Nifty Pixels

Screenshots

Problem Statement

Nifty Pixels is an NFT marketplace that lets you create, buy, and sell pixel art NFTs all in one place. You can create pixel art using our built-in tools, mint your art as NFTs, and sell them on our marketplace. We're inspired by the simplicity of the 32x32 pixel grid—and we’re curious about what will be created when lots of people, all around the world, are given the same set of tools.

Solution

For the frontend, we used React, Relay, and ethers.js.The backend is more interesting. For our API layer, we used The Graph, and created a subgraph (https://thegraph.com/hosted-service/subgraph/arcticmatt/nifty-pixels) for Nifty Pixels. We started out (perhaps naively) by using ethers.js to query events. Switching to The Graph made development much faster, and made building the frontend similar to building web2 apps (React + Relay). For storage, we used Arweave. This ensures NFT metadata is stored permanently and immutably.Lastly, Nifty Pixels is built on the Polygon blockchain. We want Nifty Pixels to be an accessible platform, where anyone can mint an NFT quickly and cheaply. Polygon helps us achieve that goal because of its fast transactions and low gas fees, which make it much more accessible than building directly on the Ethereum blockchain.