Salesforce officially announced NFT Cloud at Connections on June 8th, 2022.
The Connections event also included three fireside chats about web3 over the course of the two day event, featuring Patrick Ward from Rootstrap, Raja Rajamannar from Mastercard, and Ariel Wengroff from Ledger. There was also a display at the campground with a lovely Belgium guy performing demos of the product, and a 3D camera scanner that created a somewhat depressing 3D model of each person so they could awkwardly strut down a virtual runway.
Some quick details about where the product stands right now, as gathered via several partial viewings of the live demo:
Requires Commerce Cloud.
No-code solution to minting NFTs.
Wallet Object includes a risk score.
Current chains are Polygon, Avalanche, and Palm.
If NFT Cloud sticks around, they will add Solana, Flow, and maybe other Proof-of-Stake chains.
Salesforce has built a MetaMask login for Salesforce.
Requires Commerce Cloud:
Commerce Cloud is required to build the entire flow of building the NFT project, publishing, connecting to wallets, minting, and tracking.
The structure of the product within Salesforce includes the following objects. There might be more objects involved, but these are the two I observed during several partial viewings of the demo:
NFT
Includes details like the chain and traits
Has a related list of Wallets
Wallet
Includes details like wallet address and risk score
The risk score is generated by making API calls to services that can assess if a wallet has been used for activities like hacking or gambling.
No Code:
The NFT Cloud engine writes the smart contract for you and leverages Threekit to build the art.
Since many smart contracts have the same architecture, the process of outputting a smart contract and pinning assets to ipfs can be fully automated by Salesforce. However, this is also why only three chains are currently offered: Polygon, Avalanche, and Palm. These three chains use the same contract architecture that is used by Ethereum. Other chains, such as Solana, require different contact architecture, and therefore have not been implemented yet.
As far as the art goes, Threekit is already in a relationship with Salesforce Commerce Cloud so it was a natural choice.
The NFT object stores traits, such as colors and accessories.
Let’s say I am a furniture company like Interior Define and I want to create an NFT project. Interior Define allows customers to customize a couch with color, texture, configuration, size, and feet. Using Threekit, I could mint an NFT that looks exactly like my couch:
Color: Cobalt
Texture: Performance Plush Velvet
Configuration: Corner Sectional Sofa
Size: 98 inches long + 38.5 inches depth
Feet: Oiled Walnut Tapered Round Wood
Yes this is my actual couch and I love it. Leveraging Threekit, I could mint a 3D replica of my couch as an NFT via NFT Cloud.
Threekit also has AR capabilities. Take a look at what Astro would look like hanging out in your living room (link needs to be opened on a mobile device with a camera).
After you build the NFT project, you will be able to host the minting of the NFT project on a webpage via Commerce Cloud. This will include a connect wallet button and a mint button. Only MetaMask is supported at this time. Wallets and NFTs will be passed back to Salesforce. At no point will you have to write your own code.
Chains:
Salesforce has committed to using only Proof-of-Stake chains, as they are better for the environment than Proof-of-Work chains. This means that Ethereum is currently off the table. However, I would argue that it could be back on the table post-merge. The Merge is when Ethereum eventually merges with what they call the beacon chain, and does a hard cut-over to Proof-of-Stake. The Merge is always right around the corner, and that corner keeps moving further away.
It is important to note that the chain restrictions only apply to the NFTs that Salesforce builds for you through NFT Cloud. If you have NFT Cloud, you could feasibly leverage the Wallet object to track an NFT project on any chain, including Ethereum by manually or programmatically creating a Wallet record. Take a look at my piece on connecting MetaMask to a CloudPage in Marketing Cloud for an approach to capturing wallet addresses on your own.
If you do not have NFT Cloud, you will not have the Wallet object that Salesforce has built. You could create your own custom Wallet object that mirrors the NFT Cloud Wallet object, but without the risk score that NFT Cloud provides.
Salesforce login with MetaMask:
I do not expect this to be implemented to the public anytime soon, and I got the sense that this was just a passion project or hypothetical experiment. However, the ability to log into Salesforce with MetaMask instead of a username and password has some nice potential. For example, a company that is built on a DAO structure could leverage MetaMask login to Token Gate Salesforce for DAO token holders only.