20201223課堂內容
NFT價值
What is NFT?
A non-fungible token (NFT) is a type of cryptographic token that represents a unique asset. NFTs are tokenized versions of digital or real-world assets. They function as verifiable proofs of authenticity and ownership within a blockchain network. NFTs are not interchangeable with each other and introduce scarcity to the digital world.
Fungibility refers to the property of an asset whose individual units are interchangeable and essentially indistinguishable from each other. For example, all fiat currencies are fungible. To act as a medium of exchange, each individual unit must be interchangeable with any other equivalent individual unit. A one-dollar bill is interchangeable with any other genuine one-dollar bill.
NFTs can be used by decentralized applications (DApps) to allow for the creation and ownership of unique digital items and collectibles. While NFTs can be traded in open marketplaces that connect buyers with sellers, it is worth noting that the value of each is unique.
Various frameworks have been created to facilitate the issuance of NFTs. The most prominent of these is ERC-721, which is a standard for the issuance and trading of non-fungible assets on the Ethereum blockchain. A more recent, improved standard is ERC-1155, which enables a single contract to contain both fungible and non-fungible tokens.
The standardization of NFTs allows a higher degree of interoperability, meaning that unique assets can be transferred between applications with relative ease.
NFTs have the potential to be one of the key components of a new blockchain-powered digital economy. They could be used in many different fields, such as video games, digital identity, licensing, certificates, or fine art — and even allow fractional ownership of items. Storing ownership and identification data on the blockchain would increase data integrity and privacy, while easy, trustless transfers and management of these assets could reduce friction in trade and the global economy.
NFT Case Studies
1. RARIBLE (RARI) | User generated digital collectibles and marketplace
Rarible enables users to easily create a digital collectible (no coding skills required) and sell it on their marketplace. RARI brings together some of the more interesting DeFi trends of 2020, with digital collectibles being combined with yield farming, and liquidity mining — with users rewarded in $RARI governance tokens for using the platform. At the time of writing the RARI token price is up 1700% since July.
With a focus on user generated artwork, RARI enables intellectual property through the user creation of new artwork with a proof of provenance provided by the NFT. It also facilitates the sale and terms of sale on their marketplace, and at near zero costs.
Since its launch in November 2019, 36,336 artworks have been created on Rarible, with 26,574 sales and a total transacted of 9.63M.
In early September, Rarible announced that it had raised an undisclosed amount in a pre-seed round led by CoinFund. They stated that this investment would help develop a community-governed, blockchain-based NFT marketplace as well the $RARI governance token. The $RARI token is best described as a reward for genuine buyers and sellers who use the platform: 75,000 $RARI are distributed every Monday (starting from July 20th 2020) among active marketplace participants. $RARI is designed to allow the most active creators and collectors on Rarible to vote for platform upgrades, request features, and curate and moderate content.
Rarible is a community-governed marketplace, aimed at becoming a fully Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO). The $RARI token is the first step in this direction.
2. TERRA VIRTUA (TVK) | A 2D & 3D animated NFT ecosystem
Terra Virtua is a digital collectible ecosystem. Terra Virtua aims to provide its users with “a deeper sensory experience” by taking digital collectibles into a multiplatform VR and AR world. It is a similar concept to the Pokémon Go integration of AR gaming with the real world.
Whilst some digital collectibles are game-related, lending them an intrinsic value by using them in-game, most digital collectibles are simply static images; the digital equivalent of a trading card. This was one of the biggest challenges Terra Virtua chose to confront and is the reason behind the development of VR and AR integrations.
Terra is launching its own range of character-based 3D animated creatures, called ‘vFlects’ along with licensed collectibles in 2D and 3D from The Godfather, Top Gun, Sunset Boulevard and Lost in Space. Later in the year the company will release licensed collectibles from Pacific Rim and World War Z.
In addition to offering a marketplace for an interactive range of unique and licensed digital collectables, Terra Virtua is launching an entire ecosystem where owners can store, display, interact with and show off their collection via an app which allows the user to take a photo or video of themselves interacting with their collectible in a real-world environment.
The company has created the Terra Virtua Fancave: a personal, customizable, 3D environment where the user can display their collectibles. The VR version of this has also been developed and is planned for release in 2021. The company has also created the TerraDome: a larger version of the Fancave where users will store and play with larger items, such as the F14 fighter jet from Top Gun or the giant Pacific Rim mechs.
Gary Bracey CEO at Terra Virtua says, “The key mission of Terra Virtua is to bring NFTs to the mass-market. The videogame experience of the core team gives us a strong focus on UX and UI and by making the process both frictionless and compelling we hope to bring the world of interactive Digital Collectibles to the mainstream.”
3. ENJIN (ENJ) | Gaming
In 2009, Enjin launched the Enjin Network, a gaming community platform which now has over 20 million users. In 2017, Enjin began building a suite of blockchain products that enable users to easily manage, explore, distribute, and integrate blockchain assets.
Rather than using the ERC721 standard for NFT, Witek Radomski, Enjin co-founder and CTO, developed ERC-1155, a new standard that will define video game tokens on the Ethereum blockchain. The Enjin token already powers over 1 billion digital assets. The ERC1155 is not just for gaming, its application will benefit a wide range of industries, from entertainment and finance to industrial design, artificial intelligence, real estate, and more.
The core concept behind ERC-1155 is that a single smart contract can govern an infinite number of tokens. An ERC-1155 contract made for a game could contain a wide variety of items, from weapons and armor to health potions, magic spells, superpowers, etc.
UNISWAP
What is Uniswap?
Uniswap is a decentralized exchange protocol built on Ethereum. To be more precise, it is an automated liquidity protocol. There is no order book or any centralized party required to make trades. Uniswap allows users to trade without intermediaries, with a high degree of decentralization and censorship-resistance.
Uniswap is open-source software. You can check it out yourself on the Uniswap GitHub.
Ok, but how do trades happen without an order book? Well, Uniswap works with a model that involves liquidity providers creating liquidity pools. This system provides a decentralized pricing mechanism that essentially smooths out order book depth. We’ll get into how it works in more detail. For now, just note that users can seamlessly swap between ERC-20 tokens without the need for an order book.
Since the Uniswap protocol is decentralized, there is no listing process. Essentially any ERC-20 token can be launched as long as there is a liquidity pool available for traders. As a result, Uniswap doesn’t charge any listing fees, either. In a sense, the Uniswap protocol acts as a kind of public good.
The Uniswap protocol was created by Hayden Adams in 2018. But the underlying technology that inspired its implementation was first described by Ethereum co-founder, Vitalik Buterin.
How does Uniswap work?
Uniswap leaves behind the traditional architecture of digital exchange in that it has no order book. It works with a design called Constant Product Market Maker, which is a variant of a model called Automated Market Maker (AMM).
Automated market makers are smart contracts that hold liquidity reserves (or liquidity pools) that traders can trade against. These reserves are funded by liquidity providers. Anyone can be a liquidity provider who deposits an equivalent value of two tokens in the pool. In return, traders pay a fee to the pool that is then distributed to liquidity providers according to their share of the pool. Let’s dive into how this works in more detail.
Liquidity providers create a market by depositing an equivalent value of two tokens. These can either be ETH and an ERC-20 token or two ERC-20 tokens. These pools are commonly made up of stablecoins such as DAI, USDC, or USDT, but this isn’t a requirement. In return, liquidity providers get “liquidity tokens,” which represent their share of the entire liquidity pool. These liquidity tokens can be redeemed for the share they represent in the pool.
How to swap tokens using Uniswap
The Uniswap protocol can be accessed through its front-end at uniswap.exchange. You’ll also need an Ethereum address, for example using a wallet such as MetaMask.
Thus armed, you can swap tokens or add tokens to a Uniswap liquidity pool; it’s just a matter of selecting the token that you want to swap out of, and the token you want to swap into. Then you’ll need to approve the transaction using your wallet, and confirm the swap (remembering to bear in mind any additional Ethereum fees for swapping).
Since Uniswap is an open protocol of smart contracts, a number of front-end user interfaces have already been created for it. For example, InstaDApp allows you to add funds into Uniswap pools without needing to access the official Uniswap user interface. Interfaces such as Zapper.fi allow users to add funds to Uniswap pools using just ETH instead of ETH and another token. The interface even offers simple one-click solutions for purchasing pool tokens in combination with bZx token strategies.
DeBank
DeBank is a dashboard for tracking your DeFi portfolio, with data and analytics for decentralized lending protocols, stablecoins, margin trading platforms and DEXes.
SuperRare
What is SuperRare?
In the world of collectibles, people want the real deal and they are willing to pay big money for it. And where you find big money, you will also find fraud, forgery, and general mischief. By using the Ethereum blockchain, the entire the history and origin of a piece of art can be tracked on a distributed ledger no one controls and anyone can access.
On the SuperRare platform, artists create a piece of art and tokenize it–meaning they link the art with a token. It’s not just any token, the new digital art is forever linked to a Non-Fungible Token (NFT). This special type of Ethereum token has the property of being as unique as the artwork itself.
Once the NFT is on SuperRare, it can be bought, sold, or even HODLed as a long term investment. Artists can either put their creation up for an auction-style bidding process or sell it for a set price. Once the NFT is sold to a buyer, it can then be resold at any price on a variety of NFT trading platforms.
Who Invented SuperRare?
SuperRare was founded in 2017 by John Crain, Charles Crain, and Johnathan Perkins–the CEO, CTO, and CPO. They are also the founders of Pixura, the company building the crypto collectible technology running SuperRare.
What’s so special about it?
SuperRare is a platform where digital art lovers can connect and collect–they call it “social collecting”. The idea behind SuperRare is the belief that collecting is inherently social so collectors and artists should be able to easily interact around their shared passion. On the platform, users can see who the top collectors and trending artists are, how many pieces they’ve bought or created, and how much ETH they’ve spent or accumulated. You can also view the art itself along with a description and its history of owners.
Rarible
At its core, Rarible is a NFT (non-fungible token) platform for securing digital collectibles secured with blockchain technology. To fully understand what this means, one needs to understand the nature of NFTs, which we will dive deeper into later. Put simply, non-fungible tokens are “unique” in a sense and can, therefore, be excellent when it comes to signaling ownership over a specific asset.
However, Rarible has a considerably more ambitious vision than merely becoming a platform for securing art and digital collectibles using blockchain. This is partly why investors are flooding to Rarible’s ERC-20 governance token, RARI, which we also explain in more detail below.
The Moscow-based platform Rarible was founded by Alex Salnikov and Alexei Falin back in early 2020. Fundamentally, Rarible represents a digital NTF platform with a particular focus on art assets. Specifically, Rarible includes a marketplace that allows users to trade various digital collectibles or NFTs, similar to OpenSea.
Users can also use Rarible to create — commonly known as “minting” NFTs, or non-fungible tokens. This is a big deal for various content creators. For example, an artist could sell their creations, such as books, music albums or movies, as NFTs.
Additionally, the artist might choose to then offer prospective buyers a sneak peek of the content — effectively a preview, trailer, or snippet — but only release the full content once a person purchases the relevant NFT.
Perhaps most notably, Rarible is also placing significant emphasis on creating an entirely autonomous platform, run through a community governance model. Moreover, Rarible is now shifting heavily towards becoming an actual Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO).
The goal of a true DAO is that the platform users will be the ones in charge of all the decisions for the platform — meaning Rarible’s RARI governance token is crucial.
Beeple拍賣
Blockchain-backed digital art is continuing to make waves and this week an artist who calls himself ‘Beeple’ raised $3.5 million during his latest non-fungible token (NFT) art collection auction. The “Everydays” collection auction included 21 original single edition Beeple pieces, a 100 piece series, and three open edition variations sold in five-minutes.
During the first week of November, news.Bitcoin.com reported on a piece of blockchain-backed election art that sold for $66,666, and the animated piece changes after the official U.S. Electoral College decision. That artwork was created by Mike Winkelmann, otherwise known as ‘Beeple,’ and his non-fungible token (NFT) art collections have been extremely popular.
This week, Beeple raised a whopping $3.5 million in a NFT auction that sold his collection of art dubbed the “Everydays” collection.
One of Beeple’s pieces had an auction that raised $777,777 for the art and the bid was entered with only a second left to spare according to the NFT online auction house Nifty Gateway. After that sale and all the art was sold, Nifty Gateway’s official Twitter account tweeted about the milestone auctions gathering over $3.5 million in ether.
Many other artists have been flocking from the traditional art space to the world of blockchain-backed art. The acclaimed comic book illustrator Jose Delbo has been selling NFTs and the popular 4K digital video artist Terry Flaxton has also joined the movement. A Scotland-based NFT artist, Trevor Jones, has sold work for $55k (“Picasso’s Bull”) and $111k (“Genesis”) as well.
Decentraland
Decentraland is a decentralized virtual reality platform powered by the Ethereum blockchain. Within the Decentraland world, users can create, experience, and monetize what they build and what they own.
In Decentraland’s shared virtual world users can buy land, known as “parcels” that are recorded on a blockchain backed ledger. The land itself, as well as the virtual properties built on top of it, is a type of a non-fungible digital asset or utility token called LAND, which is stored in an Ethereum smart contract.
LAND owners control the content published on their land, which is coded into a smart contract. This content could be anything from scenes and images to games and applications. Users can explore, travel and visit venues in a similar way to in the real world. The platform is also a peer-to-peer network for users to interact.
How does Decentraland work?
The Decentraland application is built to track real estate parcels defined by LAND tokens.
The software leverages Ethereum to track ownership of this digital land, and it requires users to hold its MANA token within an Ethereum wallet to engage with its ecosystem.
Developers are free to innovate within Decentraland’s platform by designing the animation and interactions experienced on their virtual real estate.
Architecture
Decentraland has many layered components built using Ethereum smart contracts.
The consensus layer maintains a ledger that tracks the ownership of land parcels. Each parcel of LAND has a unique coordinate in the virtual world, an owner and a reference to a description file representing the content within the parcel.
The content layer controls what happens within each parcel, and includes various files required to render them:
- Content Files — referencing all static audio and visuals
- Script Files — defining the placement and behavior of the referenced content
- Interaction Definition — peer-to-peer interactions such as gesturing, voice chat, and messaging.
Marketplace and Builder
Outside of the gaming environment, the Decentraland team has released a marketplace along with a drag-and-drop editor users can leverage to build scenes.
The marketplace enables participants to manage and exchange LAND tokens, priced in MANA. Owners can use the marketplace to transact or transfer parcels and other in-game items such as wearables and unique names.
Of note, all transactions are settled between Ethereum wallets, and therefore are verified by Ethereum’s network and logged on its blockchain.
Decentraland’s builder tools authorize owners to curate a unique experience within their LAND parcels. Interactive scenes are designed through its editing tool, where developers can access customization libraries and payment implementations.
