On Wednesday June 8th, 2022, a meetup in Vancouver, BC. It was a curated open forum on the use cases of NFT’s beyond influencer marketing. The keynote speaker, Kris Constable (@cqwww), has a remarkable background in cryptocurrency, crypto exchange, cybersecurity, and the privacy space. Some of his work includes:

CoinOS (link)

The white label NFT marketplace provider for businesses & brands. Capitalize on the next generation of crypto assets.

• Web Wallet
• Point of Sale NFT
• Marketplace



Token Ocean (link)

We Make it Easy For Brands to Leverage NFT's.

We are a white label provider of bitcoin based NFT marketplaces.



Idvpn.ca (link)

We enable businesses to handle all of their compliance needs without the business risk of handling any personal information.



Interplanetary Distribution Portal(link)

We're a censorship resistant white label NFT ticket platform for content creators.



Preamble

There is so much going on in the crypto space, it’s nearly impossible to stay current. Coming from a background of non-linear database infrastructure using full stack javascript - I am curious to see how these systems will integrate. Knowing about non relational databases and data storage methods from any number of web-based API's, I can't wait to see how that fits together using blockchain. In order to leverage NFTs, blockchain, and cryptocurrency into Acorn’s digital workflow strategy, it’s important to keep a pulse on what’s happening.

These technologies are still very much in their infancy.

Specifically, I want Acorn Interactive to be able to build out software initiatives that get compensated with cryptocurrency. We'll have more on this in coming posts, but for a short conceptual snippet we're interested in making better use of smart contracts.

Examples:

1. Medium Article
2. Prototype Blockchain Based Smart Contract For Freelance Marketplace System

Meeting the people behind these initiatives and seeing what makes them tick, where their interests lie,  the do’s/dont’s and and some of the pain points is a much faster way to get a leg up on this stuff than reading endless streams of software documentation.

Takeaways from the Keynote:

Like any new and novel technology there are always use cases that are hard to anticipate. Kris did an excellent job of outlining some of the ones he’s worked on. His ethos on NFT’s was constructed on pretty much everything beyond PFP

A picture-for-profile non-fungible token is a piece of digital artwork that holders can use for their online identities. It also unlocks access to a community of like-minded holders.

Source

Below is a list of some of the projects he worked on that stood out to me in his presentation.

Heli Skiing

Kris had worked on an event-based NFT for Heli Skiing where the “ownership” of an event could be easily transferred. This way, a purchaser of an NFT could book the service but, could sell it back to the market fairly seamlessly. After hearing this, several reservations came to mind:

1. Arbitrary bidding up of the price resulting in unused service capacity
2. Familiarity of NFT based exchange protocols preventing people from using the service 
3. Insurance transfers for helicopter skiing

There’s a lot to unpack here beyond this article, but the exposure to the idea of event based NFT systems was new, and certainly a worthwhile area to explore. If the whole point of tourism is to create good memories and NFTs are a blockchain instrument of assigning value to digital assets - why not make use of the technology to promote tourism?

Sci-fi Movie

The next topic of conversation was a NFT-based T for a science fiction movie streamed online. The NFT was an NFT-gated-website mechanism paying for exclusivity to see the film itself. What caught my attention was his mention of Bidirectional Royalty Distributions. This means an NFT could be utilized to provide incentives for a film's cast and crew to provide quality work by including them into the royalty stream. The holders of the NFT themselves would benefit from owning the token and the cast and crew would want to make quality content theoretically, making a win-win situation. While the if and how dimension of this is less clear, it was certainly a concept to explore further.

New Plantation

Kris then explained his experience building an NFT for a teak and avocado farm in Nicaragua. The premise was to shed visibility on these farms and use the NFT to promote access to capital. As well, this system could give them attention from international markets. Using artwork curated from local artisans, this NFT would allow international buyers to support Nicuaraga’s artisan and agriculture efforts simultaneously. Furthermore, an interface was provided with a literal “sliding scale” widget. For example, if a purchaser wanted to donate 50% of the appreciation to the community, and keep the remaining 50%, the decision was theirs. If 100% was to go back to these communities as a philanthropic goal, that could be accomplished as well. Allowing a network-based determination of rerouted gains distribution kind of blew my mind.

Afterthoughts 

Above were some of the key examples that caught my attention. From there, the evening spun off into a more informal Q&A period and state of NFTs in June 2022 type conversation.

There were many facts brought up and presented on the crypto domain that I found particularly interesting. For example, one of the biggest adoption hurdles in decentralization, crypto and NFT's is actually perceptual. An audience member made a joke about how the primary role of cryptocurrency was to facilitate money laundering. Kris acknowledged the perception and reminded the audience that only 2% of Bitcoin use is actually criminal. He backed this up by mentioning he was a keynote speaker at the Bribery and Economic Crime Summit: Promoting Transparency conference by TRACE International on June 26-27 of 2019.

Since there's a lot to learn, let's review some basics...

The event moved into some higher level and noteworthy commentary. Kris made the statement “Not your keys not your coins“. This was in reference to using centralized crypto-exchanges who are responsible for managing and maintaining private keys for you.

A private key is:

“... an unimaginably large number that is kept secret and used to access BTC when making transactions.”

source

If a network is housing and managing keys for the sale and purchase of cryptocurrencies, then the purchaser and seller don’t have access to the “unimaginably large secret number” technically making the ownership of the assets belong to the crypto vendor. 

Kris went on to overview some directions he wanted to see NFT’s transition into moving forward, which caught my attention. He saw a bright future in NFT's privacy centric identity with a particularly interesting example of a nightclub. When a nightclub traditionally swipes an attendees ID, their systems could simultaneously extrapolate any number of meaningful data points to run a trace for their information across the internet.

He framed the question as why should they be doing this in the first place? If the only meaningful information to permit an entry into the nightclub/bars/or festivals would be that the photo matches the card holder and their age is greater or equal to the legal drinking age in their region, why should the venue/event house the data in the first place? Everything else is superfluous, and none of their business. Why introduce the risk of the nightclub/bar/festivals organizers storing that information?

From the venue utility standpoint, NFTs could speed up the check in. From the customer satisfaction standpoint it would be speed, security and the anonymous entry of the ID holder. He also pointed out that doing the dirty work of pioneering the user experiences for NFT based access control would be essential.

It makes sense - if any of these systems are too hard to operate then the operators (humans) will not use them.

Access and incentives are the holy grail for long term success in NFTs.

-Kris Constable, CEO and co-founder at COINOS.io, Tokenocean.io, IPDP.io

It was nice to attend an event that explained NFT's in more detail, as I was unclear about the value of the NFT space until it was broken down for me. 

Thanks Kris!

Before I wrap up

Since blockchain, cryptocurrency, NFT, and decentralization are new and, often, foreign concepts to many - I wanted to leave the article with a bit of terminology.

Federated protocol (link)

Open protocol that allows lots of small networks to talk to one another without giving up control completely so they can still use a custom internal protocol.

Liquid Bitcoin (link)

Liquid Bitcoin (L-BTC) is a special type of asset on the Liquid sidechain, with a supply that is verifiably backed 1-to-1 with bitcoins (BTC) held by the Liquid Federation on the Bitcoin mainchain. L-BTC is designed to make the activities of traders and exchanges more efficient than transacting on the Bitcoin mainchain by providing faster settlements and strong confidentiality.

Lightning Bitcoin (link)

Lightning Network (LN) is a layer-2 solution built on top of Bitcoin. LN was created in response to scalability issues with Bitcoin, namely the speed and cost of Bitcoin transactions.

Hot wallet vs cold wallet

If you buy any amount of crypto and you want to store it yourself, you have to choose between holding your cryptocurrency in a “hot” wallet, a “cold” wallet, or using a combination of the two. A hot wallet is connected to the internet and could be vulnerable to online attacks — which could lead to stolen funds — but it’s faster and makes it easier to trade or spend crypto. A cold wallet is typically not connected to the internet, so while it may be more secure, it’s less convenient. Should you use hot wallets, cold wallets, or a combination? Read on to learn more.

Source: Gemini