Launching the Nevermined Marketplace back in June was not just a major milestone. It was also a springboard to test, iterate and keep building new features.
So we issued a PR in Github to attract the attention of our CTO Aitor Argomaniz (we know, it’s the only way 🤷). Because we wanted to ask him what’s in the pipeline and what’s already been pumped out by our tech team.
Aitor, the overall response to the Marketplace was very positive. We got Algovera on board as a partner. But what’s the focus from an engineering perspective?
Aitor Argomaniz: We received some very useful feedback from the community, so for Q3 we decided to split up our tech delivery strategy in two parts. On the one hand, we’re increasing the robustness of some of the existing elements.
On the other hand, we used the feedback to prioritize our own huge list of ideas and focus on two key features: onboarding of users that are not web3-savvy and promotion of assets via widgets.
Let’s start with the improvements.
AA: The most crucial change is that we simplified the way app developers can integrate the AI Web Service they purchased. Under the hood, we’ve now integrated Swagger to implement the OpenAPI standards into Nevermined. Simply put, this allows AI Devs to create OpenAPI definitions for their agents, models,… and those are much easier to understand for ‘normal’ app developers. It’s important to keep things as simple and standardized as possible.
With this feature publishers can onboard agents in a simpler way, pre-configuring all the attributes already defined in their OpenAPI spec files.
Another benefit of this OpenAPI service definition is that it allows subscribers to query these services directly from the browser. This makes the process of a service integration simpler because you can see directly how every available request exposed by the service works. If you want more in depth information, we’ve written this tutorial.
This is actually already live. After all, we’re already halfway into Q3, no? 😁
One part that I noticed when using the platform is that I need a workaround to attach an AI service to more than 1 subscription.
AA: Working on it, working on it! But you’re right. It’s quite likely that you want to create more than 1 subscription plan for your AI agent. Maybe you charge $10/month, but you want to give a discount for longer subscriptions, say $100 for a year.
Currently, you have to register your asset twice. It’s possible, but not ideal. So we’re going to improve that user experience, by digging deep into the Nevermined SDK, the core code, and make some pretty robust changes to our smart contract suite.
What are the new features that users have been asking about?
AA: The main request is one that has been on the team’s ‘critical feature’ list from the beginning: embeddable widgets. Part of the Nevermined vision is to give AI Developers and Data Owners control. That’s not just control over their assets, but also control over where they promote and sell them.
Example of an embeddable widget.
Click it to explore/purchase the asset in the Nevermined Marketplace
Anyone who publishes an asset with Nevermined can now use the Widget functionality to create a nice-looking preview of your AI Subscription plan. The app generates HTML code that you can easily embed in your website or blog or whatever. The idea is that your community doesn’t have to go to the Nevermined marketplace to discover your fantastic AI agent. Instead, you can start selling access directly to your audience.
What are you most excited about for the coming months?
AA: Oh, the team is working really hard on making the login or connect experience much easier. I mean, MetaMask is great, but it’s not super intuitive to anyone who’s not Web3 savvy. And we also know that AI devs are not at all like experienced Web3 users. They look at all that stuff and they have all kinds of crypto-related alarms going off in their heads. We can’t blame them, really. But we also need to convince them that Web3 technology, under the hood, can benefit them as AI developers, way beyond crypto.
So we’re currently integrating the Web3 Auth Key Management service. That would mean that you don’t have to have MetaMask to use Nevermined. In the near future, you’ll be able to create a ‘normal’ account with Web2 credentials and all the wallet management stuff is being taken care of in the background.
After that, the next step is then to give people the opportunity to pay in fiat, rather than just with USDC. Again, the on-ramp to acquire crypto, even if it’s a stablecoin, is really not appealing to lots of AI devs. So we’ll fix that for them. We’re working on a few other ideas, but the red thread is to abstract the blockchain related elements of the interface and make it as accessible as possible.
Thanks Aitor. Pull request approved. Squashed and Merged.
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