Learn Why Privacy-Preserving and Cross-Chain Commercialised NFTs are a Paradigm Shift
Scrolling through Twitter and other social media networks, seeing one tribe come after another is not atypical. Tribe in this context refers to early adopters of a particular tech pushing for newer paradigms but find themselves pitched against another like Web 2 vs Web 3. The most recent was an employee of Microsoft picking on Chris Dixon, who tweeted that:
“Tokens give users property rights: the ability to own a piece of the internet.”
Chris Dixon, a partner at a16z crypto and an ardent proponent of NFTs and the Metaverse, was laughed off by Matt Velloso from another tribe (web 2), and you know the rest.
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A piece of the internet in Dixon’s tweet doesn’t exclude trading that portion for the benjamins. We see this regularly from the sale of the infamous Estate 331, Beeple’s every day that sold for $69 million, or even NBA Top Shot tapping into fans’ nostalgia to collect precious moments in the sports as baseball cards. So Velloso’s skepticism could have stemmed from the trading-in for gains aspect alone or just a fad that promotes infantile meme culture and nothing at all to be taken seriously. But beyond trading in NFTs for quick bucks, NFTs, with cross-chain compatibility and commercialization, open up a whole new world of endless possibilities for businesses. NFTs offer a new means of making money: digitising assets, monetising intellectual property, and verifying the authenticity of physical assets on the internet.
DeFi, the new approach to finance, demonstrably knocks out the middleman and gatekeepers of legacy finance. When coupled with the current boom in NFTs, borderless and better returns capabilities could grow even more if it adds to its superpowers, privacy capabilities. We made a strong case for privacy in DeFi, establishing why the lack of it has hampered businesses from adopting it as they should.
Cross-chain compatibility is crucial for an evolving Web 3 world
As most businesses look to maintain their dominance in their particular turf, newer companies are constantly iterating and looking for ways to dislodge their industry leaders. Transitioning or infusing their processes with blockchain technology improves cost efficiency, traceability or general operations. A mass exodus of business from the legacy tech stack to the blockchain will only happen if companies are confident that their transitioning would only bring them more growth or its prospect.
Permissioned blockchains like Hyperledger Fabric by IBM sees this need and has even evolved to add token management system with configurable privacy levels. That helps to further its adoption for businesses that opt for public blockchains due to its smart contract feature. Nonetheless, Hyperledger’s adoption is still somewhat sketchy compared to how public blockchains have blown up in these recent months.
So, the standard narrative is that of Ethereum pushing to become a world computer where retail and institutional-grade users perform financial, medical, entertainment, or even security-related transactions atop it. EVM compatible chains like BSC, Polygon, Avalanche, or even Solana, whether they position themselves as complements or substitutes, have found a way of making their users easily interoperate with Ethereum.
Moreso, Polkadot’s primary use case enables interoperability between chains, regardless of their features or status as a private or public chain. Solana is another public and EVM compatible blockchain built to allow for scalable, user-friendly apps with the capacity to facilitate up to 50 000 transactions per second at 0.4 block time and a $0.00025 transactions fee. Many more are springing up each day with their unique value props, which remains a plus for the Web 3 ecosystem, no matter how splintered.
Use cases for PolkaCipher’s privacy-focused and commercialised NFTs
Beyond each blockchain’s capability, one thing is clear — the future of the tangled web of blockchains is interoperability. And if so, PolkaCipher’s cross-chain capabilities and unique selling proposition of commercialising NFTs and the expansion of the latter’s use cases among off-chain businesses and DeFi operations bounce off even more vital.
So, whether it is public blockchains like Ethereum, Polkadot, Solana or even privacy-enabled but permissioned Hyperledger, PolkaCipher is conceived to be at the center of them all.
Privacy-enabled NFTs for businesses could guarantee them the chance to align themselves with the specific needs of their customers per engagement, improved and immersive user experience. This could further dovetail into safe, secure, and transparent revenue streams for such businesses. An excellent way to achieve the above is adopting PolkaCipher’s Permissioned Community through hashed time-locked contracts based NFTs.
Another brilliant use case is Governance Rights without the need for holding tokens (in this sense, we refer to protocol tokens like UNI or even CPHR). We made a brilliant case on how most DeFi protocols’ governance is flawed and mainly hijacked by their very early adopters. This is a sincere cause of concern to DeFi protocols and traditional businesses looking to tokenize and infuse some resemblance of the DAO into their operations. But with PolkaCipher, rather than businesses minting governance tokens that could end up being hijacked, companies could opt for privacy-enabled NFTs and then auction them to ensure a fair chance to anyone looking to maintain a proprietary interest in these businesses.
Moving over to NFT authorised web app logins. Legacy apps are centralised by design and inherently vulnerable to hacks. But beyond that, users have to suffer the additional burden of remembering passwords they use to access these apps. As of 2020, it was estimated that app users were already managing more than 300 billion passwords. A report by Verizon shows that stolen or brute-forced credentials cause over 80% of all data breaches during hacks. Even with 2FA verifications, data breaches have not slowed down, underscoring the need for better login and authentication processes.
Through our applications, a business can connect/disconnect to any applications they use, either on-chain or off-chain, without storing any data on the platform. Instead, all data is hashed on the chain and can be accessed through our privacy-preserving NFTs as a key. Think of it as a truly decentralised way of using the internet.
SMEs are the lifeblood of most major economies, and we understand that. Small businesses can leverage PolkaCipher’s commercialised NFTs to mint gift cards and distribute them to their customers for improved customer loyalty. As they buy from these small businesses, customers can collect and redeem these gift cards at any other store that accepts crypto.
Moreso, our Business NFTs or bNFTs allows businesses to privately mint, distribute and collect NFTs for their internal use, let’s say for salary documentation or even issuing insurance contracts. We illustrated a scenario here.
With the commercialisation of privacy-enabled NFTs for big and small businesses, perhaps Mat Velloso’s current skeptic stance on NFTs can take a 360 degrees turnaround if indeed his skepticism is borne out of what use cases they serve. But if not, we might not be able to help Mat here except that he should just continue to watch and see the undeniable value NFTs offer to not just speculative retail users looking to spin in some gains but also SMEs and big businesses open to innovative ways of conducting their business operations.
About PolkaCipher
PolkaCipher is a privacy-preserving oracle network on the Polkadot Blockchain focused on bringing the use case of private NFTs to off-chain businesses and be a bridge for seamless integration to on-chain Defi apps.
PolkaCipher’s unique offerings help push the use-cases of the NFTs in real-world scenarios while still being connected to a cross-chain network that is fair and accurate. PolkaCipher intends to achieve business goals by helping users transact privately and securely using NFTs as a mode of access to different decentralized apps (Dapps) and real-world business rewards.
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