Crypto NYC Hosts Nifty.Supply
Every Tuesday Crypto NYC hosts a weekly lunch where a member of the crypto community gives an update on their project. On July 24th, Crypto NYC hosted Nifty.Supply, a start-up cofounded by two members of the Crypto NYC community, Seth Feibus and Tarrence van As. Nifty.Supply is a permissionless non-fungible token creation and issuance platform. Artists and other creators can use Nifty.Supply to tokenize and distribute their work. Tuesday’s presentation was led by Feibus, who gave an overview to a group of roughly twenty-five members of the New York crypto community.
Feibus and van As met at Crypto NYC, where they are both members of the coworking community. They bonded over a mutual desire to improve the current options for state management on Ethereum. Van As is one of the co-founders of Common Interest, and led the lunch presentation on June 26.
Feibus and van As were working on creating non-fungible tokens with other members of the Crypto NYC community, and grew frustrated by the cumbersome process of creating new ERC-721 tokens. Nifty.Supply was built to make the ERC-721 token creation process accessible to creators without requiring a technical background. Non-fungible tokens provide a variety of use cases for content creators, from making it easier for artists to monetize their work to ensuring the validity of pieces of artwork.
The ERC-721 protocol allows for the creation of non-fungible tokens(NFT), in contrast to standard ERC-20 tokens in which each token is identical. The NFT acronym is where Nifty.Supply derives its name. The recent Cryptokitties craze is the most popular implementation of the ERC-721 token protocol. Non-fungible tokens can be bought and sold like traditional assets but can also be programmed to have unique functionality. For example, cryptokitty tokens can be “mated” to produce new blended versions of the parent cryptokitties. Cryptokitties have been one of the most successful and popular use cases of Ethereum, with some of the digital cats trading for thousands of dollars.
Feibus designed the Nifty.Supply to be easily accessible for content creators who aren’t familiar with the cryptocurrency ecosystem. Feibus and van As both recognized that in order for Nifty.Supply to expand, they would need to make the their platform accessible to a wide audience with varying levels of technical skill.
“If this technology is supposed to be permissionless and bring people into the [new] economy, ultimately we have to cater to their needs and not expect everyone to know how to code solidity contracts,” Feibus explained. “We want to make this technology more accessible. Nifty.Supply is for anyone who has an idea for a non-fungible token or has a craft that they want to monetize …. It is completely point and click, no coding skills are required with an easy to use interface that doesn’t assume anything.”
Nifty.Supply has built the first iteration of their tokenization platform, which Feibus displayed during the presentation. During his presentation, Feibus gave a live demonstration of the token issuance process.
The first step when issuing a new non-fungible is creating what is known as a “collection.” When an ERC-721 token is issued all the relevant contracts are stored within this collection. Using cryptokitties as an example, all cryptokitties are stored under the overarching cryptokitties collection.
Feibus wasn’t planning on giving a live demonstration of the token issuance process, so he used a creative commons image of a lamp that he happened to have on his computer as an example asset to tokenize. Feibus assembled metadata on the lamp as well as the asset’s description. Once the image, metadata and description were pooled, the information was hashed and uploaded into IPFS. IPFS is a distributed storage layer which is popular with Ethereum and Web 3.0 developers.
Feibus and van As have begun exploratory conversations with a variety of content creators, from video game to fashion designers, that are interested in tokenizing their creative work. Feibus and van As see their solution scaling from artisanal, independent content producers to larger companies who need enterprise solutions to track their content after it has been sold. As an example, Feibus envisions fashion designers using non-fungible tokens to battle counterfeit versions of their products.
There has been growing interest in the arts community in using blockchain solutions to digitize and track artwork. Feibus and van As recently hosted an event for the arts community to help explain the concept of non-fungible tokens and how these tokens can be used to facilitate transactions in the art market.
“We hosted an event at the Bushwick Generator … we just talked to artists and they were really excited about the idea of making non-fungible tokens. They didn’t know what they were beforehand, but now they do and they want to do it,” Feibus elaborated.
On Tuesday, July 31st , Crypto NYC will host Jessica Hanania from PricewaterhouseCooper. You can register for the lunch here. Hanania’s presentation will take place at the Crypto NYC headquarters in TriBeca. Please follow Crypto NYC on Medium or Twitter to receive updates on our community member’s exciting projects.
