Will the NFT that has tripled in three years become the meme in 2020?

Text | Popsicle

Production | PANews

How to make a circle and reach a wider audience, so that the currency circle is no longer a carnival for a very small number of people? This is the question before every practitioner. Tide brand is on the chain, the game is a lot of people optimistic about the runway, there is a concept that has been popular in the past two years-NFT.

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A set of data recently published by NonFungible.com shows the rapid development path of NFT since its birth in 2017. This report called “ 2019 NFT Annual Report '' analyzes some Dapp data represented by ERC721 on Ethereum. The data shows that a lot of fresh blood has poured into the NFT market in 2019, especially in the game field. The case appears.

Market value increased 6 times in 3 years

What is NFT? The full name of NFT is Non-FungibleToken. For example, a BTC in your hand and a BTC in other people's hands are the same, the anchor value is equal, and they can be exchanged at will. Non-homogeneous tokens (NFT) are, in other words, unique tokens. Even in the same system, NFTs exist as separate attributes. And NFT, unlike BTC and ETH, can be divided into 0.1 or 0.0002. The unit of NFT is always 1. Features: unique and inseparable.

Since 2019, mainstream public and cross-chain systems including ETH, NEO, Wanwei Chain, Vechain, EOS, and Cosmos have supported the embedding of NFT modules. The NFT token standards from ERC-721 to ERC-1155 have gradually been polished and formed, and have been recognized and accepted by the industry.

Image source: NonFungible.com

The cryptocurrency market in 2018 is in a bear market as a whole, but the total market value of NFT has increased by 482% compared to 2017, and the number of NFT cryptocurrency players has increased by 92% compared to the previous year. The market value of NFT increased by 17% in 2019, and the number of players only increased by 1%. NonFungible.com predicts that by 2020, the total market value of NFT will increase by more than 50%, and the growth of users will exceed 30%.

Image source: NonFungible.com

The active degree of smart contracts can be regarded as the heartbeat of a market. From the active time of NFT smart contracts in 2019, it can be seen that 2018 and 2019 are in a steady growth trend.

These data indicate that the NFT market is brewing.

Three games account for half of the transaction volume

NFT is naturally suitable for crypto games, creating personalization and scarcity. There are 7 main types of NFT game items: collection, unreal world, art, function, TCG cards, role-playing, and strategy. Among them, the most popular ones are collection-type items, such as Cryptokitties, a crypto cat that once blocked Ethereum. Looking at the distribution of users and the number of transactions, Cryptokitties, My Crypto Heroes and 0xUniverse occupy half of the NFT market.

Image source: NonFungible.com

Cryptokitties, which continues to dominate the list, is the world's first cat-raising game developed with blockchain technology by Canadian company Axiom Zen. There are two ways for cats to be born. One is the official release of a newborn cat every 15 minutes. The total number of cats is limited to 50,000. These 50,000 cats are called Generation 0 cats. Every cat is unique, cannot be copied, cannot be stolen and destroyed.

Unlike other collectibles, obsessed cats can be mated and reproduced virtually, giving birth to a first-generation obsessed cat with a unique gene, and the owner can choose to continue to grow and sell. Behind every obsessed cat is an NFT.

Not only are players favored, the capital market is also investing in olive branches. For example, in September 2019, cryptocurrency game Gods Unchained led by Naspers and Galaxy Digital and received $ 15 million in financing. Gods Unchained is a card game. Players who first enter the game will get a set of free standard cards. Players can buy, fight or buy cards from other players on the official website to obtain unique attributes. Gods Unchained once auctioned a card called Typerion for $ 62,000, the most expensive card in the world. Gods Unchained's NFT tokens were traded up to 13 million times in November 2019.

In the aforementioned NonFungible.com report, ERC-1155 data for the Enjin platform was not entered.

Enjin (Enjin) is currently the world's largest online game community creation platform. It was founded in 2009. There are more than 250,000 game community unions, tribes, fan websites, etc. in the world. Resources, this part of the user will directly contact the cryptocurrency through the Enjin platform, becoming an increase in the crypto market. Enjin has developed a new token standard system ERC-1155. On June 18, 2019, ERC-1155 has become the Ethereum token standard. In the short term, the Enjin platform will be the main battlefield of the ERC-1155 token model in the future. On February 18, 2020, the Enjin platform was officially launched, and the bottom layer of Enjin adopted ether.

Fang network, as its own data processing engine, users can conduct transactions and game creation through Enjin's trusted platform, which is a combination of a series of technologies.

NFT Permeable Life

In the future of standardization and legalization of tokens, NFT can bring us huge imagination. NFT really penetrates into our life scenes, not only virtual products, but also identity authentication, electronic storage, collection bottles, even every book in the library, bags in stores and so on.

At present, there are already real objects that have combined NFT. In December 2019, NIKE, a world-renowned sports brand, obtained a patent in the United States that can be tokenized on the Ethereum blockchain. The patent name is CryptoKicks. This patent generates a unique ID for the shoe, creating an ERC-721 standard NFT. NFT serves as the sole identifier of the shoe, recording the attributes, color, style, etc. of the shoe.

When consumers buy sneakers, they can use a mobile phone or other device to unlock the 10-digit identification code on the sneaker label to generate a unique NFT. This NFT represents the ownership of the shoes. When the shoes are transferred, the NFT will be transferred to the purchaser along with the shoes. These NFTs representing shoes are all stored in a program called Digital Locker, similar to a cryptocurrency wallet.

Image source: Screenshot of Nike's official website

CryptoKicks borrowed from the trendy gameplay of the fascinating cat CryptoKitties. Sneakers can produce small sneakers. Buyers can pair virtual sneakers with other sneakers in Digital Locker for breeding. If manufacturers are willing to produce these virtual sneakers, they can finally be made into physical sneakers. KnownOrigin is a DApp running on the Ethereum network, which enables users to create, purchase, transfer and trade unique digital artworks. When a user purchases or transfers the KnownOrigin.io item, it also means that the NFT corresponding to this item will be automatically transferred to the user's Ethereum address. Artists can also easily publish their own digital artwork through KnownOrigin to create their own NFT. Other similar scenarios with KnownOrigin.io include MakerSplace, Superrare and Rareart.

Image source: KnownOrigin's official website

NFT or new meme collection

Richard Dawkins first proposed the concept of meme in the book "Selfish Gene", which is translated into Chinese as "Mimu" or "miaozi". It means, "the basic unit of culture is transmitted through non-hereditary means, especially imitation."

From the perspective of cultural theory, many popular phenomena are meme collections, and there are many ways to make money by meme. For example, diamonds and gold are constantly implanting concepts such as "diamonds represent love" and "rare" in people's minds, and online games have also designed requirements for players. Bitcoin is also a successful result of meme. The uniqueness and permanence of NFT is a special use of blockchain technology. Strictly speaking, NFT is not a "coin", NFT is more like a service. In the above examples, more attention is paid to the scarcity of NFT. To be sure, the scarcity of NFT is very strong, and it seems that NFT can increase the scarcity of products. In fact, what the audience is more willing to buy is the products and services behind the NFT, and the story.

The total market value of the NFT market in 2019 is only 210 million US dollars (only ERC-721 series). This order of magnitude has not yet reached the market value of a single currency ranked 30 in the current digital currency, which indicates that there is still much room for growth in the NFT market. .

NFT is different from homogeneous tokens, and the application scenarios of NFT are more precise and extensive. With the scarcity and the cultural connotation behind the product, NFT may become a new meme collection, penetrate into a wider range of scenarios, and realize the true out of the circle of cryptocurrency concepts.

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