NFTY NEWS [January 27, 2019]

NFTY NEWS is a weekly newsletter covering the latest developments of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) in the blockchain space – collectibles, games, new platforms, and much more. NFTY NEWS is created by contributor Brian Flynn and adapted from his Medium page. For more information on NFTs, check out Brian’s reading list to get you up to speed on crypto digital assets.

NFTY #36: Proof of 🍩

Plasma Bears, Dapper NFT License 2.0, and lots of 🍩s

In this week’s NFTY News… we’re talking about just bears & donuts. That’s it. Just kidding — there’s a lot more stuff happening this week, including Dapper’s revised NFT license, Unlock Protocol’s first live product, and the launch of Guesser.

Plasma Bears launched by Neon District to prove out sidechains & ERC1155 standard

Plasma Bears is the newest collectible experiment by coin_artist — you probably know her for her bitcoin puzzles. This time, she’s trying to prove out ERC1155 and Loom sidechains with a digital build-a-bear. Anyone can create a scavenger-hunt for these collectibles. When all the parts are put together for a set, something magical appears on the bear.

Dapper Labs Introduces NFT License 2.0

Dapper Labs has revoked the trademark on the NIFTY license and came back with a revised license for digital goods. Digital goods allow content creators to use the art in more ways than traditional physical goods. Highlights of the new license include:

• Allows NFT owners to commercialize the art up of their digital goods up to $100K
• The owner isn’t allowed to modify the art or use the NFT in connection with hatred, violence, or inappropriate behavior.

Unlock Protocol releases v0, allowing content creators to sell keys as ERC721s to access content

After months of development, the team behind Unlock Protocol releases the first version of Unlock. Now, content creators can create keys in the form of NFTs that provide access to their content. The team at Unlock has released a demo of the product that you can try here.

Guesser launch announced for Jan 29

Want a way to invest in the success of your favorite projects or individuals? Create a prediction market for their success and bet that they’ll reach their goal. While Augur may be difficult to understand for a non-crypto user, apps like Hot or Not may be a better anaology to encourage users to use these types of prediction market applications.

I’m guessingthat as more of these augur centralized interfaces come online, we’ll start to see more specific prediction market applications tied to a certain topic to preserve liquidity.

dGoods — The EOS equivalent of ERC155 is announced by a consortium mixed of block producers & game developers 

The leading game development studio on EOS, Mythical Games, announced a new EOS standard for game item interoperability. The open-source standard includes a defined metadata template for each type of digital good & the ability to create infinite tokens (fungible or non-fungible) within a single contract, similarly to ERC-1155.

The ERC721 standard has some drawbacks, such as a lack of a proper metadata standard and separate game-item contracts. Will Warren pointed this out on Twitter this week:

Should be interesting to see if interoperable & composable EOS game items can get on the same level as Ethereum’s dApps. It’s more likely that dGoods benefits games with much more centralized applications just to enable liquidity for players.

My favorite listens of the week

• Eugene Wei (Former Head of Video of Oculus) was on Patrick O’Shaughnessy’s podcast“Invest Like The Best” this week to talk about his latest idea of requiring proof-of-work in social networks. New social platforms should have organic “work” done by the individuals within the network, rather than inorganic bootstrapping by the founders.
• Rudy Koh, the CEO of Mythical Games, was recently on the Farsight Interviews podcast talking about Blankos and building games on EOS. Check it out.

🍩 on r/ethtrader & proof of work in closed platforms

This week arguably had one of the more exciting developments in crypto of 2019 so far. What happens when you turn social currency into a tokenized currency? Chaos. 

Let’s look at this in the lens of a games. Remember the auction house in Diablo 3? They turned an auction house with in-game currency into a way to sell your items with USD…and it ended up into a complete shit show.

We’re starting to gather enough data here. Games (including social games, like reddit) are used as means of escapism. Users work to gain social status in these closed ecosystems. Once users in these closed ecosystems start to realize their work (grinding for levels and social reputation, posting for likes) can be done with other work ($$) they become enraged.

What will happen in future open ecosystems when tokens can flow freely? How does a community respond to other communities introducing new forms of value within their ecosystem, when it wasn’t originally intended by the original creator? These questions aren’t easy.

TL;DR — Closed ecosystems like subreddits & virtual worlds have their own rules, including balanced & fair gameplay. Once we introduce external rules into the mix, users have a difficult time adopting.

If you are working on creative use cases, or working on trying to get more people into crypto and reaching end users using non-fungible tokens, I would love to talk about how I can help. Reach out to me on twitter @flynnjamm, my DMs are always open.

Contributor Name: Brian Flynn
Website: http://nfty.news/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/Flynnjamm
Medium: https://medium.com/@brianubiquik