Blockchain buzz is gaining traction in the financial sector. Its credibility has made it reach wider sectors of the industry along with getting itself explored in the artistic realm and no doubt, this experiment has made the world go frenzy into exploring their artistic skills and spending millions making the celebrated art enthusiasts millionaires thereby upholding and supporting the NFT sector. Yes, we are talking about NFTs. NFTs have managed to expand their tentacles to every part of the web.
THE PRESENT PICTURE OF THE SCALABLE CNFT
Cardano was built by a decentralized community of scientists, engineers, and thought leaders. Addressing itself as the 3rd generation blockchain, Cardano in 2015 came up with a purpose to approach the three major challenges that were encountered in the Bitcoin and Ethereum blockchain-Scalability, Interoperability and Sustainability. In the pursuit of fulfilling its philosophies, Cardano developers found a way to mint NFTs without the smart contract functionality. The newfound way has proven to be insanely popular as every NFT project on the CNFT platform is witnessing a spike in demand in its pre-sale announcements.
But to mint an NFT, users have to create a native token. The Cardano developers will then embed the token metadata link to an InterPlanetary File System address (IPFS) address in which the image will be uploaded. It already happened in SpaceBudz.
As per the SpaceBudz creator, Alessandro, Cardano-native collectibles sold out 10,000 NFTs in a period of three days. It even got sold for $40,000 in the secondary market.
Explaining the native token, Alessandro said:
Tokens on Cardano are native and are on the same level as ADA. Instead of smart contracts, so-called “minting policies” control the flow of a certain token group. NFTs are basically tokens on Cardano with a quantity of 1
@spacebudzNFT sales are starting to get a little bit crazy 🥸 Big shoutout to @StaleDev for making this bot! pic.twitter.com/UW7iwCUL6J — NFT Room (@NFTRoom) March 30, 2021
Another NFT friendly platform, CardanoKidz was engaged with NFT minting from August 2020. According to Zac, a member of the CardanoKidz marketing team, pre-sale rounds got sold out “within hours of launch”, a similar activity was witnessed in the case of Cardanoheroes as well.
Sale has ended guys. Thanks a lot for all the support! Cardano Heroes Roadmap updated, 11/50!#cardanoheroes #nft pic.twitter.com/j9npbABMAf — Cardano Heroes | NFT on Cardano (@cardanoheroes) April 20, 2021
Zac happened to share one instance where a satoshi-inspired kid sold for 32,000 ADA even before the minting of the NFTs took place. Zac appreciates the tools of the blockchain system, which includes the community-developed token and the minting policy tracker. It sort of made the developers’ work easier.
The birth of 'The Mighty One' @IOHK_Charles 1for1 #Cardano Kidz Sketch NFT. Full Colours coming next.. pic.twitter.com/bonB0Y9JLt — CardanoKidz | Cardano NFTs (@CardanoKidz) April 2, 2021
Zac further added:
We can’t wait for smart contracts to arrive for more functionality but we had JUST enough tools and experience to make NFTs work on Cardano. It’s been an incredible journey so far.
WHAT ARE NFTs?
NFTs are non-fungible tokens that aren’t fungible like stablecoins. Unlike commodities, they can’t get exchanged with each other. They certify ownership of an artwork.
A market that allows you to sell your creation, be it artwork, videos, gifs, JPEG images, even games anything. You can even earn by owning a game, as the players would pay rent to play it. They are artworks inspired by stories.
There is a list of famous individuals that have become millionaires by selling their artworks, including CryptoPunks, Cryptokitties, Beeple, Jack Dorsey’s tweet, Logan Paul, Kings of Leon, Kevin Roose, TIME Magazine, and many others. Last month, Elon happened to join the NFT game on Twitter.
But isn’t it easy to make duplicate copies of artwork in the digital space and make it look like your own artwork? The best thing is the underlying database that is keeping a check on each of the creations. It is certainly not the search engine, but the blockchain. Your creation, if generated as an NFT, gets its certificate of ownership, a digital asset of your own. Once recorded on the blockchain, it successfully attains immutability. An NFT buyer can resell, distribute or license the digital asset.
The NFT creator gets the liberty to claim the creative rights, set terms and conditions for trading of the NFTs, gets to receive royalties for NFT that is resold.
HISTORY OF NFT: AN UNEXPECTED BOOM
NFTs can be traced back to tokens, or small denominations of Bitcoin, called Coloured Coins, running on the Bitcoin blockchain. Soon, it was abandoned due to an unsupported mechanism found by the Bitcoin blockchain. Soon enough, the crypto space began recognizing the imperative quality of NFTs, along with the immutable nature of any information stored in the blockchain.
The launch of a peer-to-peer financial platform, Counterparty in 2014, on top of the Bitcoin blockchain laid the foundation of modern NFTs. Since then, NFTs never look back. It entered into a world of exploration and experimentation with the augment of a meme trading platform, Rare Pepe in 2016 on the Counterparty platform. Historical records speak of the coining of the term NFTs by none other than the recent entrant, Ethereum in 2017. In the same year, the token platform saw a major shift from Bitcoin to Ethereum.
The Ethereum blockchain had a protocol for the creation and storage of tokens. With the absence of third-party, Etherem became a market leader in the generation and trading of NFTs. The NFT market started to boom with CryptoKitties, a digital trading game launched by the Vancouver-based company Axiom Zen which exploded in popularity, and the free sell-out of 10,000 unique characters of CryptoPunks created by Matt Hall and John Watkinson to Ethereum users, where the same crypto punks got sold for 1.6 million dollars, another for over 7 million dollars later. The NFTs never stopped after that. With the recently discovered MoonCats project on Ethereum, NFTs are there for a long time.
MINTING OF NFTs ON CARDANO IS STILL IN ITS TESTING PHASE
For minting NFTs on Cardano, the process that follows is burning and then minting. One can get the NFTs through Yoroi wallet. As per Polina, the metadata contains the data on minting NFT. Minting NFTs necessarily takes place in smart contracts. When smart contracts are not there, minting is that very process when tokens turn non-fungible.
Regarding the minting policy of Cardano NFT, Polina, tech lead engineer of Cardano while giving the minting tutorial says:
So minting policy for tokens is something when a token gets minted or when it gets burned, so this is the place where we have the potential to make tokens non- fungible. Currently the options for minting policies are either just signatures.
In a minting process, certain signatures for the minting have to happen before coming to the expiry slot. The multiple tokens can be released under the same policy. Well, on the other hand, announcements have been made for the pre-sale of many of the NFT projects.
Here is a list of the CARDANO NFT PROJECTS, while more are underway to join the list:
Team CNFT announcement! We have signed and are moving into an office next week. 😎 Plus we’ve just hired someone new. Some of the team will still work remotely but this #NFT stuff is getting serious! It is not a hobby for us. Expect lots more, soon! #Cardano $ada #CNFT 🟡 pic.twitter.com/MJkF6XbgUV — CNFT.IO | Join our Discord | Link 👇🏼 (@CNFT_IO) April 16, 2021
CHARLES’ OPINION ON NFT MARKETPLACES
Charles Hoskinson, in his live broadcast via Periscope from Colorado on March 25, talks about his further plans for the development of the NFT platform. As he asserts that ‘NFT marketplaces have become a big deal.’ After going through the multi-sided market from various facets, he thought of selling his art on Cardano which he had already traded on Ethereum. Charles Hoskinson sort of appreciates his idea, since he is a capitalist, and if one is to get confused and halt on the uniqueness and providence factor, he further asserts a valid reason on his idea saying, “This is the ADA version versus the Ether version.”
On exploring the field of NFTs, he says:
Learning on NFTs as an entrepreneur and as an ecosystem architect and actually what’s cool is that a lot of problems about metadata identity, authentication, problems about governance, we have native capabilities built into Cardano, from catalyst to metadata standard to how we handle native multi-asset.
Charles seems inquisitive and experimental with everything that comes his way. Inspired by Jack Dorsey’s tweet turned NFT, Charles thought of minting his journey on two NFTs, portraying some of the vulnerable stages of his life. As per Hoskinson, there should be memoirs, where one need to have cases to remind one that they have moved beyond their vulnerabilities, to which he further says:
Rare moment of lack of humility to whoever desires to have it and frame it, put it on a wall or something like that.
Explaining the prospective property of NFT platform on Cardano, he says:
A lot of then problems about metadata identity, authentication, problems about governance, we have native capabilities built into Cardano from catalyst to metadata standard to how we handle native multi-asset that I think will make us probably long term, one of the best platforms to issue, curate and transfer an NFT from one party to another party.
He witnessed the same stage during the birth of Ethereum, and he believes that “we have captured that spirit and momentum and we are going to see enormous amounts of innovation and crazy ideas.” He further said:
We give a helpful steer and push people in the right direction but unlike Ethereum we have a catalyst, which is growing at leaps and bounds.
Charles added :
Cardano has been a long game aligning with all of its philosophies. Most of DeFi will become multi-chain leading to hybridization platforms of Blockchain.
A lot of art enthusiasts will hop onto the CNFT platform for its scalable version of minting NFTs, and the quality of providing convenience to the users. The CNFT team is set to embrace 30+ NFT projects including CardanoBits, Professor Cardano. Meanwhile, the NFTs on Cardano is quite cheap as minting native token costs around 2 ADA, or $2.50 approximately.
Possessing an average market capitalization, Cardano’s Ada has been hosted in more than 30 exchanges. With a common purpose of bringing a technology platform to bring a positive change, Cardano believes in building a community in creating the blockchain of the future.
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