BTS Labs held an AMA with Element on October 7th. The theme of this AMA is “Element-The First Community-Driven Aggregated Marketplace”. The guest we had were Sea, the founding team member of Element. She introduced that Element aims to buy & sell NFTs across top chains & marketplaces with lowest gas fees with savings up to 49%.
Q1:
BTS Labs: I saw Element has grown very fast in the last 5 months. It is hard to imagine how you get 50,000+ users in this kind of bear market period. Could you introduce your team and founder first? I believe you must have some magic power.
Sea(Founding Team Member): Thanks for mentioned about this. We have been like in last 3 months, you know, going through a very difficult time, because we have a global team. It’s hard to manage the time zones. Meanwhile, great amount of updates need to be supported. Its realy a hard time.
We only have like 20 to 30 people about full-time employers, and 80% are from R&D team. And we have a large volunteer community separated from Asia, like countries like Japan, Singapore, and also the United States.
And there is a very important person named Fred. He’s the CEO and the founder of Element. talking about his experience, I think most people may know. He is popular from web1, 2, to3. He has worked for KingSoft, the only competitor of Microsoft in China.
He worked there for 10 years, and nearly this time I think most 90% of the users are using wps and mobile, so they have made a great success, and his first entrepreneur was a gaming aiming company which is called LineKong (8267) went IPO in HongKong in 2014. and at that period of time Animoca Brand was kind of a competitor for them. And in 2018, he entered the blockchain industry. The company is called Marsbit. And at that period of time he has talked to many people like Gavin Rood, Vitalik, FTX’s Sam , and also like the founder of MakerDao, Rune.
Since last year NFT became more popular, and we see the users flying to this industry. We see the transition, so Fred just said why not do an NFT marketplace?
Another guy is Will, he’s in charge of the whole technology and smart contract. And because of him we have a very quick update on features. He is a full-stack engineer, and worked 10+ years for online & mobile games.
We have a very strong product team. The funding team has worked together at least for 3–15 years.
Q2:
BTS Labs: When your team decided to do an NFT marketplace, you have already heard about OpenSea, right? I remember it was last August you launched the first version, and it was a hot time for them. So my question is why, and what are the differences between you and him.
Sea(Founding Team Member): I think NFT is a huge marketplace with full categories far away more than PFPs and art works.
So I think this is the most difference from Element and OpenSea. Element have 80% of new domain names’ transaction volume right now, on both Ethereum and BNB Chain, like Space ID, .bit, and babs. With more categories flying out, you will see huge differences by then.
And next, I want to clarify that Element is built for traders, not only for collectors. Traders rely more on three things, liquidity, cost, and efficiency:
- High liquidity: Element make users could by 99% of NFT orders (more than OpenSea) and selling across marketplaces, that is what we want to provide, high, or even full liquidity;
- Low cost: including gas fee and aslo market fee, we only charge 0.5% market fee compare to OpenSea, 75% cutting down, and 39% gas fee saving comparing to Sea Port, which is the OpenSea protocol;
- High efficiency: we provide a multiple of trading tools, sweeper, collection offer, multi-cancel, cart functions, etc, to make users could buy 10–20 NFTs in one time;
I think you guys could have a great experience on Element. Have a try: https://www.element.market
Q3:
BTS Labs: What is the killer function you think for an NFT marketplace?
Sea(Founding Team Member): I cannot mention only 1 to decide which is the kille function, I can only give an example that what we can do:
- Whole on-chain data: you can searching for 7*24*5 minutes on-chain data instantly by our data tracking, which include, sales, buys, whale buyers, listings, floor prices, etc..I mean for all-chain, not only our marketplace, which is huge different from any other NFT marketplaces.
2. Multiple tools: buy, sell, across-chain, cancels, collection offer, sweep, all can help users improve trading efficiency.
3. Customized collection category: Element is the best marketplace for domain names collections, 3D, 4D, 0x10k, even searching by NFT names, we respond very quick for users special needs and functions.
I cannot mention them all, I strongly recommend you guys could have a try.
Q4:
BTS Labs: I heard the interface gas fee is super low compared to others, could you explain a little bit and how you guys make it achieve?
Sea(Founding Team Member): When you buy and sell NFTs on OpenSea, you can just do it once a time, it will be inconvenient if you want to buy and sell many NFT pieces, especially if it is a hot collection. Meantime, if you want to buy the best price, you have to jump between different trading markets, wasting a lot of time and gas. However, if you are using Element, things go differently.
In the process of using Element, it is obvious that the transaction gas is lower than that of OpenSea. By using Element, you can buy and sell many NFTs in one transaction, meantime, by using the ElementEx protocol (I have already tested), it could help you to save up to 49% transaction gas, which is 39% lower than OpenSea, and even lower 10–20% than Gem.
What have we done? In three parts. I will try to make it esay understand.
- Not fully programming with Solidity. In fact, there is a certain difference in transmission cost between Solidity and assembly. The ElementEx protocol directly uses assembly for processing, which reduces the transmission cost in contract execution;
- Split ERC721 and ERC1155 contracts, and split Import entry functions such as buy, sell, basic and advanced features, which can reduce redundant calculations;
- The order status is stored in binary bits, and the fields in the order structure are multiplexed bit by bit, and the slots are reused to improve efficiency and reduce costs;
If it looks complicated, I can summarize it into three key points, which are relatively advanced processing in reducing transmission cost, reducing process calculation redundancy and improving storage efficiency.
Q5:
BTS Labs: We saw a lot of domain collections get popular recently, but not PFPs, do you think the NFT market did make some changes now? And how about the future you think?
Sea(Founding Team Member): I think two parts, the one is metaverse, you can also think is Gaming, and the other is DID system.
NFT is very different from ERC20 tokens, because it is a kind of entertainment combination with financial, people could find real satisfaction in both web2 and web3 through NFTs.
On the one hand, gaming is already very popular in web2, and people get more needs in the virtual world, so it is easy to transfer systems from the internet to blockchain. And do not forget the Internet could help you better than just using money, but also earning money in web3 games.
On the other hand, DID system will be more complicated and fullness, labels like “cute”, “cool”, even “female” or “male”, labels like “ages, personalities, lifestyle, certificates”, all kinds of type NFTs will be blooming in a very short time.
I very excited to see this happen.
Free Questions
Q1:
BTS Labs Community: Success isn’t overnight. It’s when everyday you get a little better than the day before. A Great and visionary team is needed for this. I would like to know about the Element team, mentors, their skills and achievements?
Sea(Founding Team Member): I think I have talked a lot about the Element team.
A funny story I could share is that in the year of 2017, we had known about “crypto kitty”, the first NFT collection, and we did a “crypto dog” game in 2 weeks.
Even we did not run the game, the funny is we tried and learned about NFT as the first beginning. When we return to the NFT marketplace, we believe we know NFTs and we know traders.
Q2:
BTS Labs Community: We can see some of NFT Marketplace give a good benefit for newcomers who just get in touch with NFTs, like OpenSea who have free minting features so newcomers in NFTs easily to build their project. so, for newcomers, do Element have features that will support them?
Sea(Founding Team Member): I think the best thing we can do is teach newcomers who want to know about NFTntradings. Meanwhile, we provide content, twitter spaces, WLs, to let users know more detailed information about the NFT collections. We have a very open and self-educational community in Discord, welcome to join: https://t.co/Q4NZsKf5ZJ
Q3:
BTS Labs Community: Can you please tell us the motivation and benefits for traders/ investors to hold “‘#ELE”’ token in a long term investment? I’m quite curious about your plans to help drive demand and scarcity for the token in circulation?
Sea(Founding Team Member): I can not talk too much about $ELE tokens, causing it not to be released yet.
What I can say is that we are not launching a mining system, and all the tokens are to benefit all collection owners and users.
And if you are curious, plz come to join the ELE storm event to earn some &ELE tokens.
https://www.element.market/reward
Q4:
BTS Labs Community: I’m an active user on Element Marketplace and really love the product which is easy to use and is supporting a lot of blockchain. I want to know more how Element onboards new project in the Launchpad? It’s a close meet with new project or something different?
Sea(Founding Team Member): Sure, good question. You know launchpad is a very difficult thing to do even for OpenSea, this is the first-market thing: we cannot decide which one could launch successfully and which will not.
What we can do more is to give the chance to our community to know more details from the collection side and WL, the early chance to be involved.
Next, we may consider doing game launchpads on BNB Chain. The reason is the game is different, users could gain more fun and the chance to access the game. Meanwhile, each project has to observe strict rules if they want to collaborate.
Q5:
BTS Labs Community: The NFT marketplace is looking a bit saturated, how can you convince me other artists that your platform is better than the others out there or the others they’re currently in?
Sea(Founding Team Member): I believe it is not true. Users need Element to be a trader-convient NFT marketplace. And that is what we are heading to.
And if you decide to provide more trading tools, the development work is too heavy to cathing. I believe we are the best team to do this.
On the other side, we have the most active user community, no one creator wants to miss.
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