NFT support is coming to QRL - Calling on all NFT artists who wish to be part of the genesis run to apply!
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Calling all NFT artists to be first NFT project launched on the QRL Blockchain
While the community has been busy with the Winter Hackathon, the QRL team has been hard at work developing native post-quantum secure NFTs - so far a first in the industry. Today we’re happy to announce that there’s now preliminary support for NFTs on the QRL blockchain in devnet.
With a full NFT genesis launch expected next year including proper tooling and documentation support, we’re calling for all NFT artists who would like to be part of this seminal moment to contact us at info@theqrl.org for a chance of being selected to be the first NFT project launched on the QRL Blockchain.
For those interested, please give links to previous work as well as a short bit of what you have in mind for the project.
About NFTs (Non-Fungible Tokens)
What are they, exactly?
Simply. Non-fungible means something is unique in kind.
Non-fungible commodities include things like art, diamonds, land, baseball cards, snowflakes, and houses. Each diamond has a different size, weight, cut, and impurities that make it unique. Land is unique by its location and geography. There are no two snowflakes that are the same, even ones created in a lab. This uniqueness creates assets in the same class that aren’t interchangeable in value.
Examples of fungible commodities would include QRL or fiat, which is interchangeable in value with itself. It is possible for fungible assets to become non-fungible in a variety of ways, such as if they’re sequenced with unique numbers, making it possible to distinguish them.
The token aspect is just to say it’s a digital representation of a non-fungible commodity, which gives it the additional property of being capable of being owned and traded on the blockchain.
The Non-Fungible Token movement can be considered an evolution of Non-Fungible Commodities applied to blockchain.
Special note: To some extent, fungible assets may have some non-fungible properties. QRL, Ethereum, and Bitcoin all have unique transaction histories. The main driving property of whether something is fungible or non-fungible is its ‘use value’.
The importance of identity and ownership in the face of the looming threat of quantum computers
Blockchain allows for self-governance of your own assets and the transmission of those assets to third parties in a trustless environment. This extends to NFTs as well, and allows for the proliferation and trade of any non-fungible digital asset natively. With some extra steps, and in some cases a trusted notary, non-fungible physical assets as well.
By governing your own assets (through the ownership of the private key), you have the ability to send, trade or otherwise transfer those assets to be governed by someone else (or entity). Brilliantly, this makes it possible to facilitate useful governance structures around NFTs as well, such as through the use of multi-signature transactions, or fractional Non-Fungible Tokens to allow owning ‘shares’ in NFTs.
The downside is if someone gets a hold of your keys, they can transfer the assets to themselves and thereby own that non-fungible asset. The reality of this issue compounds when you think about it in terms of real-estate, diamonds, cars, land, and other such assets. It’s important for anyone with governance over NFTs to properly secure their wallets, but in the future, that’s not going to be enough.
This is because sufficiently powerful enough quantum computers will allow people to steal NFTs on blockchains which are using quantum vulnerable cryptography by deriving the private key from its public key (emitted when making a transaction). These blockchains includes any blockchain reliant on ECC, which includes Bitcoin, Ethereum, and almost every other blockchain currently in circulation.
When a sufficiently powerful enough quantum computer is the subject of much debate, but with so many industry leaders now involved with quantum computing in some capacity, quantum computing progress has been accelerating at an accelerating rate.
More about this can be read on our page “The future of post-quantum resistant blockchains”
Use cases for Quantum Safe NFTs
With security as a prerequisite to any system that hopes to carry significant value, we can look at some of the use-cases for quantum safe NFTs, which includes:
- Digital art: One of the most prominent use-cases seen for crypto, and doesn’t really need to be mentioned.
- Real-estate: Land and titles can be notarized and transferred on the blockchain.
- Fractional real-estate: It’s possible to break apart a non-fungible asset into separate equal parts. A popular example is fractional real-estate, but this can be applied to anything where a group of people would like to own a trade fractions of an asset.
- Gaming marketplaces: Items can be traded in and out of games for other NFTs or any asset really, bridging the game world and decentralized marketplaces.
- Virtual reality: By segmenting portions of a game into different parcels, it’s possible to buy, sell, and otherwise trade what amounts to digital real estate or other created items.
- Games: It’s possible for NFTs to be defined with extra metadata including the stats of elements in games. These stats can be everything from cards to weapons, characters, or other assets.
Where we’re at and what’s left
We’ve successfully implemented a good portion of being able to create NFTs on the QRL blockchain on devnet, but to make this a reality, we’ll be looking to expand the tooling to make the creation of NFTs something easy and streamlined for anyone to get involved.
This includes things like:
- Adequate documentation and tooling to create NFTs
- Guides on facilitating your own digital-art NFT project with the QRL blockchain project
- More interfaces to view and interact with digital NFTs
Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) are great for creating unique digital assets, but they are difficult enough to deploy and manage in blockchains that exist today, much less ones striving to be future-proof. For this reason, NFTs deployed on QRL will not only be ready for the future, but can be made without compromising ownership & provenance. One of the aims of QRL NFTs is to allow for the easy deployment and management of non-fungible tokens as assets on the QRL blockchain, securely, and without compromise.
We look forward to sharing ongoing developments over the coming months not just on this, but also on progress towards Proof-of-Stake, smart-contracts, EnQlave, our developer expansion, and more.
Want to learn more?
Give our website theqrl.org a browse or join us for a chat in one of our many communities on Telegram, Discord, Reddit, Facebook, or KakaoTalk.
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Want to dig into our audited, MIT open-source, enterprise-grade codebase? Check out our github at: https://github.com/theQRL/QRL/
