Basics

At the core of the EthITEM system sits an Orchestrator, a contract that uses an external KnowledgeBase Contract to keep track of all native and wrapped tokens.

The first time a token gets wrapped, a Collection will be created. This will hold all future minted ITEMs by wrapping other instances of the same token.

The Orchestrator is an upgradable contract that uses a factory for the creation of the collections. The factory, in turn, relies on upgradable models, one for each of the wrappable standards. The models get cloned during the collection deployment (all collections are cloned from a Model).

Each model shares its version with its children Collections. Once it gets upgraded, a new Collection will be created when the first token is wrapped.

It’s easier to understand with an example:

Model: ERC721ModelV1 > Alice wraps an ENS. Since there’s no corresponding collection, a collection (ENSCollectionV1) is created by cloning the ERC721ModelV1. > Bob wraps an ENS. Since we already now have an ENSCollectionV1, that collection will be used (no new collection is created if there’s already one available). > The model is updated: ERC721ModelV2 > Julian wraps an ENS. Since the ENSCollectionV1 was cloned from an older model version, a new collection is created: ENSCollectionV2. All subsequent ENS that are wrapped will be inserted here. > Older collections can be migrated to newer ones, by unwrapping all their ITEMs and wrapping them with the new Models.