NFT’s Explained..and some useful NFT resources
are you tired yet of NFTs?
Hey, hope your week is going well. I have been compiling this intro to NFTs for about 2-3 weeks, and just decided to just push it out. I’m curious to see if it’s helpful or not. Don’t worry, a review is still coming this week!
Nifty (NFT) Intro
It took a while, but NFT’s have recently swept the headlines of major publications. People can’t understand why someone would pay millions of dollars for a jpeg or GIF. Simple explanation: An NFT (Non Fungible Token) is a digital collectible. It’s a bit like a digital baseball card. The more technical explanation is that encryption enables NFTs to be a unique token which is not interchangeable due to the unique address it has been given. It is impossible for the tokens to be exchanged or replaced. They can be removed from the network by the owner (an act called ‘burning’).
Let me outline a use case. A common phenomenon on the internet is the meme, which usually consists of a free image with unique and usually funny text. The meme proliferates for free on the internet, with little chance for capitalization by the creator.
NFTs make capitalization possible by tagging this meme with unique data (like date created, who created it), which means that the true owner (or owners) can be verified and that the artwork cannot be reproduced. It’s like owning the original Mona Lisa, instead of owning the artist print. Prior to the blockchain, creating this type of digital scarcity was hard, if not impossible. People could just copy a picture and act as if it was their own image, without an effective way to verify it was.
Tangible example - “Avastars”
With blockchain, you can verify origin, ownership, and authenticity. The blockchain acts as a source of truth (a ‘ledger’, or database) which cannot be altered. A great example is the collection of NFTs called ‘Avastars’.
Marmota x Milky is the artist team which created the art for Gen1 Avastars. The team resides in Sao Paulo, Brazil, and have worked with brands such as Adidas, Burger King, and Hyundai.
Each Avastar piece of art contains
12 genes that make up an Avastar (Hair Type, Mouth, Skin Tone etc.)
traits (Top Hat, Vampire, Zombie, etc.) randomly assigned to them via browser-based RNG.
The artist team created each of these 450 physical traits and 158 color palette traits that made up the genetic pool of Gen1. As users scrolled, Avastars made up of these traits showed up on their screen. If they found a trait combination they like, they could buy it, which made it into an NFT.
https://opensea.io/assets/0xf3e778f839934fc819cfa1040aabacecba01e049/8683
example - Avastar #8683 (see link and below):
Below the image are areas where you can see what makes the piece unique.
Starting off, there are the details about who created the art, as well as the various properties of the art.
Below that is additional information that shows how many of this NFT there are (1 of 1) and other information.
Finally, this is the unique address which only this piece of art has (contract address).
I hope this illustrates the potential of blockchain and NFT’s. This potenital has created a market of collectors and flippers. Early icons of the NFT were CryptoKitties (collectible kitties with programmable features and rarity) and Axie Infinity (unique game items and currency). Recently, names like Grimes and Lindsay Lohan are creating and selling NFTs.
There is simply too much to explore, but I wanted to provide some areas to start. NFT projects emerge on a daily basis, so an involvement with crypto twitter, or the places below provide a way to start.
RESOURCES.
NFT Bible. This provides a comprehensive overview of NFT questions by Opensea. Opensea is an open marketplace where Artists can mint artwork, and collectors can bid on artwork.
Curated Marketplaces. These are places to bid on or purchase NFTs from a narrower band of artists. Nifty Gateway doesn’t require one to set up a metamask wallet. The others do.
SuperRare
Open Marketplaces. These marketplaces are like an ebay for digital art and collectibles. There are many types of art/collectibles available. These marketplaces are where big artists and little artists live together. These marketplaces are mostly ethereum based, except for WAX. Portion and Zora have both digital and physical collectibles/art.
Portion - $PRT token.
Cargo - $GEM token.
Wax -$WAX token.
infinft - Mint artwork with a focus on customizable attributes.
Gasless minting. Mintable currently has gasless minting. Enjin is nearly complete with this functionality and will be one to watch.
NFT Mining/Farming/Staking. These places offer ways to provide liquidity using the value of your NFT’s or a token, in return for another token or NFT as a reward for the risk you take doing so.
Meme – Stake $MEME, earn NFTs. $MEME token.
Cargo Gem – Stake $GEM and your NFT – earn $GEM and Cargo Minting credits.
NFTX - $NFTX.
Charged Particles – $CHARGE.
NFT Loans. Borrow and lend against the value of your NFT collection or parcel of digital land.
NFT podcasts/newsletters. Places to educate yourself on NFTs. Past episode can provide great overviews of the space.
Places to track NFT analytics. You can track the movement of NFT sales, just like you can track the movement of cryptocurrencies, who owns them, where they are bought, and for how much. These sites can help for understanding what is being found valuable, or identifying under-valued pieces.
Interesting Projects:
WineFt – Generative art project which produces ‘Wine’.
Font - NFT based decentralized font marketplace
Charged Particles – see description in article.
POB – Generative art tied to minting.
Jeff G Davis – Phoenix based artist with very interesting abstract programming based art.
NFTX - NFTX is a platform for making ERC20 tokens that are backed by NFT collectibles. $NFTX token.
NFT20 – Decentralized exchange for NFTs. $MUSE token.
Digitalax – Operating system for digital fashion. $MONA token.
Murall - MurAll is a digital collaborative mural/canvas/wall measuring 2048 pixels by 1024 pixels(2097152 pixels in total) that anyone anywhere can draw on if they hold the $PAINT Token. $PAINT supply decreases as it gets used, increasing the value of the token with each mural.
Async art – Programmable art layers which change with time/configurations.
ArtBlocks - platform focused on genuinely programmable on demand generative content.
Opulous – Tokenized royalties used as basis for loans. $OPU (not live yet).
OpeNFT - community-owned Crypto Art aggregator
NFT Protocol – NFT Decentralized Exchange. $NFT token.
Dapper Labs -Blockchain based games and collectibles
Flow – protocol to make blockchain based applications faster, easier to use and develop, and less cost-prohibitive. $FLOW token.
Whale – Social token backed by NFT collection. $WHALE token.
Roll – Social Tokens (some of which are for artists/creators). $RAC is a famous one. $WHALE. $KLTR.
Rally – Social Tokens – similar to the above. $RLY token.
Ethblockart – Generative art with different styles to generate NFTs.
Gener8tive. – Generative art.
CryptoArtNet – Database of artists.
Node Runners - $NDR.
Coin Artist - $COIN.
“Classics”. These were first move
CryptoKitties -generative art kittens.
Avastars – generative art faces.
CryptoPunks.-generative pixel characters.
Decentraland -virtual world. $MANA token.
Enjin. $ENJIN token.
CryptoVoxels -virtual world.
*There is an emerging area of digital real estate/etc - a lot of these places are a way to wear, display, and share NFTs virtually.
Fundraising. Ways to support yourself or other NFT creators.
7 genesis grant -apply to receive a grant and mint your first NFT.
Gitcoin - Open source grants. Occasionally, airdrops from defi projects are based off contributing to Gitcoin grants.
Non ethereum marketplaces and conclusion. There are Hive, NEAR, EOS based NFT marketplaces. Growing areas of interest in NFT are financialialization of NFTs, digital display works, museums, and magazines of NFTs. Thank you for reading, and maybe I will include those in another article!
If you have any topic you are interested in reading more about, or if you have additional questions about NFTs, defi, and crypto in general, email me at jake.severn@icloud.com.