NFTY News #15: Let’s get NIFTY (Recap)
NIFTY Recap, CryptoDecks, and Tokenizing Organisms
NIFTY took over Hong Kong this week! The first conference dedicated to the emerging ecosystem of non-fungible tokens, was held on July 24th -26th. Over 800 attendees, including game developers, startups, content publishers, law firms and universities, were on the scene to discuss everything from technical standards and extensibility, to IP rights and tokenizing physical assets.
Let’s dive in 👇
1. Recap of NIFTY
Here are my takeaways from the event:
- The ecosystem has been progressing slower than expected, but the passion is there. It remains to be seen if CryptoKitties will be dethroned. What will it take for other dApps or other non-fungible token players to reach users who casually invest in crypto and know what Ethereum is?
- Gas UX & Scalability drastically limit what we can do with blockchain games. Part of the reason we haven’t seen mainstream adoption is because of the lack of infrastructure around blockchain games. Gas prices have seen an extreme amount of volatility and we’ve seen that it takes more than a dozen clicks to purchase a CryptoKitty.
- Mainstream users don’t care about “true digital ownership” — Why are we creating blockchain games in the first place? There was some conversations that I’ve had with a few individuals about closed ecosystems in what’s meant to be an open source environment. Putting digital assets on the blockchain just to raise a ton of money doesn’t contribute anything to the greater ecosystem. We need less thinking around blockchain games and more thinking of how we can become players in a larger ecosystem.
- There’s no way to value NFTs. We don’t have certainty for valuing fungible tokens. I’ve seen some people trying to value non-fungible tokens — it doesn’t work. When there’s a way to track the number of times a non-fungible is used outside its native environment, we can attempt to calculate value.
- We’re building new tools that focus on Interoperability — Last week, NIFTY Gallery launched to allow users to showcase their nifities. This week, we’ve seen new ways to allow users to calculate the value of NFTs with CryptoDecks.
2. CryptoDecks is launched
We now have another resource for non-fungible value tracking for traders. CryptoDecks allows users to discover, pin, and track cryptogoods.
CryptoDecks is not a dApp. Rather, it’s similar to Nonfungbile.com. Users can search, pin, and create lists of their favorite non-fungible tokens. CryptoDecks will rank tokens based on the number of pins/votes on certain tokens.
Maybe this is the first step in valuing non-fungibles? 🤔
3. NIFTY Hackathon Recap of Finalists
Here are the winners from NIFTY. Each of the winners also received a non-fungible token trophy (shoutout to Morgan for the awesome idea). Non-fungible token trophies are a way of signaling skills tied to your identity.
3rd place — Cryptaceous Creatures
We need some education around blockchain games and nifties. Cryptaceous Creations is an excellent idea showing what non-fungibles are and how we can collect/compose tokens to make an ERC721 dinosaur.
Seems really similar to the idea of CryptoCarz, a NFT VR Racing game. Cars are a ERC721 made up of smaller components. I talked about the idea of composing non-fungible tokens to create a larger non-fungible token using composition.
Shoutout to the CryptoCarz team who also built a Drag Racing demo on Decentraland at NIFTY. Using prediction markets, users pick & bet on a coin which determines the speed of the car.
2nd Place — Mystery Box
Non-fungible tokens are just assets part of a larger game. With Mystery Box, we can have a RNG game-like mechanic using non-fungible tokens. Anyone can create their own mystery box with non-fungible tokens that they own. Users who buy the mystery box have a chance of obtaining one of the non-fungible tokens inside.
This is a super neat way of bundling non-fungible tokens. Now users can not only create their own non-fungible tokens, but now they can also sell them through mystery boxes providing additional utility & fun to their own ecosystem.
1st place — Last of Ours
Last of Ours is really similar to Panda Earth in that endangered species are tokenized 1:1. You can use the tokens as avatars in Decentraland. You can also earn new digital assets if your adopted animals have some newborns!
The tokenization of scarce organisms seems to be a solid use case for real-world NFTs. As I’ve mentioned in the past, donations are the killer use case for NFTs because our donations are tied to a digital sound good which can also act as an investment.
4. Terra0 Launches FlowerTokens
Flower Tokens from Terra0 launched last week which tokenizes 100 flowers as a non-fungible token. It’s another great example of supporting an organism by tokenizing. Many of the tokens have already been selling for a few ETH. You can track the progress of the flower directly on the site.
Here’s what Flower 70 looks like:
Here’s a picture of the panel I lead on Extensibility & Interoperability. (After surveying the audience, I realized less than 1% of the crowd even know what those words meant) Thanks for the great discussion PaperUnicorn, David, and Gabby!
As always, I’m super stoked about talking to others about the possibilities of NFTs. If you want to talk about NFTs, or anything crypto related, drop me a line on twitter @flynnjamm, my DMs are always open.
Thanks Tom and Andrew Beal.
