Unlock Protocol Product Updates for January 2022
Unlock's January 2022 release adds upgradable contracts, NFT airdrop support, and over a dozen other new capabilities for creators and developers.
The Unlock Protocol team has been on a 🚀 ride of BUIDLing as we blast into 2022! First, there is a major new release of the underlying Unlock smart contract — the engine that powers Unlock — as well as a whole smorgasbord of new capabilities that add power and flexibility to the protocol.
Members of the Unlock team — heck, the whole Unlock community — are constantly finding new ways for creators and developers to benefit from building their membership-based projects, solutions and businesses using the open-source Unlock Protocol. Here’s what’s new in January 2022.
You can now upgrade Unlock smart contracts
When you deploy a lock with Unlock, a new instance of the PublicLock contract (ERC-721) is created with the parameters you defined (name, token, etc). In Solidity, several patterns exist to deploy a contract from another contract. The previous version of Unlock was using a Minimal Proxy (EIP-1167). Instead of deploying the entire contract for each new lock created, a small proxy is deployed just to hold the data and forward calls to a main instance that deals with all the incoming data. That would potentially save a significant amount of gas when deploying a new lock instance.
However, the minimal proxy approach did not allow for upgrades. We wanted all locks to benefit from the latest features available, so we implemented a mechanism to deploy a full proxy from a contract and allow users to upgrade their locks when new features were released.
Here is a deep dive behind what this means for implementers of Unlock.
New capabilities for Creators
- Airdrop NFT keys directly from the Unlock dashboard — A lock owner can grant keys directly from the dashboard to their members
- Non expiring memberships — Memberships can be set to never expire
- Increase the number of keys on a lock — A lock manager can increase the number of keys on a lock even after it was created
- Offer gas refund from locks — A lock manager can allocate a “gas refund” to be paid to the person submitting a purchase transaction
New tools for Developers
- onValidKey Hook — Ability to delegate the check about whether an address owns at least 1 valid membership to a 3rd party contract — this can check to see if a key purchaser has, for example, a particular ERC-721 NFT or a particular ERC-20 in their wallet
- OnTokenUri hook — A hook to let a lock owner customize the metadata on the NFT that’s fully on chain
- Key manager on purchase — When purchase transaction is called, a key manager can be set that could be different from the beneficiary of the membership
- Try/catch on Unlock — Locks could technically be “cut out” of Unlock and still work
- Sign In With Ethereum: Unlock’s front-end now provides a “Sign In With Ethereum” endpoint that can be used by a 3rd party application to easily identify a user’s Ethereum address
Ok, you’ll be glad you read down this far. This is kind of like the after-credits scene in the MCU movies. But — instead of Nick Fury, you get a look at some of the kick-ass stuff that members of the Unlock community have launched over the past couple of weeks. Check it:
Croissant has launched BakeryDAO with a thundering Twitter thread...
ETHAnglia is bringing web3 to the East of England...
WPOptimizers 🇪🇸 has created a membership site for optimizing WordPress, the open-source content management system that powers 43% of the web...
The Willow Tree has launched their membership for bridging web3 and rave culture (and their site design is off the charts)...
CDAA is one of the first projects we have seen using utility NFTs as the basis for industry certification and on-chain credentials for digital asset advisors...amazing...
Want to know what’s going on with Unlock in real time? Jump into our Discord. #protip