Messier.art — NFT Marketplace on Terra
Full-stack NFT marketplace with Rust/CosmWasm smart contracts. Led technical architecture end-to-end as CTO.
CTO
technical leadership
E2E
on-chain + off-chain
$MSR
token + DAO
The problem
Build a production-grade NFT marketplace — minting, listing, escrow, royalties, staking, token airdrops, DAO treasury — on a relatively new L1 (Terra) with limited tooling. As CTO, owned every technical decision from smart contracts to product UX.
Approach
- Authored CosmWasm smart contracts in Rust for minting, escrow, and royalty flows.
- Designed $MSR tokenomics — lower trading fees, deflationary buybacks, NFT staking yield.
- Built an off-chain indexer projecting chain events into a queryable Postgres store.
- Shipped the marketplace UI with wallet integration and listing flows.
- Set up DAO-based validator rewards and profit-sharing for token holders.
Key decisions
Off-chain indexer over direct chain reads
Querying the chain on every page view is slow and brittle. An indexer gave us joinable relational queries and predictable latency.
DAO-governed treasury from day one
Token holders vote on treasury deployment. Community ownership baked in instead of bolted on.
Trade-offs
- Indexer adds an operational component — worth it for UX and cost.
- CosmWasm ecosystem was early — invested in tooling alongside product.
Impact
- Shipped a functional marketplace from scratch as founding CTO.
- Platform featured in international press (Yahoo Finance, GlobeNewswire).
- Deep exposure to decentralised system design and async on-chain flows.
Let's build
Have a system that needs to scale — or stop breaking?
I work with a small number of teams each month on architecture reviews, scaling, and hands-on backend engineering. If that sounds like you, let's talk.