Soho renders NFT media quickly and accurately with Center

The Challenge

Rendering NFT media is hard

Properly rendering NFT media is difficult. Applications have to contend with images, animations, audio, video and even complex HTML — not to mention numerous edge cases that require specialized handling. On top of that, NFTs are constantly revealing, often resulting in brand-new media that must be properly detected and shown to users.

In a competitive market, Soho cannot afford to provide anything less than an excellent experience for users

As a mobile platform for NFT collectors and creators, Soho needs to support instantaneous, highly accurate rendering. Its users expect to see the latest NFTs, loaded instantly and updated promptly after reveals. To do this in-house, they would need to build complicated infrastructure that would require significant engineering resources and overhead.

Solution

Soho discovered Center, which provides the market-leading NFT renderer. With the Center API, Soho can render NFT media with a simple, predictable URL. Center supports:

• File transformations: Soho can specify custom file types (like .png) and Center will rasterize the media before serving it. This makes the media easier to work with and display in their application.
• “Safe Rendering”: Center provides safe versions of NFT media, so that Soho can ensure any potential malicious content is removed before serving it to users.
• Audio and video files: Soho can easily show any type of NFT media with Center, including audio and video files.
• Re-sizing: Soho can specify the exact dimensions for the media before making the request, and Center will serve them precisely what they need.

Results

• No complex in-house rendering infrastructure required
• 2+ months of engineering time saved
• Lightning-fast load times for mobile application
• Noticeable improvements to application quality and polish
• Up-to-date NFT media after reveals that delight users