Redefine NFT (Music, 4th-Dimension, Privacy, Interaction)

0. Quick Takes

  • Current status:
  • The NFT is proof of ownership, a receipt for your purchase, not the work itself. Everything is a link, and NFT is one of those links.
  • Currently, NFT is mainly considered as artworks, including conceptual art and generative art. The investment strategy of some of the NFT is more like movies and games than artworks and is very much related to the community and publicity.
  • The future:
  • NFT will be more diverse, not only in the form of images but also generally in the form of music, video, and various HTML tags (SVG, iframe, Canvas).
  • New application scenarios for NFT will emerge in finance, privacy, and social networking. The permanent storage of NFT metadata is essential, and Arweave will do this.
  • Some thoughts:
  • NFT will redefine art, music, and social relations by combining and revolutionizing technology and humanities. Creators will be the makers of a new world.

1. Definition of NFT

A) Original Definition of NFT

NFT represents Non-Fungible Token.

a) Non-Fungible: one and only.

Non-fungible means that each NFT is different and not directly interchangeable. Van Gogh’s paintings, for example, are not directly exchangeable to each other because of their different subject matter and scarcity. In contrast, two currencies (excluding commemorative notes, etc.) are directly interchangeable, regardless of the degree of wear and tear and where they pass through.

Non-fungible also means that each NFT has a unique identifier, which guarantees the uniqueness and scarcity of the NFT, but not the scarcity and uniqueness of the work itself.

b) Token: traceable and tradable

As a token, NFT is a receipt for the purchase of a work, proof of ownership, and does not “directly” represent the work itself. At the same time, NFT as a digital token is easy to transfer, publicly viewable, traceable, and can be verified for scarcity. The advantages of the Web era are reflected through NFT. Of course, some may argue that the disadvantages of the Web have also been brought to NFT, such as rampant piracy and lack of physical presence. This is also an issue we will discuss later.

Is NFT artwork?

The NFT explosion in the Crypto space is booming, with the floor price of the top NFT projects rising, more and more celebrities and big companies buying NFT, and some meme projects being hyped up to sky-high prices. Chinese companies are also scrambling to release their own signature NFTs, yet these “digital art” pieces, which cannot be traded (they claimed that those pieces “might” be able to be traded in the future) and are stored centrally (with “consortium” blockchain distributed around “the country”), perfectly omit the two key properties of NFT. However, those disadvantages do not prevent buyers from FOMO.

This is how Sotheby’s defines NFT: “NFT is the newest medium for digital art.” It’s as if we’ve all accepted this definition, that NFT is art. In a way, NFT is indeed like art: it’s basically a picture, it’s basically hard to comprehend, and it’s basically overpriced. But does the position of artwork really fit NFT at all? Is NFT a non-fungible token, or what exactly should it be?

B) New Definition of NFT

First of all, NFT is not essentially a work itself, but a receipt for a work you have purchased, representing that you own a work. The value of NFT is that it is commercial, historical and can be flexed and mimicked.

The general public cannot easily comprehend NFT with the view of the NFT industry as a digital art industry. Most people (including me) do not know what art should be, and perhaps only some people can resonate with some NFT artworks.

A more accessible and relevant definition of NFT might be: Some NFT is similar to movies or games. It is digital art, but not the traditional artwork in a frame under the lights of a museum. There are indeed many elegant art-related NFTs, but there are still certain branches of art that are widely understood by the general public, such as movies and games. By reviewing NFT with this logic of movies and games, we can easily understand the investment strategy of NFT.

Similarity of NFT with Movies and Games

  1. What you are essentially buying is not the work itself but an access code (like a movie ticket) or a receipt of ownership.
  2. The development of the community and the official publicity is more important than the quality of the work itself.
  3. Most projects will only be trendy for a while, and then no one talks about them. They will be trendy again when there’s another episode or drop.
  4. The participating artists, actors, or production team is vital as the project’s core.
  5. Unlike art with a thousand-year life span and famous works among all people, the community aesthetic of NFT changes very quickly. It is more difficult to sustain the popularity of NFT projects.

Investment Strategy of NFT

  1. The price of NFT is highly correlated with the activity of its community.
  2. Most projects have a short lifespan and need to complete their roadmap to strengthen the market consensus on their prices.
  3. The whole market reflects a trend from western aesthetic dominance to multicultural and multi-community aesthetics.
  4. Innovative projects are outperforming forking projects.
  5. Like commercial and literary movies, PFP NFTs are easier to understand and have better price hype.

NFT Explained Based on Movie/Game

  1. Ownership

Every time we talk about NFT, many people say, “This pic is mine if I right-click and save it.” In the Internet era, the cost of copying something is much lower than in the industrial age, so significant that it is almost zero. As the picture says, the NFT is indeed yours if you bought them, but even if everyone knows it’s yours, everyone can still do whatever they want with your NFT.

From the point of view of artworks, the collector still needs to prove the ownership of the artwork, and others can still steal it. For example, saving the photographs of the Mona Lisa. However, we can clearly know who owns these works from the public information.

The value of a work of art derives primarily from aesthetic value, including the context, scarcity, visibility, and copyright value of the work (and, of course, public value). The value of the NFT derives primarily from the social status, utility (from the potential for composability), and flex value (for showing off) derived from ownership. Thus, the plundering of purely aesthetic values has little effect on the NFT, and most of it has no aesthetic value at all that the general public recognizes.

We can find all the pirated movies and cracked games on the Internet for movies and games. But when we play movies or games on a mini phone screen and mono sound, we lose the experience of watching movies on an IMAX screen and stereo sound in a movie theater and the experience of playing genuine games. The experience of using pirated and licensed versions is entirely different, and so is NFT.

You can easily fake it but we know it’s fake.

Beyond that, the greatest ambition of any creator is to get the work out there and be seen. Our piracy practices have actually had a positive effect, helping to spread the project’s work. Whenever I see someone cite research written by Foresight Research without proper notation, I get angry and happy. Many directors go to pirate DVD stands to see if their work has been pirated because the pirate is a form of recognition for the creator. Of course, this has little to do with the concept of ownership, but it does make sense of what it means for NFT to be pirated easily. The most despicable form of collecting is buying work and hiding it yourself or storing it in a Swiss Freeport warehouse.

2. Culture

The NFT ecosystem has spawned different communities, like the various communities in the movie and game. Various NFT clubs are like fan groups of movies or games, holding multiple online and in-person events, forming the concept of communities, and creating user-generated contents.

For example, BAYC’s community is outstanding, Punk’s community is excellent. With a PFP, you can get famous on Twitter. For the movie industry, I can think of the example that Jackie Chan’s fan community created Rotten Tomatoes.

3. Classification

NFT is also very similar to movies and games in terms of classification. We can explore the development path of NFT by looking at the categories of movies and games.

There are comedies, such as the Indonesian Student Selfie Collection; there are popcorn movies, such as various PFP projects, that are easy to understand, but hard to find a gem; there are sports and gaming movies, similar to the NFT of various GameFi projects, which rely more on the quality of the subject matter itself; movies and games also have specialized categories for specific genders, similar to CryptoCoven; movies and games have series, like Loot has multiple drops and the first drop/episode is the most valuable; there are also movies and games with adult contents, and there are many NFTs of such genre (there is even a marketplace for that); there are also movies and games with science fiction genres, which can be compared to NFT projects with Metaverse concepts that the content and roadmap is mostly imaginary.

Later, we will discuss how both movies and games can be distributed directly as NFTs in the future and stored purely on-chain.

4. Censorship

Like movies and games, the creation of NFT must be uncensored. Otherwise, the poor soil will only produce deformed fruits. Some countries have extraordinary censorship mechanisms for movies and games, resulting in a lack of movie and game industry and culture, and many movies and games have been degraded into a money-laundering tool. Of course, I really “like” some exciting re-creations, such as the following. Some countries are excellently drawing a very “cheerful, happy family-style” ending for some movies.

This can be a difficulty for NFT to overcome. The spread of NFT itself and the community may involve some sensitive content, which may be subject to content censorship, which is very scary. We will talk about this later.

2. Future of NFT

A) Arweave NFT

The most essential thing of NFT is actually: When you buy an NFT, you don’t get the artwork (see the example of NFT and wife), you get a token, and the token is a receipt that says, “I bought this work from the author.”

What we’re buying is really just a link to the work 🔗 and a receipt 🧾. The value of the NFT work itself may remain the same, but the act of “owning it” will increase in value as the community grows and its usefulness expands. And the act of “owning it” is digital, public (in most cases), and verifiable.

Understanding that NFT is just a link, we can ask: What if the author changes the file or URL directly? After all, many projects are now using AWS or some decentralized subscription-based storage solution for storage. If projects don’t want to renew their subscriptions, the files will be lost. That’s where our Arweave comes in.

Permanent Storage of NFT

Arweave is a permanent storage network and is probably the only decentralized network on the market right now that provides permanent storage. Arweave can store files for at least 200 years with only pay once, including forever storing pictures, videos, music, and other data.

Our NFT as a link, usually stored on a network such as Ethereum, is permanent and immutable. The files pointed to by the link can be kept forever with Arweave’s permanent storage. The default NFT storage option for Metaplex on Solana is Arweave, the optimal solution for NFT storage.

On Arweave, users or NFT projects can easily and quickly create a dedicated web drive publicly or privately. It is also Verto.exchange which can be used as an NFT marketplace, Koii for NFT minting, and Bundlr (their new website is very nice) for NFT file uploads across blockchains. Other solutions are likely to emerge, such as using a fully AR native NFT contract template to create applications with SmartWeave.

Our files are permanent, but the links are not, and the link of the gateway of arweave.net still needs to be renewed every year. If Arweave doesn’t renew it or our gateway is broken, we may not access our data. The solution to this problem is to decentralize the Arweave gateway (ar.io is doing this!), push for URL prefixes like ar://, and introduce standards like ANS stored on Arweave to create decentralized domains for files and users.

NFT Intellectual Property and Usage Rights

Artistic plagiarism in NFT has been a hot topic, with one group strongly supporting IP regulations and the other strongly protesting regulations. Both groups feel they will be the future of Web3.

The first group argues that the concept of intellectual property should be enforced through the blockchain, that works and their creators are indivisible, and that Web3 must therefore protect and enforce more comprehensive intellectual property rules. The other group says that, given that the blockchain is full of provable sources, there is no need to follow traditional IP regulations but rather to encourage open creativity. They tend to see “old” IP regulations as a way to emphasize privilege. At the same time, the open nature of the Internet and blockchain, and community creation, are the cornerstones of NFT. On this basis, several “copycats” were born, such as CryptoPhunks and mphers, basically holds the value of copyleft, of course, to make money.

Technically, the management of intellectual property and usage rights is also relevant to the permanent storage of NFT data. Suppose the NFT does not include metadata and license statements. In that case, the data is changeable, and if someone sues you for violation, you can simply replace the data to avoid violation of IP and usage rights. This can also be solved by Arweave.

We don’t need to argue about who wins or loses for these two opposing voices but rather satisfy both groups. Whoever wants stricter access control, sign up for stricter access control; whoever wants to open up their IP and fully embrace the community’s creativity, put up an open protocol like CC0 and make NFT works public property.

There are already registries like Royalty Registry that record intellectual property and usage rights for NFTs. At the same time, Arweave’s Atomic NFT standard does precisely that, packaging everything about NFT, including usage protocols, together and stored forever. We should not suppress one view but embrace all ideas. Technology is not driven by people who change themselves to fit the world but by stubborn people who insist that the world needs to change for them.

Embracing all points of view is also the spirit of Arweave. Recently Sam, the founder of Arweave, posted a mission to permanently store all news about the situation in Russia and Ukraine on Arweave. Sam asked to store all opinions, not what users think is right. It is for historians to decide whether a statement is correct or not. What we should do is to save all the content without excluding any opinion.

The full text of the above sub-section is from arweave.news If you want to learn more about Arweave and its ideas, arweave.news has a lot of in-depth content and ideas for you to learn.

In short, what we get when we buy NFT is not the work itself, so permanent storage of the work itself and permanent addressing of the work is a must. Arweave will be the finishing touch and the last mile in completing the concept of NFT.

B) NFT with Different Formats

At present, the format of NFT works is basically images, so people often make fun of themselves that investing in NFT is actually investing in a bunch of JPEG. Recently, we can see more and more other formats of NFT on different platforms and projects emerging.

Music NFT (.mp3)

The Music NFT is already a well-established NFT track. Music NFTs give music creators permanent royalties and permanent control over their work. NFTs are permanently tied to the creator; fans can “invest” in the artist’s career by investing in their music NFTs. The overall revenue is redistributed by the advent of the NFT, with fewer agents exploiting the income and the creators and fans earning more of it directly.

One of the most prominent music NFT platforms is Pianity, which promotes the prosperity of the platform through a creative revenue distribution mechanism.

Pianity is a music NFT platform that proposes a model that gives collectors a certain annualized revenue. Pianity earns a fee from the primary sale and secondary trading of music NFTs and then distributes the revenue to each NFT holder based on a ratio of the value of the NFT at the time of purchase to the total value of all NFTs. Since the ratio is calculated based on the price of NFT at the time of sale, it may lead users to deliberately raise the price of NFT to obtain a higher allocation ratio, which will, in turn, stimulate the market to gradually increase the distributable revenue and attract traffic attention. In addition, its token PIA also belongs to Arweave’s profit-sharing token type, so users will also receive Pianity’s traffic revenue in addition to the NFT revenue they can get.

The core of music NFT is the redistribution of profits, and Pianity is designed so that collectors, creators, and the platform can all enjoy a reasonable income so that the actual value of music NFT can be reflected.

While most platforms allow the creator to make the entire piece an NFT, Async Art can break the work into subcomponents (note that this is not fragmentation). These subcomponents form two concepts. When the subcomponents are grouped together, they are the entire musical composition. When the subcomponents are separated, they are different layers (tracks) of the musical composition. Each subcomponent layer is tokenized.

When music artist creates music, they use the DAW to create different tracks in the process itself, including drums, bass, vocals, etc. By tweaking these track layers, the parameters can be adjusted to create a new musical work with a similar style but different details, similar to projects with generated avatar PFP.

Developers are the makers of Web3, and creators are the makers of NFT world. Async Art has innovative NFT creator tools that allow the creation of programmable artwork that is data-driven and easy to use and has royalty forever. Not only does music NFT, but PFP and other artwork can be created using Async Art’s creator tools, bringing not only the above-mentioned benefits to the artist, but also greatly simplifying the creation process and reducing significant development costs with such tools specifically built for NFT.

Async Art brings the composability and re-creation to the music NFT. The music industry has sampling and remixing to recreate works. From assembling a few notes, music emerges, and the re-creation of musical works will always be an essential part of the music. Async Art fills this gap in the musical NFT and is much closer to the crafting process of the original music work than the PFP NFT.

Future of Music NFT: Fan’s Economy

Most music NFTs are still focused on the music itself, but there is more room to explore the audience for music, such as the fan culture of music or the identity of the artist or the fan. There are various categories of music and even sub-categories under each category. There are often rock fans who don’t like EDM and old-school rap fans who can’t stand mumble rap. For music lovers, music is part of their personal identity, which can be expressed in NFT.

Someone may be a crazy Nirvana fan who has heard every song a million times or someone who loves Justin Bieber and goes to every concert, but none of this can be verified or demonstrated until NFT comes along.

NFT can be used to prove a fan’s familiarity with a band and their music or even represent their purchasing power, like a badge. NFT is traceable, immutable, and will serve as an authentication of a fan’s identity. Fans can use this certification to show how active they are and thus receive more “fan rewards.” An example of this is that when buying tickets for a concert, fans can show their NFT to prove they are the biggest fans and get a “ticket whitelist,” thus bypassing Bots and resellers.

At the same time, tickets as NFT are verifiable and circulable, which is a huge demand for music fans who bought tickets at a high price and still can’t get into the concert in the end, while including concert tickets, movie tickets, and other tickets. Market size is expected to reach $72.3 billion in 2022.

Music is a social and imaginative universal language that has created countless fans’ and community cultures. In contrast, Music NFT has brought fans and creators closer together and made creators in the Web3 era realize that quality of work is more important than quantity. We are looking forward to more creative and innovative projects on Music NFT to explore the future.

Video NFT (.mp4)

The least information-dense medium is text, pictures, music, and finally, the richest and most visual is video.

Video NFT allows creators to earn their fair share of revenue directly, instead of being robbed by the platform, where a video with millions of views can only earn income with a tiny portion of the advertising fee.

The gem of the video NFT platform is Glass.xyz. Glass.xyz currently sells NFTs of high-quality MVs, which are very much related to the music NFTs we mentioned earlier. Basically, all music NFT related concepts are perfectly represented in it. At the same time, Glass.xyz has made an innovative PRISM NFT protocol, which aims to solve the puzzle of NFT liquidity and distribution.

On Glass.xyz, the revenue issue for creators is very well solved. A video may have only a dozen views. Still, the creator can collect hundreds of dollars from the fans, which is a better incentive for creators to create and for the industry to grow positively than centralized video platforms.

The main problem with video NFT is storage and streaming. This problem is not difficult to solve. We can use a centralized cloud service (a not-so-good solution) or use Arweave storage and meson.network to solve the bandwidth problem.

SVG, iframe NFT (</>)

For Web3, applications are basically web pages that run in the browser. The skeleton of a web page is the individual HTML tags. In addition to music and videos, we can also explore HTML tags such as SVG and iframe.

SVG is a vector graphics format, which is more like a picture drawn on a web page by describing strokes than a typical image. SVG with some inline CSS animations can be used to create very cool moving image NFT. The image quality of SVG is much higher than pure .gif format, which will not be blurred when zoomed in. SVG can be stored directly in the contract code with just a string. For example, Uniswap V3’s LP NFT is a base64 SVG stored entirely on a chain.

An iframe is a web tag embedded in a web page. Essentially, it is a complete HTML page (like the map embedded in a restaurant website). With the iframe tag, we can embed the entire page in the OpenSea preview box. Each NFT of this project is an individual web game, and since it is an iframe itself, you can play it directly in OpenSea. Different DApps can also embed other web NFTs into their own web pages in the form of iframes. The iframe approach also brings endless possibilities and combinability to NFTs in the Web. Who can resist an Alien Invasion NFT?

In fact, there are several other NFT projects that play with HTML tags, which we will continue to talk about in later chapters.

Web3 is the next generation of the Web, and DApps are usually Web-based, which means developers need to keep up with W3C standards. We are looking forward to more innovations from NFT based on HTML, CSS, DOM standards.

Matrix NFT

Matrix NFT mainly means that the NFT work is a 2D or 1D list. This type of project basically uses a matrix as metadata and a separate “renderer” to create a concrete image for the matrix. The most typical example is the map project, where the NFT points to a 2D list of rows and columns, with each element representing a different resource on the map. Another novelty is the AI NFT. ASM adds the concept of a brain to the character, and the player can purchase a brain NFT to add a “soul” to the character. The brain here also exists as a matrix NFT similar to the concept of genes, including a Genome matrix, and then with ASM’s own model to explain the DNA of each brain.

The most exciting and combinatorial part of the matrix NFT is the difference in renderers and the ability to reuse an NFT by building your own renderer, just like Loot.

C) Artistic NFT

In this section, we will reconnect NFT with art, return to the logic of digital art, and revisit some of the artistic concepts of NFT. Some of the works in NFT innovate new art and revive some of the qualities of art itself.

Often, valuable works of art appear in paintings and sculptures. Recently, more and more “traditional” artists have begun to publish their work in the NFT format. The NFT is becoming increasingly attractive to them. The artworld is definitely one of the most imaginative and conceptually driven markets. For decades, the art market has also been trying to liberate itself from physical objects through a rational medium.

Conceptual Art

Conceptual art comes from Duchamp, who believed that a work of art is fundamentally the artist’s idea. Conceptual art departs from the material, replacing the physical with the abstract. The work below is a piece of conceptual art, and you can learn more about its backstory and the author’s intentions. You can buy the artwork as it is, but there is no such thing as art, only the artist and the concept.

Conceptual art consists of ideas, not the realization of ideas. When a piece of concept art is purchased, all you get is a certificate documenting ownership (Wow, that’s like NFT). Or it means each conceptual art piece is a Meme. Anyone can perform a conceptual artwork, but only the owner can perform it “for real.” The conceptual art certificate is essentially a mock NFT, conveying ownership of an abstract concept. Conceptual art failed. People still wanted to show off tangible artworks for the traditional art world. In conceptual art, the ownership of abstract concepts was too abstract and sold as pure concepts.

NFT solved the problem of conceptual art. NFT attracts collectors interested in digital art who do not care about the physical world and builds an automated and transparent NFT marketplace and identifiable public ownership on a public network.

Interactive NFT

Interactive art is a form of art in which the author provides the meta-artwork with rules and then encourages the visitor to participate in changing the form of the work. For interactive artworks on the Internet, it is the art that the author writes the code, the user clicks, and the artwork changes. An excellent example of this is Flash games, which I consider a form of “interactive art.”

Another concept that is very much related to interactive digital art is Creative Coding, which is coding to be cool and artistic instead of coding to be functional. Digital interactive art and creative coding are basically the same things. If you look for an image of it in HTML, it’s the Canvas tag.

It’s not always easy to understand the concept, but this little thing below from Rick and Morty is interactive art + creative coding. It’s an entertaining experience interacting with a bit of mouse dragging and dropping.

One of the most exciting projects in interactive art is Olta.art. The platform is full of interactive NFTs that you can click on and interact with. Words can’t describe the interactive experience. It’s very artistic.

The interactive experience is the selling point of Interactive Art + Creative Coding NFT. It’s the same as going to the movies or the opera. You pay to have a 90-minute relaxing and enjoyable experience. The more virtual and experiential something is, the more it’s worth treasuring.

4th-Dimensional NFT

Time is a lovely concept. Everyone’s experience of time is different, but time is a perpetually moving creator + destroyer for us.

Bitcoin and Ethereum are both “clocks” that keep ticking. The blockchain is a random Gaussian clock that moves relentlessly forward. And Bitcoin and Ethereum clocks can even be reversed at times. Interestingly enough, the faster the heartbeats, the shorter the life span for animals.

A lot of the NFT artwork has variations around the passage of time. For example, Alien Clock or Moon in the Moon. “Multidimensional beings are looking at this clock, contemplating the impermanence of existence and the infinity of the universe. “ Of course, the concept of “time” as we understand it is not the same in higher dimensions.

Some projects, such as WeirDAO’s gN(dReaM¹⁶)Gm, focus on time cycles. Day after day, we experience the sun rising and setting, which also gives us some thoughts on time.

Or in fact, streaming payments are also considered time-related blockchain work.

The concept of time is closely related to the blockchain, and NFTs are often proof of time, proving how long ago they have been involved in certain activities or have specific knowledge. NFTs that use time as an element of variation can be considered a unique and distinctive piece of art for blockchains.

Customized NFT

In the beginning, the meaning of portraits of people was based on religion or rituals, and it was not until the early Renaissance that the first European portraits of individuals were created. In addition to princes and nobles, some wealthy people could also request portraits. Each portrait had a unique face rather than the uniformity and rigidity of the past.

1607 Sancai Tuhui and 2017 CryptoPunks

For example, Pixel Portraits makes custom CryptoPunks-style NFT pieces. Users pay a fee and ask the community to help create the artwork as requested. Most of the works created so far are public figures or celebrities. This is actually a sign of the slow integration of NFT with reality, as the original NFT was purely virtual. However, when people can decide what to create, they will still choose real people and stories that they know.

The growing number of customizations can be considered a renaissance of NFT. It gives people a break from intense trading and a chance to enjoy the cultural, artistic, and humanistic atmosphere of the NFT community.

D) Privacy NFT

In most cases, NFTs are bought to “show off” on the public network of the blockchain, but like the music and video NFTs we mentioned earlier, these forms of work are relatively less likely to be shown off. For example, music, long posts, and videos shared on social media are hardly ever seen, while selfies get more attention because they are more concise. At the same time, collectors buy music and video NFTs for the primary purpose of supporting the creator or the growth of the work, so it does not matter whether it is public or not. This has created a demand for private NFTs.

Also, the on-chain version of OnlyFans can be a beautiful thing. Privacy NFT is even more critical because we don’t want our private preferences to be on the public web after all.

Privacy NFT is basically an NFT that contains Unlockable Content, hidden content that can only be viewed by the NFT owner. Here’s an example of Unlockable Content, but not NFT. The difference between Privacy NFT and traditional pay-per-view is that the creator and the collector are closer together, and both have gain more profit.

Currently, popular NFT marketplaces such as OpenSea offer Unlockable Content options for individual NFTs but only support text in Markdown format, and creators cannot upload files directly to NFT.

Stashh on Secret Network tends to have the default global privacy setting for NFT, with additional privacy settings for NFT collections (such as hidden collections and hidden owners). There is more control over the locking of individual NFTs, with NFT attributes in the form of Key and Value, which can be set to fully public, protected, or fully private. However, it is also not possible to upload files directly, but only to present private content in links or plain text. Previously, Quentin’s NFT was sold on the Secret Network.

A more elegant implementation is Darkblock. Darkblock links Unlockable content and NFT creation, allowing text uploads and Unlockable Content in almost any format. From Darkblock’s application, you can drag and drop files to have them uploaded and stored on Arweave’s permanent network. As a bonus, the files stored in Arweave are not necessarily public, you can encrypt them yourself, and files uploaded via Ardrive can be uploaded privately from within the app using AES256-GCM and Drive ID encryption.

We are looking forward to the Privacy NFT. The Privacy NFT will give creators more options to cast their private content into a private format to protect the privacy of the collectors and at the same time bring them closer to their fans.

E) Finance and Gaming NFT

Finance NFT

Art NFT has a market of roughly $50 billion, gaming NFT has $10 billion, and digital trend NFT has a market of $1 trillion. The financial NFT market is much larger than all of these combined.

Uniswap V3 LP ownership was issued through NFTs. There is now a dedicated market for financial NFTs: Solv. NFT can be very precise regarding representative ownership to optimize some issues.

But personally, I don’t think this has particularly explosive potential because it feels like they are doing NFT just for the name of NFT. It’s the art-related NFTs that excite me the most. Hopefully, the development of financial NFT will prove me wrong later.

Gaming NFT

The in-game props and characters as NFT is another excellent way to explore. I won’t go into those well-discussed topics. What is more interesting is the traditional game company’s view of NFT.

By converting assets to NFTs in the Play-to-earn economy, game producers give users some of their revenue, but many blockchain game projects make money by just selling NFTs. Game NFTs mainly exist as an expensive admission ticket. For many players, playing for money is not a “gaming” thing to do.

Traditional gamers have a natural resistance to blockchain technology. After all, mining is indeed partly responsible for the dramatic increase in hardware prices. When news comes out that several traditional game studios are planning to release NFT, they are often opposed by many gamers. Games such as CS:GO do not rely on NFT and have created a very healthy economic system, and these gaming companies do not need NFT to earn profits, and there is no need to offend some players to adopt the new technology.

Whether to NFT, when to NFT, how to NFT, is new questions for gaming companies.

F) Cross-chain NFT

Those long divided shall be united; those long united shall be divided: such is the way of the universe. Cross-chain is the ultimate goal of blockchain and Web3. There are already countless token cross-chain protocols, but NFT cross-chain is often overlooked. People are obsessed with cross-chaining tokens, because they need tokens to be moved to do things on different chains. But NFT cross-chains are often (seemingly) solved with the support and aggregation of marketplaces or social protocols. But when every time a new ecosystem emerges, there will be a copycat CryptoPunks projects emerging. It is the evidence that the NFT cross-chain problem is not solved.

Axie Infinity is doing a direct hard cross-chain of NFTs to its own sidechain; Cool Cats is dropping a different series on a different chain; Fast Food Nouns is doing staking of NFTs on Ethereum chain and then “clones” them to other chains, and the cloned NFTs cannot be transferred and can only be used for gaming; Immutable Apes X is making a tool to allow NFTs on L1 and Immutable X to cross back and forth; Trove and Mural are making NFT hosting for L1 to cross chains; and UMA is doing cross-chain NFT composability. When an NFT on one chain has Action, the NFT on the other chain can change accordingly.

For cross-chain NFT, my view is it needs to be differentiated by project or by NFT type to do different cross-chain services. After all, the global unified NFT is difficult to implement. The vision of cross-chain NFT is still very ambitious and is the ultimate path of the future focus of the multi-chain universe.

3. Conclusion

NFT is a new paradigm for the art world and the Web, a crossroads between technology and humanities, combining and revolutionizing both.

Twenty-five years ago, John Doerr predicted: “The Internet is the greatest, legitimate wealth creation activity in the history of the planet.” Today, Crypto has taken up the baton of the Internet as the greatest wealth creation movement. NFT’s significance is undeniable, and the more controversial it is, the more valuable it is. When Cathie Wood first learned about the concept of NFT, she exclaimed that it was just as surprising as the first time she knew about the Internet.

When we look at NFT, we see more than just a JPEG, but the community creation and Meme culture of Pepe, the community cohesion of the PFP project, the composability of Loot, the innovation of art, the relationship between creators and fans, and some thoughts on rights and property. With almost every asset in the world existing in a non-fungible form, NFT will redefine the world. NFT is far more beautiful than it seems.

Subscribe to msfew
Receive the latest updates directly to your inbox.
Mint this entry as an NFT to add it to your collection.
Verification
This entry has been permanently stored onchain and signed by its creator.