This is the first part of a series about Digital assets in WAX blockchain by Dapplica.
Intro
Digital asset in blockchain normally means a token that is fungible (FT) or non-fungible (NFT). The only difference is that NFT should have unique identifier which matches to many practical use cases such as:
- Collectibles (e.g. digital version of paintings)
- Tickets to cinema or museum
- Game assets
In other words the main idea behind being Non-fungible is to be non-replaceable, so for example an item you own (unique painting can’t be replaced with another same painting keeping the same value), but if you own 1 Bitcoin you can replace it with another Bitcoin with no drop in value.
As with every new technology we are seeing how it develops and progresses, so NFT does. To keep it simple and omit most of tech details in these guides we will relate NFTs to one most used standard in WAX as of now called Simple Assets, developed by Cryptolions
As for end user NFT use cases can be following:
- User can obtain item by playing a game or performing certain action
- User can buy item on marketplace
- User can receive item from 3rd party for non action
Wallets and Blockchain Explorers for NFTs
NFTs can be checked via blockchain explorers or modern wallets. At WAX ecosystem there are several ones, such as:
- WAX Cloud Wallet (WCW)
- Bloks.io, a blockchain explorer where you can see your NFTs by entering your account.
WAX Cloud Wallet is built by the WAX team to simplify the user experience of blockchain technology in general, so by registering via social login or email user will receive the blockchain wallet automatically. WAX Cloud wallet supports many social logins such as Google, Facebook, Kakao Talk, Steam, Discord, Twitter, Reddit, Github, etc.
Once users is in there are possible to see NFTs in there, for example:
Directly from their own wallet user can transfer items to another user if needed.
WAX Cloud Wallet is also the simplest way to play blockchain games so many of existing games support it. As mentioned, by playing games users can receive NFTs and either keep them or sell at the secondary market.
Alternative way to check if any user owns NFT is go to Bloks.io and enter account name. By clicking on the NFTs tab the user gets a list of NFTs owned by that account.
By clicking on an individual item, the user can see details, such as author details, ID, name, picture, changeable and unchangeable data. As changeable data can be some powerful tool for NFT creators, this leads to real power of NFTs, but this topic will be covered in one of our next articles.
Also please remember that is a power of blockchain you can browse what other wallets own and even see some stats and for example probably some rarity, uniqueness of items held. This is helpful in particular when you define a value of your item in order to sell on the secondary market.
NFT Marketplaces
As industry develops there are marketplaces that are coming, which offer simple ways to track and buy/sell your items. One of the first marketplaces at WAX was Simple Market, as it was also developed by Cryptolions (authors of Simple Asset standard).
You can login with same WCW and see your items in your profile:
By typing amount and pressing sell button users can make quick sell operations from their profile, and should receive a popup from Wax Cloud Wallet in order to confirm the operation.
NOTE: This is where you should check if the account you gonna transfer is ‘simpleassets’, so that is the marketplace address
Simple Market also has plenty of functions that can provide users with the ability to watch deals of the day, filter items by author, recent trades and so on.
By looking at market trades gives a feeling of the pulse of the entire ecosystem.
In order to buy any item from the marketplace you have to click on a particular item and choose the option to buy via WAX token or MoonPay (USD gateway).
It is important to check that the author is verified, so a blue mark is next to the author and the name of the account is correct (as long as you know it). So if you are buying with WAX via WCW, you should see a popup again to confirm the operation.
That is only your interaction with this ‘unknown beast’ called blockchain 😉
Analyse history and make better decisions
Some cohort of NFT early adopters are considering trading digital assets as a full time job, and they are analyzing all possible data in order to make appropriate decisions.
Normally there are several things that needs to be checked before user:
- Collection/product popularity. Users research product information, how big is the community or historical context(if we talk about the digital identity of a real world item) and define some expectations based on that.
- Item’s rarity. Normally each item has to have an explanation about the rarity of it, in other words if it’s one of it’s kind there are several.
- Item’s trading history. Blockchain is an open database, so users can evaluate whether it is actively re-selling with price growth.
Let’s take as an example the GPK (Garbage Pail Kids) case that was sold within 28 hours. Garbage Pail Kids is a series of sticker trading cards produced by the Topps Company, originally released in 1985 and designed to parody the Cabbage Patch Kids dolls, which were popular at the time.
From this context and also activities in telegram chats https://t.me/WaxTradeTalk and https://t.me/wax_io we could see expectations and demand of upcoming launch of GPK at WAX blockchain. Once most of the packs were bought and unboxed it created even more rumors and ‘speculations’ about, a whole new chat appeared that were only about trading those GPKs https://t.me/GPKTrade .
Let’s move to items’ rarity context. Every NFT normally has to have known supply or at least rarity compared to items in the same collection. Once GPK trading started, people got into rarity mechanics by using spreadsheets and formulas or even some web tools appeared to help on those. Collectables is one of them, so they are shown rarity of each item by an already unpacked one, you can check by following the link.
As you can see some items exist only one of its kind, assuming it will get a lot higher price opposite to the number of items counted.
History. As being told above, items’ history also has an impact, as you can see it’s being grown or sold at discount, sold from authors or from second hand, how many times sold and so on.
Examples of price history can be found below, due to the nature of blockchain everything is transparent and can be analyzed.
So by clicking on any of the transactions you can get details from bloks.io of price. See below example that asset was sold for 301 WAX tokens. Of course you can check if it was sold to someone active in trading, so a purpose is to resell at a higher price or someone that is holding as a true collection.
We are also assuming true collectors in every area (collectible set) and ecosystem are more valuable than traders, so it’s nice to see and pick them out of traders profiles. But that’s another whole topic to write and discuss in next articles.
There are also resources where you can track now live prices, history and volumes per trader or item or collection in general. At CryptoSlam users can find most of the details needed to see how active the particular market is.
By particular link also you can check details of a particular user, what they traded, their collections, address and so on.
Conclusions
WAX got its momentum and is extremely growing, some upcoming partnerships are to be announced by the WAX.io team. Assuming they have solid positioning for digital assets blockchain and the right team with relevant experience, we are sure it will be growing as a driving ecosystem for NFTs.
There are major factors that we are seeing already, which are:
- Easy to use user friendly Wax Cloud Wallet, with ongoing developments and updates and most popular social networks logins implemented.
- Major adopted standards for NFTs, and several new developments.
- Several active digital asset marketplaces that use WAX blockchain already.
- Fast and free transactions for end users because of blockchain infrastructure and nature (EOSIO codebase used).
- Topps launch case, we saw huge success with only the first collection pushed into the market so far.
The WAX team is focused on end users to streamline their experience when working with blockchain and dApps. Also they are kept to grow the ecosystem via providing support to developers and teams via Worker Proposal Fund, that is huge at the moment is over 100M of WAX tokens. Details also can be found here.