NFTY #35: Swappin’ at Firefest 🏄
By: Brian Flynn
Tags: Crypto, Nfty, Blockchain, Nfts, Dapps

NFTY #35: Swappin’ at Firefest 🏄

The NFTY News tracks the ever-evolving narrative of how the mainstream will enter crypto. In each edition I explore non-fungible tokens, dApps, and the ecosystem affecting consumer crypto applications.

FIreFest Music Festival in Minecraft Jan 12, 2019

I love looking and reading about events in previous multiplayer games to observe human behaviors in anonymous & digitalized worlds. Second Life had tons of these events.

It’s even more interesting to see how big companies start building in closed silos but then opt for a more open source approach as they start to scale in late stages.

Let’s dive into these narratives in this week’s NFTY News 👇I’m exploring it in depth in this week’s NFTY News! 👇

More investors are betting on digital celebrities

The folks behind Lil’ Miquela are getting another check as new fans start to flock to authenticity. This is in a time when music festivals are being held in virtual worlds over real-world venues because of the anonymous benefits & low cost of production that virtual worlds provide.

We got in 30 minutes later, but instead of muddy grass underfoot, we were crunching through pristine polygons. Giant digital animals lined the festival paths while the stages themselves stretched up infinitely into the sky. The crowd, over 5,000 strong, ran around manically, cube-shaped avatars pogoing with each bass drop, their heads gyrating in strange and exuberant shapes.

Maybe when we see start to see digital merchandise turning into tickets, we’ll start to see more producers and creators take advantage of what virtual worlds can offer. Because let’s face it — in a virtual world, tickets can be anything of ownership programmed into access.

Niantic finalizes Series C, focusing on developer tools and location data

More tech industry funding news! Niantic (the team behind Pokemon Go) closed their Series C of $245M. The company is planning to spend the majority of development efforts on opening their proprietary location data & AR tech as they start to look for ways to play long-term games.

Epic Games shifted towards a more open-source approach recently too. It’s fascinating to draw similarities between the Niantic & Epic Games as both had break-out games within the past three years.

But seriously — I can’t freakin’ wait for Niantic’s new Harry Potter game launching later this year.

BoxSwap, a NFT trading platform, enters 0x Accelerator

BoxSwap is the newest non-fungible token trading platform to launch. It’s not like OpenSea. Instead, it’s similar to Atomic Bazaar. Users can trade non-fungible tokens and ERC20s in an atomic swap.

BoxSwap has a fantastic user experience for the limited capabilities of Ethereum. However, we as an ecosystem need better ways of specifying a tokenID . Users should globally be able to click an image in their wallet and send it to the trade screen rather than looking up what tokenID they own.

Mainnet launches this week: MarbleCards & Veil

Veil is finally here on mainnet to save Augur from it’s user experience miseries. Veil is currently the third largest relayer according to 0xtracker — just behind Paradex (Coinbase) and Radar Relay.

We also have another new project that launched this week… MarbleCards! The project allows any user to tokenize a URL and turn it into a trading card. Think about the possibilities with tokenizing affiliate links on OpenSea with their new bounties program. 👀

Events happening: