My non-fungible token is my home

May 26, 2018 | Journal, Technology

Tokens are migrating to the mainstream. CryptoKitties has demonstrated how the blockchain can extend beyond money into real-world ‘things’. it doesn’t sound like a big leap to enable me to own my own digital cat, but it has the potential to be a whole lot more useful than digital currencies alone.

With CryptoKitties, I can have a cat and that cat belongs to me. If the developers stop supporting the front-end that enables me to look after my cat, it doesn’t change the immutable fact that the cat exists and is mine. I can use someone else’s front-end and my cat will waiting for me. Even better other developers can build other ways of interacting with my cat – my cat can have a hat and that hat belongs to the cat and not me – and the original developers can’t stop this from happening.

This conversation with one of the creators of CryptoKitties Dieter Shirley is good – he is a lucid thinker. Really liked the way he described the potential future for ‘non-fungible tokens’ (and his self-confessed struggle with coming up for a new word for ‘thing’ which must be one of the oldest word in any language).

Once we have things that can exist in their own right on a blockchain, then we have the basis for a whole heap of applications. Dieter talks about something that you earn that contributes to your status – for example, only people who attended a Kanye concert can get a certain token. Collect 10 of these tokens and you graduate to a gold token. This mechanism can send a strong social signal – it’s a form a digital self-expression the way our vinyl record collection used to be. This is exactly the type of mechanism that we are hunting for in regards to ‘reward-for-effort’ tokens in the cooperative space.

The biggest hurdles to mass market solutions are solving the currently very high technical barriers around on-boarding and know-your-customer compliance. And beyond that the scaling problems with ethereum. As Dieter explains ‘we’re running the network on the equivalent of an Apple IIe’… Ah, brings back memories, I loved my IIe.