Item Publication, Storage & Deployment

Right now, all Templates and items in the Creator Studio use ERC-1155 smart contracts. After completing the Item Creation flow and clicking ‘Publish,’ all of your Item’s media file(s), description, tags, and properties are immediately uploaded to a decentralized file storage system called IPFS using our dedicated Lamina1 Distribution API/Spaces servers. 

From there, the Lamina1 Hub sends a transaction that executes the ‘mint’ function in the Template’s smart contract (ERC-1155 for both of our initial test Templates), including the link to the data that was uploaded to IPFS. This creates a brand new item on the Lamina1 blockchain with a randomly generated unique ID, which you can see and track in your Activity tab upon its creation.

The item itself, as well as the logic on who owns it and how it can be modified is stored directly on-chain. The rich media data (e.g. images, videos, 3D models, audio, etc.) are generally stored off-chain in IPFS. This means that as long as the Lamina1 blockchain is live, on-chain data can be accessed, and sometimes modified by other smart contracts on the chain depending on how the data is managed. Meanwhile, off-chain data does not have guaranteed persistence or availability by default. It cannot be accessed by on-chain smart contracts, but it can sometimes be modified by them.

As discussed in the Defining Rights & Royalties section above, future iterations of the Creator Studio and Lamina1 Hub, we plan to move some of the item’s metadata on-chain so that it can be used to enforce rights and royalties on sales and transfers that happen directly on-chain. Moving properties on-chain would also allow them to be accessed and modified by dApps across the L1 ecosystem, including on-chain games, music and film platforms, and other on-chain business logic.

Once an item is published to Lamina1, it will appear immediately in creators/collectors public Profiles and  Items tabs as long as it meets some baseline criteria in its metadata – namely, a title, a description, and an image and/or working URI link. This information is verified by the Hub when the item is minted on-chain, which gives it the OK to be displayed on the platform. Items that do not meet these criteria in their metadata will still be linked to your account, but will not be displayed.

Similarly, published Items can also be brought into any Space they are compatible with –– i.e. according to the template you used to create it, and its accompanying metadata.

Once an item is published, it can then be brought into any Space it’s compatible with –– i.e. according to the Template you used to create it, and its accompanying metadata. 

The Lamina1 Hub will kick off the authentication and item distribution process by sending an initial set of information to the Space to initiate login. In response, the game engine running the Space will send back a message requesting the on-chain and off-chain information it needs from LAMINA1 to know who you are, what kind of items you have, and other key information it will need to load into the game. 

The Lamina1 network will then forward the Space a JSON package including a list of what items you have, their item metadata, your LAMINA1 username, and your previous point history. All this information is then converted into C# before the Space runs its game logic –– a pre-built system by a game developer that will take that data and convert it into the visuals you see in game.

For more information on how Item Distribution works on a technical level, read the following section on Item/Asset Integration.