NFT Roundtable丨Besides collection, what’s the next step for NFT?

At 15:30 on June 25, 2021, the Liandaodao live broadcast room specially invited three well-known overseas projects, Aavegotchi, Unicly, and REVV, to hold an #NFT roundtable.

Aavegotchi Chief Summoner /Tech Lead Coderdan & The founder of Unicly Leia Fisher & Animoca Brands Head of Live Operations Tanja Sammatti participated in the special live broadcast of "Besides collection, what is the next step for NFT?". Sakura Xiaoying, head of Liandaodao Media, talked with three guests and presented the hottest content in the industry to you through questions and answers.

The following is the interview transcript:

1. First of all, I would like to welcome the three guests to the Liandaodao live broadcast room. First, please introduce yourselves and briefly introduce your projects to everyone.

Leia Fishe: Hi everyone! My name is Leia. I'm a designer and developer, and an art fan. I've been in the NFT space for many years~Unicly is an NFT protocol for combining, splitting, and trading, born to enable NFT liquidity. The protocol allows users to package any number of NFTs together to form a "uToken", which is the equivalent of an ERC20 NFT collection. Users can then provide liquidity and AMM for these NFT shards.

Coderdan: Hello everyone, I am Coder Dan, the founder of Aavegotchi and the CEO of Pixelcraft Studios, the development company behind Aavegotchi. Aavegotchis are playable NFT pets generated by staking interest-bearing aTokens on the Aave platform. The on-chain feature of Aavegotchis pets distinguishes the degree of rarity based on the distribution of the bell curve. Aavegotchi was launched on Polygon L2 in March of this year. Currently, our secondary NFT market Baazaar has thousands of DAUs and strong trading volume every day.

Recently, we also released a new Metaverse Litepaper showing how Aavegotchi will transition from a simple collectible to a true NFT game. Here is more information:

https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/Z2Tr-Yglho3FlhztoZQbjQ

Tanja Sammatti: Hello everyone, thank you for having me. My name is Tanja, and I’m responsible for the live broadcast operations of the REVV Motorsport gaming platform and some other Animoca Brands blockchain products. I’m a blockchain enthusiast and a big believer in the importance of digital property rights. I’m very happy to be here today to introduce what we are building~

REVV is the primary utility token and in-game currency for branded racing games produced by Animoca Brands, including F1® Delta Time, MotoGP™ Ignition, Formula E: High Voltage, and the upcoming REVV Motorsport gaming experience and metaverse. REVV is being used as a utility across applications and the driving force behind the ecosystem’s “earn as you play” model.

2. What do you think about the future development of the NFT field, and how do your respective projects integrate with the trend of NFT development?

Coderdan: I think it’s still very early in the NFT space, and while we’ve seen some interest from large media companies and celebrities, NFTs have yet to enter the mainstream. In my opinion, one of the best ways to enter the mainstream is through games, and that’s what we do with Aavegotchi. Our goal is to be a breakthrough in NFT gaming, providing monetization opportunities for anyone in the world. We do this through a unique combination of free games and earning while playing. Our recently released Metaverse white paper provides a great overview of how this new gaming economy will be built. I believe the intersection of DeFi and NFTs is very powerful and will bring huge wealth to all early players.

Tanja Sammatti: The NFT space is like the nascent stage of the Internet right now. I believe NFTs have a wide range of use cases, especially for open-source digital ownership. Our project opens up a metaverse in motorsport and introduces the concept of "earn while playing" and NFTs. We hope to bring more people in by expanding the already existing gaming economy with blockchain, because we believe gamers understand the importance of digital ownership.

Right now, the vast majority of gamers (over 2 billion people) play games using virtual assets and virtual currencies, but they don’t actually own those items and they have no value beyond what that specific game allows. Blockchain changes that, as players can now truly own their items, trade them freely, and earn money from their time spent in-game. It creates an entirely new economy and form of ownership and interoperability, as NFTs are not tied to a specific game due to true ownership, but can also have utility outside of a certain title or platform.

Leia Fisher: Buying NFTs is laborious, and we want to make it easier for people to exchange NFTs among their favorite projects, just as if they were liquid tokens. Fungible tokens may have thousands of buyers and sellers, but every NFT trade depends on matching one buyer and one seller, which leads to low liquidity. Additionally, many users are squeezed out of some of the most desirable projects, leading to more concentrated ownership and pent-up demand. Fragmentation allows more people to trade NFTs at lower price points, enabling more of us to own even the most coveted NFTs.

3. What challenges do you think the current NFT market faces? How does your project solve this challenge?

Tanja Sammatti: The biggest challenge is probably going to be educating the mass market about how blockchain works and how it can completely revolutionize the use of digital property rights (or the current lack thereof). Right now, people look at the high prices of NFTs in the first quarter of 2021 and then the subsequent drop and conclude that this is a temporary craze based on speculation. This is absolutely wrong, and once people realize there are many kinds of NFTs and the utility they can provide, things will change. NFTs are here to stay and they will completely change the power dynamic between gamers and game publishers.

Animoca Brands is the first full-blown gaming company to go all-in on blockchain. Other companies may have taken a tentative approach, but we dove in headfirst. On our platforms, like REVV Motorsport and The Sandbox, players are already enjoying true digital property rights, and stories about what this really means are starting to emerge. We are continually working to expand and improve this ecosystem and experience to make it easier to dive in. We believe that our product provides so much real-life value that growth and adoption will come naturally over time, so our focus is on educating users and improving the product to provide more utility and value. Of course, different marketing initiatives are also important so that people know this is happening, so we have a lot of campaigns going on there as well.

Coderdan: The main challenge of the NFT market is how to attract new users. Especially on Ethereum, some NFTs cost hundreds of dollars in transaction fees alone. As for Aavegotchi, we issued it on Polygon L2, and the transaction fee is almost zero, which solves this problem.

Another challenge is hiding some of the technical aspects of blockchain and NFTs from less tech-savvy users. Projects like NBA Topshot have done a great job of this. However, our philosophy is that rather than hiding the blockchain, we can help our users understand this new technology through gamified interactions. As with any new technology, education is the most important thing, and we have already brought countless new users into DeFi and NFTs through Aavegotchi.

Leia Fisher: Buying NFTs is laborious, and we want to make it easier for people to exchange NFTs among their favorite projects, just as if they were liquid tokens. Fungible tokens may have thousands of buyers and sellers, but every NFT trade depends on matching one buyer and one seller, which leads to low liquidity. Additionally, many users are squeezed out of some of the most desirable projects, leading to more concentrated ownership and pent-up demand. Fragmentation allows more people to trade NFTs at lower price points, enabling more of us to own even the most coveted NFTs.

4. As a sophisticated and complex NFT+DeFi project, how does Aavegotchi push the crypto industry into the mainstream of the world?

Coderdan: As mentioned in the previous question, Aavegotchi mainly does several things:

1. DeFi is a very native use case of blockchain. Aavegotchi is the world's first NFT supported by DeFi, which makes DeFi interesting and NFT financial, making it easier for it to enter the mainstream.

2. We are one of the earliest projects to move to the second layer of Polygon, which provides a solid foundation and premise for reducing transaction fees and improving efficiency.

3. In the design of the entire game, we introduced two important economic models: "Play to Earn" and "Free to Play". The former gives mainstream users a stronger motivation to play games and earn income by playing while earning, while the latter lowers the user participation threshold to the minimum. Users can participate in the game and earn part of the rewards without holding any NFT assets.

4. We introduced the Aavegotchi metaverse gameplay. Gotchiverse will be the first blockchain metaverse to introduce profitable plots of land. Plot owners can let their Aavegotchis (or hire others) to farm their plots to harvest alchemy coins. Gotchiverse will be an open social space where players can participate in various activities such as farming, crafting, trading, and fighting.

(Virtual world map)

5. In the NFT game track, what are the differences and advantages of Aavegotchi compared with the currently popular Flow and Opensea?

Coderdan: Participate in various activities in the Metaverse, such as farming, crafting, trading, and fighting, and earn corresponding income

First of all, Aavegothci, Flow and Opensea are not in the same sub-track. Under the same NFT track, Aavegothci is an NFT+DeFi game, while Flow is a public chain focusing on NFT, and Opensea is an NFT trading platform. In addition to being the first collectible pledged by aTokens, Aavegotcghi's entire ecosystem also includes the built-in NFT trading platform Baazaar, and the upcoming Aavegotchi metaverse, our little ghost pets can wait. Those two are platforms, and we are playing and earning blockchain games. We can earn NFTs and money by holding GHST. https://aavegotchi.com/get-ghst

6. It is mentioned above that Unicly is a decentralized NFT protocol for combination, segmentation and trading. Compared with other sharding platforms, what are the competitive advantages of Unicly?

Leia Fisher: Great question. We think our key attributes include:

- Allows sharding of collections containing multiple NFTs across different smart contracts (ERC-721 and/or ERC-1155s).

- Treat each NFT in a shard collection as a unique, non-fungible item.

- Allow collectors to bid on specific NFTs instead of entire collections.

- Treat all shards equally and never rely on randomization of reward distribution.

- Share the proceeds from NFT disposal equally among all shard holders (or uToken holders).

- Allow shard holders to accept bids by voting with their shards, rather than forcing them to counter-bid.

- Reward contributors of the best NFT collections through liquidity mining of UNIC governance tokens.

7. We found that Unicly has cooperated with many great projects and artists. What do you think is the attraction of Unicly to them? How did you convince them to join this experiment? What are the criteria for Unicly to select partners?

Leia Fisher: Yes, it’s a super exciting thing! We don’t have to convince anyone to join Unicly, anyone can collect, it’s a permissionless blockchain. We had some great early collectors join us because they believed in our project and its core purpose. We are very lucky to have all the amazing collectors, projects and artists’ collections who have joined us since then and will continue to build. We are also continuing to look for partners to provide more tools and opportunities to our users.

8. The REVV ecosystem is mainly based on racing sports games. Faced with such a fiercely competitive stock market, what advantages and characteristics does the REVV project have that make it stand out? What gratifying achievements has REVV made so far?

Tanja Sammatti: REVV has a lot of advantages, highlighting that the REVV token already has a role as the in-game currency of F1 Delta Time, and there is a clear roadmap for how this role will develop with other games. Our team is experienced in making games, in fact, we have previously been selected as one of the top mobile game developers in the world

(https://www.animocabrands.com/animoca-brands-top-50-developers),

So we know how to build exciting games.

We also hold licenses for top brands like F1, MotoGP, Formula E and many more coming soon. These brands all have huge fan bases which will help with user adoption and growth of the platform. As a bonus, we have a solid foundation, in fact, we recently closed a $88,888,888 fundraising and officially achieved unicorn company status

(Private company valued at over $1 billion - https://www.animocabrands.com/raises-us88888888-us1billion-valuation

Chinese:

https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/372050477

So there are a lot of strong points as to why we can feel pretty confident.

In terms of results, we have completed multiple successful sales for our titles like F1 Delta Time and MotoGP Ignition, as well as some great secondary market sales, showing the continued value of NFTs on the platform. As an example, our 70th Anniversary Edition first sold at auction for 987,000 REVV and was later resold for 3,000,000 REVV.

And most importantly, we already have players making a lot of money through the game, so Play To Earn is no longer just a concept.

(https://www.techinasia.com/3900-week-racing-cars-blockchain-game)

9. In addition to racing, does REVV have other applications? Why did you choose racing instead of other sports?

Tanja Sammatti: Racing has huge mass appeal. Anyone can play racing games, and it allows for a huge amount of content in the form of championship structures, events, cars, and drivers. It’s diverse and global, so it’s a great foundation for a metaverse. The beauty of blockchain is that it allows for a lot of freedom, so the number of applications REVV can have is truly limitless. We’re only at the beginning. To join our community and learn more about our product, visit: https://linktr.ee/revvtoken

10. From the perspective of future development, in addition to collection, what do you think is the next step for NFT?

Coderdan: I think that in addition to NFT games, other areas of NFTs will be financial products and identity. NFTs are also used to represent identities on the blockchain, and projects like Unicly are doing very interesting things with sharding of NFTs. In the end, NFTs are a technology that is eating the world, and its appetite is not small. One day, the whole world will be tokenized.

Leia Fisher: It’s an exciting time, big brands and celebrities, sports stars, so many artists and galleries doing cool things and with such unique styles, NFTS, forming different DAOs. Cool stuff! And this is just the beginning of the applications of this technology.

Next step - Financial NFTs are finding new use cases, such as representing insurance policies and liquidity provider positions. Uniswap v3 may be at the forefront of this trend, with each of its LP positions represented by an NFT.

Tanja Sammatti: As mentioned before, we believe that gaming will be the first industry to be affected and the path to mass adoption of blockchain - because gamers already understand virtual currencies and virtual goods. However, this is really just a starting point, and the opportunities for blockchain and NFTs are really endless.

The next step is to connect the digital world with the real world in a clearer way. Most users still fail to grasp the fact that the digital world has become entangled with the real world and that our online personas are just as important or even more important than our physical selves. Being able to represent physical assets on the blockchain is the next step for NFTs. This could mean anything from property ownership to memberships or, for example, educational records.

Blockchain makes it possible for people to own and prove ownership without the need for a middleman like a bank. It opens up a world of possibilities, and those who join now have the opportunity to be the first to shape the future.

Thanks to the community and media for their support (in no particular order):