How the Middle East first NFT launch leveraged AWS at scale

The Customer

Crypto Bear Watch Club (CBWC) is a luxury timepiece based NFT launched in early 2022. Promoted by the Damac group, the largest private sector real estate company in the Middle East, it is a utility backed token, and has presence in the real world as well as in the meta verse. CBWC owns land in Sandbox and the launch was a great success with 3010 limited edition bears bearing luxury watches, with 300 traits applied and three tiers of value for the customized bears. CBWC is also launching its own brand of luxury watches for its members, and is in the process of developing a massively multiplayer online role-plating game (MMORPG).

The Challenge

CBWC wanted a platform that was extremely secure keeping in consideration the crypto landscape. CBWC expected large scale bot, phishing and other DDoS attacks during the initial launch and mint, and needed a solution that could effectively scale, while not allowing malicious traffic to enter the core infrastructure. It needed the malicious traffic to be stopped at the perimeter. External connections to the Ethereum blockchain has to be secure, and independent external audits were needed to certify the platform before go-live. All in all, the platform had to be extremely resilient so as to overcome any amount of challenges thrown at it.

The Solution

The solution was primarily to host it in AWS, which could scale almost infinitely, but could also oblivitae the need for a large, expensive infrastructure. Leading to launch date, we deployed multiple environments, development, staging, and prod, with minimal infrastructure, and then pre-launch scaled up dynamically to the actual traffic. The front end was developed in NextJS and deployed in S3 buckets and was configured behind CloudFront distributions, which was configured with the Amazon Web Application Firewalls (WAF) with pertinent rulesets applied to prevent attacks like malicious traffic from bots, DDoS attacks, malformed requets etc.

The Result

The launch and subsequent operations was an enormous success, leading to CBWC getting listed in OpenSea as one of the Top 10 active NFT projects at the time of the listing. 3010 limited edition bears with unquie traits were lanuched and was traded actively on OpenSea, and further developments included deployments of a platform where the bears could be staked and rewards in the form of Arkouda tokens. Development is actively going for the launch of a MMORPG to be deployed on AWS, as well as the launch of Arkouda, a virtual, metaverse world in Sandbox.

Technologies and Services Used

• Amazon EC2
• Amazon CloudFront
• Amazon Aurora MySQL
• AWS Config
• AWS Elastic Beanstalk
• AWS Systems Manager
• AWS CodePipline
• Amazon S3
• Simple Notification Service
• AWS CodeDeploy
• AWS WAF
• Amazon ElasticCache
• Amazon EFS
• Amazon CloudWatch
• Amazon Kinesis Firehose