Zhang Yuanjie | The Infinite Possibilities of the Future World: Everything is NFT
Huobi University Huobi Education
Huobi University Huobi Education
In the past year, we have seen the rise of trendy shoe culture, joint design, and blind box economy. The core logic behind these is the rise of IP. In such an IP era, how to realize the transfer of value and make the cultural attributes of products have more solid economic value?
The answer is NFT.
Yu Jianing shared his thoughts on the future of NFT in the 2021 "Riding the Wind" New Year's speech. He believes: "In the future, all industries will be based on IP management, and all IP will form NFT on the blockchain."
NFT is a new species formed by the combination of blockchain technology and real industry. NFT, a new IP cultural form based on blockchain, has begun to rise. In the future, all industries will be closely integrated with IP, and the value of NFT is not only limited to the field of art, but also opens up another new and unique value-carrying method for digital assets on the chain, becoming the coming "new platform" for the development of industrial blockchain. tuyere".
Zhang Yuanjie said that although the NFT market is still small compared with other fields in the encrypted world, it is expected that the market size will explode and reach US$1 billion in 2021. In the future, everything is NFT, and NFT will have infinite possibilities.
Faculty Profile
Faculty Profile
Zhang Yuanjie is the co-founder of Conflux. He graduated from Fudan University with a bachelor's degree and a master's degree from Brandeis University. Before joining the Conflux team, Zhang Yuanjie worked in a Wall Street financial technology company, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Alumni Foundation and Huatai China Merchants Fund of Funds, and has extensive experience in investment, capital markets and business operations.
The following is the essence of Zhang Yuanjie’s speech, organized by Huobi University.
The topic of today's speech is "Infinite Possibilities in the NFT Encrypted World". In the blockchain ecology, in addition to the commonly used Bitcoin, stable currency, and Ethereum, many things can be presented in the form of NFT.
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NFT: Unique, Indivisible Token
First of all, let’s talk about what exactly is NFT? The full name of NFT is Non-Fungible Token (non-homogeneous token), how to understand it? We can see that a dollar in the picture below is a dollar. Although the number of each dollar may be different, the value of a dollar in my hand is the same as that of a dollar in other people's hands, just like Bitcoin in the encrypted world Like Ethereum, these are fungible tokens, or FT.
As for the CryptoKitties on the other side, each CryptoKitties is unique; in a movie, although they are all movie tickets, there is a difference between the front row and the back row; although houses are collectively called houses, but Every house is distinct. Assets with unique properties like these can be carried in the form of NFT.
Another difference is that NFT is indivisible. For example, if you use one dollar to buy a popsicle worth US$0.5, the other party can also give you US$0.5 in change; but if I want to give you half an encrypted cat, it is impossible to leave the two legs of the encrypted cat alone, it must is a complete whole.
In the world of NFT, NFT can refer to various things. We collectively call it Metaverse. Meta refers to the unit with the smallest information content. Contains very rich content.
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NFT contract standard and distributed storage
Just explained what NFT is conceptually, let's analyze it from a technical point of view. Everyone knows that there is no contract standard for Bitcoin, Ethereum, etc. Most of the token contracts on Ethereum are ERC20 standards, including many platform tokens in the DeFi field are homogeneous tokens issued according to the ERC20 standard , that is, FT.
In the world of NFT, the earliest contract standard is based on Ethereum’s ERC721, which is characterized in that a contract can only issue one asset, and each asset is unique. These features are very suitable for electronic artwork, and we will also use it Called encrypted artwork.
Next came the ERC155 contract standard, which can be understood as semi-homogeneous tokens. Semi-homogeneous tokens refer to the issuance of multiple assets in one contract, but these assets belong to the same category. This is very applicable to the field of games. For example, there are ten dragon-slaying knives and one hundred Yitian swords in the game.
The other is a composable NFT contract standard: ERC998, which can contain multiple tokens in the form of ERC721 and ERC20, and package FT and NFT assets. For example, a superhero has a hundred dollars in his pocket. The hero itself is an ERC721 NFT asset, and the hundred dollars is an ERC20 FT asset.
ERC998 has a feature that it is impossible to transfer the child token without owning the parent token, that is to say, if you do not own the ERC721, you cannot transfer the 100 yuan from the hero.
The block size of Ethereum is only a few hundred K, so NFT contracts can only store digital and text information, and cannot handle images, sounds, streaming media and other content with a large amount of information. So these contents can only be stored on a centralized server. Once the centralized server is down, even if you have NFT, you cannot retrieve the electronic artwork without a backup. At this time, distributed storage comes in handy. In a distributed storage network, if some servers are offline, the overall storage is very safe. The receipt of the distributed storage file associates the receipt information with the NFT information issued on Ethereum, which largely ensures the one-to-one correspondence between the NFT and the corresponding electronic object. This is a very good combination of the two technologies. Combination is also what I see now that distributed storage is particularly useful.
Specifically, we can take a look at the example of Super Rare: an artist creates an electronic artwork on his computer, and then uploads it to the Super Rare platform. After uploading, the platform will create an NFT on Ethereum and send it to the creator.
The creator uses the address of Ethereum to digitally sign, verify the identity of the owner, and then store the artwork on IPFS. At this time, a unique code will be generated to name the image, and searching for the code in the distributed network will return the image, which is difficult to tamper with. At the same time, the code information will also be stored in the information associated with the NFT. When purchasing artworks, NFT can be used to express the ownership and transfer of artworks.
Everyone here will have questions, this encrypted artwork image can be copied and used by others, so what is the meaning of this NFT to me? In fact, after entering the electronic world, ownership and use rights are separated to some extent, and other people can print them out for appreciation or exhibition, but these people do not own the works. In fact, the owner of the work, that is, the NFT holder of this work, even encourages people to use this image, because the wider the spread and the more people use it, the more people will appreciate this work, and this one The value of works of art will only increase.
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Application classification of NFT
Next, we can see the pyramid classification of the NFT field in the figure below. The higher the level, the fewer people participate. In the field of encrypted art, there are few people who participate in it. Next is the virtual world, similar to Animal Forest, a particularly popular game on Switch. Further down are collectibles, games, and domain names. For example, CryptoKitties is a combination of games and collections. Everyone collects cats, and they can reproduce with other cats, and have the opportunity to get particularly rare cats.
In the picture below, we see that the top ten NFT projects on nonfungible.com involve virtual worlds, artworks, and collectibles.
From the perspective of market size, we see that the NFT market in the encrypted world is still very small. It will be 200 million in 2019 and 300 million in 2020. Although the scale is small, there has also been an increase of nearly 50%. I predict that there will be a big explosion in the market this year, and it should be no problem that the market size will reach 1 billion in 2021.
We can look at the auction volume of various encrypted art platforms. Before June 2020, the transaction volume was actually very small, but by the end of this year it exceeded 8 million. You can see the green breakthrough. The SuperRare platform has always been the leader in the industry before, but suddenly Nifty Gateway began to explode. The main reason behind it is that the Winklevoss brothers of Gemini Exchange bought Nifty Gateway. On this platform, you can place orders directly with credit cards, not just with Ethereum. Come buy art. This is why after the entry of Nifty Gateway, the transaction volume will skyrocket by six to seven million US dollars.
After talking about the artwork, let's look at the collection. The first generation of NFT collectibles project is called CryptoPunk, which is called encryption punk in Chinese, and it was born in early 2017. At that time, the ERC721 contract standard had not yet been born, and there was no trading platform Open Sea, but CryptoPunk was born in this way. At the time of issuance, 10,000 ERC20 tokens were selected, each of which is unique. But because CryptoPunk lacks gameplay, it cannot breed like CryptoKitties, but because of this, the scarcity of CryptoPunk is even more highlighted-because there are only 10,000 of them.
Let's take a look at the last three transactions among the 10,000. The amount is very high. Among them, Zombie Punk No. 3831 was sold at a price of 100 Ethereum.
Regarding collectibles, you may have heard of blind boxes, including Bubble Mart, which was very popular and launched last year. The first batch of blind boxes in Bazai City, a project combining blind boxes and NFTs, is about 7,124, and the sales volume has reached 500,000 RMB.
Next we look at Sorare in the game field, known as the football manager on the blockchain. FC Barcelona directly invested 4.3 million US dollars, and now 107 football clubs around the world have granted it the copyright of genuine stars. Sorare mainly sells star cards, one unique card per season, 10 super rare cards, and 100 rare cards. It will be re-released every season, and the season card can be increased by 5%.
There are five card slots on the game interface, corresponding to the midfielder, forward, defender, goalkeeper and substitute. After putting the player card in a specific position into the corresponding card slot, wait for the result of the game. The result of the game is based on the real-time personal results of the 5 members of the deck in real games. Game duration, goals, assists, shots, passes, saves, steals, cards and many other professional indicators. The winner of each season will be rewarded with rare cards.
Everyone has the opportunity to go around the virtual world and experience the virtual world on the blockchain.
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The Infinite Possibilities of NFT: Everything is an NFT
In addition to the above fields, the use of NFT has unlimited possibilities, such as domain names (ENS), fried shoes, tickets and so on.
In fact, there are many types of NFT, which can correspond to any rights and interests. At the end of today's class, I would like to end with "Yuan Jie's Day" against the background of the sci-fi world Cyberpunk 2077:
On Saturday morning, Yuan Jie wrote an article and posted it on the self-media platform. By the way, he checked last week's platform dividends and tipping income. The platform uses blockchain technology, and each article is an NFT. After the article is published, the NFT is put into the smart contract of the platform to participate in the revenue sharing. The rules of the platform are open and transparent, and the code is guaranteed;
At noon, Yuan Jie went to eat and started the Tesla with the mobile app. Log in to the App to load Yuanjie's private key, and read and verify the Tesla Car Token. The car key is also an NFT, which records the car's VIN number, car model, car owner information and associated insurance information;
In the afternoon, Yuan Jie logged into Taopiao.com and watched the movie at night. There was a new movie that was good, so he bought two tickets. Each ticket was an NFT. When watching a movie at night, scan the QR code , NFT movie tickets are withdrawn to the contract of the theater, and the producer and the theater will share the revenue according to the actual NFT sales volume;
In the evening, Yuan Jie and his business partners went to watch the game and bought the star’s signed limited-edition sneakers and highlight highlights. Both the sneakers and the video have corresponding NFTs, and they were signed from the star’s private wallet address and transferred to me;
At the same time, a commercial contract was signed with the partner, the contract is also an NFT, a total of two copies, each holding one, the NFT contains the commercial terms and the main information of the contracting party;
Before going to bed, Yuan Jie looked through the encrypted art platform Tspace and found several beautiful digital artwork NFTs, so he bought them and added an NFT insurance on Ins3 as a hedge. At the same time, it was discovered that Aidou released a new album, and also ordered an NFT of a music album. According to the provisions of the smart contract, part of the advance payment was directly transferred to Aidou's address;
Yuan Jie finally fell asleep. His physical body may or may not exist in 2077, but his soul and thoughts have been uploaded to Cyberspace to obtain eternal life. His soul has become an NFT.
The above is the content shared today. Thanks to Principal Yu for the invitation, and also to all Huobi students for listening. See you next time.
About Huobi University
About Huobi University
Since its establishment, Huobi University has been committed to cultivating top talents in the industry. As an industry educational institution focusing on blockchain applications and the development of the digital economy, Huobi University has provided training for blockchain technology, marketing, operations and management talents. According to the needs of different groups, Huobi University has set up "Blockchain Excellent Talents Special Training Camp (authoritative online live broadcast special training course)", "Global Blockchain Leader Course (GBLP)", "Comprehensively Learn Blockchain There are more than ten online and offline courses such as "Courses" (audio and video courses) and "New Frontiers of Blockchain Technology".
The Global Blockchain Leader Program (GBLP for short) is the top business course in the blockchain industry launched by Huobi University. A model of transformation in the blockchain era.
The GBLP lecturer team spans the three worlds of global academics, business, and venture capital, and has developed a global blockchain leadership course based on the demonstrations of blockchain technology experts and business leaders. GBLP courses will be taught in Chinese and English in Beijing, Hainan, Silicon Valley and other places, and will be divided into modules such as trends, industries, investment, and study tours in Silicon Valley. Courses include blockchain industry trends, global blockchain policies and laws, blockchain + industry scenarios and case studies, blockchain project investment trends and logic, blockchain and new economy and new finance, etc.
