Yuzhen Guo

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The first digital collection “Everydays. The first 5000 days” auctioned by the British auction platform Christie’s was closed in March of this year. The winning bidder obtained the “Non-Fungible Token” (NFT) for the work at a price of nearly 70 million U.S. dollars (69,346,250 U.S. dollars). The occurrence of this incident to a certain extent subverts the concept of the traditional collection market and has brought unprecedented impact to the entire art world and the alternative asset investment market.

What is NFT?

NFT means non-Fungible tokens, which are indivisible, irreplaceable, and unique. Different from ERC-20 tokens, because it is inseparable, it guarantees the uniqueness of each one from the code level. Therefore, NFT can represent physical assets and their ownership in a unique way on the blockchain. You can also understand it this way: there are no two identical snowflakes in the world, so you can use a snowflake to represent something unique in the real world, but the significant difference is that snowflakes cannot be circulated on the chain, so no one will use snowflakes to hype, although it is scarce enough in characteristics.

Use Cases

The current use cases of NFT are mainly concentrated in categories such as collectibles, artworks, games, and virtual worlds. But other categories such as sports, fashion, and real-world assets are also developing steadily.

In terms of sales volume, collectibles are currently one of the most popular applications of NFT. For instance, there is a market where NFT technology is used to create tokenized versions of celebrity athletes and celebrities. The fantasy football game Sorare allows players to collect “limited edition digital collectibles” of their favorite athletes from 100 football clubs, which has successfully attracted the attention of football fans. And now, this market is booming.

The application of NFT in the gaming industry is also very extraordinary. Gamers are the perfect target market for NFT because they are already familiar with the concept of the virtual world and currency. But unlike traditional games, NFT allows players to have real ownership of their digital assets, and thus creates a way for players to make money by creating and developing in-game assets, which gradually forms a new economic model. Players can learn encryption knowledge by playing games without taking any financial risks, and more importantly, they can earn ETH and NFT. A player in developing countries can earn as much as their monthly incomes by just playing games like Axie Infinity and Cryptopick.

For digital artists, one of the biggest challenges is to protect their works from copyright infringement. The emergence of NFT technology provides an excellent solution to this problem because they provide proof of ownership and authenticity. Starting in 2020, as more and more museums and galleries are forced to close due to the pandemic, many artists have now turned to NFT and online exhibition halls.

Challenge

Currently, there is a problem with the NFT issued on the two larger public chains in the NFT ecosystem, Ethereum and Flow. Although the cost of the NFT issued based on the public blockchain networks is almost zero and NFT itself cannot be modified, it also makes the cost of deceit negligible at the same time. Even though some NFT issuance platforms have pre-review, follow-up reporting, and other preventive measures, counterfeiters are still hard to completely eliminated.

Prospect

At present, the application spectrum of NFT is still relatively narrow, concentrated in the niche circles of games, encrypted artworks, and card collections. But I think the possibilities and potential of NFT are limitless. One of the obstacles to its large-scale application might be the lack of extensive education on blockchain technology and the world of encryption. This can be partially ascribed to the geek, rigid and technology-oriented natures of NFT and blockchain technology. Hence, to increase the acceptance rate of the general public, it is fundamentally necessary to further simplify it and make it easy to use. Besides, if the increasing interests from the capital market can greatly enforce the market supervision on NFT trading in the future, the liquidity of NFT in the global market will be substantially increased. At that time, I believe almost everything can be turned into NFTs, creating more interesting and exciting use cases.

Resources:

Beeple’s masterwork the first purely digital artwork offered at Christie’s. (2021, March11). CHRISTIE’S. https://www.christies.com/features/Monumental-collage-by-Beeple-is-first-purely-digital-artwork-NFT-to-come-to-auction-11510-7.aspx

Clark, M. (2021, August 19). NFTs, explained: what they are, and why they’re suddenly worth millions. The Verge. https://www.theverge.com/22310188/nft-explainer-what-is-blockchain-crypto-art-faq

https://sorare.com

https://marketplace.axieinfinity.com

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Can you imagine the possible image of a future robot? What does it look like? The T-1000 from Terminator 2? Transformers from Cybertron? Or an agile robot with unprecedented mobility like those developed by BostonDynamics? Indeed, most of the human technologies are made from steel, plastics, and chemicals, so are robots. But the story has changed since advances in computational search and 3D printing made manufacturing physical instances possible. In 2020, researchers from the University of Vermont and Tufts University engineered living robots, called Xenobots, using skin and heart cells from frogs. Yes, they are the moving tiny blobs in the picture.

How were they created?

They are the products of computational design and biological manufacturing.

The first step of computational design is the evolutionary algorithm. The evolutionary algorithm creates multiple generations and thousands of candidate solutions for new design forms, and simulates each design in a physics-based virtual environment, and automatically assigns performance scores. The lower-performing design will be deleted and overwritten by a randomly modified copy of the higher-performing design. Repeating this process can yield diversified and high-performance design solutions. Then, performance filters are used to judge and delete the design that does not meet the requirements. There are mainly two filters. The first is “Robustness Filter”, which is mainly used to judge and delete those designs that cannot resist the chaotic and complex physical environment through noise resistance. The second is “Build Filter”, which is mainly to judge and delete designs that are not suitable for the current biological construction method.

*Designing and manufacturing reconfigurable organisms*.

Biological manufacturing comprises stem cell culture and micromanipulation. First, scrape the skin cells and the early cells of cardiomyocytes from the Xenopus embryo at the blastocyst stage, separate them into single cells, and then incubate the different cells in a layered stacking manner. Then the researchers used tiny tweezers and electrodes to manually shape the gathered tissue, and manipulate it under a microscope to shape it into the approximate shape designed by the computer.

What can they do?

Don’t be fooled by their appearance, they are genuinely advanced machines. “These robots can move, explore, and collaborate on their own,” said the research team. They can move on their own without additional nutrition, exploring in a watery environment for days to weeks. Even if they are cut open, they can heal automatically. What is amazing is that these simple cellular robots exhibit surprisingly complex behavior characteristics, such as circling together or herding cellular debris into piles. They have a hollow structure, which means they can carry some objects (such as drugs) to designated areas, and these characteristics and functions undoubtedly have high research value and prospects in the fields of medicine, biology, chemistry, etc.

Will this be another Pandora’s Box?

To attract eyeballs, many media have rendered an atmosphere of fear in their reports, and people felt that this biological design will eventually destroy humans, just like in many science fiction movies. I can hardly agree. Please do not underestimate the greatness of the creator of nature. The simplest life in nature can go up to Mount Everest, down to the Mariana Trench, enter the edge of the earth’s atmosphere, and even parasitize in the human body to coexist with us. Their complexity is not in the same order of magnitude.

We do not need to be afraid of this breakthrough in scientific research. We should realize that every major discovery in human history has greatly promoted the development of human civilization, and this time will not be an exception. Perhaps, there indeed are crazy scientists in reality, just like the villain characters in Spiderman movies, who want to use their research findings to do some crazy things. This brings me to the last point I want to make. We need to conduct reasonable supervision of scientific research under the premise of complying with the law and try to build a new ethical framework to deal with possible subversive ethical threats.

Source:

Kriegman, S., Blackiston, D., Levin, M., & Bongard, J. (2020). A scalable pipeline for designing reconfigurable organisms. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 117(4), 1853–1859. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1910837117

https://www.wired.com/story/xenobot/

https://www.cnet.com/news/tiny-living-robots-made-from-frog-cells-could-soon-swim-inside-your-body/#ftag=CADf328eec

https://www.uvm.edu/news/story/team-builds-first-living-robots

https://cdorgs.github.io