Decoded; In the light of NFTs.
For the past couple of years, NFTs have been a buzzword in the mainstream media and in cryptocurrency headlines. But, while it is being covertly whispered in some corners that the euphoria about NFTs may have diminished a little, the fact is incontrovertible that a lot of amazing things around NFTs are still going on behind the scenes, many of which were showcased in this year's Polkadot Decoded Conference. We shall explore a few of these in this discourse.
Notably, the blockchain and cryptocurrency community witnessed on June 28 and 29, an extraordinary event -Polkadot Decoded 2023- which was hosted in Copenhagen, Denmark. This highly anticipated conference brought together dozens of experts in the industry, as well as developers and enthusiasts to display and discuss the latest advancements in the Polkadot ecosystem. With more than a hundred speakers and a showcase of nearly an equal number of blockchain projects, Polkadot Decoded 2023 generated a great deal of excitement and impulse within and all around the community.
A good starting point in this exposé would be to review the remarkable work of the Moonsama network as regards NFTs before exploring other projects.
MOONSAMA, THE FUTURE OF NFT UTILITY
Moonsama is an NFT utility platform and ecosystem that revolves around NFTs and NFT utility, and has evolved to become arguably the largest NFT ecosystem inside Polkadot. Being the multi-chain protocol that enables rapid building for NFT applications, Moonsama accelerates the go-to market of NFT-powered solutions by allowing them to leapfrog over some of the critical building blocks.
Now, it is common knowledge that while working in the Web3 space or building a dApp, it is unavoidable to deal with tokens -be it Fungible Tokens or Non-Fungible Tokens. Clearly, this is because NFTs are enablers of a long list of use cases. But, despite their potential, a considerable fraction of all NFT projects still struggle to build and deliver on their roadmap. Moonsama, therefore, provides infrastructural solutions that builders can leverage on to scale some of the most critical building blocks and to focus on what makes their projects unique.
Interestingly,, use cases focusing mainly on the gaming space, communities and generally having fun was how Moonsama started. However, beyond just beautiful pictures, there had to be more utility for NFTs. Hence, as explained at the Polkadot Decoded Conference by the Moonsama team, Moonsama developed dozens of flavours of NFTs with different tweaks to the surrounding infrastructure, all geared towards developing products that can be leveraged to give an NFT utility in more innovative use cases and applications, thereby doing more interesting things with NFTs -and faster. This was with a focus on grooming already existent products and opening this up to help communities who would like to build on Moonsama not to be lost in the technical details of creating NFTs, rather to derive utility for them in their applications.
To put it simply, the Moonsama technology stack is like a sandwich with the trust layer as its very foundation. Being a multichain project, they have their own parachain (Moonsama network) and there's also Moonriver and Moonbeam, while they also exist on Ethereum Mainnet and now Polygon. Thus, their assets are on blockchains and all the other components are anchored into it as the source of trust.
The Moonsama Network is an upcoming substrate-based parachain that will be launching publicly soon and is envisioned to become an NFT hub in the Polkadot ecosystem. In the initial stages, users will have access to crowdloan rewards and migrating Sama tokens from Exosama network to Moonsama network using the Moonsama router product. Also, once Raresama launches, mass migration of existing Exosama NFT assets will be possible. Essentially, using what is called Paraverse auctions on Moonsama network, users will be able to define on the chain their communities, governance, and their own NFT-based staking and resource economy with some privilege to access the tooling and services that Moonsama can provide. This way, community members and others building with Moonsama will be able to do all the exciting things that Moonsama is doing with NFTs.
Moving up, the second layer is the utility layer, which is basically the primary component that allows NFTs to have utility and applications. Built on the foundation of the Moonsama network, these utilities include Multiverse Portal, Moonsama Composer, NFT 2.0 Customiser, Crafting Sysytem and Reward service. As we shall see shortly, there are several use cases including Moonsama Metaverse, Web3 music, Digitising Wildlife and so on.
The Multiverse Portal is the backbone of the Moonsama ecosystem because it is what dissociates NFTs. It allows movement of assets between chains and in and out of virtual digital spaces like the Multiverse. The Moonsama Composer is an online tool enabling rapid building and deployment for composable art collections. It enables users to: upload, manage and share project files; edit, preview and generate composed art collections; generate and extract metadata of composed collections; and render collections into playable models. This also comes with composability between collections. So, with Moonsama Composer, users can craft NFTs out of NFTs by defining blueprints. Moonsama Metaverse is the ultimate hub of all Moonsama-supported NFTs. It imports assets via the Multiverse Portal and uses them in the Metaverse. It also enables one to interact with other NFT owners or communities, participate in seasonal activities and challenges, and witness firsthand the rise of the multichain NFT ecosystem. Other possibilities are: Staking and governance, Web3 music, and digitising wildlife.
MOONSAMA AND SOVEREIGN NATURE INITIATIVE
This pipeline connects ecological nature-based data to digital creatives, establishes a connection between real life and virtual world, and brings more meaning into those experiences. At its launch, 400 Cub NFTs were sold out within hours, with $100,000 raised and channeled into wildlife conservation and research through the Kenya Wildlife Trust (KWT). Here, the NFTs enriched with on-chain eco-data which enables them to evolve into their full grown counterparts through Web3 gamification.
Further, as elaborated on by the CEO, Sovereign Nature Initiative launched the Decentralised Ecological Economics Protocol (DEEP), where raw, unstructured and sometimes analogue data (in the form of stories, details and statistics) about animals in the wild is collected from conservation organisations. This data is then standardised, digitised and then used by game developers to create assets for their user base. Attributes are also drawn from real life stories, ancestry information and tales of the lives of wild animals: their societies, cultures, alliances and conflicts. Characters and item traits are updated by ongoing conservation efforts of KWT, thereby representing the full life cycle of the animals in a virtual world using NFTs. This is the true application of data in the spirit of Web3, decentralisation, automation and transparency, and it is already making massive waves in the NFT world.
The collaboration of DEEP with Moonsama has made possible the following: Integration of lions into Moonsama Metaverse; creation of NFT metadata about specific lions (while the marketplaces retains experience, allowing animal’s digital twin to learn); representation of African savannah; interactions/animations between avatars; accessibility of the lions' domain to all who wish to visit.
The Lion Cub NFTs continue to generate revenue for players and conservation partners after an astounding 120,000 trading volume in the initial days. As this happens, authentic engagement between blockchain and conservation has led to the creation of NFTs that hold enduring values and dynamicity to keep players engaged. At the same time, benefits flow to nature stewards and nature itself -a positive message for our Web3 world. It also provides increased complexity, dynamicity and quality of stories and characters for game developers and studios.
GAMING ON VARA
It is important to note here that there are different layers of the gaming stack in terms of how on-chain a game is. At the very bottom level there is on-chain game assets, where there are skins and items. Next, there is token-gated access, where owning an NFT or other tokens grants one access to play the game. Then, there are token-gated on-chain accounts, which not only grants access to play the game, but also saves data on progress. Ultimately, the topmost level is fully on-chain games, where everything from the UX to the computing are all running on-chain. With these, different game developers will have the luxury of choosing from this spectrum how on-chain they want their games to be as well as their desired user experience. A gaming example used by the Vara team during the Conference is the Tamagotchi Battle, where NFTs attack and defend against one another and adapt as they do so. Here, there are fully on-chain mutable NFTs, meaning that these NFTs will automatically update based on triggers and transactions on-chain.
EXILED RACERS
Exiled Racers (EXR) is an NFT project as well as an algorithmic racing and predictions game built on the Moonbeam platform, which is one of the parachains on Polkadot, making it a first-of-its-kind concept. Building a Web3 game on what is essentially a Web3-dominated world and bridging the gap between Web2 users and Web3 gamers is its core advantage.
It is low touch, high reward web3 gaming inspired by the intuitive designs of fantasy sports apps and the comradery of club culture. The target is time-poor ex-gamers and communities lacking utility and engagement. The three NFT types used to achieve this include: pilots, racecrafts and boosters. These NFTs have attributes impacting performance (like strength, speed, stamina, etc). Indeed, it has a fantasy league-style game "team" set-up and provably fair algorithmic 3D racing enhanced by its partnership with Zeitgeist for predictions algorithm. EXR is at the very top of the funnel for Web3 growth, and its sponsors drive awareness throughout the EXR funnel which include: Polkadot, Moonbeam, Zeitgeist, DAM, AXELAR, Biconomy and PRIME.
WILDCARD
Wildcard is Ajuna’s Tee-based multi-chain L2 solution. It is a marketplace and a bridge, but it has other NFT relevant applications. Its pro’s include arbitrary programmability, high compatibility, easy on- and off-boarding from Ajuna and Polkadot to Ethereum/Polygon.
Asides this, Erdstall offers four advantages to competing technologies like Zx-rollups and Plasma. They are: trustlessness, more efficiency, less fees and more security.
CRUST
Crust is a decentralised storage protocol based on IPFS (Interplanetary File System). The protocol incentivises anyone to rent out their spare storage space. It switches people with free storage with anyone that wishes to store or host data. Of all the endless use cases of decentralised data storage, one of the most important is storage of NFT Metadata. Most people know that not all NFT Metadata are stored directly on-chain, at least not in most cases. The reason for this is simple: storage on-chain is expensive. For example, one megabyte stored on Ethereum is about $200,000, although there are other chains that do it at cheaper rates. But, generally, Metadata of NFTs is stored off-chain. So, the NFT contract actually points to an off-chain location where the data is stored. This doesn’t mean that we have to rely on centralised services. This is where Crust comes in -to store data totally centralised in off-chain environment which is permanent and totally immutable. They achieved this while working with some big projects like Ternoa and RMRK.
Another recently launched product of theirs is Crust Cloud, which is Crust’s commercial product line on top of their infrastructure and protocol as they explained during the showcasing. What makes it very massive is that it aims to redefine decentralised storage by introducing the concept of Web3 storage buckets.
Web3 storage bucket is basically an NFT-gated storage capacity which lives on gross networks and on IPFS (by far the most adopted file storage protocol in Web3). In other words, a user’s NFT points to a storage capacity which is on IPFS. To further elaborate on what promises these buckets hold for the user, the first thing is that it is fully decentralised on Crust Network, based on Crust Network protocol stack and DePin with multiple guaranteed replicas. Also, it is truly immutable since every bucket data is stored on IPFS with unique IPNS names integrable with ENS (naming services), DIDs (Digital Identity Services) and much more. And in addition, it possesses fully secured NFT-gated authentication without KYC, username or password.
The various bucket types can be: permanent (which provides over 100 years storage with one-time upfront payment) or renewable (which works based on subscription, where flexible renewal is possible based on user demand). However, all Web3 buckets are fully scalable and buckets of different sizes can be minted by users with crypto payment.
How this works is that intending users go to Crust Cloud UI, at crustcloud.io, then they can mint their desired storage bucket. The bucket will be created or Metadata will be created around it and the user will receive it to their wallet, after which they will be able to use it. All NFT Metadata is stored permanently and immutable on IPFS. The owner accesses Web3 storage bucket with NFT-gated Web3 authentication and stores files via web UI or restful APIs.
Because it is essentially the same with any other NFT, owners can transfer Web3 buckets between different accounts or even trade them on any NFT marketplace. All rights and benefits wil be transferred with NFT ownership.
NFTS 2.0
One of the components of InvArch, the DAO economy only possible on Polkadot, is NFTs 2.0. This is composable NFTs which can be used for a myriad of use cases, one of them being on-chain reputation systems, which InvArch is particularly interested in.
Another related application is IP assets: which is using NFTs for content creation, whether it is for artists, musicians, inventors or architects to store their IP on-chain, licence the IP on-chain, and then facilitate tokenised licence over the InvArch network.
Finally, with regard to on-chain entertainment using multiple metadata, a creator can now change the contents of their NFT multiple times whenever they want. So, they can drop to their thousands of fans a new song whenever they wish since the data can change inside NFTs, which is a good tool that allows creators to always engage their fan base directly. Also, community members and users can become stakeholders and be given governance, where the first NFT gives them access to future experiences.
With on-chain music, different communities can be reached. For example, in communicating with the gaming community, music can be used as a cross-utility project to enter new games and reward game winners (with news music NFTs), which is one thing that communities want. In all, NFT technology has evolved and is still evolving, and the possibilities are absolutely limitless.
Links:
https://twitter.com/CrustNetwork/status/1636622215847485440?t=uEoSe5fB-WRokjLEowj7SA&s=19
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLOyWqupZ-WGub-yTvi6iPMJfdD3iA_Xfi
