Decentral Storage for NFTs | SnapFingers Weekly #9
- This summer’s NFT boom makes the demand for decentralized storage even more pressing.
- Filecoin is the leading project of decentralized storage. Currently, the efficient storage all net is 24PB, and the number of files is 235,000 and Filecoin also provides NFT. Storage to store NFT data.
- The total storage of Arweave has reached 10.98 TB, 2.76 times that at the beginning of this year; recently, Arweave launched a new kind of profit-sharing token system named PST.
- $SOL has reached an all-time high with its market cap exceeded that of USDC, jumping to 8th place.
📂 №1 Potential areas
Storage layer boom stimulated by NFT
On August 19, the CryptoPunks R&D team announced that the properties of CryptoPunks (i.e. metadata including hairstyles, glasses, beards, hats, etc.,) and images (NFT files) were placed on-chain. Before that, CryptoPunks, worth millions of dollars, were stored off-chain.
There are two types of NFT-related data:
- NFT metadata: description, names, properties, images, and other data. (can be regarded as the components and description of compound art)
- NFT files: image files to be exhibited ultimately.
If the metadata and files of an NFT are controlled by a centralized server, then this NFT is a centralized one. There would exist two problems:
- Impermanence: The server can go down or offline, making it hard to find the image
- Mutability: The developer can modify the image to something a collector does not expect.
Imagine that a collector nominally owns an art piece but lost the original. Does this kind of ownership still count? Once there strikes a big-scale storage security accident, the loss for NFT will be colossal. But due to the unprecedented outbreak of NFT, the need for decentralized storage has become significantly pressing. SnapFingers Weekly has summarized the progress of decentralized storage plans at present and storage plans adopted by NFT/content platforms.
-01 Filecoin（FIL , $71.74, 7d -10.2%, Aug/31）
Filecoin is the leading project of decentralized storage. Currently, the efficient storage all net is 24PB, and the number of files is 235,000.
Filecoin can hold on-chain storage on Ethereum, including DeFi data, NFT metadata, and NFT files. Recently Ethereum smart contract development tool Truffle tweeted that it has teamed up with Filecoin to help developers worldwide create and deploy fully decentralized applications. In May, IPFS Protocol Lab officially launched NFT.Storage for users to save NFT content and metadata in IPFS and Filecoin for free.
-02 Arweave（AR , $58.15, 7d 85%, Aug/31）
The most distinctive feature of Arweave is that data can be stored permanently. The total storage has reached 10.98 TB, 2.76 times that at the beginning of this year. Its on-chain daily trading volume reached 110,000 at its peak on August 14, an impressive growth compared with the beginning of the year.
Recently, Arweave launched a new kind of profit-sharing token system named PST. Developers can utilize SmartWeave to add a mechanism in its application and charge a slight amount of fees and distribute them to PST holders. The Arweave token AR can be used to pay storage fees and be recognized as the unit of accounting of the network (UoA). AR is also the main trading pair of PST tokens.
-03 Storj（STORJ, $1.46, 7d 4.7%, Aug/31）
The decentralized cloud storage platform Tardigrade has been commercial. Users can store their data in the Tardigrade network when using open-source software to experience more inexpensive and secure data storage services. The open-source project and Storj can split the payments for using storage service and get a win-win for both sides.
-04 Sia（SC，$0.019,7d -6.4%, Aug/31)
In February 2020, Sia launched its decentralized content distribution and sharing platform Skynet. According to their official data, the number of files stored on Skynet has exceeded 13M and the storage scale reached 247.24TB. Each file uploaded to Skynet will return a unique content identifier called Skylink similar to the CID of IPFS. Skynet provided a mainstream programming language SDK oriented to Web 2.0 developers, which is a perfect choice of users terminal application and static originator deployment.
-05 Filebase
Such centralized companies like Filebase or Pinata can pack decentralized storage protocols into more usable services for individuals or developers to utilize.
NFT projects adopt an off-chain decentralized storage plan:
- Opensea launched a feature to freeze metadata on June 17, available for IPFS and Filecoin to store NFT metadata. Once these metadata are frozen, they can not be modified. A new URL originating after the freeze will consume gas to be re-uploaded to the Ethereum network.
- The NFT standard Metaplex on Solana adopted Arweave as the default tool to store metadata.
- Mintbase uses Ethereum and Arweave to mint NFT.
- Mirror host all blogs of users on Arweave’s blockweave.
📂 №2 Highlighted Project
The booming Solana
On August 30, the price of Solana token $SOL hit an all-time high, reaching $101, increased by 208% within 30 days, and its market value surpassed USDC, ranking 8th. Solana’s total value locked increased by 151% in one month, reaching US$3 billion, ranking fifth.
Solana’s uniqueness and its key milestones:
- Solana uses the Delegated Proof-of-Stake (DPoS) mechanism to achieve high throughput and uses the Proof of History (PoH) mechanism to increase the degree of decentralization. If the “Nakamoto Coefficient” is used to measure the degree of decentralization (a commonly used method created by Balaji Srinivasan), Solana’s performance on this indicator is even higher than that of Ethereum or Bitcoin.
- In July 2020, Solana ushered in its first major turning point: the cryptocurrency trading platform FTX announced that it would establish a DEX — Serum on Solana. SBF said in an interview with Forbes on August 30: You can think of me as a fan of Solana, this is a very cool product. Establishing Serum on Solana is our best choice.
- Earlier this year, Alameda Research developer Armani Ferrante released Anchor Framework. Solana uses the Rust programming language, but Anchor makes building applications for Solana more like programming with Solidity, the most popular language on Ethereum.
- In June Solana Labs has raised $314 million, led by a16z and Polychain Capital.
According to data compiled by Solanians, the number of Solana ecosystem projects increased by 130% in July compared to March. Well-known projects in the Solana ecosystem include:
- Serum is a DeFi ecosystem, including Serum Dex, Serum front-end Bonfida, automated market maker Raydium, Maps.me for offline map apps, and Oxygen, a DeFi prime broker protocol.
- Star Atlas is the ace project in the Solana GameFi track. It is a space-themed MMORPG (massive multiplayer online role-playing game) with a science fiction theme. It is built with the Unreal engine 5 and has movie-level visual effects. The Star Atlas game will be launched in the Q2 of 2022. Recently, Star Atlas announced a partnership with blockchain game and NFT publisher Animoca Brands.
*Games under Animoca Brands include The Sandbox、F1®Delta Time、MotoGP Ignition etc.
*Star Atlas conducted a public token sale on Raydium on September 1st
- Audius is a web3 streaming platform for all musicians built on Ethereum and Solana. It issues and manages $AUDIO Token on Ethereum, and runs “upvotes” and “like” on Solana. These functions need to be built on high-speed and low-cost infrastructure to provide an Internet-level user experience.
After Audius announced its partnership with TikTok, the price of its governance token AUDIO doubled within 24 hours, and its market value exceeded US$1 billion for the first time.
Solana’s success in head-to-head battles relies on a few assumptions:
- The execution layer is more valuable than the settlement layer.
- It can “borrow” PoW security from ETH or BT
- Sharding breaks DeFi
But what if those assumptions don’t prove to be true?
- While value flows to the execution layer in TradFi — AmEx, VISA, and NASDAQ are more valuable than their respective settlement companies — that may not be the case in blockchain, where there may be value to executing and settling in the same place. With VISA, I don’t need to think about the settlement, I just swipe my card and it works. If I have to sell my Ethereum-based assets and move USDC to Solana to execute there, maybe it’s just not worth the hassle.
- Maybe execution layer plays like Solana and Polygon can’t just borrow the security from PoW blockchains at scale, and people are happy to pay higher transaction fees for more security.
- Although sharding theoretically makes DeFi composability more difficult — each shard might have a different price for an asset — software may be able to solve that challenge, just as Anatoly solved a seemingly impossible parallelization challenge with PoH.
SnapFingers compiled the top recent headlines, 44 in total.
📂№1 Market Data
#Macro
- Aug. 27: Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell said the Fed will begin to reduce its monthly bond purchases by $120 billion before the end of the year but will wait until the job market and inflation pass tougher tests before raising rates. After that, the U.S. dollar index (DXY) subsequently fell, the S&P 500 rose to a record high, and Bitcoin (BTC) rose about $1,500 in one hour. Indicating that market participants viewed Mr. Powell’s speech as “dovish”.
#Stablecoin #Bitcoin
- The total issuance of stablecoin on the chain exceeded $81 billion on August 24. And now total stablecoin issuance is $82.15 billion (DeBank, 8/30), up 2.8% from last week. Among them, USDT accounted for 41.23%, USDC accounted for 31.53%, and BUSD accounted for 14.81%.
- MicroStrategy purchased another 3907 bitcoins at a total price of $177 million. As of August 23, 2021, the company held a total of about 108,992 bitcoins, with an average price of approximately $26,769.
#New Public Chain
- Avalanche’s total lockup hit an all-time high of $2 billion and currently stands at $2.14 billion (August 30). Community members claim that FTX founder SBF has allocated $170 million to mining, of which $86 million and $73 million have been invested in BENQI and TraderJoe, respectively.
#DeFi
- Total DeFi lock-up value hit an all-time high of $165.4 billion on August 28.
- On August 26, the total volume of dYdX L2 products, a decentralized derivatives trading protocol, exceeded the $10 billion mark and currently stands at $14.77 billion (August 30). On August 29, daily trading hit an all-time high of $2.55 billion.
#NFT
- In August, NFT market volume reached $2.3 billion, with OpenSea contributing $2.23 billion (The Block, August 30), breaking The previous peak of $315 million in March and setting a record high.
- Visa purchased CryptoPunk 7610 for $150,000 and released a white paper to announce its entry into the NFT field. This move triggered market FOMO sentiment and frantic scavenging. The daily sales of CryptoPunks increased by 11 times within 24 hours, and the floor price rose to 75.5 ETH. Visa will buy more NFT, the head of cryptocurrency at Visa said.
- NBA star Stephen Curry bought BAYC NFT for about $180,000 and used it as a Twitter avatar.
- Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) and Bored Ape Kennel Club (BAKC) will appear at Sotheby’s from September 2nd to 9th.
- Three of the Top five NFT deals last week were Art Blocks and two were CryptoPunks. The total turnover of the Top 5 was 2.7 times higher than last week.
📂 №2 Project Development
#Ethereum #Layer2
- Ethereum client Geth released version 1.10.8 to fix bugs prior to the London upgrade.
- L2 scaling solution Optimism provides a new gateway interface that allows access to any ERC20 token.
- The Ethereum Domain Name System ENS fully integrates with the DNS domain name space, allowing any “.com “domain name to be interactive with an Ethereum address.
#New public chain
- Cardano is in the final phase before activating smart contracts on the main network, with the planned launch of the Alonzo Hard Fork on the main network on September 12, an upgrade that will allow users to run smart contracts. (U.T oday)
#DeFi
- Aave announced the upcoming launch of the Aave Governance Bridge tool.
- Aave community initiates a proposal to decide whether to launch the real World asset (RWA) market on Aave protocol.
- Sushi joins Avalanche Rush DeFi rewards program, the rewards pool is up to $15 million.
#NFT #Metaverse
- The Solana NFT Alliance is officially launched. The NFT Alliance will help create a common NFT standard on Solana and prepare for the large-scale adoption of the network.
- Metaverse platform Cryptovoxels announced the launch of BOOP token, which will be awarded 1:1 BOOP tokens for the number of visitors to a player’s building.
- The L2 NFT solution Immutable X will start the public offering of token IMX on the CoinList platform on September 8.
#Other
- MetaMask is open to the issuance of token and airdrop, but there is no plan to issue token immediately.
- Coindesk has launched a new version of the website and will also launch the digital currency DESK.
📂 №3 Large Corporations
#CeFi #Financing
- Japanese cryptocurrency exchange Liquid Global has received a $120M loan from FTX.
- Crossborder payment service provider XREX raises $17M in a funding round led by CDIB Capital.
- BitCheck platform provides crypto assets collocation service, while cryptocurrency exchange MyXchange provided provides services including business collocation, trading and fundraising, digital wallet, and fiat exchange
- Blockstream secures $210M series B funding and acquires mining chip manufacturer Spondoolies, about to bring ASIC miner to market next year.
#NFT+
- Facebook is considering building NFT products and features. Facebook executives stated that Novi digital wallet could be used to hold NFT and
- China Vision may launch the NFT digital art trading platform.
- Budweiser Buys Beer.eth Domain Name for 30 ETH is taking its first steps into the NFT universe.
📂 №4 Voices and Opinions
- Fidelity expects the BTC price to touch $100M in 2035.
- Bloomberg: Axie Infinity turns the pandemic jobless into crypto traders.
- Ryan Watt, head of gaming at Google and head of the virtual and augmented reality business at Youtube stated that NFT’s taking over the gaming industry is self-evident.
- YFI Founder Andre Cronje (AC): NFT fragmentation protocol is a Ponzi scheme. The coin originator converts any valuable Meme NFT into a fragmented token and then distributes 10% to himself to profit from it.
📂 №5 Project Financing
#DeFi
- Euler, a capital-efficient permissionless lending protocol, announced it secured $8 million in a Series A round led by Paradigm.
- (DeFi) lending protocol Apricot Finance has completed a $4 million funding round with participation from Delphi Ventures.
- 1inch Network aiming for $70M Venture Round at $2.25B Valuation.
#NFT
- Fox Corp. has come in as the lead investor in a $100 million Series A fundraising round for blockchain platform provider Eluvio.
- Paradigm and Founders Fund lead $16 million investment in 3LAU’s NFT music platform Royal.
- Alethea AI raises $16M in private token sale for intelligent NFTs for the metaverse with purchases including Alameda and Dapper Labs.
- Vera, a non-fungible token decentralized finance blockchain platform, has secured $3 million in seed funding with Animoca Brands led the round.
- DeFi Warrior raised $2.3 million to bring the first crypto galaxy game to life
#Crypto Funds
- Prime Venture Partners Announces Fund IV of US$100 million.
- Crypto exchange OKEx said it is launching a $10 million fund to help develop GameFi, or “play-to-earn,” projects.
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