NFT-based games integrate traditional gaming concepts with blockchain technology, non-fungible tokens (NFTs), and other decentralized financial elements.
Gamers are loving GameFi (the intersection of gaming and NFTs, and even DeFi) for three main reasons:
True ownership: While in conventional digital games, players can buy in-game assets, those assets don’t actually belong to them. On the other hand, NFT-based games give players complete control over their assets– in-game assets like cards, lands, avatars, or swords are NFTs.
Verifiable rarity and uniqueness: Non-fungibility makes it possible for creators to make 100% unique tokens, as well as programming different rarity levels for the assets. Naturally, some items in games will be scarcer or more useful than others, and their value should reflect that. Since everything happens on the blockchain, it’s easy to verify the scarcity, uniqueness, and authenticity of each asset.
Opportunity to earn income while playing: These games implement play-to-earn mechanisms. By participating in games, players can earn cryptocurrencies and in-game items that have real-world value. Many games have their own secondary markets for trading.
NFT-Based trading card games are getting so much attention because they’re a perfect mesh for most any game genre, from role-playing games to fighting games. One of the most popular gaming categories is card trading.
For many people, training card games, or TCGs, revive childhood memories of collectible card games while at the same time offering a new way of generating revenue.
In play-to-earn NFT-based card trading games, each card is a non-fungible token (NFT), usually in ERC-721 standards. They enable the play-to-earn mechanism using common elements found in GameFi, such as an in-game currency and a marketplace.
Here are the top NFT-based trading card games.
Gods Unchained
Gods Unchained is the most popular trading card game in the blockchain universe. It runs on Ethereum and Immutable X.
Gods Unchained is a free-to-play fantasy-themed turn-based, tactical card game; players must build their decks based on a strategy.
By playing the game, you can earn common core cards. Those cards can’t be traded on the marketplace; at this point, they are not minted on the blockchain. It’s possible to increase the value of these common cards, by earning “flux”, a resource gained by winning the ranked games.
Gods Unchained has a process called The Forge, in which players who have earned enough flux can merge two identical core cards into one by spending flux. This process creates higher-quality cards, and since the forged cards are minted on the blockchain, they can be sold on the blockchain, sometimes for a hefty profit.
Splinterlands
Splinterlands game runs on the Hive blockchain.
You can test the game for free, but to start playing, you need to buy a starter set for $10.You can get new cards by buying packs from the shop or individual items from other players in the marketplace. You can also sell your assets on this marketplace.
One of the highlights of Splinterlands is its cross-compatibility with multiple blockchains, enabling users to trade their cards on several marketplaces.
In addition to selling your cards, you can earn in Splinterlands by getting its in-game currency DEC (Dark Energy Crystals). There are a couple of ways to acquire DEC in the game. First, by winning ranked battles, and second by destroying the cards you don’t use anymore. You can use DEC to buy assets from the game’s shop.
Another way to earn on Splinterlands is renting your cards via peakmonsters.
Sorare
Sorare is a fantasy football game built on the Ethereum blockchain.
You can collect player cards and build teams, and as with real-world trading card games, the real value comes from the most valuable player cards. Depending on the rarity of the card, it can get quite expensive.
The Sorare play-to-earn mechanism enables users to participate in tournaments, where users can earn points and rewards based on their team’s performance.
Dark Country Game
Dark Country is a trading card game on the WAX blockchain with gothic-themed characters like zombies, ghosts, and haunted Indians.
In addition to cards, players can own heroes, items, and lands as NFT assets. Players can stake Dark Country assets on rplanet.io and collect cards on collect.social to gain the platform’s Racoon tokens.
Dark Country has a weekly forging activity similar to Gods Unchained’s The Forge called Heroes Reforge and Staking. Players need to burn four heroes of the same type in order to receive a new hero with better quality. They can then stake this improved asset to earn rewards.
Dark Country has recently introduced land assets compatible with WAX and Flow blockchains.
With lands, several new revenue generation options will be possible soon, such as land leasing and staking the platform’s in-game currency Shadow Dime (SDM) on lands.
Final Thoughts: Emerging Exciting New TCG Projects
While some may argue that the game mechanics of most NFT-based games are primitive and “not quite there yet,” TCGs marry the simplicity of a trading card game with the blockchain very well.
A few more exciting TCG projects to keep an eye on include:
Skyweaver, a free-to-play Ethereum-based game in beta mode. Players have three grades of cards: base, silver, and gold. Base cards can’t be traded, but silver and gold cards can be. You earn silver cards via ranked rewards and conquest, and gold cards via conquest.
Parallel, a science-fiction-themed card game also based on the Ethereum blockchain. The team built its own NFT drop system. The project is currently raising funds by selling drops, which contain cards. These cards will have utilities once the game development is complete.
Metropolis Origins, is a cyberpunk-themed card game by QXR Studios running on the WAX blockchain. It’s a sequel to game designer Graeme Devine’s adventure game Metropolis. The game released a founder NFT pack that enables owners to play the game in beta mode.
The evolution of blockchain card games will be one to watch, as more implementations of conventional card games on the blockchain continue to emerge. With NFTs’ programmable nature, we can expect to see the evolution of more dynamic, and potentially lucrative and competitive, playing card games in the near future.
A rug pull is a type of scam where the team of a cryptocurrency project suddenly exits the project, running away with investors’ funds.
Rug pulls occur particularly often on decentralized exchanges (DEX) and in the NFT world.
DEXs allow users to trade cryptocurrencies without intermediaries; well-known examples include Uniswap, Balancer, and PancakeSwap. There is no central authority on these decentralized exchanges and users can trade anonymously. They’re primarily used to swap one cryptocurrency for another.
A typical rug pull scenario unfolds as follows. Malicious developers launch a new token and list it on a DEX. Investors can easily exchange more established tokens like ETH for this new token. Once enough investors’ funds accumulate in the liquidity pool (LP) for this seemingly legitimate token offering a high APY, developers quickly dump their holdings and drain their funds, and the new token’s value plummets to zero.
The year 2021 didn’t fall short of such scams. According to a report by Chainanalysis, this type of maneuver was the most popular one among the whole crypto fraud varieties in 2021, accounting for 37% of all scam revenue.
Rug Pull Example #1: Fake Project Forks on OlympusDao
Imposters exploited the popularity of meme coins among crypto traders by using a dog-themed logo inspired by the Greek god of Anubis depicted with a dog’s head. Developers presented the fake project AnubisDAO as a fork of the decentralized reserve currency OlympusDAO and launched the project’s ANKH token on the Copper platform.
The developers used pseudonyms, and the project had neither a website nor a whitepaper. Nevertheless, $60M was raised in WETH, which disappeared from the project’s liquidity pools just twenty hours after the launch.
Rug Pull Example #2: Binance Smart Chain Forks
The Binance Smart Chain (BSC) saw multiple headline-worthy rug pulls. Meerkat Finance, a fork of the Yearn Finance protocol, was supposed to be a yield farming pool. After the launch, $31M in Binance token, BNB, disappeared from the project’s LP. It’s still not clear if this was a real rug pull case. However, the projects’ Twitter accounts disappeared along with the investors’ money which is a strong indicator that the project team was involved with the scam.
Another BSC rug pull case is the TurtleDex project, whose developers ran away with $2.5 million that had been raised as 9,000 BNB. The team drained the funds from the Binance native DEXs Pancake Swap and ApeSwap and sent them to multiple wallets to sell on the Binance Exchange.
Other projects rug pulled on the BSC DEXs are Defi100, Uranium Finance, and Stablemagnet. Defi100 marketed itself as a synthetic index token based on the total market cap of the DeFi sector.
Rug Pull Example #3: Squid Game
When the Netflix series Squid Game soared in popularity, imposters came up with a Squid coin idea. It was supposedly a play-to-earn cryptocurrency project that promised investors to participate in online games inspired by the hit series. It was launched on Pancake Swap.
There were many warning signs for the potential investors, like an unprofessionally written whitepaper and a recently registered website. Nevertheless, the team exit scammed with over $3M investors’ funds after the Squid currency peaked at $2,861.
Rug Pull Example #4: Fake Uniswap V2 Fork
Uranium Finance claimed to be an automated market maker (AMM) protocol forked from Uniswap V2. Stablemagnet billed itself also as an AMM. They cost the investors $32M, $50M, and $27M, respectively.
Rug Pull Example #5: Avalanche Meme Coin Goes Bust
In November 2021, it was Avalanche’s turn to experience its largest rug pull.
SDOG coin, issued by SnowdogDAO, was supposed to be the first-ever meme coin on Avalanche, and it was launched on the native DEX Trader Joe. Eight days after the initialization, SDOG’s value plunged to $1,500 after skyrocketing to $6,000.
The SDOG case was a bit different than a typical rug pull; the developers promised the community a buyback of the coins, meaning the company would repurchase its own coins.
This tactic reduces the number of tokens in circulation, and in theory, supports a deflationary token environment. The actual rug pull occurred while $40M worth of SDOG coins was transferred from Trader Joe to the project’s own AMM.
The buyback failed because an account swapped $10M worth of SDOG for other cryptocurrencies in the meantime. This was only possible if the account had the “challenge keys” required by the project’s smart contract, hinting that the rug pull was an inside job.
Rug Pull Example #6: NFT Rug Pulls
Rug pulls can happen on centralized exchanges as well, as evidenced multiple times by NFT rug pulls.
One of 2021’s most notorious scams was an NFT project called Evolved Apes. Thousands of investors piled their money into Evolved Apes, whose developer ran away with $2.7 million.
Another NFT rug pull incident was Baller Ape Club, a collection of 5,000 NFTs supposedly inspired by the famous Bored Ape Yacht Club collection. On the drop day, developers directed the potential investors to a fake link that repeatedly showed a warning pop-up with a transaction failed message, although the transactions were successful. In the end, $2M worth of SOL was stolen from the investors.
Iconics, an NFT project also launched on the Solana blockchain, had promised its investors to deliver 8,000 unique NFT artworks. Instead, collectors received a random collection of emojis. Developers ran away with $140K.
How to Avoid Rug Pulls
If you don’t want to fall victim to a rug pull event, take notice of these red flags before investing in the brand new red-hot project.
A DEX loophole is that audits are not obligatory for token listings. Nevertheless, legitimate projects undergo audits to convince their investors. Be wary of projects that avoid this process.
Can you research the individual members of the development team? Are they all anonymous or pseudonymous? Do your due diligence, and note that fake faces and fake names are common on team bios.
Add skepticism if a price soars in value exceptionally fast without a fundamental cause.
Excessive promotion can be another warning sign.
Does the project have an official website, social channels, and whitepaper? If so, can you spot amateurishness in the presentation, such as rushed whitepaper typos?
Does the project have an active Discord or Telegram? How is its community?
Legitimate projects tend to have tens of millions of dollars in total liquidity, as well as some longevity that supports the project’s community. Look for the common elements in the cryptocurrency industry’s established projects, and try to find the same signs in upcoming projects.
Final Thoughts: Rug Pull Safety
Cryptocurrency rug pulls can trap both novice and experienced investors. Newbies are unaware of the risks behind the decentralized projects, and veterans fall prey to FOMO while seeking high-upside and hyped opportunities.
It’s essential to know about different tools scammers use to exploit the cryptocurrency system and spot the projects built on a lie.
lt Although blockchain is a secure, reliable, and stable technology by itself, don’t give the same sort of credibility you would to a project like Bitcoin or Ethereum to any new upstart just because it’s using the blockchain.
Blockchain protocols allow for the recording of transactions in a trustless, distributed, peer-to-peer manner using a public ledger without the need for any central authorities.
Blockchains have changed how the world organizes capital, data, and assets and will continue to have implications across several industries, including financial services, real estate, supply chains, etc.
The blockchain concept had existed before Bitcoin came to public light in 2008, but Bitcoin is the first significant example of a blockchain that everyone now knows.
Bitcoin arose to solve the fundamental problem of lack of trust in value transfer methods and peer-to-peer payments over the Internet without double-spending, meaning without spending the same set of values twice, since digital information can typically be copied.
The public ledger that is blockchain maintains a continuously growing list of transactions and data chained and stored within blocks that are cryptographically secured from tampering or change by any parties using the network, making it immutable.
Additionally, because it is a distributed, public ledger, all parties using the network can see the past history of transactions, and the transactions can never be removed. The ledger becomes a shared and synchronized database across all parties, allowing all transactions to be publicly witnessed and transparent via a block explorer.
How Do Blockchain Protocols Work?
The blockchain is run by a network of nodes, or distributed networks of computers. These independent nodes verify the accuracy of transactions, maintain updated versions of the ledger, and record new transaction data on the public ledger.
The ledger is built as a linked chain of blocks. Each block contains a number of transactions validated as legitimate by the network during a specific time span and then recorded in the ledger.
Each block also includes the cryptographic hash of the prior block in the blockchain linking one block into a chain of blocks, which provides integrity of the previous block all the way back to the genesis block of the blockchain.
The benefit of blockchain is that it allows for distributed control instead of only functioning as a distributed database where data is still controlled by one entity. This allows different parties, people, and institutions that may not necessarily trust what the other is saying is legitimate to share information without requiring a central administrator (like a governing body or central bank) to verify the information alone.
Instead, the blockchain depends on its unique consensus mechanism, whereby nodes validate and record transaction data to reach a consensus that determines the final output of data into the ledger.
This prevents a single, non-trustworthy player or small majority from maliciously deciding to change the record of the ledger. For Bitcoin, this would require a majority to obtain 51% control of the hash rate for the Bitcoin network, which is almost impossible to do.
As new transactions are added to the blockchain, the prior transactions become more difficult to manipulate. With 13,000+ live Bitcoin nodes today on the network, it becomes almost impossible for a bad actor or hacker to remove past blocks from the chain or publish fraudulent data to the ledger.
Different Types of Blockchains
While the above details the Bitcoin blockchain, there are several types of blockchains with their own style of reaching consensus, governance, and other factors.
Ethereum is a platform for decentralized blockchain projects such as dApps, decentralized Finance (DeFi), Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs), and smart contracts.
NFTs are blockchain-based tokens that each represent a unique asset such as a piece of digital content, media, art, or other tokenized asset and verify its ownership and authenticity. NFTs are designed to be cryptographically verifiable, unique or scarce, and easily transferable.
Any developer and project in the world can use the Ethereum public blockchain in a permissionless manner to launch their own tokens, including NFTs, as long as it adheres to the specifications of the Ethereum network.
Today, the Ethereum network regularly facilitates the flow of tens of billions of dollars of value, with over $150B USD of value currently locked in smart contracts on its network as of Q4 2021 to facilitate decentralized asset exchange such as involving lending, insurance, and payments.
Due to the adoption of DeFi and NFTs, Ethereum has recently become so widely used that using the Ethereum network has become cost-prohibitive for many users today due to high transaction fees and congestion on the network.
Thus, many participants have explored other Layer-1 blockchain platforms that offer similar decentralized applications like Ethereum, with lower transaction fees and varying decentralization and security profiles.
Other Layer-1 blockchain protocols involve blockchains with varying performance and utility to target niche or enterprise sectors, such as Avalanche, Flow, Solana, and Terra, and have also innovated with new consensus algorithms, blockchain architectures, and execution environments.
As alternatives for specialized tasks, certain purpose-built niche blockchains have arisen, such as high-performance blockchains for creating NFTs such as Flow, blockchains for making supply chains more efficient, or others to help move and store different types of information at a higher throughput than on major public blockchains such as Bitcoin.
Unlike the general-purpose blockchain of Ethereum, Flow is built to efficiently scale for billions of people interacting with NFTs such as in-game items. Flow was created by Dapper Labs, the team behind NBA Top Shots and CryptoKitties.
Flow improves upon Ethereum specifically for the use case of NFTs to create fast, proof of stake-powered consensus without the sharding in ETH 2.0, near instant finality without reducing decentralization, in contrast to Ethereum’s 12-60 second time-to-finality, and is scalable for the large demands of a growing blockchain gaming industry while being inexpensive to use.
Solana is another high-performance public blockchain created to track transactions in a specific sequence, optimizing scalability over decentralization, and enabling scalable apps and NFTs for developers and users, with extremely low transaction fees and high throughput.
Final Thoughts: Blockchain Use Cases
Blockchain as a technology can be used for any use case, enterprise or otherwise, that deals with the transfer of data or value in some form.
It has the potential to revolutionize the financial services industry due to removing the need for intermediaries such as payment processors. Any industry that involves agreements, which is almost every business in the modern economy, can benefit from the use case of smart contracts, which are agreements denoted in code.
Elections, voting, and governance, in general, are another use case of blockchain that can become more transparent and easier to participate in for all parties.
Rights to intellectual, physical, or creative digital property is another use case that blockchain makes easy to authenticate and transfer as tokenized assets, in the example of NFTs.
Due to the decentralized, trustless, and immutable nature of blockchain technology can create several innovations and impact many industries that will continue to change the organization and transfer of data and assets.
While Bitcoin was the original blockchain that came to public light, Ethereum and other more niche and specific blockchains are where the majority of modern-day development is happening.
Pastel Network is excited to announce its partnership with Nervos, which will be integrating Pastel’s Sense and Cascade protocol across its native NFT standard. This partnership signifies the continued successes of both Pastel and Nervos, and is a massive step forward for the overall NFT ecosystem. It is a testament to the growing need for NFT reliability, security and verifiability, solved via Pastel’s advanced infrastructure.
Backed by VC heavyweights including Sequoia Capital, Polychain Capital, and Multicoin Capital among others, Nervos provides readily interoperable solutions that will unlock the potential of Universal dApps. Nervos has partnered with and helped enhance a number of projects across the DeFi, NFT and Gaming sectors — such as Kollect.me (the first marketplace launched on the network), a gamified trading platform, a photo sharing social network, and an NFT creation and distribution platform.
The Nervos Network provides another much-needed solution for the blockchain space. Nervos allows enterprises to build and deploy decentralized applications (dApps) without committing their entire tech stack to the blockchain, allowing them to more easily scale their products. Nervos’s sophisticated hybrid solution, achieved by combining the advantages of a public blockchain and an application chain, has attracted many NFT projects that now stand to benefit from the network’s partnership with Pastel. Through this integration, NFT platforms built on Nervos will be able to leverage Pastel’s Sense and Cascade protocols to provide permanent storage and near-duplicate detection verification to their users.
“The NFT space is ripe with opportunity, but few projects are addressing the security and storage issues in the industry. With its innovative technologies, Pastel is solving many of these challenges and truly protecting users and digital assets on NFT dApps,” said Kevin Wang, co-founder at Nervos. “By integrating Sense and Cascade, Nervos will be able to offer security and reliability to developers and users working with NFTs in our ecosystem.”
NFT security and storage integrity have become the primary issues affecting organizations across the NFT ecosystem. Scams and frauds are widespread while centralized storage is failing to provide adequate reliability. All layer 1 Blockchains and layer 2 Dapps are experiencing these road blocks and are on the search for solutions. Pastel provides them.
With Pastel’s Sense and Cascade protocols, organizations have the ability to prove authentication and certify the rareness of NFTs while having access to permanent and reliable storage via easily integrable, lightweight open-APIs. During Nervos’s
“Nervos’s technology changes the way users can interact with others via NFTs by granting them the ability to send, receive, and create NFTs with little-to-no fees,” explains Anthony Georgiades, co-Founder of Pastel Network. “We’re excited to provide the infrastructure that will allow Nervos and the many decentralized applications built on top of it to take advantage of their ever-growing opportunities in the NFT ecosystem by providing enhanced security and reliability.”
How does the integration work?
Pastel Network has not only worked relentlessly to develop incredible infrastructure for the NFT ecosystem, but to also deliver it to network partners in a lightweight, seamless manner. Partners of the Pastel Network such as Nervos and along with other native blockchains or dApps are granted an API Key and Token, which is used to interact with a Pastel Network API Server. The API Key and Token makes requests to the Pastel Network API Server, running a Full Pastel Node signed by the Nervos PastelID.
During NFT minting on Nervos (such as via the NRC721 or another related standard), secure and authenticated (OAuth2) REST API calls are made via an API Server that passes the hash of the candidate NFT to Pastel Network. The return responses — 1) a JSON file with the relative rareness score in the case of Sense and 2) the SHA3–256 hash for the JSON file stored in Kademlia which itself contains the SHA3–256 hashes of the set of redundant copies of the JSON files in Kademlia — are signed by 3 randomly selected SuperNodes operating on the Pastel Network. Smart tickets write and store the outputs to the Pastel blockchain, which is returned to Nervos and included as additional Response fields in their own NFT standard.
Sense is near-duplicate NFT detection protocol on the Pastel Network, built to assess the relative rareness of a given NFT. Sense recognizes the most subtle similarities between two digital collectibles, even if one has been transformed. The protocol goes beyond the standard “digital fingerprint” approach to establishing the rareness of an NFT, and actually looks at the rareness of the pixel patterns in data. While digital fingerprints do allow users to verify that an NFT was created by a particular creator, this is a fairly weak form of rareness. Sense solves this problem by assigning a ‘Relative Rareness Score’ to quantify how rare an NFT is relative to all NFTs in the underlying dataset.
Sense leverages a number of pre-trained deep learning models to transform each NFT into a fixed list of over 10,000 numbers (the ‘NFT fingerprint vector’). It then assesses the correlation between a given fingerprint and the database of all existing fingerprints on Pastel and Nervos’s platform, other NFT marketplaces (e.g., Rarible, OpenSea), and open databases on the entire internet (e.g., Google) and outputs a relative rareness score — a number between 0% (i.e., the NFT is identical to a previously registered NFT) to 100% (i.e., the NFT is completely unique). Sense “sees through” superficial changes in the same way as a human eye, and, like a human, can recognize even the most subtle change in an NFT.
Cascade is a distributed storage protocol purpose-built for NFT metadata in a fully redundant, decentralized, and permanent manner. Pastel is the first NFT platform to have its own completely integrated, decentralized storage layer. Cascade is based on the advanced technologies of RaptorQ and Kademlia and ensures that users only pay once to store their data forever.
By leveraging the RaptorQ fountain code algorithm, Cascade begins by breaking each asset into a series of redundant chunks. Every chunk contains certain random fragments of the combined file which is distributed redundantly across participating SuperNodes running on the network. Two parameters control how the data is encoded into chunks: 1) size of each chunk and 2) desired redundancy factor. The sets of chunks are then randomly distributed across network nodes using Kademlia. No complex or centralized system for deciding which node is responsible for which chunk, no iteration through SuperNodes to find one with the relevant chunk, and no complicated logic for handling chunk re-allocation when SuperNodes enter and leave the network.
These first-of-their-kind protocols combat the most challenging of issues that every organization and individual is experiencing across the NFT ecosystem. Nervos clearly saw the need for next-generation solutions to help support its network and platforms. This partnership with Nervos is a prime showcase for what Pastel can offer to the entire space.
About Nervos Network
The Nervos Network is a collection of protocols and public blockchain ecosystem aiming to solve the biggest challenges facing blockchains like Bitcoin and Ethereum today.
The Nervos Common Knowledge Base (CKB) is the layer 1, proof of work, public permissionless blockchain protocol of the Nervos Network. It allows any crypto-asset to be stored with the security, immutability, and permissionless nature of Bitcoin while enabling smart contracts and layer 2 scaling. Its unique crypto-economic model is designed to better align the interests of users, developers, and miners as compared to first-generation blockchains.
Pastel is the world’s preeminent protocol standard for NFT technology. Pastel also allows for the development of third-party applications to sit on top of its Network, enabling developers to enjoy the scalable registration features, storage processes, and security of the broader ecosystem. Lightweight protocols such as Sense — which was built to assess the relative rareness of a given NFT against near-duplicate metadata — and Cascade — which conducts permanent, distributed storage of underlying NFT data — can be integrated across any native L1 blockchains or L2 marketplaces.
Pastel is an entirely native blockchain supported by SuperNodes, which provides computational resources to the network to support asset registration, distribution, and permanent storage. Pastel is managed by world-class developers, cryptographers, and technologists, supported alongside an experienced and extensive network of marketers, influencers, and third-party agencies. Pastel is backed by key stakeholders including Innovating Capital, a prominent venture fund.
This article was first published by our team here.
After 3 painstaking years of development in stealth, we launched our Mainnet in January 2021. Our co-founders, Jeff Emanuel, Alexey Kireyev, and Anthony Georgiades had a vision stemming all the way back in 2018 of building a blockchain that was application-specific and purpose built for rare digital collectibles, a novel concept at the time. Rare digital collectibles, or NFTs, were brand new, but they saw that the current infrastructure — such as Ethereum and Bitcoin—were not built to handle the storage requirements and transaction sizes of this emerging ecosystem in order for it to thrive in the years to come.
Well, that dream came to fruition this year.
Pastel’s Preliminary Vision
We launched Pastel with the goal of building a marketplace so that creators, collectors, and builders could benefit from the world-class features and protocols that Pastel had to offer. At its core, it was to be a decentralized system that allowed for creators and collectors to trade NFTs in an entirely decentralized, peer-to-peer manner. A platform built purely to be the alternative to those running on Ethereum — offering a very intuitive interface, negligible fees, proven authentication of NFTs, and reliable storage.
With this objective in mind and our technical prowess already proven, we raised $5M in seed funding from Innovating Capital to continue refining the network and platform while simultaneously building out our marketing and business development program. We employed a less popular development model than most projects coming onto the market today. Unlike other projects who marketed their vision, raised capital, and then started building, we focused on perfecting the technology first.
Then the wheels started turning once again…
After a few months of developing the marketplace, we began to identify that certain gaps in the broader NFT ecosystem were growing larger and larger. We saw major issues not being solved but rather ignored. NFT scams and frauds were innumerable and asset loss due to antiquated and centralized storage solutions was dangerously high. But, again, nothing was being done about it.
We already built the protocols to solve these problems, but they were to be accessible only to those using the marketplace on our native blockchain. That did not sit well with our team because this ecosystem was built with collaboration, decentralization, and open-source in mind. The very nature of decentralization is that no one entity holds the keys to the castle. We had the tools to protect users from scams and asset loss with all the necessary infrastructure to work with layer-1 blockchains and layer-2 DApps.
Additionally, we had a number of layer-1 projects interested in utilizing our protocols on their own networks.
So, we opened our technology to the world.
Pastel Network: the World’s Preeminent Protocol Standard for the NFT Ecosystem
After this revelation, we focused all our efforts on becoming the infrastructure standard for the NFT space. We decoupled our protocols and features, modifying them to be standalone solutions easily capable of integrating across the ecosystem via open-APIs.
Core features are as follows:
Sense Near-Duplicate NFT Detection Protocol: Directly integrate Sense, a lightweight protocol on the Pastel Network, into any project to assess the relative rareness of a given NFT against near-duplicate metadata.
Cascade Protocol for Distributed Storage: Built for speed, scalability, and redundancy, Cascade is a fully distributed, permanent storage solution for on-chain NFT metadata.
Pastel Developer Modules: Develop on-chain marketplaces or third-party applications directly on the Pastel blockchain, supported by a series of protocols, well-documented APIs, and RPC functionality to help builders get started.
Agile Ticket Structure: Easily represent NFT data on the blockchain and add custom features or launch dedicated apps on Pastel using an innovative ticket schema built on intrinsic data integrity.
Sense and Cascade are Truly One-of-a-kind
Sense is a lightweight protocol on the Pastel Network, built to assess the relative rareness of a given NFT against near-duplicate data. Sense can recognize the most subtle similarities between two digital collectibles, even if one has been transformed. The protocol goes beyond the standard “digital fingerprint” approach to establishing the rareness of an NFT and actually looks at the rareness of the pixel patterns in data. While digital fingerprints do allow users to verify that an NFT was created by a particular creator, this is a fairly weak form of rareness. Sense solves this problem by assigning a ‘Relative Rareness Score’ to quantify how rare an NFT is relative to all NFTs in the underlying dataset.
How it works: The software leverages a number of deep learning models using Tensorflow with Keras Applications to transform each NFT into a fixed list of over 10,000 numbers (the ‘NFT fingerprint vector’). It then assesses the correlation between a given fingerprint and the database of all existing fingerprints on Pastel, other NFT marketplaces (e.g., Rarible, OpenSea), and open databases on the entire internet (e.g., Google) and outputs a relative rareness score — a number between 0% (i.e., the NFT is identical to a previously registered NFT) to 100% (i.e., the NFT is completely unique). The Sense Protocol “sees through” superficial changes in the same way as a human eye, and, like a human, can recognize even the most subtle change in an NFT.
Sense protects creators and collectors from fraud, scammers, and outright theft. While we verify the authenticity and provenance using the creator’s digital signatures (like all NFT systems in use), we go much further and assess how rare the underlying pixel patterns of the NFT’s data are. If value is largely a function of rareness, we believe that this additional layer of rareness authentication will result in better valuations for NFT creators.After all, if another creator makes a similar NFT in the future, they will still be able to register it, but it won’t achieve anything close to the rareness score of the original NFT. Platforms are also able to guarantee that any nefarious activity to produce counterfeits in the future will be futile, as any attempts to list duplicate works will result in low rareness scores or possibly flagged for removal.
Now to storage —
Cascade is a purpose-built distributed storage protocol for NFT metadata that is fully redundant, decentralized, and permanent. Pay once, store forever.
The current approach of relying simply upon a TokenID and external hyperlinks to centralized storage servers or unreliable external dependencies like IPFS leaves users highly vulnerable to the loss of assets and requires ongoing external maintenance. Pastel is the first NFT platform to have its own completely integrated, decentralized storage layer based on the advanced technologies of RaptorQ and Kademlia. We ensure that the underlying digital asset itself is uploaded, verified, and registered on Pastel’s Cascade Protocol — rather than just the token with which it is minted. Through a series of smart tickets living on the Pastel Network, creators can store their masterpieces in a distributed fashion that is tightly coupled and indelible from the NFT itself.
How it works: Cascade Storage Protocol, leveraging the RaptorQ fountain code algorithm, begins by breaking each asset up in a series of redundant chunks. Every chunk contains certain random fragments of the combined file which is distributed redundantly across participating SuperNodes running on the network. Two parameters that control how the data is encoded into chunks: 1) the size of each chunk and 2) the desired redundancy factor. The sets of chunks are then randomly distributed across network nodes using the Kademlia DHT algorithm. No complex or centralized system for deciding which node is responsible for which chunk, no iteration through SuperNodes to find one with the relevant chunk, and no complicated logic for handling chunk re-allocation in the case of SuperNodes entering and leaving the network.
These protocols are truly game changers. Sense is the first of its kind in the ecosystem, and Cascade is the true alternative to centralized storage.
Marketing and Business Development Recalibration for Pastel as the Layer-1 NFT Infrastructure Standard
With this new focus, we went heads down shedding light on these pervasive problems plaguing the NFT ecosystem, while making known that the solutions we created for these problems were easily accessible.
Our team traveled the world speaking at conferences and meeting with different projects and platforms in order to educate this ever-growing community on what Pastel has to offer.
Our team conducted countless AMAs and interviews to spread the word as well as wrote educational articles to provide a clearer picture on what the issues were and how Pastel solves them.
And, our efforts bore fruit.
We closed out 2021 by partnering with TomoChain — a native layer-1 blockchain — to integrate Sense and Cascade across its NFT standard.
But, we are not stopping there. 2022 is poised to be even bigger.
2022 Roadmap
Pastel will carry the momentum from 2021 and continue providing our world-class infrastructure to the NFT ecosystem.
In 2022, we are focused on:
Expediting development releases for a number of our internal projects — such as with versions Cezanne, Monet, Van Gogh, and Kubo;
Building stronger blockchain bridges, specifically with Ethereum, Solana, Avalanche, Polkadot, and Polygon;
Expanding our network of partners with more native layer-1s, layer-2 DApps, and third-party enterprises;
Delivering more user incentive programs; and
Launching user-focused products.
Continuous Development Releases
Coming into 2022, we have revamped our entire development cycle to allow for faster, more frequent releases. Given that we are a native layer-1 application-specific blockchain, this is now more critical than ever. Each release cycle is well-planned, methodical, and heavily tested prior to a full Mainnet release.
We have been working on our largest upgrade, Cezanne, since our initial Mainnet release went live in January 2021. We anticipate that Cezanne will be fully deployed to Mainnet by the end of Q1. Subsequently, we will be following tight, quarterly release cycles. Each upgrade is composed of 4 distinct 2-week sprints resulting in a Testnet launch, and then subsequently 4 individual 1-week sprints for further development, de-bugging, and testing towards a Mainnet release.
Our various release cycles are well-intended to lead to major on-chain Mainnet enhancements. Overall, the upgrades will result in improved performance, increased scalability, revamped reward / incentive mechanics, more paths to increase PSL burn, and numerous blockchain-level optimizations that will make the Pastel Network stronger than ever.
Core areas of focus include:
Sense and Cascade Open-API full Mainnet release
Sense Protocol upgrade to include sharding for increased performance and scalability
Cascade Protocol upgrade to include storage-challenges for enhanced incentive measures and security
NFT CDN and ‘hot file’ caching via SuperNodes
Upgrades to smart-ticket structure to add overall NFT functionality
Full release of Pastel Developer modules with well-documented APIs and gRPC functionality
PIP-02 resulting in an enhanced consensus mechanics
Security improvements to harden against attack vectors
More Bridges and Cross-Chain Integrations
Pastel Network was founded around the idea that multiple chains will thrive over time. As a result, our core infrastructure was designed in such a way that Pastel can interact with a variety of other crypto ecosystems in a seamless fashion.
Wrapped-Pastel on Ethereum is already enabled on the Pastel Network, allowing users to access native PSL and its diverse array of use-cases directly on Ethereum. This year, our community can expect to see many more integrations with other chains such as Solana, Avalanche, and Polkadot. As more networks are bridged to Pastel, users within other ecosystems (e.g., OpenSea), can directly benefit from the wide breadth of Pastel functionality such as storage and certification. This also will be to drive overall network acquisition growth.
Further Partnership Launches
We are intensifying our business developments effort in order to increase our footprint in the NFT ecosystem. Given the interoperability of the platform and the integrability of our protocols and solutions — including Sense, Cascade, and our Developer Modules — we can target all of the major verticals in the market: native layer-1 blockchains (e.g. Solana, Avalanche, and Flow), layer-2 marketplaces and DApps (e.g. OpenSea, Decentraland, and Metaplex), and third-party enterprises (e.g. DraftKings, Artsy, and WME).
We are positioned well to pursue these target verticals and build on our recent successes.
Ongoing Incentive Programs
In 2022, we are focused on increasing the overall network usage by further incentivizing and rewarding activity in a variety of formats. Initially, we will be launching an incentive campaign to catalyze staking interest and garner enthusiasm to operate SuperNodes. This campaign will be performance-driven and will include rewards, such as PSL airdrops and NFT giveaways.
User-Focused Products
Despite our strategic pivot to an infrastructure integration business model — servicing projects and platforms — we firmly believe that the individual user, or consumer, is a major priority. This year, we remain committed to launching various user-facing products. To start, we will be launching two products that will allow consumers to leverage the next-generation protocols and solutions we offer to our partners, but in easy-to-use and intuitive interfaces.
We are beyond excited to bring these products to market because they have the ability to carry the NFT ecosystem into a very prosperous future.
Closing Remarks
2021 was just a warmup. We expertly navigated this rapidly evolving environment making key strategic decisions for the betterment of the project and the market as a whole. And, now, we are positioned to make a very big splash.
We have never been more focused and inspired to make 2022 legendary. We will continue to push the boundaries of innovation and creativity in order to usher Pastel to the forefront of the ecosystem as the preeminent NFT protocol standard for NFTs.
We have no doubts this will happen, so come join us for the ride of a lifetime!
About Pastel Network
Pastel is the world’s preeminent protocol standard for NFT technology. Pastel also allows for the development of third-party applications to sit on top of its Network, enabling developers to enjoy the scalable registration features, storage processes and security of the broader ecosystem. Lightweight protocols such as Sense — which was built to assess the relative rareness of a given NFT against near-duplicate metadata — and Cascade — which conducts permanent, distributed storage of underlying NFT data — can be integrated across any native L1 blockchains or L2 marketplaces.
Pastel is an entirely native blockchain supported by SuperNodes, which provides computational resources to the network to support asset registration, distribution, and permanent storage. Pastel is managed by world-class developers, cryptographers, and technologists, supported alongside an experienced and extensive network of marketers, influencers, and third-party agencies. Pastel is backed by key stakeholders including Innovating Capital, a prominent venture fund.
This article was first published by our team here.
