctions (limited release)

We are starting to roll out auction functionality on Entrepot! The first auction on Entrepot is live now — the Poked Studio Pixel Collection. NFT creators will be able to set a starting price, minimum increment, and duration for the auction. Initially, this will be a restricted feature as we solidify functionality, but we’ll soon enable this for all creators.

Again, we are enabling auction functionality with native ICP (powered by Volt smart wallets), so you can make bids on NFTs without ICP leaving your wallet. This also means that there are no fees to make bids on NFTs.

Marketplace Interoperability (coming soon)

Our goal for a long time has been to enable better marketplace interoperability on the Internet Computer, and we’re finally doing it! You will soon be able to trade Yumi, CCC, or Jelly NFTs directly on Entrepot, no NFT or ICP wrapping required.

Marketplace interoperability is again powered by our Volt smart wallet solution. Just transfer your external NFT into your Volt wallet and as long as the NFT standard is supported by our marketplace micro-service, then you can list it on Entrepot!

Thank you!

We couldn’t do any of this without community support, so to celebrate the IC community, we will be giving away a few thousand Volt smart wallet canisters for free to top Entrepot users. We have whitelisted several thousand of the most engaged Entrepot users and upon creating your Volt wallet all costs will be covered by Toniq. If so, we’ll pay the canister creation fee and top up your canister with a few trillion cycles.

We hope you enjoy these new features, and we can’t wait to drop a few more updates before the end of the year.

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Technical Appendix

For all the technical folks, Volt smart wallets power all of the new features we are releasing. So let’s dive a bit deeper to explain how we built our Volt smart wallets.

True Ownership:

You truly own your Volt smart wallet. This means nobody can make changes to your Volt wallet and you are the only one that can upgrade your smart wallet canister. Toniq doesn’t even have control of your Volt wallet.

Immutable:

You can only upgrade your smart wallet from the verified Toniq Volt factory canister (for now). This is the only upgrade source as there are security concerns if we open it up too early. In the future, anyone can spin up a smart wallet factory and enable upgrades for smart wallet canisters. The factory canister is black holed, meaning nobody can change the code installed on the canister.

Upgradeable:

There is an admin gated function on the factory canister which allows Toniq to add new smart wallet code. This is how we will upgrade the smart wallet code over time. The factory code won’t ever change (see the “Immutable” section), but we can upload new smart wallet canister code using the admin gated method. On the user side, you can make a call to the factory to upgrade your smart wallet whenever you want. If you don’t want to upgrade, nobody can make you. These upgrades will usually happen as you interact with assets in the marketplace anyway, so generally you don’t need to think about upgrades.

Resistant to Running Out of Cycles:

Users must keep their own Volt wallets topped up with cycles. This may worry some users because if they forget, their smart wallet runs out of cycles and the canister gets deleted. The good news is that even if this happens, you don’t lose anything. The canister doesn’t store any data, so you can just send more cycles to the factory canister, get the latest version of the smart wallet code, and reinstall on the same canister ID as before, continuing to interact with the tokens or NFTs you own with your Volt wallet.

Extendable:

Our ultimate goal with smart wallets is to enable an iPhone-like experience where app developers can build dApps that anyone can install to their smart wallet. Imagine an app that watches floor prices on Entrepot, and when an NFT is listed that matches your search criteria, you receive an email or OpenChat notification and it automatically purchases the NFT for you. Or imagine being able to send a transfer notification to a receiving wallet where they have to click “accept” before the tokens are sent. This dramatically reduces the chance of transfer error and ensures your tokens get sent to the correct address.

We’re extremely excited to continue to build out smart wallet tech for the Internet Computer and we can’t wait to show you the next round of smart wallet updates that we have.

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Toniq Labs
Toniq Labs

Written by Toniq Labs

Building the decentralized future on The Internet Computer

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