Fetch Name System Marketplace and Pricing update

We have a lot of exciting news coming up in the next few weeks and it's time for a quick update!

Marketplace Development

We're happy to announce we've made great headways on our work for the FNS marketplace, and we're targetting a release for end of January!

We're currently in the process of finalizing the UI. Development of the associated smart contract has been progressing quite well and we're close to completion for the last features. We have also set up extensive testing to maximize security for everyone and this process is also close to completion.

With this new update, you'll be able to bid on Domains, but also put your own for sale. For this release, we'll be supporting all native denominations, which means you'll be able to trade domains using your Fetch and Mobix tokens, or any currency bridged using IBC (this includes Axelar USDC).

This new marketplace will be available directly on the Fetch Name System website.

Automated price update

When we introduced FNS, we aimed to provide a constant pricing in USD to keep domains affordable for Fetch.ai users.

Considering the lack of Oracles we initially opted for manual updates for prices (denominated in FET tokens). This approach seemed fine initially until the recent drastic changes in the FET price: we updated prices several times, but we were playing catch up as the value of FET was rising quite fast. This meant users would typically have to pay a higher price for new domains and we were not happy with this state of affairs.

To address this issue, we are happy to anounce that we've implemented an automated process to keep FNS domain prices in line with the current Fetch token price! From now on, pricing for minting will track the evolution of the Fetch token much more closely.

The process is simple:
1- Get the current price of FET in USD using the Coingecko API
2- Compute the new price in FET for the different pricing segments
3- Send a transaction containing these new prices to the smart contract

We believe transparency is key when interacting with users, which is why we've made this updating procedure open source.

We are also making best use of tools developed by the Fetch.ai foundation: transactional logic uses the Cosmpy library. You can find the code on Github.

That's all for now, follow us on Twitter to be notified on our upcoming announcements!