Adam talks about NFT20 backstory and how their product going to help bring liquidity and utility to NFTs.
Hello! What’s your background, and what are you working on?
My name is Adam and together with my co-founder Jules, we are the developers behind VeryNifty.io, exploring and creating different NFT products to try push the limits. Some of the more popular products we created are NFT20 and a tamagotchi NFT game called gallery.verynifty.io.
I’ve been self employed and creating online products as an indie developer for the past 12 years. I first heard about bitcoin back in 2013, when clients of a previous business I owned wanted to pay me in Bitcoin for a service I provided. I declined to be paid with BTC, as I didn’t know how it worked. This incident got my attention for a short period of time, but I quickly lost interest.
During the 2017 bull run I finally took the leap and got more serious about blockchain once I learned about how Ethereum worked and the endless apps you could create on it.
Right now our main focus is on NFT20. NFT20 is a protocol where you can swap and trade NFTs via a few different mechanisms:
- Tokenize your NFT into ERC20 tokens, this makes your NFT fungible and tradeable on Uniswap.
- Use our platform and exposure to create dutch auctions for your NFTs and sell them right away.
- Swap your NFT for any other NFTs in our pools.
This is the first version of NFT20, and we are already working on new features. Our end goal is to become a protocol for other smart contracts to build on top, which will help bring liquidity and utility to NFTs.
What’s NFT20’s backstory?
Back in October Jules, my now co-founder, called me to participate in the Ethglobal online hackathon. We created the gallery.verynifty.io tamagotchi game for the hackathon. When the game ended up becoming one of the the top #4 most played games in Ethereum as per Dappradar, we decided to skip the hackathon and keep working on the game with our early community.
The game started with an airdrop and you had an online NFT pet with which you could mine MUSE (our token) every 24 hours.
As the game grew and the bull market entered in full effect, the gas prices made the game almost unplayable. We had so much fun with the project that we didn’t want to stop building for our community. and MUSE was already a public token so it didn’t feel right to just quit.
After lots of discussions and brainstorming about different ideas based on what we learned running the game, we decided on the idea for NFT20.
What went into building the NFT20?
We started building the first version NFT20 while we were still working on the game. The development took about 2 months: we used solidity for the smart contracts, VUE JS for the frontend and Node JS for the backend. Our community members were a big help, especially Cadu Veloso who helped design the frontend for the protocol.
Not many people know that this project was started without any presale or even a founder pre-mine. One of the downsides of a so-called “fair launch” is that there are no funds for audits, so all our contracts are unaudited as of now.
We have done our best to ensure that the protocol is error-free, but inevitably there may be some bugs. We are known for moving really fast so I would say our protocols are even more exposed to bugs than other more established DEFI protocols. Moving forward, we will consider using the DAO funds for an audit
We don’t recommend people investing more funds than they can afford to lose in any of our protocols, everything we do is highly experimental.
What’s your business model?
We didn’t raise funding for any of our projects. In our original game, users spent MUSE to upgrade their NFT and keep their tamagotchi alive. 90% of that MUSE was burned and 10% went to the developers.
Our business model was that of a real e-commerce business where you get paid for users using your product, turns out this is quite unique in the crypto world. Our business model for NFT20 is to create products that users want to pay for. The platform makes 5% in fees from all tokenized NFTs, and those fees are redistributed to MUSE holders.
When we pivoted from the game to NFT20, the community voted on a specific MUSE distribution. You can see the proposal here.
The DAO has 100k MUSE vested over the next 12 months, which at current prices is about $2.8MM. Spending decisions will only be made via MUSE governance. If we keep growing, the DAO funds could be enough to keep us experimenting for a while. Eventually, the community will need to take profits seriously and either invest from the DAO funds to generate cash flow or make profits in other ways via the protocol.
What’s your position on the regulatory landscape today?
We are not experts enough to talk about this subject.
What are your goals for the future?
There are over ten thousand projects on Coingecko where the founders will try to convince you that they are the future of finance, NFT, art or whatever the new hot term is. Our stance since the beginning was that we don’t know or assume anything but we ship fast, have good intentions and are willing to learn.
The mantra of VeryNifty and NFT20 in particular is to just keep shipping features and products based on other developers and users’ feedback, while having fun and trying to grow our community. Right now we are in bug fixing mode as we just launched one month ago, but some of the features we are thinking of releasing are:
- P2P NFT marketplace.
- Tools for artists to easily create NFT contracts.
- More content around NFT project discovery
We are also in talks with some companies for potential partnerships that could expand the scope of what we can achieve, this is all speculation though and as of now nothing has materialized.
What are your future thoughts for the DeFi market?
I think the future is bright! When there is a lot of money involved there are a lot of experiments happening and innovation will naturally come out on the other end. Unfortunately, the other side of all the money in the space is the proliferation of scams, or companies with a 1 page website raising millions of dollars and claiming they are the future of finance or NFTs.
At NFT20 we hate that side of the industry, this is why we decided to not raise any money or make any claims about our future, we are just putting in hard work consistently and iterating on products based on what we learn from users and what we think the market needs.
Where can we go to learn more?
We appreciate the opportunity you have given us to share our background with the DefiPrime community. Anyone who wants to learn more about us or use our products can visit:
- NFT DEX - NFT20.io
- Our twitter - @niftymuseum
- Our Telegram - https://t.me/nft20
- Our Discord - https://discord.gg/kfByfux
