Meet the platform bringing sustainability, reliability and security to digital assets trading

By Gaia Lamperti

The non-fungible-token (NFT) ecosystem and rare digital assets have opened up a massive market in recent times and we are now probably just scratching the surface of their unlocked potential. With the development of a variety of new, different use cases, it has quickly become clear that general purpose-built blockchains cannot always support NFT standards adequately.

And so what was initially just the idea behind Pastel Network, a purpose-built native blockchain to host NFT projects, became a real necessity for the community of creators and collectors alike.

“Pastel was really built from the ground up to solve a number of use cases, whether it’s high transactions and network congestion issues, scalability constraints, security concerns, etcetera,” Anthony Georgiades, Co-Founder and COO of Pastel Network, explained in an interview to IBS Intelligence.

A primary focus of Pastel Network is developing a solution to prevent scams in the space through a duplicate detection system that assesses the rarity of the digital asset across the entire internet.

“We’ve built out a couple of our own protocols, one of which is called Sense, which is a near-duplicate NFT detection protocol and the other is called Cascade, which is our own in-house, storage protocol itself,” Georgiades said. Both of these protocols can be implemented by other platforms as one-off features very seamlessly.
Sense, in particular, can immediately begin creating robust, indelible fingerprints for every NFT on a given platform once integrated. “This allows for a reliable source of authenticity and some sort of detection against copyright infringement.”

This way, Pastel is working on bringing much needed reliability and security to the digital assets trading system with a completely open-source approach, allowing anybody to launch an app or a marketplace directly on top of its network through simple API calls. Aside from its clear technical interoperability, Pastel also makes the process of registering, buying, selling, and trading NFTs on its white-label platforms easy. “We have designed the platform to be very intuitive and user-friendly making these processes a lot simpler,” Georgiades added.

Pastel is now in beta phase, “gearing up to a full launch” and already boasts tens of thousands of collectors and creators testing the platform, as well as an increasingly growing community of “builders”, users integrating the platform’s storage protocol, building on top of its APIs, or launching their own application directly on the network.

The platform has its native cryptocurrency too, PSL, which is “the gas that fuels the entire marketplace, used to mint, buy and trade NFTs,” in Georgiades’ words. After launching a conversion service just a few weeks ago, now PSL can be converted back and forth between Pastel and the Ethereum blockchain.

With some transactions, in the case of “green NFTs”, the network has also a carbon offsetting system in place, by sending a portion of the fee to an environmental non-profit planting trees, as a way for the platform to even out the significant energy consumption caused by NFTs. “It’s basically a way to offset some of the broader sustainability issues that you might cause from blockchain ecosystems.”

Pastel is now working on upgrading its protocols, optimising techniques for scale and signing off partnerships. “The industry is moving really fast and super exciting stuff is happening,” concluded Georgiades.