AMA Highlights: NFTify
By Daniel Dal Bello, Director.
May 31, 2021–7 min read.
On Friday 28 May, we welcomed Nikita Nguyen, co-founder and CEO of NFTify, into the Hillrise Group Telegram chat for an AMA.
NFTify allows businesses to create their own individualized platforms to sell NFTs, but without requiring technical experience.
Copyright protection is one of the unique features of their platform. It utilizes its proprietary system that detects fakes, duplicates, or similar tokens.
Their native N1 token powers the internal NFTify economy for NFTs, store setups/plugin purchases, rewards, and governance.
There are still a lot of steps to be taken in order to make NFT technology more accessible, and in that regard we were interested to talk with Nikita, as NFTify position themselves as the “Shopify for NFTs”.
In this post, we have compiled key questions and answers from the event.
Rowan Zwiers
Could you tell us more about yourself and your personal vision for NFTify?
Nikita Nguyen
I’m Nikita Ngan Nguyen. I’m the CEO & Co-founder of NFTify.
I was born and raised in the suburb of Hanoi, Vietnam. After college, thanks to my Japanese language skills, I landed a job in Tokyo, my dreamland. That was with a nongovernmental organization, where I had the chance to interpret for all the top Vietnamese politicians who visited Japan for labor collaboration.
I stayed with them for over a year until I decided to switch to the biggest Vietnamese IT company in Japan, for a more dynamic environment. Since then I’ve spent over 12 years in the IT industry.
I was in charge of business development for their Japanese and US branches until we founded Ekoios, our Blockchain development house in 2015.
At Ekoios, we get to engage and provide business & tech consulting, development services to hundreds of Blockchain start-ups all over the world. That definitely gives us a general picture of the Blockchain ecosystem and helped us come up with the idea of creating NFTify, a platform that we’re confident will become very impactful that is lacking out there.
Raymond Reijnders
We are noticing a strong overlap in teams between Ekoios and NFTify. Have you brought over any of your previous team, and what are some of the lessons learned that you’re carrying over?
Nikita Nguyen
My CTO Dylan Dong Do and I co-founded Ekoios in 2015. And actually, now, NFTify is backed by Ekoios with a team of over 120 Blockchain & AI engineers.
The team has developed hundreds of blockchain projects from scratch to finish for global partners for the last 6 years. Working with such talented people has given me a lot of valuable knowledge and management experience as well.
Rowan Zwiers
Are there team members in NFTify that are not part of Ekoios or is the operation of NFTify run by the Ekoios team?
Nikita Nguyen
No. We’re a separate team but sharing some members with Ekoios.
Raymond Reijnders
The NFTify 1st Sprint Demo video recently published on YouTube shows the ease of use in creating your own NFT store. It demonstrates an example NFT creation based on a Minions GIF — which is copyrighted content from Universal Pictures.
This brings forth the question of how your KYC and AI services work exactly to prevent misuse of copyrighted content on the platform.
Nikita Nguyen
Well, the platform will also provide built-in AI services for copyright protection purposes, which is probably what people are concerned about the most when it comes to digital content.
Store owners will have to provide KYC when they register a store, so we’ll be able to communicate in the case of a dispute, and will be able to remove violated NFTs from the platform. With AI integration, whenever a store owner uploads his work to the platform, it is analyzed and alerted. And our AI will detect similar/fake content to have timely actions, including removing it from our platform.
Rowan Zwiers
Would that practically mean that if I were to upload a Minions GIF as NFT your AI will send a flag notification about the copyright?
Nikita Nguyen
That’s correct.
Rowan Zwiers
How is the database used for the AI integration managed?
Nikita Nguyen
At first, NFTify will manage this data. At the moment we still have no plans to let the community manage this database.
Raymond Reijnders
NFT projects have taken quite a tumble post-NFT-season and continued to do so in the recent market crash. The first factor was likely due to over-saturation and over-hype.
How do you think the next NFT cycle will pan out, and how are you positioning yourselves for it?
Nikita Nguyen
Hopefully, in upcoming years, NFTify will help the public get very familiar with NFT, and it will become the new way to help artists generate money for their work, and change the old system where their arts are undervalued.
Rowan Zwiers
How does your business model synergize with that of existing NFT marketplaces (Rarible, Opensea…) and NFT galleries (Gallery.co, TryShowtime), if at all?
Nikita Nguyen
With NFTify, people can create an NFT store without coding and can start a store, tokenize, and sell NFTs right away.
Let’s say you are an artist. You want to create your own brand, your own store, but you don’t have the money and time to build your own platform. You also don’t want to sell your art on some messy NFT marketplace, then NFTify is the perfect solution.
Rowan Zwiers
How likely do you feel it will be that running NFT platforms such as Opensea will create a function for small businesses to create their own NFT store environments, and if so what would be the remaining competitive edge for NFTify?
Nikita Nguyen
Well, there are a lot of NFT marketplaces nowadays. And Opensea or Rarible or Zola have lots of transaction volume.
However, we are also the only ones that allow people to build their own NFT store with just one click. Pretty much all the features differ from other projects because we are building something no one has built before.
A gamified music NFT store will be first in the line. Next step, we will launch a secondary marketplace for people to trade NFTs without having to list them on another platform.
Raymond Reijnders
You’ve likened yourselves to ‘the Shopify for NFTs’. In your own analysis of Shopify, what do you think they have done right, and in what way do they fall short?
How does that play out with regards to your own strategies?
Nikita Nguyen
Well, Shopify assists you in creating and managing stores with a very simple and clear interface. They allow small businesses to build online business seamlessly with marketing support. We’re similar to them in that way.
However, the ecosystem around NFT will be different. And we will develop the surrounding economy in our own direction.
Rowan Zwiers
You’ve mentioned NFT lending as a use case in your whitepaper — which is seemingly a very different focus.
How does this NFT lending function fit in with your overall product strategy?
Nikita Nguyen
After the main features, we will continue to develop add-ons.
For NFT lending, NFTify will provide a P2P marketplace for collateralized NFT loans. It allows borrowers to put up assets for a loan and lenders to make offers to lend in return for interest.
In my opinion, DeFi and NFT will exist side by side and complement each other’s shortcomings. In the DeFi market, you can trade, mortgage, or lend with crypto-assets, now you can completely use NFT as collateral. We want to make NFTify become an all-in-one platform for anyone, anything NFT! People won’t need to use another platform outside of NFTify.
Rowan Zwiers
When taking NFT as collateral, how do you propose to pinpoint the underlying value?
Nikita Nguyen
We will provide suggestions based on the DeFi market.
Raymond Reijnders
PolkaFoundry is a project that we’ve recently had the pleasure of running an AMA with. You’re also using the PolkaFoundry infrastructure for the platform.
We’re definitely unfamiliar with its use in practice — could you share with us what that process has been like? What’s the experience like so far?
Nikita Nguyen
Well, NFTify is a solution built on Polkafoundry, a substrate on Polkadot. We were thinking of building our own chain. However, since we’ve known Thi for a decade, we trust that his team is going to deliver what they have promised. Besides help overcome the current limitations of Ethereum, we also benefit from better performance and cross-chain interoperability of this chain.
Rowan Zwiers
How is the development of NFTify’s MVP coming along, is it still on track to be launched before the end Q2 2021, and do you already have some specific partners to launch their NFT stores during Q3 2021?
Nikita Nguyen
We’re still on track. With the desire to bring products to the market soon, we have been working non-stop, even during holidays. The MVP will definitely be released on time.
We’re having many ongoing conversations with other projects to onboard the first artists to register and sell NFTs on NFTify. Recently, we have partnered with Faraland to launch their first gamified NFT store on NFTify.
Hillrise Group supports ambitious Web3 startups with early-stage venture capital and fundamental research.
NFTify allows businesses to create and deploy their own NFT store without coding.
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