Welcome to Crecoland — Where NFTs are fun again. 🐊🎪
Why we need better NFT standards, on-chain metadata and tools for creators and collectors.
Right-click save Economy
2021 was the year of NFTs. We all witnessed the creation of a new asset class: NFTs or “non-fungible tokens” have become very popular to track ownership of digital assets.
“Content creator” - this is a job description our grand parents struggle to understand. It is an Internet-native concept where value is created through digital assets: videos, podcasts, music, images, blogs, vlogs, ads
A whole new industry has developed around digital content. The Internet has created an environment where we consume, share, like and socialize over digital content but also caused the commoditization of it: “Right-click save and it’s mine”, “why should I pay for content if it’s digital?”, “artists should offer for free - we are used to it”.
Centralized platforms and distributors controlling content, and enforcing rights have helped creators initially, but put them in positions where the majority of the created value can be extracted by those platforms. They dictate the rules and creators struggle to make a living even though their huge fan bases are paying more than enough for their works.
NFTs, PFPs, IP, P2P and other hyped abbreviations
NFTs are a new technology solution that empowers creators and fight commoditization of digital creations — and they are arguably the only good one (compare digital rights management — DRM). NFTs enable creatives to own their creations, create products based on their work and build a community that wants to support them, values their work and pays for assets in a peer-to-peer (p2p) fashion.
NFTs can carry intellectual property (IP) rights and commercial rights to (digital) products that are bootstrapped by the community — the Internet equivalent of co-op brands. Artists can earn royalties on secondary market sales of NFTs.
All possible without middlemen, “king makers” or barriers to enter or in other words “permissionless” and “decentralized”. At least that’s the vision..
A subcategory and new phenomenon are “NFT profile pictures” short PFPs.
They are not only the digital equivalent to owning an expensive asset like a Rolex, iPhone or sneakers as a “flex”, status symbol or to signal wealth or “good taste” they are also identities and digital keys.
Protocols and applications can query the ownership information and give the owner access to apps, tools, APIs, communities or social clubs, airdrops, lending protocols, even physical locations, game access, in-game assets, discounts on products…. thereby blending the borders of an increasingly important digital world and our digital personas with the real world.
NFT standard — it’s complex because it’s simple
When we speak about NFTs we most often refer to tokens on the Ethereum blockchain and the ERC721 standard for these tokens.
Many people have a very fuzzy definition of what NFTs are and do. Which can seem paradox because the NFT standard at its technical core is not very complex and similar to fungible tokens or coins.
Fungible tokens like WETH, USDT, DAI, APE, .. follow the ERC20 standard. These fungible tokens, on a protocol level, are described simply as balances.
For fungible tokens where all tokens have the same meaning or value the token standard defines a mapping from address (public key or “account”) to balance and offers interfaces for e.g. atomic transfer functions. The asset type is provided through the context i.e. in which contract this balance state is stored. The above can be interpreted as:
“0x12345… owns 20 tokens of USD and each USD has the same value”
These tokens can be efficiently managed and traded in automated market makers and protocols known as decentralized finance or DeFi.
NFTs are very similar but different:
Because one token does not equal another, NFT contracts do not store an address => balance relationship.
If we query for example the “Bored Ape Yacht Club” state we can find out that address 0xb38BD68A6F0BA599808D65c7A9cF2a428105b680 owns a token with ID 3049.
The OpenSea marketplace presents the state information as displayed above. But to get to this simple representation, many steps are necessary:
A platform or frontend needs to query and track the contract state, it then needs to query the contract for the metadata URL, resolve the URL to a host which can be a network or protocol like IPFS, it needs to find and download the metadata content, parse the contents, extract the image url, index the attribute information, store it in a database, download and cache the image until it can finally display the asset and all of its information.
NFTs are so simple because they shift most logic “off-chain”. Smart contracts or decentralized applications can not perform any of these steps. The reason why we rely on centralized infrastructure (like Opensea’s indexers and API) and have very limited use cases compared to e.g. DeFi.
The only information the contract has is the token ID and a URL, which supports many different use cases but at the expense of not being able to write good, truly decentralized applications.
Metadata URLs the NFT Blindspot
While the NFT standard is a powerful tool to track ownership of digital assets and to facilitate transfers based on programmable rules it also stops right there. The reason for this is that the Internet (or web2) and blockchain (or web3) have limited abilities to interact with each other. The internet can easily access blockchain information but not vice versa. Blockchain state is very secure and constrained data so every information we store on the Web or a different network becomes unavailable and can only be re-introduced through expensive and error prone “oracles” — which are trusted nodes making information available in transactions.
The flexibility of the ERC721 standard is creating a blindspot for smart contracts where they have absolutely no information about the asset they are managing. The standard is good at handling many different things (real estate, art, debt, collectibles..) but not good at doing one specific thing.
Even worse: the NFT standard does NOT define IP ownership or any rights over the externally stored asset(s). A lot of this depends on a social contract and a clear definition of rights attached to the token.
The huge task of indexing NFT assets and legal definitions introduces the same centralized platforms and problems that the vision of the web3 wanted to eliminate in the first place.
Content creators struggle to pick a platform or to understand the implications of off-chain assets, restricted “store-front” contracts, how to provide availability of assets, smart contract logic and mint process.
Platforms exercise power in form of censorship, pending verifications, shadow banning, de-listings, lock-in effects, favouritism, API throttling, …
CreCo for Creators and Collectors
Creco is a community of creators and collectors. Our team has collected many thousand NFTs and was in the front row of “drops” with leaked metadata, disappearing images, platform scandals and influencer “cashgrabs” and has seen a lot of negative effects when great tech is misused.
We believe it is time for a change. We believe in a vision of NFTs where the metadata is on-chain. Where we can return to permissionless protocols that verify collections based on transparent rules, filter assets, and that are governed by the community. NFTs that will not turn into broken links when someone stops paying for the image hoster or that disappear if the API server is down.
The NFT standard needs to be redefined to reflect asset information. To unlock the full potential of the EVM, and to create truly “smart” contracts and trustless applications.
On-chain metadata will create a DeFi wave for NFTs
Enter Crecoland
Our vision is Crecoland: an environment for NFTs that follows new standards, that make NFTs programmable and truly innovative. A place where creators are empowered and NFTs are fun again.
NFT owners should own the DNA or trait data of their assets and benefit from this ownership and derivatives created by the community. Builders should have access to funding to be able to work on exciting applications that make use of on-chain trait information, NFTs and new exciting technologies.
We believe the next revolution will be caused by “web3-native projects” not game studios or fashion brands that track asset ownership on the blockchain.
Our crecodiles 🐊 will be the first citizens of Crecoland. A generative NFT PFP collection to signal support for this vision and participate in the genesis of this ecosystem.
The crecodile DNA will be stored on chain in a compressed way. All it takes is one extra integer (bitfield) to unlock the full NFT potential. A first step to build applications that do not just track ownership but also understand different asset types.
We believe it will unlock a new wave of applications like NFT DEXes (decentralized exchanges), curation protocols, smart lending pools, games at the intersection of DeFi and lead to a lot more creative coding.
Crocs are our homage to the NFT space.
We believe we can improve NFTs and contribute to the ecosystem. We believe on-chain metadata is the future of NFTs.
If you want to support us and build with us or if you just want an awesome croc PFP join our community.
And follow us on medium to learn more about NFTs, technology and what we are building.
🐊🐊🐊
