On this episode of CoinGeek Weekly Livestream, host Patrick Thompson digs deep into the staying power of nonfungible tokens or NFTs. Joining him on the discussion is Razvan Petre, founder of TokenPow, an all-encompassing auction platform on the BSV blockchain.
“NFTs are coming back into play in a major way, and the way I put it is that they have a lot of gravity, something is pulling people, attracting people towards the NFTs,” Patrick says.
Patrick notes seeing a great deal of NFT profile pictures on Twitter, the most common being CryptoPunks—NFTs that live on the Ethereum blockchain. CryptoPunks rose to fame during the NFT boom in February 2021. It peaked in May, after a collection of nine CryptoPunks was purchased for US$16.9 million at a Christie’s auction, making it the second highest NFT purchase ever made next to Beeple’s US$69 million sale.
So why the popularity? Razvan and Patrick both agree that one aspect of it is due to Ethereum’s network effect, something BSV currently lacks. To address this lack thereof, Razvan suggests onboarding big influencers with millions of followers to share auction links to their audience. As Razvan implied, “Imagine what a guy with a lot of followers can do, right? He can share all these links and then he can have income just by doing this.”
On this episode, Patrick describes TokenPow as the Open Sea of BSV. Open Sea is a well-known Ethereum NFT marketplace where people buy and sell jpegs. Patrick is perplexed with its popularity considering ETH’s high cost of minting. And so, to compete and succeed in the NFT marketplace space, Razvan’s strategy is to do things differently. He points out that in Ethereum, NFTs “are just animated GIFs and some jpegs,” which he notes “is really basic stuff.” On the flip side, he said TokenPow is creating innovative NFTs that are not seen in other blockchains.
Without divulging too much information, Razvan briefly discussed his plans for TokenPow. He said they’re creating a movie trailer NFT that can be airdropped to other users and an NFT that represents access rights in order to play a song for a certain period of time. Razvan also mentions the possibility of creating a subscription service NFT.
For his part, BSV’s capabilities make it possible for his team to create features that other blockchains can’t or have trouble doing so. “I don’t think all these things can even be done on Ethereum, probably because of the fees and the way it works, it will really be difficult for them to do something like that.”
Razvan is also keen to point out the advantage of creating NFTs on the BSV blockchain allows data to be stored on-chain as opposed to somewhere in a cloud or an IPFS or InterPlanetary File System, a decentralized storage and file referencing system for Ethereum. On the topic of Ethereum based NFTs, Razvan asserts “they (NFT owners) don’t even know where it is and in what data center, and if that goes down, probably the NFT is worth nothing or its maybe just a scam in some cases.” As far as legalities are concerned, for his part, storing data on-chain is the safest way to go. “Because everything is on-chain, we can actually go and see the whole history of what happened with this NFT, who bought it, who sold it, who was the author. Everything is on-chain. It cannot be altered. And it’s all there for everybody, for the auditors, for the tax authority, for everybody when they have the right tools to investigate it.”
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