Pylons Joins Up With Tendermint

Hi, Mike from Pylons here! I’m really excited to formally announce that Pylons is Tendermint’s first incubation, and that as part of that I am now also Tendermint’s Director of NFTs. For most of you, that will raise some questions, such as “What are NFTs?” and “What is Pylons?” and “How do I help win the NFT game for the Cosmos community?”. I’ll try to give you a bit of an answer to all of them.

First, NFTs. NFTs are digital items that you own and control yourself. There are more details, but that’s the core of it. You could ask “why not just call them digital items, then”? Why not indeed. Please sign our change.org petition! And Pylons is an NFT engine. I mean, Pylons is a digital items engine.

So why does Tendermint want to incubate a digital items engine project? NFTs are in the news a lot right now, so it makes sense to make sure that the Cosmos community is positioned to support NFT use cases. And Cosmos is a very strong platform to make NFTs much more mass market, because it’s so performant. Right now, most digital items are on Ethereum, which is very hard to program for, slow, and expensive to use. Pylons is fast, free, and easy to use!

Pylons is a development platform for item-based experiences of all kinds, from games to concert tickets to fantasy sports. Pylons is designed to support complex interactions with a very simple creation process, so you don’t have to know a blockchain programming language to build the recipes for a Pylons app, you can lay out the transitions in JSON, and use our SDK to build your mobile app for user interaction. It’s a solution we’re very proud of, and I’m excited to see how the community reacts to it once it’s out there!

The plan now that we are working together is to leverage the Tendermint team in finishing the open-sourcing process and rolling out a testnet and then a main net. After that we’ll be out there with a sandbox helping you all build cool apps, and build zones that connect to Pylons to do adjacent things like NFT marketplaces. And I want to know what you all think. You can join our Discord, email us, send us unsolicited cat pictures on Twitter (ideally cats being mean to other cats, like knocking them down but in funny ways, no cat injuries), and also apply to be paid to write Pylons code!

We will have a lot more for you all in the coming weeks, a Pylons sandbox, intros to our team members, and thoughts on NFT standards and interoperability. We should have a full SDK, and docs, and a running art minting app called Easel by the end of June (hopefully sooner!) Until then, I’m so thrilled to be on this journey with all my Cosmonauts, and looking forward to hearing from you!