Product vs Software Releases: Upcoming NFT Market

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At the Steem Engine our motto is to Trade Anything. We want to be the back bone of that. In order to facilitate that we've introduced NFTs. These are non-fungible tokens. It allows us to track everything single token in a series individually. Each and every token is unique with a unique ID.

Anyway when we launched it wasn't perfect. And some of that is the difference between a product and software. With a product you probably only try to get out one version of the product a year. You need it to be feature complete because people don't buy incomplete products. Software is different though. You get to go to market as quickly as you can to start bringing in revenue and testing things out in the wild.

What we just released is an alpha and an incomplete one at that. My initial concerns cover 3 topics.

  1. NFTs are too hard for non-devs to make
  2. NFTs need a market
  3. The side needs speed and reliability improvements

What are we doing?

Well, I'm happy to say that we're nearing the completion of the market side of things. Not only are we trying to create a method for everyone to trade the things they own in a big public catalog, but we're starting to think through how everyone can create their own unique storefront within that larger decentralized marketplace. I have a pretty simple philosophy. If I can help you make money then I'll make money too. So, I'm hoping V1 of the market is out before January.

In order to have a business you'll need stuff to sell. I believe that many people will embrace digital collectables. In order to make that happen I think it needs to be super easy to create NFTs. It has to be so easy that non-devs can do it. So, we're working on the NFT creation wizard to try to make that as simple as possible.

I think the wizard will also be in January. Here's hoping.

Another big project is making improvements to the site. We've noticed over the past couple weeks as things have grown that the site isn't as stable or fast as we'd like. I don't like jumping between projects. So, we're finishing up the launch of the market and then we'll go back and spend as long as it takes to optomize the site. We've found a couple of areas already and have started diving into those. The net effect should be that it's faster, easier, and more reliable than ever.

What can I sell here? I don't get it...

Ok, I see three broad catagories: collectibles, financials, and games.

Collectable is similar to crypto kitties. You have art that you've made and people can buy it and trade it. Assuming we offer a museum for all your NFTs it should actually speak to who you are. You like cats, rainbows, and machine guns. I can start formulating something about you based on your NFTs. Or maybe you have extremely expensive NFTs and I can be impressed. Or maybe you're a collector of erotic art so maybe I know that if I create a boob based NFT I should hit you up.

I guess overall is that collectables are really the simpliest version of an NFT. They don't do much in v1. Maybe later a game gets created using your cats, rainbows, and machine guns... I mean, that game sounds pretty fun... but on day one you're really just collecting things.

"But aggroed, who will want my art?"

Well, that part is really up to you. We'll have a market here. It'll be up to you to get friends and family to support you work. Now it may turn out that Steem Engine isn't a great place to monetize a brand new audience, but it's my expectatation that Steem Engine is going to be a fantastic place to monetize an existing audience.

Imagine if you have a brand like garfield, you're a famous adult acctress, or you run a popular comic book or sports team.

Now it's easy to create and distribute digital collectables and all you have to do is share your limited edition, cashmere, home schooled, vegan, free range, fair trade unique comic characters such that you're offering fewer than your audience would want to purchase and now BOOM. You have monetized your audience.

Future of collectables

In V1 of collectables I doubt they do much. However, I keep thinking about how digital collectables can then turn into a game. A good example would be sports. You start by just collecting cards representing the players. That's V1 and the alpha of your game roll out. But V2 now you can play them in fantasty sports. The hook being that if you want to play a certain mega player you can only play them if you own the card!!! Now the collectable has an entertainment and bragging rights component. Maybe it comes with the ability to earn by playing too.

Finance

If you're not into collecting stuff like cards and comics you might be stoked to own stuff like houses and cars. Each house could be recorded on the blockchain. Now stuff like deeds, ownerhsip, titles, work records, tax reports, and anything else can be publicly stored on chain and searchable by anyone with an internet connection. There are trillions of dollars in mortgages. Imagine being able to tokenize and trade them with ease on the web. Financial friction will be brought to basically nothing and maybe capital can be deployed wisely and efficiently.

Games

Ok, last up I see games. Maybe you start with some hearts, rainbows, emojis, clowns, armor, weapons, pepes, or whatever. But later on it can turn into an inventory of items. Unlike a standard inventory that just lives on your private server these could exist on a public blockchain as NFTs. Now you can do crazy stuff like rent the sword, trade the sword, and know more things about it. How many other people own this? How many are selling them? What price are they setting?

NFT in game inventories just unlocks so much potential that traditional games just can't touch or explore.

So, what's the point?

We release software and make improvements. We're nearly done with NFT markets and an NFT creation wizard that makes everything much easier.

We're also making progress on site speed and reliability.

All that will help turn Steem Engine from a smart contract platform to a decentralized marketplace! If it all goes according to plan you'll be making money there soon!



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Thanks for the work. The Quest tokens (rpg items) are doing well.
I am getting ready to launch a 2nd game NFT soon.
1st I’ve heard about the storefront.
That is absolutely amazing. It will help out game developers like me so much.

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Also I think the roll out of NFT’s has gone well

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(Edited)

I'm personally going to need to see a few examples to really wrap my head around it.
I was thinking of a new splinterlands player tokenising a deck, selling tokens and buying packs with the proceeds, and distributing a percentage of rewards/winnings amongst token holders, but then a fungible token could do that.
I guess we could go up a level, like felipejoys and the herons.
I could recruit 10 top level tcg players, and launch 10 tokens.
Speculators look at past accomplishments of each of the players, and buy tokens in one or several of them.
I could actually just pay them in fiat, and pocket their winnings; they don't even need to know/care about crypto.

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In reality what's happening is that there's a database. In a fungible token you keep track of one major stat. How many of these tokens do you have. With NFTs each one of the tokens has it's own row. So now instead of tracking one thing "how many do you have?" you can track any amount of stuff (determined by how many columns you use in teh spreadsheet/database.

So, we can start with issuing serialized collectibiles. Boom you have number 15 of 500 of Klye's sweet sweet ms-paint piece entitled "whale balls"

OK, then you want to make a simple game. Those painting can now do something. You score points with them every time you X. winner receives Z every time it happens.

Ok, now you are moving beyond simple games to complicated. Diablo has a killer loot system. All these distinct items with different buffs. Well, they can all live on your private database or move to this system and be tradable! Now I can take this sword that give agility damage and healing and sell it to someone else.

Ok, lastly. I want to Tokenize a time share. I make 365 of them representing I day's worth of time share. Each one has a day associated with it. So, you don't have 1 day of 365. You have January 3rd! That's just one column of data. You could store hundreds of data points for thousands of tokens and track the living shit out of all of it!

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(Edited)

That'd be interesting.
Sell recurring rights for 305 specified days, for $500/each
Buy one of these guys off the coast of Panama:
image.png
The remaining 60 days you can take yourself, or rent it out yourself, to cover upkeep.
Who's not going to drop $5000 once to lock down a ten day getaway every year indefinitely? Starting to see some of the potential here.

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Door lock can only be opened by the relevant account's keychain device.
Don't want to use your days this year? Delegate the tokens to somebody else.

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If we have a pretty badass idea for a business with NFT's, will a fairly steem literate person be able to issue these NFT's or is there support for someone who has a good plan but lacks the technical skills to throw this thing together?

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Love how excited you are regarding NFTs. Same here!

I'm currently working on 3 different projects surrounding NFTs d I couldn't be more excited.

Much love to the whole Steem-Engine team & all the hardwork they've put in so far 👍 Excited to see what the future holds, and I'm happy to see your open-mindedness when it comes to 3rd party markets ( even if it's based on simply making you more money lol )

GG ON NFT, SE ;^)

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