New 👀 for Argus

Since we last updated you all, we’ve reached some significant benchmarks in the buildout of our service suite, and our CTO, Giovanni, will be following up with a technical update in the coming days. But we also wanted to thank everyone who supported us in Fund9 of Project Catalyst, show you the project’s new look, and detail a couple things on our near-term roadmap.

Thank You Project Catalyst Supporters!

Thanks to those of you who supported us in Fund9 of Project Catalyst, our most critical proposal was funded. And especially given current market conditions, we hugely appreciate this vote of confidence from the Cardano Community and the wind it puts in our sails. This funding is not only allowing us to keep building through the 🐻 uninterrupted — it’s also enabling us to integrate the Ethereum blockchain and scalably identify cross-chain NFT copies on Cardano and Ethereum — which is another industry first.

New website and look for ArgusNFT

And now, for the fun stuff: You may have already noticed we have a new logo, but we also want to invite you to check out our new landing page at www.argusnft.com. We hope you enjoy our illustrated interpretation of Argus, improved service descriptions, and the interactive, NFT similarity map at the bottom of the page. And we hope this cleaner, more professional presentation will help convey the services we’re offering to marketplaces, creators and collectors. The interactive, NFT similarity map allows you to explore the similarity of NFT collections on Argus-supported chains. If you have a few free minutes, we’d love for you to check it out and let us know what you think.

Aegis is Coming Soon

Last but not least, the Alpha version of our Aegis service is almost complete. As we outlined in this previous post, Aegis is an encrypted image registry and notification service for NFT creators and collectors, which allows them to protect their NFT assets and art from plagiarism. Subscribers to Aegis can easily register their NFTs or digital are, and from then on, they’ll receive notifications if anyone tries to copy these digital assets, or sell these copies.

Future versions of Aegis will also automate the IP takedown application process for subscribers whose plagiarized assets have been listed on an NFT marketplace. And improving Aegis’ UX/UI will certainly be an iterative process that takes some time. But we’re excited to launch Aegis Alpha in partnership with some select, Ethereum NFT artists to show them one more benefit to creating NFTs on Cardano. You can learn more about our plans to use Aegis as a vehicle to onboard digital artists — especially those currently creating NFTs on Ethereum — by reading our funded, Fund8 Project Catalyst proposal that really got our project started. And we look forward to wrapping up the last aspects of this proposal in the next month or so.

To those of you who’ve followed our project till now, or are just learning about us, we really appreciate your continues interest in our project during these “not so flattering” times for the cryptocurrency industry. And we can tell you that while prices may be depressed right now, our workpace is, and our work ethic and commitment to delivering is unwavering. We’re very excited to be working on a number of exciting partnerships in the Cardano ecosystem we’ll hopefully be able to announce soon. And our partnerships with JPG Store and ProofSpace are only getting stronger over time.

At the same time, we’re excited to be humming along on our Ethereum integration, and are full steam ahead building tools to promote authentic NFT creation and collaboration across multiple blockchain ecosystems and the wider world of content creators. The long-term utility of NFTs isn’t diminished by a lack of short term utility, so we thank you for supporting us in building an innovative set of tools to bring legitimacy and better UX to NFT markets.