Paima Studios Solves Cardano's NFT Transaction Metadata Challenge, Enabling New Use Cases

As Cardano grows to incorporate a thriving decentralized ecosystem, one challenge that has plagued the network is the inability of the native smart contracts language, Plutus, to access transaction metadata, holding back NFTs, on-chain games, and more.

Cardano’s decentralized ecosystem is expanding rapidly, but one challenge that has limited the network’s capabilities is the inability of Plutus, the native smart contracts language, to access transaction metadata. This limitation has hindered the development of NFTs, on-chain games, and other applications.

However, Paima Studios, a Web3 application engine company, has now found a solution to this problem. Sebastien Guillemot, co-founder of Paima, announced the new update on Monday.

We managed to get a Cardano Plutus script to validate CIP25 metadata ?

Big implications, and enables many new use-cases:

- NFT AMMs (not easily doable in EVM!)

- New interop standards

- Onchain games

and we just open-sourced it

Cardano NFTs are issued under the token standard CIP25, which defines how NFT issuers can specify an NFT’s attributes, such as its image, name, URL, and more, in its transaction metadata. However, the challenge for Cardano developers is that Plutus is unable to access this metadata. This limitation prevents dApps built on Cardano from accessing this data and limits the use cases for NFTs on the network.

To solve this problem, Guillemot and his team at Paima are proposing a new approach that can access metadata directly from Plutus, regardless of the token standard. This is achieved by having Plutus access the final transaction hash, which contains the metadata.

But what if we could access tx metadata (CIP25 & more) directly from Plutus? ?

It turns out you can using a clever trick!

Plutus cannot access metadata directly, but can access the tx hash (which contains the metadata!) pic.twitter.com/pmDxqc8ohK

— Sebastien Guillemot (@SebastienGllmt) July 6, 2024

A Plutus smart contract is then armed with all the other fields and checks that the hash matches. Guillemot explains the mechanics further, stating:

We built an Aiken smart contract that does exactly this: it reconstructs the transaction binary data in Aiken and checks if it matches the hash! This answers one of two questions: Is it feasible? Is it efficient/cheap enough?

According to Guillemot’s team, this new approach costs half as much as the standard CIP68, as it reduces the number of UTXOs.

Meanwhile, ADA is trading at $0.3744, up 2.36% in the last 24 hours. It dipped to a 24-hour low of $0.3335 before staging a comeback.