Original link: https://www.latepost.com/news/dj_detail?id=1239
This avatar is my NFT avatar. As long as the internet doesn’t crash, this bizarre portrait is mine.
Gai liu zi #0001
An avatar image that doesn’t even have an entity can sell for hundreds or even tens of millions of dollars, which is the main impression many people have of NFTs. But such a picture that may not sell for five dollars is also an NFT.
It’s from one of my experiments. Since researching NFTs, I always feel like I don’t understand it well enough. To this end, I decided to send a set of picture NFTs to try.
There are two ways to send NFT, one is to go directly to the big platform to send it manually; the other is to send it through smart contracts. The former is simple and fast, but inconvenient to customize rules; the latter is more flexible and free, but requires certain development work, which is also the mainstream choice for projects on OpenSea, the main NFT trading platform.
The reason why you need to use programming or a big platform when sending NFT is because it is not as simple as sending a picture on the Internet. Like BTC and ETH, NFT (non-fungible token) is a token in the blockchain, which is essentially a series of on-chain codes; but the difference is that each NFT in a group is unique , are differentiated from each other, and are not equivalent to each other like BTC. As a result, by writing pictures, music, text and other information in a single NFT, digital content that can be circulated on the blockchain can be minted. The blockchain technology ensures that the NFT holder has firm ownership of these contents. Whether or not to recognize this ownership varies from person to person, some would say that everyone can copy electronic pictures. Just like there are still people who think that software, this invisible and intangible code, does not need to be paid for.
I can program, and at one point I thought it was not a problem to write smart contracts myself. Smart contracts are programs stored on the blockchain that run automatically when some conditions are met. My needs for NFTs are simple: this is an experiment, and I hope that the NFTs I send will only be given to designated friends and cannot be resold. I hope my friends can also experience the process of minting NFTs by themselves, instead of directly accepting the NFTs I transfer like transfers. These needs can only be done through smart contracts.
For the painting part, I invited an artist friend to help me design the NFT pattern. In the conception stage, he said, “I’ll draw you,” and based on my, the author’s own Northeast Street (pronounced gāi) Liuzi style, he sent a Gailiuzi NFT. 20 friends who often go out for a walk together signed up for this experiment. Artist friends drew each of them a Gailiuzi version of him/her to make up the project.
Gailiuzi NFT
I’m confident this is an overnight experiment. But I was wrong.
BlackIDE is a popular smart contract development tool. The contract engineers who are proficient in it told me that smart contracts are not difficult, just half a day and a day. But if you want to implement a series of functions such as the front-end website, it will take another day or two. The general process is as follows:
- Write smart contracts with some developer tools, and specify rules for issuance, sale price, whitelist, and circulation.
- Use code to combine drawn materials, define the rarity of different elements, and generate a whole set of pictures.
- Upload the image to the server and write the image address to the smart contract.
- After the test is OK, the smart contract will be officially deployed on the chain.
- Make a front-end website to facilitate users to mint NFT.
But I was in a hurry, so I had no choice but to use the page provided by OpenSea to mint NFT and send it to my friends. And told friends not to resell, this is an agreement, not a smart contract.
Although it was somewhat different from the original goal, the release was finally done, but the experiment still failed: the previous article said that this picture could not be sold for five yuan, but in fact, it could not be sent for free. Because more than half of the participants do not have a blockchain wallet that can receive NFTs. He/they did not realize when they signed up to participate in the experiment that NFTs could not be sent by usual communication methods such as WeChat and iMessage, and they could not be sent without money.
The experiment revealed the characteristics and status of NFT: behind the pictures, text, and audio we see, NFT is still a technology that requires programming. Like the early Internet, it is not user-friendly enough, which makes NFTs very limited penetration among the population.
People now have different opinions about what NFT is and how much it is worth, and even polarized. Some people think that the pursuit of NFT is just another speculation: it is the tulip of the new era, the Pu’er tea of the Internet, and a fleeting hype hotspot. Others see NFTs as tickets to a certain circle, works of art, or a cornerstone for building a decentralized social network whose data is owned by users.
In the early stages of a complex matter, it is not wise to make hasty judgments. It is irresponsible to “All in” as soon as you know it, or to give a “worthless” evaluation. Nor will this article give simple conclusions about NFTs. It is a proof of NFT practitioners to more practitioners. Everyone gave their piece of the puzzle.
avatar
Some people think that NFT avatars are meaningless; but for others, NFT avatars do have irreplaceable social value. In the physical world, identities are diverse and easy to identify quickly: hairstyle, clothing, demeanor, posture, items you carry with you… In the online world, it is more difficult to quickly judge a person, and the available materials are nothing more than avatars and social network introductions.
It’s different when your avatar is a boring-looking monkey, which sends a specific, specific message. To a certain group of people, this is a code word, which means that there is likely a wealthy blockchain opinion leader behind the avatar.
The monkey is called “Bored Ape”, and it consists of 10,000 pictures from an NFT project called Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC). On Wednesday, the cheapest boring ape was about 94 ETH (ETH is Ethereum, 94 ETH is currently about 940,000 yuan).
BAYC #7990 is owned by NBA star Stephen Curry
Zhu Xiaohu, a partner of Jinshajiang Venture Capital, spent 170 ETH (about 2.27 million yuan at the time) to buy the boring ape numbered #9279 in April this year, and used it as his WeChat avatar. His fellow travelers include Cai Wensheng, Li Ning and Greenland Group.
Some people will think that Zhu Xiaohu spent more than two million to buy pictures, can’t others also right-click and save? But the technology used in NFT guarantees that all on-chain nodes around the world can prove that this picture really belongs to Zhu Xiaohu’s wallet address allenzhu.eth, not someone else.
These avatars help some people establish a sense of each other. A single NFT is worth a bunch of self-introductions.
In addition to identity, owning certain NFTs also means joining a community and owning corresponding rights. In Moonbirds, the NFT project of well-known American investor Kevin Rose, holders can join the exclusive community. There are many exclusive news here, and you can watch the private exchanges of well-known users. Kevin Rose himself is one of the most important opinion leaders in the industry.
The Boring Ape team BAYC will directly issue tokens to Boring Ape holders, that is, community members, promising that these tokens can be used in the BAYC metaverse project in the future. They can now also be bought and sold directly on cryptocurrency exchanges.
The holder can also do IP development and commercial activities based on the image of the boring ape. For example, in April this year, Li Ning opened a pop-up store with the theme of #4102 Boring Ape in the core area of Taikoo Li, Sanlitun, Beijing.
This is the first answer about the value of NFTs: it is a kind of identity verification, a kind of totem in a small circle, a kind of community ticket, a kind of label that advertises itself as embracing Web 3.
target
The ups and downs of NFT’s price have given it another definition: NFT is a game of cutting leeks, and it is essentially a financial target.
“Call me President Yi when it goes up, and Xiaoyi when it goes down. I don’t even know why it went down or why it went up.” When I asked Yi Shuihan, the founder of the NFT project X Rabbit Club (XRC), what should I call it when he did, he said.
He was wearing a black tracksuit and sweatpants, Apple Watch, and black-rimmed glasses when we met, very much like an entrepreneur who would show up at the Blue Bottle in San Francisco. Before XRC, Yi Shuihan made the popular image of the Chinese Internet “Leng Rabbit”, a nonsensical pink rabbit. Therefore, the XRC project has attracted much attention since its inception, and is regarded as a prelude for Web 2.0 practitioners to embrace Web3.
X Rabbit #6370
XRC is an NFT consisting of 7,502 rabbits with different images. The team reserves 502 and the rest are for public sale. NFTs can be purchased or auctioned directly on the exchange website, but if you want to buy an NFT that has not yet been released for a new project, it is a bit troublesome.
Most of the NFTs will limit the number, hundreds, thousands of up to 10,000, both uniqueness and scarcity can increase the price. The supply of high-quality projects is in short supply, and players are eager to grab NFTs as soon as possible. This is like a new A-share market. If the market is good, if you grab it, you will earn it.
The process of grabbing a new item is called mint, which is the writing of the purchase record to the blockchain. The writing process requires strong computing power. Those who provide computing power are called “miners”. They obtain gas fees by completing calculations. The mining fees are paid by the players who mint the NFT, so they “play” a new NFT. The cost is its selling price plus miner fees.
The minting process is a competition for computing speed. Whoever writes the purchase record to the blockchain first will own the NFT. Therefore, when some popular NFTs are released, the competition of global blockchain users will coax miners’ fees higher; the minting demand with high bids will be processed, and those with low bids will be eliminated, and the miner’s fee will not be refunded. This bidding competition is Gas War.
Not everyone needs to enter this war, and NFT projects generally use a set of whitelist rules to ensure that a specific wallet account must be able to successfully mint the specified number of NFTs.
This is an operational means of finding torrent users. Taking XRC as an example, when a user reaches the highest level in the project chat community and re-creates XRC, they can obtain a whitelist qualification, a total of 3500 places, and each whitelist address can mint up to two NFTs, and the minting unit price It was 0.0502 ETH (about 665 RMB at the time). Yi Shuihan hopes to screen out players who recognize the value of XRC and can help the secondary spread. XRC also cooperates with some well-known NFT communities to forward and extract whitelist qualifications.
In early January this year, a few days before the public sale, the floor price of XRC (the lowest price updated in real time) quickly exceeded 1 ETH (about 13,600 yuan at the time), and the average price reached 1.39 ETH (about 18,900 yuan at the time). RMB). This means that NFTs held by whitelisted players have risen nearly 30 times in a few days.
When an item that can be used as an asset is extremely liquid and expensive, it must have financial properties.
Some NFT buyers said bluntly on social networks: “Don’t forget to enter the original intention, the original intention is to make money. Don’t be a diamond hand (referring to someone who firmly holds a certain asset), don’t have feelings for pictures, and run as long as there is profit.”
Yi Shuihan believes that 99% of people enter the NFT circle to make money, but everyone gave it a narrative, “the avatar has become a circle”, which does not change the essence of the NFT financial target.
NFT is like a company that goes public right away. It faces pressure to maintain its stock price from the very beginning. NFT fluctuates 7×24 hours; the project party needs to release various content every month or even every week to maintain community expectations.
Since the launch of XRC, the biggest pressure on Yi Shuihan is that the price rises too fast and too high, and the rise and fall are out of control. He originally hoped that the price would rise slowly, thinking that this shows that everyone has continued to recognize the project. But “you don’t know what’s going on, the price goes up”, which brings more pressure to maintain the price. “Some people even want you to rise to 5 ETH (about 67,000 yuan at the time).” Yi Shuihan said.
Under the high expectations of the community, any behavior of the project party that is not conducive to directly raising the price is criticized as not understanding the NFT gameplay. But for an early-stage project, there are so many things to worry about beyond price, which are the cornerstones that support prices underwater. One of the most important is community operation, and the core goal is to maintain the community’s bullish consensus.
An NFT bought for 100 yuan may be a good-looking picture. But what if it rises to one thousand yuan or ten thousand yuan? If a few pictures bought at random cost 100,000 yuan, who can not care about its next trend? At this point a consensus is formed: the majority in the community may think it can reach 200,000 and put more money into it.
A common way to maintain a bullish consensus is to keep issuing new NFTs. When the unit price of a project reaches 1 or 10 ETH, a second NFT can be issued, and the unit price is generally 1/5 of the first project. The holders of the first NFT, that is, community members, can enter the whitelist and even get free airdrops (AirDrop, that is, sending tokens directly to the account for free, is a common method of pulling new). In mid-2021, the operator of Bored Ape will airdrop the “Bored Ape Kennel Club” to all accounts holding Bored Ape.
Consensus is sometimes fragile. Some unintentional words and deeds may cause a direction reversal and a price avalanche. The Azuki project, which took a nosedive this May, is an example.
Azuki consists of 10,000 anime-style profile avatars. It is a rare Asian-style blue-chip project in the current NFT market. Blue-chip generally means that the project can maintain its value stably for a long time. Due to the rapid fluctuations of the NFT market, the long-term calculation is generally calculated on a monthly basis.
Azuki was released in January this year and reached an average price of 36 ETH (about 510,000 yuan at the time) in April this year. The rare NFT Azuki #9605 even sold for $1.42 million (about 9.64 million yuan). The same set of NFT pictures are generally designed by human designers, such as hairstyles, accessories, etc., and the features are randomly combined by the computer. The rarer the combined result, the higher the value. Azuki #9605 Most of the features have an appearance probability of less than 1%, which is very consistent with bystanders’ impression of NFTs: super expensive small pictures.
The most expensive Azuki image, the price is quoted by the buyer at the moment and not the actual price
The average price of the Azuki series on May 4 this year was still 32 ETH (about 450,000 yuan at the time), but it quickly dropped to 10 ETH (about 140,000 yuan at the time) on May 12. There are market factors, and the prices of various NFTs have dropped to varying degrees after May. But the main reason is a May 10 article by Azuki founder Zagabond. He mentioned that he had founded three other unsuccessful NFT projects and learned how to do Azuki successfully from these failures.
In the traditional venture capital market, serial entrepreneurship is a plus. But in the NFT world, to admit that you have done unsuccessful projects is to admit that you have “rug” the project, that is, the malicious behavior of attracting players’ funds and then giving up the operation. The mere possibility of a rug is enough to destroy the bullish consensus among holders. Azuki prices subsequently fell sharply.
How many people can earn money from NFTs?
Most NFT projects are at their peak when they are released, and they break when they debut. Quite a few NFTs cannot even be minted. Not all NFTs have liquidity, and some NFTs cannot be bought for a long time.
The surefire way to make money is to find a business selling shovels in each round of the gold rush.
Some studios specialize in whitelisting various projects and then resell them. The studio has large funds and more careful calculations. A studio’s blockchain wallet address can often grab hundreds of NFTs of the same project. These studios crowd out the real players, they just want to make money, they have no consensus on the community, and they have no willingness to build. The project party will use various means to confront the studio.
Platforms also always make money. OpenSea, the world’s largest NFT market by transaction volume, is currently valued at more than $10 billion. OpenSea charges a 2.5% fee for each transaction. In January 2022, OpenSea’s monthly transaction volume exceeded $5 billion, and on January 31st alone, $233 million in transactions occurred on OpenSea.
There is a famous saying in the blockchain industry from Changpeng Zhao (CZ), the founder of Binance: “If you can’t hold, you won’t be rich.” (If you can’t hold it all the time, you won’t be rich.)
In the NFT market, Yi Shuihan has a different understanding of this sentence. He believes that the most important thing to hold is his own credit. Only with credit can you stay in the market all the time, and you can make money if you stay, because “(this industry ) There are too many opportunities to make money.”
When Yi Shuihan said this to me, Azuki’s plunge had not yet happened. I take it as a cliché. Now, I don’t think this “cliché” has been emphasized enough.
Art
In the eyes of others, NFTs are cryptographic art. This is the industry’s earliest understanding of NFT before NFT avatars became popular.
In March 2021, Christie’s sold EVERYDAYS: THE FIRST 5000 DAYS by artist Beeple (real name Mike Winkelmann) for $69.346 million, setting a new record for a living artist The third place in the auction record. This is also the first time Christie’s, which is engaged in traditional art auctions, has auctioned NFT works and accepted cryptocurrency payments.
Every Day: The First 5000 Days
Every Day: The First 5000 Days is a huge mosaic. From May 2007 to January 2021, Beeple created a piece of work every day, which together made up the “first 5000 days”. Christie’s called it “a milestone in collecting digital art.”
“Every Day: The First 5000 Days” is similar in form to traditional artworks and is easier to understand. Groups of NFT items, such as avatars, are not like the art in the impression of ordinary people.
CyberPunks
The avatar composed of this bunch of pixels is the earliest group NFT project, CryptoPunks. It was launched in 2017 and consists of 10,000 images. The current minimum unit price is 84.85 ETH (about 850,000 RMB).
CyberPunks couldn’t even give away at first. It wasn’t until the American news site Mashable published “This ethereum-based project could change how we think about digital art” in mid-2017 that CryptoPunks attracted attention. Notice.
The article begins like this: “Someone owns this picture…It is art, and it has an owner.” The original author emphasizes twice that you can own A digital picture, it’s art.
For those who see NFTs as art, NFTs have changed the relationship between creators and the art market.
@Sleepy0x13 is a digital artist and NFT researcher better known as Sleepy. He is one of the most well-known Chinese voices in the NFT field and will help other artists to incubate their own NFT projects.
Sleep always believes that after NFT, the relationship between creators and collectors has changed from the former serving the latter to doing one thing together. NFTs never belong to one person or one company, it belongs to the community. Once NFT is released, holders can participate in shaping the development direction of the project through various operational activities, second-generation communication and voting decisions.
In traditional art consumption, there is no need for a relationship between the artist and the consumer market. I may have a shelf of art photography, but I don’t have an intersection with the artist and the artwork itself. I temporarily own a piece of art, but there is a lack of communication between me, the other owners, and the artist.
Mr. Sleep believes that the new relationship brought by NFT can better ensure the economic benefits of art creators, but it also requires artists to learn to operate various social media and complete the work of curators in the past. Not everyone adapts to change. Many of the creators that Sleep has come into contact with just bury their heads in creating and uploading works, rather than doing community operations. This kind of project basically sinks into the sea, and the creators have no income.
Not everyone agrees that current NFTs are an art.
Photographer and visual artist Tianxi has his own studio in Tianjin, specializing in helping artists and museums digitize artworks. Having worked as a programmer, doing commercial shooting and now doing art full-time, Tianxi can be said to be the most suitable type of artist for NFT. He believes that if the NFT project simply uses technology, it is not art. This is somewhat like photography. When photography was first invented, it was a technology for recording evidence. When photography was more than documentary, photography as an art gradually appeared.
Technology continues to advance, generations are more advanced, and art is “unsurpassable” – 20th-century art works are not better than 15th-century works just because they were born later. Tianxi told me that NFTs create a standard of “as if this thing can be surpassed, and everything is judged by price”, which is clearly contrary to art.
In the communication with many artists, they all mentioned the purity of art. Aesthetics is the ability to treat art as art without any other utilitarian purpose. But NFTs are full of other purposes: to enter different circles, to make more money, to express one’s own personality… This is not in line with the artist’s pure understanding. One artist even said that NFTs can be anything, but definitely not art.
In the field of blockchain, the name most closely related to art is Pak. Some say there is a single person behind Pak, others think it is a team. Pak said in an interview that he does not consider himself an artist, but in the hearts of many players, Pak’s works are works of art.
One of Pak’s most interesting works is “Merge”, which will be released in 2021: within 48 hours of opening for purchase, anyone can buy any amount of the Merge project’s corresponding token, MASS, through an auction. After that, the Merge project party will generate an NFT with an independent number for this address according to the number of MASS held by each address, the quality is the number of tokens, and the color is determined by the number of holdings – in fact, it is a point.
m(2379) #63
According to the rules, there can only be one such NFT in each crypto wallet. So when Merge NFTs flow in the secondary market, the newly purchased NFTs will merge with the original ones in the wallet to generate “dots” with new numbers, qualities and colors. Over time, the total number of Merge points will become smaller and smaller, and the remaining points will become larger and larger.
The form and content of “Merge” are closely integrated. If it is not in the form of smart contracts, if there is no transaction for NFT, the points in Merge cannot be changed and merged. The form of smart contract itself is part of the content, “Merge” 》Only possible in the crypto world. Most other NFT works just put some pictures that can exist in the physical world into the blockchain. Yixuan, an artist who used to work in a technology company and is now mainly engaged in video work in the Northeast (that is, he painted Gailiuzi NFT), commented that if a photo is not art in reality, why should this photo pass the smart contract? When tokenurl is read, it becomes crypto art?
Yixuan also doesn’t think “Merge” is art, he just thinks that “Merge” is more qualified to be discussed in the context of art than other works. NFTs are like white paper. White paper is not art, but it contains the possibility of art. The key is to be possible.
more possibilities
“I” stood in front of a huge floor-to-ceiling window next to a famous modernist Barcelona chair. The night outside the window shows uneven brightness due to the reflection of neon lights. The room is small, but the display value is not low: a pair of CryptoPunks facing the window; on the other wall are two Chromie Squiggle by Snowfro painted with colorful wavy lines, the average price of this series in the past ninety days is more than 100,000 yuan for a piece. This is like a wonderful world version of “Ghost in the Shell”.
Portals Beta
Unfortunately, this is not my home, nor my world. Once the loading page is over, it’s the world of Portals, and every newcomer will see it.
Portals is a metaverse project based on the Solana blockchain – different blockchains have their own characteristics. The ETH mentioned above is Ethereum, which is the most common blockchain at present. Solana, as a rising star, is growing rapidly . Its lower miner fees have been dubbed “the poor man’s Ethereum”, and its daily NFT transaction volume briefly surpassed ETH in May this year.
Portals’ CMO Chris Lund never thought NFTs would stop at expensive “small pictures,” telling me that Portals wants to create a lively virtual city where users can create their own space.
But how is this different from games like Second Life or The Sims? Chris’s answer: NFTs.
Portals divide the space of this virtual world into different Spaces. The proof of ownership of each Space is an “NFT room card”. The space belongs entirely to the owner, who can hold his own events here, rent and resell the space, and these actions do not require the official consent of Portals.
In centralized online services, online software, online movies, music, skins, weapons and props purchased in the game, users only enjoy the right to use all of these, not the real ownership. Large accounts with tens of millions of fans may also be disabled or deleted by the platform for various reasons. But when buying NFTs, users are buying real ownership.
Portals’ cheapest citizen card now costs less than 1,000 RMB with almost no handling fee. The role of NFTs here is to allow users to truly own something in a virtual digital world. These things are not expensive and can even be free. “The virtual world is becoming more and more important to the real world, but can you imagine a future where we don’t have any ownership and everything belongs to big companies? NFTs are the key to solving the problem,” Chris said.
Portals are planning to gradually migrate to decentralized servers. An owned and decentralized virtual space may really have the opportunity to become someone’s second life.
Some people also hope that NFTs can play a greater role in the offline world.
LinksDAO tries to use NFTs to build the best golf community in the world. They use NFT as a membership certificate and raise funds by selling NFT membership cards, hoping to build a physical golf course.
Tianxi, who believes that NFT works are not equivalent to art at this stage, also recognizes that NFT can help the art industry. A ready-made application is to trace the source of art transactions. Traditional auction houses keep records of this: for example, an 18th-century work, who painted it, who was first-hand traded, who was second-hand, and who finally collected it. NFT can make this easier and more efficient, and the probability of error is close to 0.
The discussion around NFTs is now complex and even noisy. Some people think it’s a financial target, some people think it’s the future of art, and many people think it’s just a tech hotspot that happens every year. In fact, NFT is not a finished product, but an ongoing experiment. What goals and values does it pursue? Even choosing not to answer is a better answer than jumping to conclusions.
Why am I interested in NFTs? Which dimension am I looking at? I think it is precisely in the “possibility” that it is still undecided. My belief in the possibility of NFTs is essentially my belief in the future of the digital world.
My screen name @MasterPa has been with me for over ten years. I often say to my new friends, “No matter how brainless this ID has said, it’s me.” Because I am a person who really treats the digital world as the real world, if I can’t afford to belong to this world in this world The responsibility of the name, that will never belong to the digital world.
The concept of NFT is so natural to me, its meaning is very simple: online world, confirming something belongs to you.
When I was in junior high school, I wrote my first Chinese-language feeding tutorial for some kind of reptile. After a businessman took it away, he openly said that he wrote it himself and even put the content into the encyclopedia. I cannot prove that this text belongs to me. There was once a photo editing software that declared in the user agreement that the photo being edited had a global and irrevocable copyright. If the user did not agree, it could not be used. How many people will look carefully at the agreement? Even if you see this, how many people will not use this tool because of this?
I am a generation that grew up with the Internet, and countless important moments of my life happened on the Internet. Looking back at the content and memories I have created on the Internet over the past two decades, regardless of price or industry, they are part of my own experience. But most of the content, the text I wrote, the photos I took, and the interactions with my friends… have long since become electronic dust and dissipated in the centralized server. NFTs have opened my eyes to the possibility of stopping this dissipating.
I am well aware that today’s NFTs and blockchains cannot solve all problems. That’s why those of us who see the internet as a vital part of our lives should not see ourselves as bystanders. We need to take some responsibility for making the internet a better place.
I took on my responsibilities in the digital world, and I want my rights in the digital world.
*Thanks to the interviewees and 0xchao.eth, CuriousJoe, davey#8335 for their help with this article
Author introduction: Hanyang, when NFT falls, go to roast cicada chrysalis, starving craftsman tw@HanyangWang
This article is reprinted from: https://www.latepost.com/news/dj_detail?id=1239
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