King Midas Blockchain Lycaeum: part 3 - "Non-Fungible Tokens, What The Heck Are Those?!"

midasgold (25)in #ethereum • 5 years ago

NFT's (erc-721, erc-1155)

What is an NFT?

NFT stands for non-fungible-token. This means that a token represents a unique digital asset.
After having read my previous articles, you know what erc-20 tokens are beside being the most common token standard on Ethereum, or you've come across it in another place (It's very basic in crypto); all erc-20 tokens represent the same particular asset and are interchangeable.

Most famous example of an NFT are CryptoKitties - a collectable that rocked (or meowd :) ) onto the cryptostage in 2017.
They are erc-721 tokens representing all a funny cat but a cat with different traits nevertheless.

Creating an NFT is called MINTING.

And they can have limited or unlimited mintages depending on what kind of smart contract is utilized. NFTs are also often showing the mintage number like 1/100 or 17/50 etc.
First mint being often the most desirable among collectors and fetching the highest prices.

This NFT business might seem just a fun way to spend leisure time playing a few games like Decentraland or
sending Kitties to your friends. But they are also a good business and there's quite alot of money involved
in collecting and trading them.

There are signs that indicate that NFTs have a good future ahead for them.

There are many usecases some likely even yet undiscovered! As the industry evolves...
But for example having the ability for a gamer to buy, earn and sell in-game items is quite revolutionary indeed.
You can own virtual land in a gameworld, which is yours to build anything you like on it and you can buy clothes, hats, weapons (wearables) for your Avatar that are truely owned by you.
No loosing progress because the gaming company decides to shut servers in the decentralands decentralized virtual world for example.

The best place to trade NFT's is Opensea Marketplace.

You can put an order with a set price or make use of the auctioning feature.
Opensea functions as an user interface that makes it easy to see what nonfungible assets you hold in your Metamask wallet and you can use the site to transfer them to other addresses.
You will find several card games, virtual worlds assets and other cool stuff on Opensea.
Even URLs with .eth to get you in with the revolution ;)

Erc 1155 is a newer improved standard for NFT's.
It has certain benefits like transfer costs are less than for erc-721s.
They can also be made to represent Fungible assets.

Enjin

Enjin is quite interesting project and they are launching their main products.
Enjin has a cool feature where there can be minted Enjin tokens into the NFT's. So the NFT has a backing of ENJ-tokens.
Later the NFT can be melted to get those erc-20 Enjin tokens off and to use them how ever one likes.

Someone just minted a token with 1,155,777.1 Enjin (ENJ) — worth approximately $120K at the time of writing,
on this cool Doge card.

Look out CryptoKitties the Doge is back with avenge :)

There are other blockchains than Ethereum were NFT's can be minted.
Wax to name one and even cryptokitties are talked about to transfer onto their own Flow blockchain in the future.

Thank you for your continued interest!
Keep an eye out for the next part of the series King Midas Blockchain Lycaeum.

And remember * Escape The Labyrinth ! *