Portals is an Automated Market Maker (AMM) on Aptos. For a layman, or for someone who has been doing the traditional usage of exchanges for NFTs, AMM or the usage of Portals could be a little confusing, but it won’t be if you actually try it once.
Anyone can create a Portals pool, which basically is a liquidity pool of NFTs and some APT tokens, where the Portal automatically alters the price of the NFTs and the collection offer based on whether one of the NFTs is sold from that particular pool.
Often, on Topaz, you see the option of “Buy from Portals” when hovering an NFT with “PORTALS” text written on them on some of the popular collections. It’s the same “Portals” that I am talking about.
How do I create a pool?
Note: Before you begin, remember that this won’t cost much to try when you are pricing your NFT much above the floor price, so go on and try, and only then you would understand how Portals works. Rather, try it with some of the lower-cost NFT collections, to begin with.
To create a Portals Pool, you will need to visit portals.wtf and then, tap on Create Pool. Connect your wallet, the one that has the NFTs that you want to have in that Portals Pool. You will see all the allowed collections to choose from. I’ll go with Aptos Monkeys here to easily make you understand how to set this up.
Set the initial price for the pool –
You will have to set the price, which will be the price of the first NFT bought or sold by the pool you are creating. For example, the floor of Aptos Monkeys while creating this pool was 14.8 APT, and I am setting the initial price at 16 APT.
Choose $APT to deposit into the pool –
This is the APT token that you will be having in your pool. This is the safer bet for you, and since the floor is 14.8 APT, you can have lesser APT than that, for example about 13.5 APT in the pool, so that will go in as a collection offer.
Set your fee –
Your fee is automatically deposited into your address whenever someone buys or sells from your pool. It is calculated as a percentage of the price of the trade. This fee is one of the advantages of the Portals Pool. You get some fee for the trading happening in this pool.
Set pricing strategy –
- Linear pools increase the price by delta $APT every time someone buys an NFT from the pool, and decrease the price by delta $APT anytime someone sells an NFT into the pool.
- Exponential pools increase the price by delta % every time someone buys an NFT from the pool, and decrease the price by delta % anytime someone sells an NFT into the pool.
So, based on how you want the next NFT’s price to be changed, you can set it to either go up or down by a certain number or by a percentage. I have set it to 1.5 APT up/down for every buy and sell activity in the pool.
Review Pool
Once you are done adding the NFTs and the numbers for all the different sections, there will be a pop-up with all the details for you to confirm, including the fee, the initial price, pricing strategy, initial APT to be deposited, and once you confirm, you will have to go through the transaction to give the selected NFTs and the set APT to Portals. They will be gone from your wallet, and that’s how Pools work.
How does this work after my Pool is created?
Now, your NFTs will show up on the Collection page on Topaz. If someone buys your NFT for 16 APT as you set it for that price, you get the APT after the regular royalties and fee, and your pool gets the set fee amount as well. Now, the next NFT from your pool directly gets priced at 17.5 APT because you set the increment of 1.5 APT after a buy from the pool. If someone had sold an NFT to you based on the offer you had put (with the deposited APT), then the NFT that you had first listed for 16 APT would automatically go to 14.5 APT. It’s a two-way price movement based on buy and sell in the Pool.
Yesterday, Aptos Monkeys had a Portals pool on the collection, in which I bought the NFT, and the price changed automatically. The next two pictures will make you understand the same. I bought the Monkey NFT at 13.76 APT, and once I did, the remaining Monkeys in the pool became priced at 14.405, which I calculated was a gain of 4.69% which might have been set by the pool creator.
Can I close the Portals Pool whenever I want?
Yes, you can choose to close the pool, but sadly, the maker of Portals hasn’t given the easy option of closing down the button with a single click of a button. You will have to go to the “My Pools” section and click on the “Manage” option and then individually go to each section to withdraw the NFTs from the pool, and the APT tokens too. The pool won’t be closed completely, as you can later deposit and continue using it, but as said, there is no permanent pool closure.
Is it safe to buy from Portals?
It is completely safe, as you are still transacting and buying from Topaz, and once you made the purchase, you will see the NFT directly in your wallet which can be seen on the Topaz profile. What you are doing is buying from the pool, but you are not getting anything different.
But since Topaz (the maker of Portals) has casually mentioned that this is “Portals is in alpha and is experimental software. Use at your own risk”, I would go with that and still ask you to open a Pool with only a caution. Buying from the Pool on Topaz isn’t that risky though if you see someone listing their NFTs on Portals for lesser than the actual floor on Topaz.
Why do my Portals NFT purchase not show up on Topaz activity?
Portals act as a separate pool and thus, it doesn’t come up under the actual activity that is happening on Topaz, just like how the price of NFT in the Pool doesn’t affect what is shown as the floor on the collection or on the homepage of Topaz. There are chances that in the future, we might be seeing those in the Topaz activity, but for now, they won’t show up and that shouldn’t worry you.
Have any other questions?
Please DM me on Twitter @thecaptaingates or on Discord Chetan#7559, or you can comment here as well if you think there should be some corrections or clarifications, or want to ask anything else about Portals.
Disclaimer: This is an independent story, and I wrote it because many users were confused about Portals. I haven’t gotten a reply from the Topaz team when I asked them on Discord to help me with a quick explainer so that I could share that with everyone, so I had to write it to help everyone. If someone from Topaz wants me to do some corrections, they are free to connect.
