Quix Launches Optimism NFT Bridge
In December 2021 the startup has turned into a new product - the NFT marketplace for Optimism - Quix. Then the NFT ecosystem was very small, Quix was literally the only marketplace where you could trade Optimism NFTs.
Quix created the first no-code NFT launchpad in the ecosystem. It was used to launch many of the most well-known OP NFT projects today—Ganland, Oliens, BoredTown, Motorheads and more else.
The team has managed to work with projects such as - CoinGecko, RabbitHole, CryptoTesters, SimpleHash, Mirror, Zapper, Mintplex and many more to help them integrate Optimism NFTs into their products.
Quix developed the Optimism ERC-721 bridge, which is now integrated into Optimism's codebase. They revamped the marketplace to simplify the process of bridging NFTs to Optimism and designed a user-friendly experience that allows collectors to trade bridged NFTs with the same ease as any other NFTs.
How works Optimism NFT bridge
The Optimism NFT Bridge is a protocol that allows users to bridge ERC 721 NFTs from Ethereum Mainnet (Layer 1) to Optimism (Layer 2).
When you bridge an NFT from Ethereum, your L1 asset gets locked in a smart contract and you receive an identical NFT on Layer 2. That “bridged” NFT on layer 2, then acts as a “key” which can be used to unlock the L1 NFT at any time. If you sell or transfer the bridged L2 NFT, then only the new owner will be able to unlock the L1 NFT for themselves.
Quix Shutdown
In July 2022, Quix suffered an exploit that resulted in the theft of over $100,000 in OP and USDC. The company announced that it would return all stolen tokens.
Unfortunately, infrastructure costs exceeded revenues, and the team could not cope (by this time the team consisted of 3 people)
The project has opened the source code - it means the Quix code will be freely available for the community to leverage and build with.
Quix announced in November 2022 that it would close its marketplace — with the closure date set for February 2023.