Category: Crypto

Gary’s Vee Friends NFTs Explained (Read Before Buying)

Posted on by Anthony Georgiades

VeeFriends is an NFT project built on the Ethereum blockchain by Gary Vee. The collection consists of two series and was created to help Gary Vee give back to his community. 

The first series was released in May 2021 and included 10,255 NFTs and 268 characters, 1242 of which were held by Gary Vee. 

The second series was released in April 2022 and included 251 characters and 55,555 tokens. This series was released alongside VeeFriends Mini Drops and Book Games NFT projects.

This article will cover what VeeFriends are, how they work, who created them, how you can buy and what VeeFriends season two brings to the table. 

What is VeeFriends?

VeeFriends is an NFT collection created by Gary Vee. The series one collection is based on 268 characters hand-drawn by Gary, each of which was inspired by human traits he admires. 

The original collection consisted of 10,255 NFTs; however, 12% of the supply was held by Gary Vee and is referred to as G.O.O. (Gary Originally Owned). 

The NFTs take the appearance of cartoon animals, bugs, and unique characters, each with different backgrounds and features. These are then divided into three categories: access, gift, and admission, each of which gives holders different benefits.

Access tokens provide direct access to Gary Vee or other holders.

Gift tokens offer unique experiences created by Gary Vee and his team. 

Admission tokens provide holders a three-year access pass to VeeCon and are the most common in the collection. 

As of October 2022, the highest-selling VeeFriend was a Watchful and Attentive Embarking Ape, which sold for 105 ETH (around $333,807) to Wu-Tang Clan. The project currently has a market cap of $133.5 million and a floor price of 4.96 ETH. 

How Does VeeFriends Work?

VeeFriends series one consists of 10,255 tokens, categorized by access tokens, gift tokens, and admission tokens. Here’s how they work. 

Access Tokens

Access tokens are broken up into four categories: one-to-one- group, competition, and scholarship. Ninety of these tokens offer in-person access, and 210 offer virtual access. 

There are 165 group access tokens, where investors can spend time with GaryVee or other VeeFriends holders. These tokens include: 

  • Ten Breakfast Bat tokens for in-person access
  • Ten Lunch Lady Bug tokens for in-person access
  • Ten Dinner Deer tokens for in-person access
  • Ten Brunch Bear tokens for in-person access
  • 125 Hangout Hawks tokens for virtual access

There are 108 one-on-one access tokens, each offering a unique experience. For example, courtside seats at sporting events, a wine shopping experience, and other one-to-one experiences with GaryVee. Other tokens include FaceTime calls with Gary; five tokens give holders access to events where GaryVee is a speaker. 

There are 22 competition tokens, allowing holders to compete with GaryVee in a pre-chosen game. Games include basketball, chess, bowling, and more. 

There are five Sorcerer Scholarship tokens, which investors must apply for to be accepted. If accepted, holders will receive mentorship from Gary Vaynerchuk.

Gift Tokens

Out of the 10,255 VeeFriends tokens, 555 are Gift Goat tokens. These tokens give holders three years of access to VeeCon. They’ll also receive a minimum of six physical gifts annually for three years. Each Gift Goat was hand drawn by Gary and can be verified on VeeFriends.com.  

Admission Tokens

Admission tokens make up the largest percentage of VeeFriends, with 9,400 tokens in total. Each character has 40 tokens with different rarity levels, the rarest of which is “Epic,” of which only two exist for each character. Other levels include very rare, rare, limited, and core levels. 

The tokens come with a three-year access pass to VeeCon.

There are forty tokens in differing rarity levels and a total of 9,400 tokens, making this category the largest within the VeeFriends NFT universe. The rarest category is “Spectaculars,” of which only one token exists. “Epic,” the next rarest, as only two.

Additional categories include very rare, rare, limited, and core levels that gradually increase in numbers. 

Who Created VeeFriends?

VeeFriends was created by Gary Vaynerchuk (GaryVee,) a serial entrepreneur and content pioneer. Vaynerchuk is the chairman of VaynerX, CEO of VaynerMedia, VaynerSports, and four-time New York Times bestselling author. He has an estimated net worth of $200 million. 

Gary was one of the first entrepreneurs to realize the potential of cryptocurrency and NFTs, first acknowledging the trend in 2014. He’s since launched VeeFriends and VaynerNFT, a project designed to help brands create their own NFT collections.  

VeeFriends was created by Gary to help pioneer the future of NFTs, with Gary stating that NFTs will change the way we interact online. 

VeeFriends Series 2 NFTs

VeeFriends Series 2 was released in April 2022 and included 55,555 tokens which originally sold for 0.33 ETH ($995.) Holders of Series 1 NFTs had the opportunity to claim a Series 2 for free, claiming the same character they already own. 

As the collection has more NFTs, GaryVee launched the collection at a lower price than the first to give more people opportunities to buy. The floor price for Series 1 is 5.96 ETH, pricing many investors out of the collection. 

The project was released in four mint periods throughout April:

Friends List (32,000 Supply) | 4/18/22

Series 1 Free Claim (10,255 Supply) | 4/18/22

Public Mint (10,000 Supply) | Date: 4/25/22

15 New Characters (3,300 Supply) | Date: 4/27/22

After release, many VeeFriends increased in value, for example, Adaptable Alien #13905, which sold for 42 ETH. This one-of-a-kind NFT featured an alien character with a Glitch Emerald background. 

How to Buy VeeFriends 

You can buy VeeFriends on several NFT platforms, including Bybit and OpenSea. 

To buy, open your platform of choice and connect your cryptocurrency wallet (MetaMask is a good option for this.) 

Make sure your wallet has the correct amount of ETH to complete the transaction and place a bid on an NFT or “Buy Now” to receive it instantly. Before you buy, check the transaction fees to ensure you have enough ETH to cover the whole transaction. 

Final Thoughts: Are VeeFriends A Good Investment?

Regarding utility, VeeFriends are one of the most valuable NFTs on the market. With each NFT, you’re guaranteed at least one benefit, from FaceTime calls with Gary himself to tickets to sports games. 

Series 1 of VeeFriends has continued to increase in value since its release, making them a good investment for all investors, even if they’re not interested in cashing in on their reward. Series 2 hasn’t seen the dramatic rise in value that the first collection had; nonetheless, the project has maintained its value and sold out, suggesting its value could increase in the future. 

However, VeeFriends aren’t necessarily for everyone. If having a chat with GaryVee isn’t your thing, other collections, such as CryptoPunks, offer great investments without the same utility. 

Over the next few years, NFTs with unused benefits will likely continue to rise in value as their number continues to decrease. Therefore holding an NFT with a redeemable reward may be a good investment. 

Can You Copy an NFT Onto a Different Blockchain?

Posted on by Anthony Georgiades

Things can get a bit complicated when simply “copying” an NFT from one blockchain to another.

As a refresher, a blockchain is a decentralized collection of financial accounts across a peer-to-peer network. It’s used to confirm transactions without needing a central governing body, allowing users to make transactions without a third party. 

NFTs (non-fungible tokens) are unique cryptographic tokens that exist on a blockchain and cannot be replicated. They come in the form of NFT art, music, in-game collectibles, and much more. 

Although someone can duplicate an image of an NFT, the code confirms the actual ownership of an NFT. Think of NFTs like a piece of art in a museum. Although the art can be replicated, the museum holds the official ownership rights of the original piece. 

Currently, the NFT market is dominated by Ethereum, with 95% of NFTs being on the Ethereum blockchain. However, many collectors are fed up with high fees and slow transaction times on Ethereum. 

As a result, alternatives such as Solana and Polygon are now becoming popular alternatives for collectors, with investors using bridge technology to transfer their NFTs from one blockchain to another. 

This article will look at how NFT ownership works, how to transfer an NFT onto a different blockchain, and how to use the ​​Polygon Bridge to transfer your NFTs. 

How Does NFT Ownership Work?

When buying an NFT, you acquire a token on the blockchain. You might experience this NFT as a picture of a monkey or something, but in essence, you own a string of programming. This token is unique and represents a particular asset. For example, if you purchased an NFT on OpenSea, you’d own a code that shows you own that particular asset. 

Once you own an NFT, you can use it commercially, for example, printing the art on a shirt or using the design in a video. However, this doesn’t stop other users from saving your image, with saving an image becoming a meme since 2021. 

Not all NFTs give you copyright and intellectual property rights, so checking the details before buying is important. 

How Do NFT Transfers Work?

Originally an NFT would stay on the blockchain it was purchased on. However, a new technology known as a blockchain bridge lets you transfer an NFT from one blockchain to another. 

A blockchain bridge, also known simply as a bridge, is software that lets collectors move NFT across blockchains. These third-party programs actively monitor blockchains to ensure a smooth transaction. 

For example, one such platform, NFTrade lets you move NFTs from one blockchain to another, with six blockchain networks to choose from. 

To start, set up an account and connect your wallet. 

Click My NFTs and choose the NFT you want to move from one blockchain to another. 

On the top right corner of the NFT page, click the three dots and select the new wallet you want to send the NFT to. 

Click Transfer NFT and verify the transaction to complete. You can then disconnect your wallet from NFT trade, and the selected wallet will now own the NFT. 

Another way to transfer NFTs across blockchains is through the Polygon Bridge. 

What is the Polygon Bridge?

Polygon Bridge is a cross-chain bridge between Polygon (formally Matic) and Ethereum that lets users transfer NFTs from Ethereum to the Polygon blockchain. Users can transfer all ERC tokens through a dual consensus procedure using this two-way bridge. This procedure uses a Plasma bridge and Proof-of-Stake bridge to complete the transaction and remain decentralized. 

How Does The Polygon Bridge Work?

When using the Polygon Bridge, no new tokens are created. Instead, tokens leaving a particular network are locked and minted through another network. The new token is then created, and the old one is burned. 

Here’s how you can use the bridge:

  1. Connect your crypto wallet (such as MetaMask) to the Polygon Web Wallet
  1. Sign your wallet through the extension
  1. You’ll be taken to the Polygon Bridge interface. Here you can choose your token (supported tokens include MATIC, ETH, ERC20, ERC721, ERC1155, and several others.)
  1. You’ll be charged a fee for this process which will change based on Ethereum traffic.
  1. If you want to transfer your NFTs back to their old blockchain, click “Withdraw” and choose the tokens you want to return to their old blockchain. 
  1. Once the transaction has been validated, your NFTs will be available to claim in your crypto wallet. 

Alternatively, you can also use the Plasma Bridge to transfer Polygon NFTs and transfer them to ETH, ERC20, or ERC721 tokens. Here’s how:

  1. Open MetaMask and click “Switch to Polygon.”
  1. Your Polygon details will show the Polygon network’s details.
  1. From here, head to the Polygon Bridge, click “Withdraw,” and repeat the process above. 

Three transactions will need to be validated when completing a transfer on the Plasma Bridge. 

The first is to withdraw an NFT from your Polygon Wallet. 

The second starts a 7-day challenge period, where an individual can challenge the transaction (this is for additional security.)

The third is to confirm sending your NFT to the wallet. 

Overall this process is more secure; however not as fast as the normal Polygon Bridge. 

However, some NFT holders may be a bit unsettled by the fact that their original NFT token is “burned” in order to create a new one.

Why Would You Copy An NFT Onto A Different Blockchain?

Although Ethereum dominates the NFT market, it’s far from perfect. One of the biggest issues with Ethereum is the transaction fees. Fees are extremely high, starting at $50-100+ per transaction, which is significantly higher than any other blockchain. 

In addition to this, the fees themselves can fluctuate dramatically. One day you may pay $50 for a transaction; the next, you could be paying over $150. This frustrates NFT collectors trying to budget or profit from their investments. 

Alternative blockchains such as Solana and Polygon have significantly lower fees. For example, the average cost of Minting an NFT in Solana is just 0.00001 SOL ($0.01.) Consequently, Solana and Polygon NFTs are growing in popularity, as shown by the growth in sales. Solana NFT sales volume hit an all-time high in the week ending Sept. 12, hitting almost $50 million (1.5 million SOL.)

Final Thoughts: Is Changing Blockchain Worth The Hassle?

As blockchain technology advances, so will the number of ways you can move an NFT onto a different blockchain. Currently, platforms such as NFTrade and Polygon Bridge are great ways to change blockchain. However, they can appear a little complicated for new investors. 

So, is changing blockchain the best option for you?

This will depend entirely on your reason for buying an NFT.

Changing the blockchain may not be worth the hassle if you’ve purchased an NFT to hold it for the long term. Instead, holding your NFT in its current wallet would be better, and hoping the value increases. 

However, if you frequently trade NFTs, then changing blockchain could help save you some money on network fees. It would also help speed up your transactions, letting you make more daily transactions. 

Before making a decision, make sure you do your research to understand the transfer process and avoid unnecessary fees. 

Pastel Investor Update

Posted on by Tiffany Behnam

State of Digital Assets & Web3: Pastel is Poised for Rapid Growth

Sustained Development, Relentless Partnership Pursuits, and Focus on Community

What’s below?

We provide an update on Pastel Network. We also evaluate the state of the broader global environment and its impact on technology, digital assets, and Pastel. We provide an outlook into the nascent Web3 industry and forecast where it is headed. Lastly, we share details on what Pastel has achieved so far in ’22 and what’s to come.

Enjoy.

State of the Market

Many of you are undoubtedly wondering if and how the digital asset and Web3 markets can recover from the current downturn. And what does it mean for Pastel Network & its native PSL token? It is important to first understand how we got here and keep mindful that digital assets are still tightly interconnected to both traditional risk-asset markets and broader economic conditions.

There is no question that we have swiftly transitioned away from a relatively frothy macro environment characterized by cheap money and low interest rates, which had enabled investors to justify paying unjustifiable multiples in order to gamble on the techno-rich future of tomorrow.

The irrational behavior of the average investor results in a failure to adequately calculate the cyclical nature of markets — particularly in a debt-based, non-free risk asset environment. Subsequent selection bias drives us to overlook inconvenient truths about systematic portfolio risk to the point until wen moon? remains the only relevant question.

Beginning in November of ’08 when QE-1 commenced, accelerating with quasi-imprudent policy inclusions over the last decade (see: Operation Twist), and culminating with COVID-19 era monetary and federal recklessness (e.g., Reverse Repos, crisis-era backstopping of corporate commercial paper, and outright helicopter money) global markets have witnessed unprecedented dovish policy catapulting the aforementioned phenomenons to new extremes.

Alas — all good things must come to an end. And as the fed’s arsenal dried up, repercussions of supply chain disruptions, energy consumption, global tensions, and fiscal stimulus collided in perfect sync resulting not only in a forceful ‘press-pause’ on the money printer but also leading to a 180-degree policy reversal.

This broader market correction started in the first half of 2021 with high-growth tech equities and began to disseminate through the latter half of 2021 across the broader public markets, finally spreading into private equity, corporate credit, growth assets, and of course crypto. To be certain, a combination of factors — from hawkish monetary policy to supply chain disruptions and global uncertainty — has undoubtedly caused a perfect storm of global market volatility.

As risk assets take a beating across the board, nothing is spared. While wen moon transposes to 75 vs 100bps, the market paints with a very broad bush and often the ‘baby is thrown out with the bath water.’ The result? Certain equities, bonds, or digital assets are temporarily mispriced, creating an opportunity. Periods of intense dislocations have historically proven to be fertile hunting grounds for value-oriented and patient investors.

Impact on Digital Assets and Web3

The downturn has been felt across the crypto market as well — hindered by a number of the same economic, monetary, and geopolitical issues. Stablecoins like Tether were strained as credit markets reacted to increasing benchmark rates, while de-pegging of UST caused lasting ripple-effects across the crypto ecosystem.

Cheap money and a self-fulfilling prophecy of stratospheric rises in token prices created a tight feedback loop of reckless leverage. A counteracting wave of margin calls and liquidations drove even the crème de la crème to insolvency (see: Three Arrows Capital), bringing down much of the market as balance sheets were wound down to nothing. Purported net-neutral market-makers moved to net-short positions and began to ‘take’.

DeFi and illiquid assets like NFTs at the right tail-end of the risk curve were arguably impacted the most. From just June to July, NFT sales value dropped by 26% to ~$647m — a monumental decrease from ~$4.8bn in as recently as January. Not surprisingly, fear spread, money withdrawals occurred, and nearly every digital asset including Bitcoin and Ethereum significantly decreased in value.

Should I Be Worried?

TL;DR: Be greedy when others are fearful.

In spite of the current downturn, Web3 and NFT technology are better positioned than ever to reshape society and the way consumers interact with the internet. NFTs are here to stay. Momentum will continue to build as projects continue to innovate and develop future use-cases — including applications in finance, healthcare, copyright, real estate, and many more as shown below.

NFTs and Web3 innovation is real and growing.

Projects are investing time, energy, and resources in innovation and refined utility. There is more building and development in Web3 than ever as projects and investors properly calculate just how massive the market opportunity is ahead of us. The Web3 market is expected to hit ~$42Bn by 2028 at a ~42.5% CAGR. Given the nascency of Web3 and the interconnected technological world, its rapid growth is unlike any new industry we have seen before.

Such growth is substantiated by the steep increase in developer, startup, and social media activity since inception as well as the healthy segmentation across key market sectors, including NFTs, Gaming, Metaverse, and DeFi.

Source: Electric Capital

Web3 continues to build momentum as the internet continues its massive evolution, and blockchain provides the fundamental foundation on which it can grow. As a result, VC activity in Web3 has increased significantly in 2021, and the capital invested will play a pivotal role in the success of Web3 companies throughout the current down-cycle.

Source: Silicon Valley Bank’s State of the Markets H1 2022 Report

In particular, Pastel Network is better positioned than ever to capitalize on current market conditions as it is focused on mass global disruption with a multi-year outlook — spending millions of dollars on continuous technological development and innovation during the current “crypto winter.” While others sit in fear of what’s to come, we remember that price is NOT a KPI. We remain more bullish than ever on our initial thesis. And we are using this time to continue to build revolutionary technology, recruit the best talent, secure large customers, and beat out our competition.

We continue to emerge as the preeminent protocol standard of Web3 with better software, higher on-chain transactions, larger protocol revenue, and bigger partners.

Our 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, 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.

Pioneering Web3

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.

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, layer-2 scaling solutions, and third-party dApps. Additionally, we had a number of layer-1 projects interested in utilizing our protocols on their own networks.

As such, we opened our technology to the world and focused all our efforts on becoming the infrastructure standard for Web3. We decoupled our protocols and features, modifying them to be standalone solutions easily capable of integrating across the ecosystem via Web3 open-APIs. Core features are as follows:

  • Sense Near-Duplicate NFT Detection Protocol: Deep-learning based system to assess the relative rareness between NFTs that can be used to detect scams / copyright infringement and provide certification of authenticity.
  • Cascade Protocol for Permanent NFT Data Storage: Fully distributed, permanent, and entirely redundant storage protocol. Pay once and store forever. Prevent centralized points of failure, monthly subscription maintenance, IPFS pinning, and 404 errors.
  • Pastel Developer Modules: Develop on-chain marketplaces or third-party applications directly on the Pastel blockchain, supported by a series of protocols, Web3 APIs, and RPC functionality to help builders get started.
  • Agile Smart Ticket Structure: A lightweight, flexible system of a higher-level series of tickets is leveraged to allow information to be written to and stored on the blockchain as a means of performing the necessary NFT-related information on the network.

So where does Pastel fit into the ecosystem after their path change?

Pastel Ecosystem Map

We continue to follow our core tenets of creating a better world for creators, collectors, and builders. And we are bringing our technology to the ecosystem. Pastel is the preferred partner for mission critical NFT/Web3 infrastructure. As a native layer-1, application-specific blockchain, we have been able to develop a framework that allows our core protocols — Sense and Cascade — to integrate seamlessly with all layer-1 blockchains, layer-2 scaling solutions, and third-party dApps. Additionally, shown in the diagram above, we are well-positioned to integrate and partner across the entire ecosystem. We have increased our footprint — all through tremendous technological innovation.

Current Achievements

Technical Developments:

Cezanne Mainnet Upgrade: We released a massive Pastel Chain upgrade — Cezanne Mainnet. It is perhaps the largest milestone for Pastel to date. Having been under development for over 8 months, Cezanne marks the beginning of a new chapter for the Pastel Network. What does this mean? In short, more on-chain transactions, more network usage, and more protocol revenue. This upgrade includes:

  • Improvements to NFT Minting and Collections
  • Support for NFT Transfers, Trades, and Auctions
  • Interchain account identification via PastelIDs
  • Cross-chain network access via Web3 APIs
  • Dramatic upgrades to Sense (our near-duplicate NFT detection protocol)
  • Enhancements to Cascade (our distributed NFT storage protocol)
  • User-friendly utility services via PastelUp
  • Improvements to network optimization and security

SmartMint Launch: We spent months developing a tool built for creators by creators. There is currently no simple solution for users to easily create smart-contracts and NFTs that allows for custom metadata, properties, and attributes while also guaranteeing permanent NFT data / metadata storage on a decentralized network.

SmartMint is a no-code NFT minting platform where creators can easily create, manage, and mint NFTs on their own custom smart contracts. The tool also provides creators with additional peace of mind as it leverages Pastel’s infrastructure for near-duplicate NFT detection (Sense) and permanent NFT data storage (Cascade). SmartMint enables creators to mint NFTs on Ethereum, Solana, Pastel, and more.

It enables creators to do what they love without the hassle and complexities of minting and deploying NFTs across various platforms and blockchains. Easily create smart contracts and NFTs in seconds via our no-code tool powered by Pastel’s advanced technologies for guaranteed NFT security, storage, and counterfeit protection.

New Partnerships:

Since opening up our technology to the ecosystem, we have closed on 8 partnerships this year with integrations currently underway. These integrations consist of a Sense and Cascade implementation at the core protocol level, NFT standard, or dApp level.

With the Cezanne upgrade here, we are now in a position to move our integrations from Testnet to Mainnet which we expect to take place in early to mid-Q4. What this means in short is that each time a new NFT transaction occurs on any of our partners’ networks, at least 2 transactions occur on Pastel. We anticipate this will equate to high on-chain transactions and protocol revenue per partner.

Partnership highlights include:

What’s Next?

We have a healthy pipeline of marquee and high-impact projects that we are close to securing in the near future. Our commitment is to bring revolutionary, mission critical technology across the entire ecosystem.

The future is bright for us. Pastel provides mission critical infrastructure to NFTs and Web3. Sense and Cascade are powerful solutions that have far more applications than merely digital art. Pastel Network was built for the future of NFTs and Web3. We are excited for what’s to come. The future of Web3 is now.

Target use cases of focus:

  • Emergent DeFi protocols that use non fungible standards — think Uniswap V3 leveraging ERC721 for LP positions — for metadata storage on our native storage layer (Cascade) and duplicate detection (Sense) to detect on-chain over hypothecation.
  • Legal documentation tokenized to provide higher levels of security must leverage Sense for authentication.
  • Medical records as NFTs will require highly scalable metadata storage solutions on decentralized infrastructure and duplicate detection technology to ensure records are not subject to tampering or copying.
  • Traditional companies like Getty Images can utilize Sense to protect against copyright.

Pastel is poised for this burgeoning world and we are excited to have you on board for the journey. All of us at Pastel would like to thank you greatly for all of your support thus far. As always, we are beyond grateful for your tremendous support! We are more driven and inspired than ever before. A big thank you from the entire Pastel Network family!

About Pastel Network

Pastel Network is a fully decentralized, developer-friendly layer-1 blockchain serving as the preeminent protocol standard for non-fungible tokens (“NFTs”) and Web3 technology.

Pastel allows for the development of third-party decentralized-applications (“DApps”) 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 cross-chain across various layer-1 blockchains, layer-2 protocols, or other third-party apps.

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.

For more information on Pastel Network, visit https://pastel.network/.

Originally Published on Pastel Network’s Medium

Pastel Network teams up with Ava Labs to bring NFT Security and Permanent Storage to the Avalanche Ecosystem

Posted on by Tiffany Behnam

Pastel Network is excited to announce that it’s teaming up with Ava Labs — the builders behind Avalanche. Ava Labs will collaborate with Pastel with the goal of providing Pastel’s Sense and Cascade protocols to Avalanche’s NFT ecosystem. This collaboration signifies the continued successes of both Pastel and Ava Labs, 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.

What is Ava Labs?

Ava Labs is the team behind the Avalanche — the fastest smart contracts platform in the blockchain industry, as measured by time-to-finality, and has the most validators securing its activity of any proof-of-stake protocol.

Ava Labs makes it simple to launch a number of different Web3 applications using blockchain technology–with highly scalable and efficient networks, customizable public and private blockchains, the capability to create any digital asset, and more.

What is Avalanche?

Avalanche is an open-source platform for launching decentralized applications and enterprise blockchain deployments in one interoperable, highly scalable ecosystem. Avalanche is the first decentralized smart contracts platform built for the scale of global finance, with near-instant transaction finality. Ethereum developers can quickly build on Avalanche as Solidity works out-of-the-box. an open, programmable smart contracts platform for decentralized applications. It also provides the foundation to scale to millions of validators with minimal hardware.

Additionally, Avalanche employs a novel approach to consensus to achieve its strong safety guarantees, quick finality, and high-throughput without compromising decentralization.

What does a Pastel Collaboration mean for the Avalanche ecosystem?

In the immediate term, we are excited to collaborate with Ava Labs to bring our mission-critical Web3 protocols to the Avalanche Ecosystem, which can be integrated seamlessly across all native layer-1s and layer-2 dApps. We will specifically work with Avalanche’s NFT dApps to integrate Pastel’s:

  • Near-Duplicate NFT Detection (Sense) → Deep-learning technology that assesses the relative rareness between NFTs to detect counterfeits, scams, or copyright infringement and provide a certification of authenticity.
  • NFT Data & Metadata Storage (Cascade) → Fully distributed, permanent and entirely redundant storage protocol. Pay once and store forever. Prevent centralized points of failure, monthly subscription maintenance, IPFS pinning & 404 errors.

Given the lightweight nature of these protocols and their interoperability as Web3 Open APIs, any Avalanche ecosystem member will be able to directly access Pastel’s near-duplicate NFT detection and store NFT metadata in a cryptographically secure, redundant, and distributed manner.

In the medium and long term, we will work directly with Ava Labs to develop fully decentralized and trustless interoperability. Initially, we can support functionality that allows users to call an API endpoint via RPC-URL to an open Pastel Client when compiling smart contracts on the C-Chain or during mint. Both of these would be done on the front end. When data is posted, they get the respondent URI which is stored as state variables. Ultimately, over time, Pastel will deploy its own subnet to allow for direct communication with C-Chain and other subnets along with cross-chain transactions (including asset bridging).

With this type of interoperability, Pastel and Ava Labs can bring decentralized NFT permanence and security to the entire ecosystem.

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 Ava Labs and along with other native blockchains or dApps communicate directly with Pastel via open Web3 APIs.

During NFT minting on Avalanche, secure and authenticated REST API calls pass 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 randomly selected SuperNodes operating on the Pastel Network. Smart tickets write and store the outputs to the Pastel blockchain, which is returned to Avalanche and included as additional Response fields in its NFT standard.

We are very excited to embark on this relationship and look forward to sharing more great news with the entire community.

If interested in learning more about Pastel and these revolutionary protocols, please see below:

Pastel Overview: https://pastel.network/

Pastel Docs (more technical): https://docs.pastel.network/introduction/pastel-overview

Sense Protocol: https://sense.pastel.network/

Cascade Protocol: https://cascade.pastel.network/

About Pastel Network

Pastel Network is a fully decentralized, developer-friendly layer-1 blockchain serving as the preeminent protocol standard for non-fungible tokens (“NFTs”) and Web3 technology.

Pastel allows for the development of third-party decentralized-applications (“DApps”) 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 cross-chain across various layer-1 blockchains, layer-2 protocols, or other third-party apps.

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.

For more information on Pastel Network, visit https://pastel.network/.

Originally Published on Pastel Network’s Medium

Cezanne Mainnet AMA Recap

Posted on by Tiffany Behnam

Pastel co-founder, Anthony Georgiades, talked all things Cezanne and answered all the community’s questions.

Initial Questions

Q1: To start off, can you give us a little background on yourself and the team?

A: Sure! I’m one of the co-founders and early investors of Pastel. I work on a lot of the day-to-day operations of the project along with some of the product management and go to market strategy. I first got involved with Pastel after meeting Jeff Emanuel, who is the co-founder and brains/vision of the Pastel Network.

Here are some bios on Jeff and our CTO, Alexey as well

Jeff Emanuel is the co-founder and CEO of Pastel. Prior to founding Pastel, he worked as a machine-learning and financial analyst in the hedge-fund world for over a decade. Emanuel has extensive knowledge about blockchain protocols, technology, and traditional finance along with a native understanding of rare digital collectibles communities. He studied mathematics at Reed University.

Alexey Kireyev is the co-founder and CTO of Pastel. For over 3 decades, he has worked as a developer and security specialist at a variety of Fortune 500 financial and technology institutions, managing hundreds of employees and building products serving millions of customers. Kireyev has deep knowledge of blockchain protocols, cryptography, and security standards and has contributed to open-source projects like Bitcoin Private, Z-Cash, and Dash.

We came together all the way back in 2018 because we saw there was a need for blockchain purpose-built for the NFT ecosystem. Ethereum and Bitcoin were not built for the size and volume of NFT transactions. Additionally, we saw that there were certain challenges plaguing the market (including scams, frauds, and asset loss) and nobody was trying to fix them. We decided to make the tools to make this NFT world better.

Q2: Can you give us a brief summary of Pastel Network?

A: Pastel Network is a fully decentralized, developer-friendly layer-1 blockchain serving as the preeminent protocol standard for non-fungible tokens (“NFTs”) and Web3 technology.

Pastel infrastructure enables existing layer-1 blockchains, decentralized applications, or third-party enterprises to protect creators and collectors. From digital collectibles & media to documents & applications, users and developers are able to certify asset rareness and truly store data forever. Lightweight protocols delivered by interoperable open APIs such as Sense and Cascade can be easily integrated across existing networks. A wide range of Web3 applications can be built directly on the Pastel Network, enabling developers to enjoy the scalable registration features, storage processes, and security of the broader ecosystem.

Q3: Before we dive into Cezanne, can you give everyone a little refresher on Pastel’s Roadmap up to this point?

A: We launched Pastel Network (the original mainnet) in January 2021. Since then, we have worked on 1) developing, refining, and thoroughly testing our mission critical protocols, Sense and Cascade; 2) creating a seamless approach to integrating Sense and Cascade across the ecosystem / conducting full-scale integrations with partners; 3) building SmartMint (which will be available to Early Access users in a couple of weeks); and of course 4) this massive Mainnet Upgrade — Cezanne.

Q4: Can you also give a little refresher on what it means to “upgrade to Mainnet”?

A: A Mainnet Upgrade is the introduction of new software changes, improvements, and features that are made at the blockchain level to continue to advance the overall network’s functionality.

Mainnet Upgrades enable all network participants and community members — such as SuperNode operators, miners, ecosystem partners, and end-users — to access the most up-to-date and cutting-edge technology.

As Mainnet Upgrades introduce drastic changes to the blockchain, they require tremendous testing, debugging, and implementation along with a majority consensus from participating network nodes and miners.

Q5: Now what is Cezanne Mainnet and why is it such a big deal to the Pastel team and broader ecosystem?

A: The Cezanne Mainnet Upgrade includes major upgrades to the Pastel blockchain and a number of improvements for our broader ecosystem.

Cezanne brings countless improvements to both end-user & NFT functionality — such as registration, minting, transferring, and trading — alongside unrestricted access to advanced protocols like Sense and Cascade via interoperable Open-APIs, seamless composability, improved token economics, and the most powerful protocol standard for the Web3 ecosystem.

Having been under development for over 8 months, Cezanne is our largest release to date and marks the beginning of a new chapter for the Pastel Network.

Q6: From the Cezanne Testnet medium article, it seems like development of Cezanne took a long time. Why so?

A: We knew this would be our most aggressive upgrade since we decided to build Pastel Network all the way back in 2018. The reason we spent 8 painstaking and tedious months building, refining, and testing is because of how complex and robust these new features are. Enhancing Sense and Cascade, alone, are massive undertakings. We have a team of world-class engineers and developers solving extremely complicated and technical problems to bring you this upgrade. We are very excited it is here!

Q7: Can you provide a high level overview of what the upgrade includes?

A: Sure! I’ll list out a few points:

  • Improvements to NFT Minting and Collections
  • Support for NFT Transfers, Trades, and Auctions
  • Interchain account identification via PastelIDs
  • Cross-chain network access via Web3 APIs
  • Dramatic upgrades to Sense (our near-duplicate NFT detection protocol)
  • Enhancements to Cascade (our distributed NFT storage protocol)
  • User-friendly utility services via PastelUp
  • Improvements to network optimization and security

Q8: Of the features from the upgrade you discussed, what are you most excited about?

A: On top of the enhancements to Sense and Cascade as well as the upgrades to runtime processes and security, I am really excited about PastelUp. PastelUp is a Pastel-Utility service that makes the installation of key infrastructure like WalletNode and SuperNodes extremely intuitive and user-friendly. This service’s features include install, start, stop, remote set-up, default settings, and various command options. It also supports better handling of operation termination and dd-server installation.

Q9: How does it benefit users and partners?

A: PastelUp is an extremely important infrastructure tool. PastelUp was developed with our community in mind as a means to support network participation, performance, and decentralization by making it easier for users to get up and running with Pastel services.

Q10: Last question before we open it up to the community. What is next? What’s the technical roadmap through the end of the year?

A: After Cezanne, we have a number of technical milestones we are poised to hit. The next big milestone is the launch of SmartMint — our no-code NFT minting platform. After SmartMint, we plan to do additional network upgrades and complete a number of bridges.

Community Questions

Q: Can you go into more depth on PastelUp? What does it really mean for potential network operators?

A: Yes — as discussed above PastelUp is a Pastel-Utility service that makes the installation of key infrastructure like WalletNode and SuperNodes extremely intuitive and user-friendly. This service’s features include install, start, stop, remote set-up, default settings, and various command options. It also supports better handling of operation termination and dd-server installation. PastelUp was developed with our community in mind as a means to support network participation, performance, and decentralization by making it easier for users to get up and running with Pastel services.

Q: What does the Mainnet upgrade mean for PSL and its utility partners? Should we expect to see more network usage? And linked to that: When will partners start working with the network? What are future partner plans?

A: This update will have the biggest impact on PSL that we’ve had to date. With the release, PSL is going to see a tremendous amount of increased usage and utility on the network.

Recall that PSL serves as the native, digital cryptographically-secured utility token of the Pastel Network. By running on a specialized, purpose-built blockchain, PSL is the foundation for accessibility. It is used to handle everything on the network including:

Core Operations: Generating a PastelID, Minting NFTs, Submitting Tickets, and Performing Open-API Requests like Sense and Cascade from third party partners

Stake: Operating a SuperNode and staking collateral in exchange for providing computational resources, validation, and security services

Governance: Stakeholders are able to initiate and vote on various proposals

What does this mean? The Cezanne Mainnet Release means that existing customers and partners will be able to start to conduct more on-chain transactions for various NFT-specific use-cases such as data storage via Cascade, counterfeit / copymint protection via Sense, minting, and more.

How does it work? Each time a Pastel partner wants to mint or create 1 NFT, they conduct anywhere from 2–5 transactions on the Pastel Network (sending data to Cascade for storage or run through Sense). Each of these transactions ‘costs’ PSL.

In short, this means more on-chain transactions, more network usage, and more protocol revenue.

To put it in perspective: If an exchange like OpenSea conducts ~20K of New NFT transactions per day, a Pastel x OpenSea integration means each time that a new NFT transaction occurs on OpenSea, at least 2 transactions occur on Pastel (Sense for near-duplicate NFT detection and Cascade for data storage / caching). This equates to an annual run-rate of ~15M transactions and ~$800K of protocol revenue assuming 2 transactions per NFT and no change to transaction velocity or $/TX.

Now extend this beyond one digital art NFT marketplace to vast ecosystems like Polygon and Polkadot, and across additional use cases like DeFi and the Metaverse. The identifiable serviceable market is massive.

Oh and one last thing — you can view the exact amount of PSL that is reqiured here: https://docs.pastel.network/basics/fees-and-burn.

Basically to store a 1GB file on Pastel forever would cost around 50000 PSL, and that is for one file.

Part of the fees are burnt (meaning that they are taken out of supply forever) and part of the fees are distributed to the registering SuperNodes (meaning they are earning protocol revenue for staking, validating transactions, and performing services like storing the data).

Discussed partners a bit above with regards to PSL use-cases — partners like OnXRP.com are literally waiting for this upgrade to start using our technology. We have a tremendous amount of future partner plans in the works, and some of the initial use cases and traction will only further support additional collaborations so we will achieve dramatic network effects.

Q: How has the Cezanne Upgrade enhanced Sense? I thought Sense was already thoroughly tested and refined.

A: Our Sense Protocol saw a dramatic facelift to make it even more powerful and robust against transformations through new methods of fingerprint analysis, statistical correlation, and rareness computations.

When a user registers an image as a new Pastel NFT or applies Sense via OpenAPI to an NFT from another blockchain, the Sense software analyzes the pixel data in this new “candidate” NFT and, using powerful Deep Learning models, generates a fingerprint vector (a set of ~1,500 numbers) which characterizes the visual structure of the candidate image in a very particular way. This allows the system to quickly compare this fingerprint vector to the fingerprints of all previously registered images on the Pastel Network, and for each one, precisely measure the visual similarity of that image versus the candidate image. This measure of visual similarity is robust to all sorts of transformations, allowing it to basically “see through” any superficial changes to an image. If any previously registered image is “too similar” to the candidate image, then this results in a lower “rareness score” for the candidate image.

We further modified how each WalletNode processes fingerprint data calculated by SuperNodes in order to dramatically decrease the time between asset registration and Sense analysis.

Through these method refinements and upgrades, we have more insight into image recognition and rareness than ever before. Sense provides users with the ability to define the relative rareness of their NFT with the highest level of precision. This release just made Sense even more capable.

Q: Is there any token burn or buy back plan?

A: There is a tremendous amount of token burn baked into the system. Please see above for PSL use cases and protocol revenue examples.

Upon core network operations, a percentage of each tx-fee is distributed to a cryptophically unspendable address, resulting in a reduction of the overall supply of PSL (“Proof of Burn”). Nearly every transaction results in burn such as:

  • PastelID Creation
  • NFT Registration
  • NFT Activation
  • NFT Trade
  • Open-API Sense Request
  • Open-API Cascade Request

Additionally, given some of the macro pressures on various digital assets such as PSL the foundation has discussed engaging in a token buy-back on the open-market. This would result in basically acquiring tokens and locking them up in our existing treasury to be used in the future for things like ecosystem partners, investors, etc. (Similar to a share buyback of sorts)

Q: Talking about the upgrade, with the upgrade how has Cascade been upgraded? Also how has Cezanne enhanced NFT functionality?

A: One of the largest updates for the Cezanne Mainnet Release is unrestricted NFT accessibility on the network. Users are able to fully create persistent identities (‘PastelIDs’) on the network which can then be used to create, register, transfer, and trade NFTs via our layer-1 protocol. This release is instrumental in ensuring that new users — whether they are individual creators, communities, or applications — can seamlessly mint NFTs for a variety of use-cases on the Pastel protocol itself using our advanced Smart Ticket structure.

Various Smart Tickets have been added, improved, and upgraded to support all of the necessary NFT-related information on the network, ensuring even more application flexibility and functionality. Stored in a simple and secure format, information is easily written, transmitted and subsequently signed by relevant nodes on the network. Various Smart Tickets implement all requirements to support:

  • User Information
  • Creator and Collector PastelIDs
  • NFT Minting
  • NFT Collections
  • NFT Transfers, Trades, and Auctions

The benefit of this system is that it provides a highly powerful and generic framework for encapsulating all sorts of structure, features, and functionality that can be easily leveraged by users minting directly on the protocol, third-party developers building entire decentralized-applications on the Pastel Network, or decentralized ecosystems seeking cross-chain composability.

In addition, the declarative and static nature of Smart Tickets means that there is no risk to end users from subtle bugs or edge cases in custom smart contracts. Instead, all the required logic for handling tickets and performing related computations is done in the node software itself, operating at the protocol level.

Q: Is Pastel’s SuperNode layer vulnerable to the same exploits that we have been seeing recently?

A: This is why Pastel is setup to have a lot SuperNodes staking a small amount of PSL vs. a small # of Vaildator nodes doing everything with staking via delegation. It is also why we do not support delegation at the protocol level, which encourages a handful of centralized validators controlling key state decisions like accepted blocks etc.

Many DeFi projects and bridges follow an N-of-M validator setup, meaning at least N of a all M validator nodes operating the network must sign a particular transaction for an ‘event’ (transfer, withdrawal, deposit) to occur. This is similar to how Pastel works with SuperNode tasks, but for many pure PoS projects there is a small number M and an even smaller N controlled by just a few central parties (defeats a lot of that ‘decentralization’ purpose).

One of the reasons why Pastel is so methodical in what we do and why things may seem to move slower sometimes is because it’s in fact far more methodical and planned out. We’re focused on client diversity and various implementation controls to prevent this — it’s harder / slower upfront, but sets up the foundation for a massively decentralized, trustless organization over the long-term. And our Validator (SuperNode) bridge setup keeps these same core principles in mind.

Q: What improvements did you make to network optimization and security with this Upgrade?

A: Speed, security, storage, and efficient runtime processes are core pillars for Pastel. We rolled out a variety of network upgrades to continue to ensure that the Pastel Network runs with maximum uptime and reliability:

  • Implemented connection pool w/ multiplexing support & peer-only authentication to improve communications in Kademlia
  • Integrated zstd compression for Smart Tickets written to blockchain
  • Converted scheduler from boost to std to replace boost threads with stoppable threads
  • Added gtest for thread services and upgraded scheduler tests
  • Modified write ticket from async to sync to prevent previous ticket error during block load / re-load (on valid blocks)

As always, security is our utmost concern and we made sure to further increase the robustness of our network in the Cezanne Mainnet Release. Certain improvements include:

  • Removed configuration of SSH clientConfig with insecure HostKeyCallback from various sources in sshclient.go
  • Cleared text logging sensitive data extraction
  • Added additional encryption to data returned by actions requiring SN PassPhrase logging
  • Supported enable/disable logging for P2P and MetaDB
  • Replaced Ticket encoding from b64 to ascii85
  • Included authentication of Kademlia’s peers to other peers when connections occur using a SuperNode’s PastelID as a certificate
  • Added additional validation of connection requests by Kademlia peers to confirm PastelID in handshake is generated by enabled SuperNodes

Cezanne Mainnet Upgrade is Starting TOMORROW — 8/5/2022

As a reminder: if you are running any existing clients please upgrade to the latest version prior to activation at blockHeight = 316300 (Tuesday August 9th at approx. 16:00 UTC).

Please use this version here: https://download.pastel.network/#latest/pasteld/

The new version requires at least 16GB of RAM and if you are running on Linux, must be Ubuntu 20.04.

About Pastel Network

Pastel Network is a fully decentralized, developer-friendly layer-1 blockchain serving as the preeminent protocol standard for non-fungible tokens (“NFTs”) and Web3 technology.

Pastel allows for the development of third-party decentralized-applications (“DApps”) 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 cross-chain across various layer-1 blockchains, layer-2 protocols, or other third-party apps.

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.

For more information on Pastel Network, visit https://pastel.network/.

Originally Published on Pastel Network’s Medium

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