Building reliable infrastructure to display Cardano native assets (NFTs &FTs) efficiently, at scale, can cost upwards of $100,000 and take 9+ months of development effort. We propose to deliver a free Native Asset Content Delivery Network (CDN) for Cardano, by making our existing NFTCDN services free to use for anyone building on Cardano. NFTCDN has been operating since 2022 and provides fast, reliable and resilient multimedia and metadata delivery through a globally distributed CDN, enabling projects to display native assets effortlessly. By removing technical and financial barriers, NFTCDN allows developers to focus on product innovation and growth, accelerate time-to-market, and promotes wider adoption and implementation of native assets within apps across the Cardano ecosystem.

Background - Native Assets

• Native assets (NFTs & FTs) are widely used on Cardano across diverse use cases
• Often used to store multimedia content - images, music, videos, documents, etc
• Media is stored on decentralised systems - IPFS, Arweave, and on-chain embeds
• Centralised storage options also used - HTTP, FTP & commercial cloud providers
• File locations are referenced as links within the native asset’s metadata

Pain Point - Technical Complexity

• Accessing native asset media requires querying the blockchain (Cardano node + DB-Sync)
• And fetching content via middleware (e.g. IPFS gateway/node)
• Apps must handle this process programmatically, at scale, with robust exception handling
• Developers face challenges from:
  • Human error (e.g. typos in metadata links)
  • Evolving standards (e.g. NFT v0.01, CIP-25, CIP-68)
  • Protocol updates (e.g. Chang HF impacting Node & DB-Sync)
• Performance, efficiency, and reliability must be maintained across all layers
• Apps must build and maintain complex, resilient backend infrastructure to support native asset display as both a capability & feature

Solution – NFTCDN

• NFTCDN is a managed Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) provider
• Provides high-availability native asset media & metadata delivery via globally distributed, high-speed Content Delivery Network
• Developers access content using only the native asset fingerprint ID - no complex setup needed
• Eliminates the need to design, build, test, & maintain complex end-to-end infra
• Enables focus on innovation of their product - not backend ops

Problem Statement - Cost to Build/Access

• Building native asset delivery infra in-house costs ~$100,000 and 9+ months (internal benchmarks)
• NFTCDN solves upfront CAPEX/OPEX needs
• But we are a paid service (pay-per-API-call) - limiting adoption
• Only well-funded teams have been able to integrate NFTCDN to date
• Many projects cannot afford the cost, leading to delays, increased risk, or total shutdown
• Market headwinds further impacted adoption, with some customers forced to shut down due to reduced user base

Proposal – The Ask

• Fund NFTCDN to make it free for all Cardano builders for 18 months under an SLA contract
• Cover operational & infra scale-up costs to deliver enterprise-grade Native Asset CDN
• Enables us to provide our solution to the Cardano community for free
• Removes cost barriers, fuelling innovation, faster development, and wider adoption

$2.5m cost avoidance opportunity & ~39,000 dev. hours savings for products seeking to integrate native asset display – removing barriers to entry, faster new product launches, improved end-user exp. & increased innovation prospects.

Tangible Benefits

• Eliminate up-front infrastructure costs (~$100,000 per product) for native asset display
• Accelerate product development by 9+ months by removing the need to build and maintain complex, scalable infrastructure
• Immediate cost avoidance opportunity of ~$1.5m and ~23,400 developer hours across 15+ existing NFTCDN customers
• Future potential cost avoidance opportunity of ~$1m and ~15,600 developer hours during proposal funding cycle by onboarding at least 10 additional products

Intangible Benefits

• Removes Adoption Barriers - Eliminates financial (OPEX/CAPEX) & technical (dev. complexity) barriers to entry
• Accelerates Time-to-Market - Enables fast and easy integration of native asset features/capabilities
• Frees Up Product Teams - Reduces backend overhead, letting teams focus on core feature dev, growth & adoption
• Boosts Developer Adoption - Makes accessible for early-stage, under/unfunded and community (free-product) builders
• Enables Broader Innovation - Enables exploration of new native asset use cases (RWA, identity, media, education)
• Future-Proof Native Asset Delivery - Adapts to evolving standards; all users benefit from shared upgrades and fixes
• Eliminates Redundancy - Shared infrastructure avoids every project building redundant, costly systems
• Improves End-User Experience - A high-speed, enterprise-grade, globally distributed CDN for multimedia content substantially improves loading speeds
• Drives Ecosystem Growth – Native asset adoption across more apps creates compounding utility and user adoption
• Aligns with Cardano's Goals & Roadmap – Directly supports Cardano's 2025 roadmaps goals around simplifying developer experience, increasing real-world utility and improving end-user experience

Alignment with [2025 Proposed Cardano Goals]

• "Get More Usage" Category
  • Goal: Attract DApps and users - product market fit
  • Goal: Easier to build on and to use Cardano
  • Goal: Cardano competitive option
  • Goal: Clear funding mechanisms

Alignment with [2025 Proposed Cardano Roadmap]

• "Developer/User Experience" Category

Proposal Objectives

• Make NFTCDN free to use for all for a period of 18 months
• Onboard new and existing products/projects
• Report on realised benefits & utilisation metrics

SLA Deliverables

1. Free Access to NFTCDN for 18 months

• Access to existing NFTCDN endpoints (/image, /preview, /file, /metadata)
• Mainnet & Testnet (pre-prod and preview) coverage
• Implementation of abuse protection measures to ensure fair-use and sustain service performance & stability as per NFTCDN AUP
• Services will be provisioned under NFTCDN T&Cs

2. Community Usage Reporting

• Provision of monthly usage metrics to demonstrate value delivered:
  • (i) Number of projects actively using NFTCDN
  • (ii) Volume of requests served across endpoints
  • (iii) Realised savings (cost-avoidance & dev. hours) achieved

3. Personalised On-boarding, Technical Support & Maintenance

• 1:1 on-boarding support via direct communication channels (NFTCDN Discord)
• Technical support throughout the 18-month period
• Performance monitoring & maintenance to ensure service provision

Definition of Done

• NFTCDN is made fully free to use within 30 days of initial funding
• The free service remains operational for a full 18-month period, post initial dev. work(s) to make the service free for users
• Community facing reports provided monthly to show growth in users, service utilisation volumes and cost-benefits realised

Cost Breakdown - 1+18 months duration

• Labour costs @ £195.2k
• Infra costs @ £46.8k
• NB. costs-split may vary depending on infra scaling requirements (e.g. provision of adequate compute to balance demand)

Payment Terms & Schedule

• Proposing quarterly payment for service provision
  • 5 cycles - 20% of funds per cycle
  • Initial funds provided upon proposal acceptance (1st cycle)

Team

• Smaug (NFTCDN Founder & CTO)
• Rocky (NFTCDN Founder & COO)

Duration

• 12 months, plus initial setup time (est. <30 days)
• Team is available as needed, with priority support for incident response and on-going performance optimisation

About NFTCDN

• Established in 2022
• Testnet (Preview & Pre-Prod) and Mainnet coverage of all native assets
• Service(s) offered on pay-per-API-use tiered pricing model
• Existing customers include Verspr, Eternl, Tokeo, NEWM, NMKR, Pool.pm
• Have served 800+ million API requests as of April-2025
• Currently running with 100% uptime since launch

Post-Proposal Completion - What happens next?

• The proposal (2025 budget cycle) seeks to fund infra & ops scale-up costs to make NFTCDN free to use for 18 months
• We will actively monitor and report on the impact delivered throughout the funding period
• Ahead of the next budget cycle (2026), we intend to submit an SLA renewal proposal, evidencing value delivered to Cardano
• We will maintain proactive communication with our users to ensure transparency around any changes, including a potential return to a paid subscription model

Non-Renewal of SLA

• In the event of non-renewal, NFTCDN will revert to a paid subscription model
• To mitigate risk of delays in the 2026 Cardano budget process, a 18 (+1) month SLA has been proposed
• This provides NFTCDN & projects sufficient time to transition
• NFTCDN's /metadata endpoint will remain free with a licensing charge (as it is today), to enable projects to still acquire native asset metadata
• Using NFTCDN's Open Source JS Media Library Tool, projects will be able to pivot from using NFTCDN as a source of native asset display to the native protocols/system embedded within the asset's metadata
• This of course means they will not be able to enjoy the benefits of reliability, performance and simplicity provided by NFTCDN

User Feedback

"CSWAP DEX has been using NFTCDN for over a year on our NFT & RWA marketplace, (www.cswap.market). It’s been a rock-solid, high-performance piece of infrastructure—absolutely critical not just for the Cardano NFT space, but also for the emerging Cardano RWA sector. NFTCDN makes it dramatically easier for builders to deliver smooth, reliable user experiences. We strongly support this proposal to make NFTCDN free for users—it’s a foundational layer the ecosystem relies on." - CSWAP

"NFTCDN has been a game-changer for us. The integration was truly plug-and-play—we set it up once and haven’t had to touch it since. Performance has been consistently excellent, and the quality of service is top-notch. We’ve never experienced any issues or downtime, and their support team is responsive and helpful whenever we’ve had questions. It’s rare to find a solution that just works—but NFTCDN does exactly that." — Trading Tent

"NFTCDN allows NEWM to quickly and easily display and hear our Arweave images and music clips on the NEWM marketplace and NEWM studio. Users experience seamless skip-free audio and it was a breeze to integrate the service." - Andrew Westberg (CTO - NEWM)

"NFTCDN works so flawlessly I did not have to think about it for the last year. NFTCDN is the most efficient way to offer all kinds of ecosystem images and media to our user base. Kudos to the team for providing a great and reliable service." - Marcel Baumberg (CEO - Eternl Wallet)

Products Currently Using NFTCDN

• Pool.pm
• Eternl Wallet
• VESPR Wallet
• Tokeo Wallet
• CSWAP DEX
• NEWM
• Cur8
• Trading Tent
• Icebeglabs
• KWIC
• Levvy Finance
• Poki
• Hazel Bot
• Buffy Bot
• NMKR

External Dependencies

• On-time proposal payment aligned to an agreed payment schedule

Internal Dependencies

• Change of subscription model architecture to remove any charges to developers for using NFTCDN (est. ~30 days / 1 month to complete)