Wen New Standard (WNS 0.0)

Research WNS
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Wen New Standard (WNS 0.0)

Abstract

WNS is an extremely lightweight NFT standard built on top of Token2022 for maximum ecosystem composability, flexibility and backward compatibility. WNS 0.0 starts off extremely simple, with a single instruction for creating a new NFT by locking supply at 1 and giving it 0 decimals. The metadata is embedded in the Mint account and has only 3 fields (name, symbol, uri). New instructions will be added only upon community alignment. The working repository for this project can be found here.

As a result of this simplicity, the token standard is already viewable on Solana explorer - Wen Poem, Genesis NFT

To make it as simple to upgrade the standard as possible, we expect the first few users to be simple NFTs that do not require ecosystem adoption, extensive features or firm standards. We should expect WNS 1.0 to be where it’s ready for general adoption, with a name change likely at that point as well.

Key Objectives

The primary mission of the Wen New Standard is: (1) delivering a composable and on-chain data light means for coordinating asset information, (2) removing rent seeking middlemen for how that information is communicated, and (3) introducing diversity into a landscape of critical technology that has become much too centralized.

Key Functionalities

There are a few critical features to the most popular use cases of NFTs that WNS intends to tackle first.

  • Collections - Grouping of NFTs around a common identifier
  • Identifying Metadata
    • On-chain identifiable information for displaying and verifying asset info including name, symbol and image
    • External data - not actionable on-chain but useful to have a global pointer.
    • Creator royalties - Who should be paid and how much, viewable while executing programs.
  • Royalties Enforcement - The actual mechanism for ensuring that platforms support royalties, as was the subject of months of discussion on Solana in 2022.

Minimizing On-chain Data

Minimizing on-chain data is relevant for two reasons:

  1. End user costs, to leverage NFTs at scale in a composable way, we need to be cost efficient.

  2. Current implementations fall short either by hurting developer experience (via complex proofs and custom RPC handling) or irrecoverable costs (up to 0.03 SOL per token). This implementation will retain a simple UX while being nearly entirely recoverable. Making NFTs up to 99% cheaper.

  3. Program complexity, building on top of NFTs as a core primitive should mean NFTs as a form of tokenized title should take up as little account space and compute as possible for it to be maximally useful.

Decentralization and composavility

Each version of WNS will be fully open sourced, immuatable and verifiable. As they are constructed using the building blocks of Token Extensions, protocols and apps will be able to integrate without fear of lack of future support and compatibility. This also means all critical functions are built in to the foundation of the L1 and once the WNS deploy is immutable, all other features will be as decentralized as the network itself.

Architecture

In the vein of building toward the future of ownership, WNS is built on the Token Extensions program. While Token Extensions does have some issues it also brings several critical benefits:

  1. Key functionality support - From collections to transfer hooks to metadata pointers, all functionality users and protocols need exists in one form or another.
  2. DAS API support - Reading data from on-chain is the most important part of any standard, DAS API powered by Helius already supports this information.
  3. Security - Token Extensions has been heavily audited and inheriting this security for core functionality will make the program much more affordable to maintain.

Initial Features

While there are many interesting ways to extend WNS using token extensions, we will initially leverage a few of them

  1. Metadata Pointer - Enable on-chain, globally accessible data
  2. Group + Member Pointers - Group NFTs by collection, inherent to the token
  3. Mint Closure - Reduce cost of minting NFTs significantly by making the largest cost reclaimable

Planned Extensions

Some additional future functionality that may be beneficial

  1. Transfer hooks - Trigger external royalty program to compute and distribute royalties
  2. Non-transferrable tokens - For use cases like the Saga Genesis NFT, POAPs, and identity.
  3. CPI Guard + ImmutableOwner - Security features that will enable more robust and safe usage of Solana NFTs.

As the core functionality is taken care of by Token22, the main role of WNS is standardizing:

  • How explorers and apps read on chain relationship between assets
  • How apps view asset data
  • How users can be best protected
  • How creators can be best served
  • How assets are created and management tooling

Next Steps

The next steps for WNS are working with the community towards 0.0.1, and from there we will find a suitable small scale project to launch that with.

About WNS

WNS is a distributed coalition of ecosystem partners, beginning with Ovols and Jupiter, building toward a more decentralized future for Solana. It is supported by the Wen Foundation, a Solana public goods organization.

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