What is Desine?

Desine is a decentralized computer-aided design (CAD) licensing application (dapp) built on the Ethereum blockchain.

How does it work?

Desine is a completely open platform for designers to mint CAD files as non-fungible tokens (ERC1155 NFTs) and configure transparent smart contract licensing agreements with consumers/manufacturers of those designs. You can also sell your designs as standard NFTs through open platforms such as OpenSea.

What do you mean by decentralized?

There is no gatekeeper. No platform or company will eventually change its terms of service behind this tool. You are in complete control, you can even cache a copy of the Desine web app which is a static webpage that does not talk to any server but instead is hosted on IPFS and served directly to your computer from other IPFS nodes pinning this page (including some that we, the developers of Desine, are running). You upload your designs to IPFS before minting (we will try to also pin your designs once you have successfully minted them minted - to increase decentralization and resiliency). You execute minting/licensing contracts locally in your browser, communicating directly with the Ethereum blockchain. You can even run your own Ethereum node if you so wish!

So how do I get started?

I am a designer

1. Upload your designs to an IPFS pinning service of your choice, we recommend Pinata, NFT.Storage or web3.storage.
2. Take the unique and deterministic content identifier and paste it into the NFT minting transaction inputs. The minting contract will check that that content hash has not already been minted by somebody else. You will also configure tags and other properties associated with your design. Once minted, you will now possess a unique NFT that represents your design.
3. Configure a licensing agreement for your design. You can then execute a second Ethereum smart contract transaction to define a license for your design. This might be part of step two, we have not decided yet!

I am a manufacturer/consumer

1. Browse OpenSea or inbuilt Desine browsing tools
2. Load the desired desine NFT into the viewer and execute a contract to either buy (using OpenSea/Desine web app) or License (Desine web app).

Is not the blockchain expensive (e.g. high gas fees)?

We plan on deploying this application on layer 2s such as zkSync which will significantly reduce the costs of minting and licensing to a few cents.

But wait! My designs are available, unencrypted for anyone to download from IPFS, without paying anything!

Yes. While we could protect your design via some form of encryption, unfortunately, it will only create complexity without benefit. Anyone could always license your design for a short while, download it and then upload it in unencrypted form for others to use. We feel the true solution will be a social movement whereby we will provide embeddable widgets that manufacturers can use to provide that this design is either owned or licensed by a particular person or company and valid at the point in time. Ultimately we want end users to adopt a do not trust, verify approach to using your designs and ensuring that the original owner is either getting attribution via licensing payments or has been correctly compensated and has willing sold the design to this manufacturer/consumer. The true solution is for purchasers of goods derived from your designs to be able to verify directly on the blockchain that the design ownership/license is valid at the point of sale. This is how artwork NFTs work.

Somebody has uploaded (plagiarized) my design(s) to desine, how do I stop them?

While, somebody can not mint an exact copy of your design (as the IPFS content hash is checked during the minting contract execution), sadly, in a trustless non-gatekept ecosystem, copying and derived works/blatant copies are very common. We do plan on implementing a means to try and contest a work, however, we fear this will lead to some form of centralization (which we do not want). OpenSea does have a ban list, we could see if there is a way to integrate something similar. We would probably require you to post some kind of collateral, and if it is deemed that work is not plagiarized, we would take a small fee in payment for whoever had to spend time appraised a false claim. However, if the claim is upheld, we will take only the gas fee to post a plagiarized warning against that desine NFT. Future consumers could be presented with that warning and link to your original work in the web app (they can then make an informed decision if to license your more original design).