Highlight is one of the leading platforms for creating and collecting digital art and artifacts. The Highlight platform enables creators to build, customize, and upgrade their own onchain digital art projects without requiring extensive blockchain development expertise. By offering a suite of modular tools and protocols, Highlight simplifies the process of deploying smart contracts, managing royalties, and integrating with other marketplaces.

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Highlight: Empowering Creators with Modular Onchain Tools

For digital art and collectibles, creators often face technical hurdles that can stifle innovation and accessibility. Highlight addresses these challenges by providing a modular smart contract architecture and user-friendly tools, allowing creators to launch and manage their onchain projects with greater control and flexibility.

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What Makes Highlight Different

Cost Efficiency through Layer 2 Solutions

Deploying smart contracts on the Ethereum mainnet can be expensive due to high gas fees. Highlight mitigates this by building on a broad selection of L2 networks. This choice reduces transaction costs from several dollars to mere cents, making it economically feasible for creators to experiment and engage with their audiences more frequently.
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Upgradeable Smart Contracts

Traditional smart contracts are immutable once deployed, limiting the ability to add features or fix issues. Highlight uses the beacon proxy design pattern, allowing contracts to be upgraded without changing their address on the chain itself. This means creators can adapt their projects over time, adding new functionalities or responding to user feedback without starting from scratch.
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Creator Ownership with Managed Complexity

Creators retain full ownership of their contracts by controlling their private keys through familiar wallet options like MetaMask or Privy. While Highlight manages technical aspects such as contract upgrades and token distribution, ultimate control remains with the creator. This balance allows creators to focus on their work without getting bogged down in technical details.
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Interoperability with Major Marketplaces

Highlight ensures that smart contracts deployed through its platform are compatible with major NFT marketplaces and platforms like OpenSea and Rarible. By supporting standards like ERC-2981 for royalties and enabling gas-free listings, the platform enhances visibility and potential earnings for creators.

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Why Should Developers and Creators Care?

Any developer or creator working at the intersection of digital art and the creator economy should pay attention to Highlight, as they implement several best practices:
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Modular Architecture

Highlight’s smart contract system is built on modular components, allowing developers to customize and extend functionalities according to project needs. This modularity reduces development time, as developers can reuse and adapt existing modules rather than building everything from scratch.
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Use of Open Protocols and APIs

Highlight provides open protocols and APIs that facilitate integration with other services and tools. Developers can build custom solutions, integrate third-party services, or create new modules that plug into the Highlight ecosystem.
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Deployment of Useful Tools for Generative Art

Highlight offers a full suite of tools to streamline the development and testing of generative (code-based) NFT projects. Relative to other approaches, generative projects provide a much more efficient and flexible way to produce unique NFTs at scale. Developers using Highlight’s Generative and Studio tooling can quickly iterate on code, preview outputs, and manage metadata efficiently, reducing the time between concept and deployment.
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Flexible Data Storage Options

Recognizing that different projects have varying needs for data permanence and accessibility, Highlight supports a range of onchain data storage options. Developers can choose to store assets fully onchain for maximum permanence or use decentralized storage solutions like IPFS and Arweave to balance cost and accessibility.

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SimpleHash and Highlight

Highlight uses SimpleHash to power core token metadata and content data pipelines. The team started by using the REST API to query relevant user wallets, contracts, and to retrieve detailed collection info. Looking to improve the overall timeliness of the Highlight platform, they added the Kafka Streaming Service to their workflow. This had two main benefits:

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• Improved timeliness on obtaining token transfer and metadata update events, through moving to a push-based architecture, instead of requiring continuous polling
• More flexibility via ingesting all relevant events on chain, which can then be piped to any internal Highlight service

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Specifically, Highlight makes use of the following SimpleHash Kafka Streaming Service topics:

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• Owner - to obtain the real-time set of ownership updates of any token on any of the networks relevant to Highlight, in real time
• NFT Metadata - for getting a real time stream of all token update events, including the addition of metadata and media to new mints, and for drops/reveals
• Collections - similarly for NFT metadata, to enable a real time stream of NFT collection updates
• Transfers - for keep the ongoing stream of token transfers and sales (including on other marketplaces) up to date

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We trust SimpleHash because they've been super responsive to all questions, support asks - and because they have the best coverage of the L2 networks we need to support. Switching to the Kafka service has also helped us embed a real time experience throughout our platform, and was easy to integrate. - Nat Emodi, Co-Founder & CEO, Highlight

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As digital art and assets evolve, and as new rollup and L2 networks emerge, Highlight can continue to take advantage of SimpleHash Kafka topics with minimal effort, as all new chains include a common schema and interface.

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The Highlight team have an amazing sense of taste on what creators care about - and we're very proud to keep supporting them and helping them build the best home for digital art and culture, and support the chains their users care about. - Olly Wilson, CEO, SimpleHash