According to NonFungible.com data, as of October 14, the total number of NFT market transactions reached 130 million U.S. dollars, and more than 4.92 million NFTs were sold, with an average price of 26.4 U.S. dollars. All three data items have increased significantly in the past month.
At the same time, on October 8th, the 21st piece (Block 21) of the Blockchain artwork “Portraits of a Mind” series was sold at Christie for over US$130,000, setting a record for the highest NFT auction price.
As the market’s trading volume heats up, this historic auction, the first appearance of NFT in a large auction house, also means that some changes in the NFT market are quietly taking place.
“The sparrow is small”, but it has “complete all organs”
As a non-homogeneous token with uniqueness and indivisibility, NFT is different from the homogeneous tokens that we have more contact with without any difference between each other. Each is a unique, indivisible and interchangeable scarce existence , With a strong personal property attribute, and this is almost a natural fit with the demand for personalization of equipment and asset assets in the game field.
In the traditional game architecture, the characters or equipment assets that players spend time and effort cannot circulate, and they are placed on a centralized server, and their survival or even ownership are not in their own hands (V God “rushed to the crown” and entered the blockchain world. To a large extent and “Blizzard” regardless of the player’s opinion forcibly changing the rules can not be separated).
Probably because of this, the first step for NFT to land is in the game field-Cryptokitties, born in 2017, as the first phenomenon-level encrypted game application, took the lead in bringing NFT into the public’s field of vision, and each encrypted cat corresponds to it. A unique NFT is a player’s private property based entirely on the blockchain and can be freely transferred and traded.
The game field has also become the first large-scale practice scenario for NFT. At present, many encrypted games such as Decentraland, Axie Infinity, Cryptovoxel, etc. are emerging in an endless stream. The Token attribute of NFT itself also helps them create an internal economic incentive model, so that players can learn from their games. Earning real money revenue greatly increases the playability of encrypted games.
At the same time, NFT, which started from encrypted games, now has applications far beyond games, and has expanded to many aspects such as artworks, collectibles, virtual assets, real assets, and identities. Among them, art and collections are the fastest growing ones. Product field.
In the field of art, each piece of art will have a unique “digital ID” under the mapping of NFT, and realize “asset tokenization” based on NFT, and break the trading time and place restrictions of traditional cultural exchanges. Real-time circulation and transactions are available anytime and anywhere, which is almost a tailor-made solution for artworks.
In the field of collectibles, NFT can use the tokenization of real-world collectibles to provide it with a constant proof of ownership. Stamps and the like can be stored safely, easily transferred and cannot be copied. Because of this, according to the Ethereum NFT market report released by the data analysis platform DappRadar, 81% of the NFT market’s transaction volume in September was contributed by the transaction volume of the NFT digital collection and trading platform Rarible.
The application of NFT in reality is far from stopping there. The previous 20,000 VIP tickets for the European Football Championship in the form of NFT launched by UEFA and Nike’s NFT attempts to verify the authenticity of sneakers using “CryptoKick ID” are all NFTs. A representative who is constantly landing in more new fields.
At present, the NFT market can be described as “the sparrow is small, but it has all five internal organs,” and it has taken shape.
NFT ushered in the “Cambrian Big Bang”?
According to data from NonFungible.com, in September, the NFT (Non-Fungible Token) market transaction volume exceeded 7 million U.S. dollars, a surge of more than 1,000%. In the first week of October, NFT sales reached nearly 2 million U.S. dollars, month-on-month. The growth has also nearly doubled, and the overall transaction volume of the NFT market has increased significantly in the past month.
However, the million-dollar transaction volume is naturally insignificant compared to the DeFi head project, and the number of active users is also the same. According to duneanalytics data, as of October 9th, OpenSea and the top two users in the NFT ecosystem Rarible, the number of active users were 25,707 and 7,331, while the number of active users of the DeFi head projects Uniswap and Kyber during the same period was 382,589 and 104,008, which is still an order of magnitude difference.
But optimistically, OpenSea is also second only to Uniswap, Kyber, Compound, 1inch, Aave, ranking sixth, higher than year. Finance, MakerDAO, Balancer, Curve and other DeFi star projects, and it has been more than the previous two months. It is accelerating growth, and gradually has the potential to explode.
In general, as long as the number of transactions and the number of active users can continue to maintain such a growth trend, the pace of various derivative innovations will naturally accelerate, and various attempts will begin to blow out, many of which are quite innovative.
Take the Async Art found on Twitter as an example. Async Art allows users to create, sell, buy, collect and trade NFT artworks, and each piece of NFT artwork is programmable-after each piece of NFT artwork is online, any holder can add his own Creation, thereby renewing its appearance, is like a relay work of successive buyers “adding bricks and tiles”.
There are even individual innovations that break the boundaries. NFT+DeFi attempts have begun to emerge. The most representative one is the NFT borrowing platform Rocker NFT, which uses a decentralized autonomous organization structure that allows users to mortgage NFT to lend DAI.
Among them, the NFT artwork created by artist Josie Bellini was mortgaged on Rocket NFT, and 1000 DAI was loaned for a period of 6 months with 15% interest, making it the first decentralized mortgage loan based on artwork. Of course, it’s only a test stage at present. After all, it is difficult to price NFTs in a fair market. Therefore, the symbolic meaning of the first 1000DAI NFT mortgage is used as a substitute, and “reputation” has played a key role.
But as a representative, DAI, as one of the leading stablecoins in the DeFi ecosystem, has also begun to be deeply embedded in the genes of NFT. From these perspectives, as the cross-linkage continues to deepen, the boundary between NFT and DeFi will undoubtedly become more blurred. It is very likely that NFT will gradually become an indispensable building block in DeFi Lego.
Hype is not a long-term solution, NFT is still early
What will be the next wave of blockchain innovation (hype hot spot) after DeFi? This is a question that almost the entire industry is thinking about, and NFT is also recognized as one of the possible directions.
It is precisely because of this that the NFT market with a strong hype atmosphere is currently in a delicate balance. Once there are signs of “quasi-phenomenal projects”, it will quickly attract market capital and traffic, which will lead to vicious speculation. “Pineapple” MEME is the most typical example.
The original intention was to ridicule DeFi and issued MEME coins. Naturally speaking, a spoof introduced a liquid mining design: users who pledge MEME coins can get pineapple points, which can be exchanged for NFT collection cards and can be directly linked to OpenSea Sales.
Unexpectedly, it has evolved into another jaw-dropping “magic wealth creation myth”-after the liquidity mining started, MEME coins soared dozens of times in a week, so that the original free airdrops in the Telegram group Worth waiting for the same suite for a while. Such speculation has greatly attracted the attention of the market to NFTs, but it is of little benefit to its real long-term development.
How to reduce the hype craze and direct resources and attention to the next development of NFT is the key test of whether NFT can usher in the next transformation.
On the other hand, the market volume of NFT seems to have some ceilings that are difficult to overcome. Although there is huge room for imagination in the mapping and linking of non-homogeneous real assets such as collectibles, artworks, and real estate, many old problems can be solved by granting liquidity and simplifying ownership certificates.
But it has to be said that the factors that need to be considered for the mapping of real assets under the chain involve all aspects, which are by no means an overnight effort. Therefore, the next most likely path to open the situation quickly is to directly rely on the native assets on the chain, as in YFI founder Ander Cronje. “GameFi”, which was publicly proposed on September 10, collided and merged with popular fields such as DeFi and encrypted games, and may be the next major innovation direction of NFT.
Although the NFT market has recently become more attractive in terms of transaction volume and innovation, objectively speaking, there has not yet been any “out-of-circle” super-explosive product in its innovation. Generally speaking, it is still relatively small. The public and primary market.
However, the future is coming much faster than most people think. Since the beginning of 2020, beyond the expectations of most people, DeFi has suddenly and brutally exploded, and the transaction volume and innovation diversity have been simultaneously carried out. Ji Big Bang.
So whether the current NFT is DeFi at the end of 2019, and whether NFT can replicate the rise of DeFi and become the next big wave in the encryption world, it remains to be seen.
