At Rare Bits, we’re incredibly excited about building products for blockchain-powered digital goods. This ecosystem is in the early stages of its developments, and as a result, a lot of the core infrastructure to build apps and services around these goods is missing. With new interoperable standards for unique digital goods like ERC721, the developer community is working together at lightning speed to move the space forward.

Rare Bits builds products and infrastructure for blockchain-powered digital goods.

Today, we’re excited to share our commitment to the developer community with a few announcements we’ll cover in this post. We’ve also redesigned our developer experience to help developers get started even faster.

1) Self-service contract listing

If you’re developing ERC721-compliant contracts, you can now self-list them on Rare Bits. Once the contract is submitted, we’ll immediately start adding the assets to the Rare Bits marketplace and asset API.

Listing your contract on Rare Bits comes with a ton of benefits:

Your own collection page: The contract will instantly get its own collection page — just like the one CryptoKitties has! You can use this as a single destination to promote assets from your contract that are available for purchase.

Reach a new audience: Rare Bits is one of the top cryptogoods marketplaces. Getting listed on Rare Bits opens up a new distribution channel for your assets.

Embed marketplace functionality into your app: Listed contracts enable developers to use Rare Bits Express — a way to add marketplace functionality natively in your app with just a few lines a code.

Make your contract readable by other apps: Assets in your contract will become recognizable in apps that use the Rare Bits API.

Our new self-listing tool is so efficient that we’ve even been using it internally to add a handful of new contracts! Check out some of the new collections we’ve recently added.

2) Rare Bits Express

Want to natively add a marketplace within your app without having to build one yourself? With Rare Bits express, you can design a native marketplace experience directly within your app once a contract is listed on Rare Bits. This lets your users buy and sell assets directly from within your app. Assets that are listed and/or purchased in your app via Rare Bits Express also entitle you to a portion of the sale price.

3) Asset API

Building apps on the blockchain that interact with unique digital goods requires new infrastructure that differs from fungible assets like cryptocurrencies. Our team has been building this shared infrastructure out for our own products — Rare Bits and Fan Bits — and we’re now working to empower other developers in the ecosystem with it.

The Rare Bits asset API provides:

Asset data: View full metadata for an individual asset and its associated contract. This includes everything from the tokenID to the last price it was sold. Asset data enriches any product that highlights non-fungible assets.

Token ownership: View which non-fungible tokens an address owns for the growing list of contracts Rare Bits monitors.

Auction functionality: Allow your users to put their assets up for auction on Rare Bits.

Check out our new API documentation to get started.

4) Testnet support

We’re excited to share that we now have testnet versions of Rare Bits. This lets you test out your apps before they go live on mainnet. We support Rinkeby, Ropsten, and Kovan.

Check out our new developer page to learn more.

Let’s BUIDL world class apps together!

Rare Bits is a venture-backed startup based in San Francisco. If digital goods on the blockchain interests you, please reach out. We’re actively hiring!