NFTY NEWS is a weekly newsletter covering the latest developments of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) in the blockchain space – collectibles, games, new platforms, and much more. NFTY NEWS is created by contributor Brian Flynn and adapted from his Medium page. For more information on NFTs, check out Brian’s reading list to get you up to speed on crypto digital assets.

NFTY News #16: Using Tokens as Access & Passports 🛂

NFTs are keys as much as they are tokens or images. As you start to obtain new tokens in your MetaMask wallet, the UI on platforms will start to change. Maybe a button appears on your screen that didn’t exist before. Maybe you get to unlock a new token. (Think of holding a key in Ready Player One in order to access the next event). Anyone can program an existing non-fungible token in another platform to be a part of their own experience.

Here are the companies using tokens as access 🉑

1. Tokn.Talk — Social Network for Any Token

Tokn.Talk connects you with other HODLERs to share discussion and engage in a community around a specific token. This could be extremely useful in identifying leaders in a token’s decentralized community while also measuring how much skin-in-the-game they have.

This may be the first time we start seeing NFTs being used as avatars, and a great implementation of self-sovereign identity in the context of token communities. This is a really big deal.

2. Unlock Protocol Raises Pre-Seed Round led by General Catalyst and Cherry Ventures

Julien Genestoux and his team are trying to make value spread more easily using a token to access content rather than using a traditional web 2.0 business model. They just raised their pre-seed round and had their first hire. Excited to see what comes from the team in the years ahead!

3. SPWLabs — Furlins with Benefits!

Not a company using tokens as access, but here’s a cool example from Todd Goldberg granting benefits by obtaining a specific token. If you purchase his CryptoKitty Furlin, you’ll get some cool perks! Maybe those perks could get passed on from that specific tokenID as well, making that Furlin more valuable than other Furlins? 🤔

What else is 🔥 in NFT News

CryptoKitties Insider Trading

It’s interesting to think about the number of cryptogames who will have to deal with “insider trading” where tokens are continuously generated by a central entity rather than having a fixed supply (like cryptopunks)

Should users be the ones generating assets, or a central entity? Should game developers be creating the tools to create game assets, or should they control the full process of minting new assets? How do we design so that we can become participants, not facilitators, in an open ecosystem? I’ve been thinking about this for awhile.

Should fungible tokens be used to govern the minting of new game assets? Should cryptogames follow the same building principles of cryptonetworks?

Gods Unchained sells Hyperion card for 146ETH, making it the second most valuable TCG card in the world

Hats off to the Gods Unchained team who had a super successful auction for their Hyperion card. It’ll be interesting to see if they ever launch another card with this rarity. I’m going to be carefully looking at the correlations between ICOs and Cryptogames.

Questions I’m asking myself about cryptogames moving forward:

• Are big raises in cryptogames going to be commonplace?
• How will value accrue in cryptogames compared to fungible tokens?
• Should funds and crypto portfolios diversify into game assets?
• Will pre-sales and first-in-first-out mentality dominate cryptogames like they have done in the past with ICOs?
• How will cryptogames solve the pay-to-play issue? Will users ever be able to obtain a game asset for free to start playing the game?

Standardizing Value — Why Token Standards are Critical for Non-Fungible Tokens by Dmitriy Berenzon

Do NFTs need standards? Dmitriy dives in on non-fungible token standards and why they matter to the development of the ecosystem. He says that “standards enable interoperability and integrations, both of which lead to increased utility and network effects for their associated cryptoasset.”

I suspect a breakout dApp/non-fungible token needs to adopt one of these new standards before they’re incorporated to a larger set of new platforms. We still have yet to discover what ERC721s are capable of. Ethmoji allows for the same composability of ERC998, but bounds the components together into one non-fungible token, paying out royalty fees to owners of each of the smaller non-fungible tokens.

Will see other creative use cases of ERC721, or will we start to move to other standards? Are standards needed to move the non-fungible token space forward? Matt Lockyer wrote about why on-chain standards are less important for the adoption of blockchain. It’s another good read on this topic.

A Primer On Non-Fungible Tokens

If you are still confused about NFTs, listen to this podcast from two of the smartest people in the space between Tony Sheng & Amitt Mahajan.

Did I miss anything? Let me know by pinging me on twitter.

As always, I’m super stoked about talking to others about the possibilities of NFTs. If you want to talk about NFTs, or anything crypto related, drop me a line on twitter @flynnjamm, my DMs are always open.