Empowering Creators with Sui Kiosk

Creators and IP holders need tools which allow them to reflect their business models on chain. Sui Kiosk (a primitive on Sui) addresses that need and offers dynamic options for creators to set terms that will be respected in any trading scenario.

Let's look into why we use it for your SuiFrens collectibles, and how creators and marketplace operators can use it to trade digital assets on Sui.

What is Sui Kiosk?

You’re probably familiar with some sort of kiosk, whether a newsstand in Paris that sells a wide range of newspapers and magazines or a small stall in a tourist shopping area that sells t-shirts and other local souvenirs. The common trait with these kiosks is that they sell something and display their wares openly for passersby to browse and engage with. A Sui Kiosk is the digital version of these types of kiosks, but in this case, it’s digital assets and collectibles (i.e. NFTs) offered instead.

Budapest photo by James Handlon

Sui Kiosk solves the problem of serving a business model in a decentralized environment – by creating and placing assets inside a Sui Kiosk, a creator can define transfer policies and rules that will control how the asset is shared, sold, and managed by future owners and/or marketplaces.

Creators are in control of the policies and rules – not marketplaces – which mitigates issues that have been observed on other chains and marketplaces (for example, a well-known marketplace recently removed strong royalty enforcement for NFTs). Additionally, as Kiosks use the shared object model on Sui, they exist as a source of truth where everyone can see assets listed for sale and, if they want to, implement their own front-end experiences to display and interact with them.

At its base, Sui Kiosk is purposely generalized, offering simple functions in order to set a common framework which helps with adoption and interoperability. The base is constructed in the following way:

Kiosk + KioskOwnerCap – these are the basic components of the Kiosk. The owner of a Kiosk can place an asset inside it, they can list it (without conditions) and then anyone can purchase the listed asset.

TransferPolicy + TransferPolicyCap – these define the conditions in which an asset can be traded or sold. They can define whether an asset can be sold or not, what price it can be purchased for, and under which circumstances it can be purchased (e.g. peer-to-peer only or via defined marketplaces).

Rules – these are the specific terms within a TransferPolicy that define how an object can be traded. For example, rules can define the existence of fees or taxes – and as in the case of SuiFrens, they define Royalties due to the creator.

As with kiosks in the real world, creators will need varying policies and business models. Therefore, Sui Kiosk allows for extensions, enabling more complex scenarios to be modeled, such as auctions and lotteries.

Read the Sui documentation to learn more about the specific functions to use when building with Sui Kiosk. Start building using the Kiosk code from Mysten Labs on Github.

Using Kiosk for SuiFrens Bullsharks & Capys

As part of the Active Contributors & Early Supporters (ACES) initiative, Mysten Labs awarded 380k SuiFrens Bullsharks to recognized addresses in June. These Bullsharks were all delivered inside a Kiosk which controls how SuiFrens are sold (currently via marketplaces with Kiosk support only), mandates a royalty and prevents the transfer of the collectibles unless the two prior conditions are met.

Our goal for placing the SuiFrens collectibles in a Kiosk was to demonstrate strong royalty enforcement, something many creators and builders need, but is rarely available as a common feature on many blockchains.

The SuiFrens Bullshark Kiosks have two key rules implemented within the TransferPolicy:

• A Royalty Rule specifying an amount to be paid to the creator (in this case it's 0.1% or 0.1 SUI, whichever is higher) when resold AND
  
  

• A Lock Rule which prevents the asset from being listed or traded outside the Kiosk, thereby bypassing the Royalty Rule

The combination of the above rules represent a simple version of strong royalty enforcement.

In order to work with the Sui Kiosk primitive, creators need to work with common packages which are supported by the various applications and marketplaces on Sui. Fragmentation can be a real risk with these types of capabilities and so it is recommended that builders work with known and established code.

Additionally, others can build their own package that uses Sui Kiosk.

We developed and open-sourced the Kiosk to allow creators, builders, and marketplaces to easily use it. And Kiosk is already supported by most marketplaces on Sui.