To kick off June, we’re making a bittersweet announcement. At the end of June, we’ll be officially winding down the Future Mints social research product. This is purely related to the website where you could connect your wallet, share research of upcoming NFTs, and receive notifications when your NFTs have a new benefit. While we still believe that this solution is needed, over the next couple years when it’s actually needed, the product should change. Perhaps we’ll relaunch something later.
We will continue writing our weekly newsletter with the plan to publish a book in early 2024.
NFTs, Gaming & The Metaverse
By Elliot Koss, Founder @ Future Mints
Technical Level: 🛠️
Last week we covered the key concepts of digital identity and self-custody by explaining the importance and utility of the crypto wallet. This is merely the jumping off point to a much larger conversation.
This week, we’re going to cover the broad strokes of what makes the blockchain exciting for the next evolution of technology. We’ll breeze over some topics that we’ll dig into more later, so if there’s something that doesn’t make sense, reply to this email and we’ll make sure to clarify it soon.
The Next Technology Wave
Everything we’ve been discussing related to blockchain is how, for the first time, technology makes it possible to decouple having a centralized company or organization keep a running balance of your life. Instead of a bank, there’s a public ledger. Instead of a credit card, you’ll have a wallet. Instead of a social media account, you’ll have a digital identity that’s connected to your wallet.
All of this is gearing us up for the next wave of technology that will take the internet that we rely on today and make it even more useful.
Imagine being able to buy a home as easily as placing an order on Amazon. One of the most commonly discussed use cases is putting home titles on the blockchain. In this scenario, rather than manually filing with the county clerk, there’s a public and immutable (ie can’t be changed) record of the home, its purchase history, and the current owner. There is no question over who owns the property, because there is a record of the chain of custody. If you want to sell the property, much like in Monopoly, someone just needs to purchase the title. The blockchain makes this complex process simple.
Imagine having a car that you want to allow your kid to drive during the day, but from 11pm to 5am, you don’t want them to be able to drive it. Once your car keys go on-chain, you won’t need a physical key to use your car. And instead of having to share a physical key with someone else, you could share a blockchain representation of your key with someone else. And then limit their access. Such as the time period noted above.
Imagine earning airline miles for one airline, and having a way to redeem them for another airline. It’s not like American Airlines is going to suddenly start allowing you to use their miles with Delta (and vice versa). Instead, your miles will live on-chain and you’ll be able to use a DeFi exchange to swap your AA miles to Delta miles.
Imagine playing a video game and earning a special piece of equipment that you want to use for your character in another game. Today, games are completely separate from each other, but in the future, when those separations break down and your digital items are on-chain, you’ll be able to move your assets from one game to another seamlessly.
Imagine engaging on one social media platform where you earn rewards for the number of people who like, comment, or follow you. For the ads that you watch. For the activity that you do or generate. Today, the social media networks derive the bulk of the value despite you, the user, generating the content. The blockchain will present a new opportunity for a startup to easily reward users for doing what they already do. And make it so that your interactions can be easily moved from one social network to another. No need to recreate a post on every network - just by connecting your wallet to the platform once, you could seamlessly post something on a TikTok-like network and also have it posted to an Instagram / Facebook / Twitter / YouTube-like network. At the same time.
These are all scenarios that are core to the future that blockchain is going to unleash. It’s not a question of if, but when. Just like in the mid 90s some people knew that the internet would unleash a new wave of shopping and consuming media, the capabilities of the blockchain will take what we currently know to the next level.
In each of the examples above, there are some ways to do this in today’s world. But those solutions are limited and require each of the companies to build substantial infrastructure. It’s the equivalent of asking every company to create their own credit card system, which is obviously impractical. It’s these shared infrastructures and standards that allow businesses to operate efficiently while taking advantage of new technology capabilities.
NFTs, Gaming and The Metaverse
This brings us to the heart of today’s topic. The representation of digital (and physical) assets on the blockchain is made possible with a Non Fungible Token (NFT). You may already be familiar with the term, but if you only think of an NFT as artwork, then you’ve missed the true value that they provide. So let’s back up for a minute.
A Non Fungible Token is a unique thing on the blockchain. It’s created with a smart contract with data, images, or video, and it’s governed by the rules of the smart contract itself. This gives an NFT the capability of unlocking doors on the internet. Similar to a username and password, except the NFT can be given or sold to someone else. Which you can’t really do with a username and password. In the examples above, your home title would be an NFT. Your car key would be an NFT. Your in-game equipment would be an NFT. Even your social media posts would be an NFT. And that’s just the beginning.
NFTs are probably the single most important evolution of blockchains, followed closely by the ability for every company to have their own token or tokens since airline miles would be tokens.
There are a ton of use cases for NFTs, but the one that will likely turbocharge adoption is the usage in games and the upcoming Metaverse. Games like CS:GO have displayed the high demand for in-game assets, and titles like Fortnite have proven that the digital cosmetic market is a multi-billion dollar industry.
It’s a no-brainer to make it easier for games to have interoperable equipment, skins, and tokens. And once these items become interoperable, there’s going to be a marketplace where people can buy and sell them. NFTs make this easy and traceable. In-game tokens living on the blockchain as their own currency allow game creators to keep their games protected, and the utility of DeFi makes it so that tokens can be exchanged for money or other game tokens - something that has been the dream of gamers for years. Now it’s closer to reality than ever before.
The Metaverse completes this picture, even though it’s still a concept today and not something that anyone has created a truly good working model. The big picture is that the Metaverse is a digital world that can be the host for all games. It’s similar to a gaming console like Playstation, Xbox, or Nintendo, except instead of each game living separately on each console, there’d be a way for characters in each game to move seamlessly from one game to another. In other words, each game would be governed by its own rules, but the characters and equipment would be interchangeable. As should be obvious by now, those characters and equipment would be NFTs. The infrastructure required to make this work is substantial, so it’s going to take a while for this part of the future to materialize. But the dream has been shared with too many people to put the genie back in the bottle now.
Over the course of the next few months, we’re going to spend more time digging into each of these areas and more. We haven’t even touched on Play 2 Earn (P2E) or how new rewards programs can be structured. There’s so much to explore here, and it’s the reason we’re so excited about the future of blockchain.
We cannot wait to share more next week.
News of the Week
May 2023 witnessed a wave of scams and hacking incidents that resulted in cumulative losses of over $54 million, a new report from security firm De.Fi shows. Just this past week, Web3 influencer Andrew Wang put his “rep on the line to say [Pixel Penguins] is for real amidst all the scams.” In his post, he shared that one of his friends named “Sarah,” or Hopeexist1 on Twitter, had been battling cancer since and released the collection to raise money for her hefty medical bills. Shortly after minting out, it was discovered that “Sarah” had stolen art used in her NFTs, and that her cancer diagnosis was made up to attract donations.
Fewocious, has risen to the ranks as one of the most successful NFT artists to date. In April 2022, Fewocious released the Paint Drop collection, in which he amassed $20 million in sales over the course of 24 hours. The hit artist announced that he’s gearing up to release his upcoming 20,000-supply digital art collection “Fewos” in August.
Nike Virtual Studios, the sportswear giant's digital arm, and video game developer EA Sports are partnering together to bring digital creations from Nike's .SWOOSH platform to the EA Sports gaming ecosystem. Details are largely TBA.