Winner Announcement: NFT Idea Challenge 2020

DEMOS is excited to announce the winners of NFT Idea Challenge 2020 which held on 1 December 2020 and ends on 31 December 2020.

First of all, we would like to send a big thank you to everyone who participated in our first Idea Challenge and tried their best to give the most creative and valuable answer!

We carefully assessed every application that we have received and the winners of the Idea Challenge are as below:

The Winners

1st: 300 ICX

• Idea Name: Visita
• Idea Description (250 words): The purpose of the NFT is to create an asset that can serve as a digital souvenir while traveling. It will be composed of beautiful artworks and music from the country they visited. It can also be used to promote the culture, beliefs and asset of the country.

Judges’ comments: Visita shares similar aspects with NBA Top Shots, which are digital sports collectible cards, but felt that the use of non-fungible tokens in the souvenir field seems special. The value of digital goods has been increasingly accepted by the wider audience, and have already been experimented with in concerts and sports events through sales and/or distribution. We see the potential of a new marketplace centered around various souvenirs.

2nd: 200 ICX

• Idea Name: Kasō sekai token
• Idea Description (250 words): Imagine creating a free roam game that has its own NFT that can be used in Virtual Reality. People can sell products, buy, and own items they desire on the game. It can be a virtual world where they can have the freedom to do and to buy whatever they want while collecting NFTs.

Judges’ comments: Kasō sekai token reminds us of projects such as The Sandbox and Decentraland. Platforms such as these depend heavily on the game item generation system & UX, as well as the attractiveness of the contents supplier. Fields such as this has long been developed, including examples such as Second Life, and has the potential to develop and scale enormously when paired together with VR/AR technologies.

3rd: 100 ICX

• Idea Name: Astax
• Idea Description (250 words): Astrax, a free roam game composed of different galaxies where users can explore, search, and finish quests to become the best player. They can build factions, buy different spacecrafts, weapons and gears. They also need to gain experience to improve their skills.

Judges’ comments: Astax seems to be similar to various blockchain games such as My Crypto Heroes. These games revolve around the struggle to win scare resources and RPG user experience, and will likely require a great game experience or a strong fanbase which are drawn to the particular non-fungible tokens, and the expectation and competition is relatively high in this particular field.

An email with information about the reward will be sent out to the winners soon, so please check your inboxes.

Judges’ Special Comments

One of the dominating trends in the blockchain space in 2020 has been decentralized finance (“DeFi”) which resulted in a significant capital and attention inflow. At the same time, the heightened interest, and the resulting gas price jump, has caused scalability issues to surface, and the need for Ethereum’s shift to PoS network, layer 2 protocols, private chains, side-chain and cross-chain interoperability functionalities have materialized. In 2021, it is expected that off-chain functionalities will increasingly be replaced by on-chain solutions, and that various blockchain networks will slowly mesh into an interoperable ecosystem. For this Idea Challenge, bulk of the ideas were related to content business and non-fungible tokens, For the next event, I am looking forward to receiving submissions which aim to address scalability issues, including but not limited to layer 1 integration between Ethereum and ICON mainnet.

On the other hand, I was thrilled to review submissions which take advantage of the technical aspect of the non-fungible tokens. I think such submissions would benefit from integrating non-fungible tokens with intellectual property and thus devising platforms designed to address the issues specific to IP and secondary marketplaces. Regarding which industry category best fits with non-fungible tokens, the Coincheck team understands that various proof of concepts are currently being developed and tested worldwide, and we would like to offer various non-fungible tokens and thus more investment opportunities and options to our users.

Kensuke Amo, Executive Director of Coincheck

I believe that the fundamental value of non-fungible tokens relate to the potential to possess and distribute data which has scarcity value. The Web 2.0 world is limited by the ownership and distribution of data within the individual platforms. I expect the Web 3.0 world to enable users to freely own and distribute data across a myriad of platforms and thus create additional data use cases otherwise impossible in the Web 2.0 world. I have therefore reviewed the viability of the idea submissions keeping in mind the fundamental characteristics and values of non-fungible tokens.

Seihaku Yoshida, CEO of Hashpalette