Designed with gaming and applications in mind, NFT support is baked into the chain as a native module on the blockchain. The blockchain industry has given birth to standards such as ERC-20 and ERC-721/ERC-1155. Agence supports some of these interfaces natively without requiring Smart Contract development. Users can mint and trade NFTs without needing to learn a blockchain specialized programming language, such as Solidity.

It is impossible to ignore the powerful network effects of the Ethereum community and interoperability in the current landscape of the blockchain industry. Ethereum compatible wallets connected to chains derived from upstream ethereum source code such as Binance Smart Chain and Gnosis Chain highlights this reality. Having a fully programmable virtual machine such as the EVM allows further development towards future standards. Agence will support the ethereum RPC interface along with a fully functional EVM in order to take advantage of the network effects.

Token ownership and transaction fees are still a primary blocker to adoption and usage for blockchain networks. However, it is vital in the deterrence of attacks on the network, as each action has an economic consequence. Keeping transaction fees low is also a strategy that aligns inversely to the growth model of a blockchain. As the value of the network grows, so do the transaction fees.

Agence solves this by re-aligning the incentives. Transaction fees can be thought of as customer acquisition cost (CAC). It is possible for entities or individuals to delegate access to their token balance to pay for someone else's transaction fees. Friends can help onboard friends and companies can easily onboard their customers.

With the prevalence of loot boxes in games, fairness to randomly generated assets become increasingly important as countries start to regulate these types of games. Loot boxes are purchasable boxes that contain unknown, randomized items. Since buyers only know the contents after purchase, some countries consider loot boxes to be similar to slot machines, and therefore regulate them with gambling laws.

Some regulations require games to reveal the rates of their loot boxes. The natural next step for regulations is likely for developers to prove that the rates are what they claim to be.

One solution is to have random number generators on-chain, so the generation of items or loot boxes can be transparent and proved to be random. To do so, Agence will support state transition functions (stfs) using web assembly, and let forges buy them. Then, forges can use the on-chain generated random to mint items fairly.

To support the concept of companies operating multiple games, different versions or categories, the Forges module makes this feasible. A forge is an entity that can be controlled by one or more wallets, and all assets can be identified by which forge minted the asset.

This enables games to, for example, easily query and identify all the assets a particular user owns that is compatible with the game.

Another feature baked into the chain is Asset Kinds. All assets created are based on a base template, or the asset kind. While all assets contain unique attributes about themselves, they also belong to an asset kind, which defines shared properties of all assets in that kind. For example, a certain model of a car could be defined as an asset kind, describing the specifications of that model. An instance of that car could have individual minor differences with each other.

The combination of Forges and Asset Kinds allow game developers to easily index and track which assets they’d like to support in their games.

Trading assets can be performed atomically on-chain in the form of multi-signature transactions. These transactions will require the signatures of both parties, and will allow them to trade assets for other assets or fungible tokens.

Assets can be lent out to other wallets, and be returned to the owner after a certain time period. The owner can charge a fee for this, part of which will be given to the asset creator (i.e. forge) as royalties. The concept is similar to renting out a movie or game, allowing players to try out assets temporarily, but also allow both the lender and asset creator to benefit.

Agence provides on-chain capabilities for sellers to list their NFTs directly for sale, or in an auction listing.

Listing an NFT locks it from being transferred until it is delisted or complete. The owner can still continue to use the assets since it doesn’t change ownership.

Whenever an asset is sold via auction, a percentage of the sale will be given to the asset’s forge as royalties.