NFTs on other blockchains: Where are we?

When you hear “NFT”, you are most likely already thinking of CryptoKitties, Decentraland or Gods Unchained. The common point of these Dapps is that they are all based on Ethereum blockchain. However, there are other blockchains that have developed solutions so that they can offer their users the possibility of using Non-Fungible Tokens!

We talked in a previous article about Genesis Spell use of NFTs on Bitcoin Blockchain. They recently announced they are migrating to Ethereum. Other projects have published their game on several blockchains: Blockchain Cuties which has chosen to release its game also on the EOS blockchain in 2019 or MegaCryptoPolis on Tron for 2020.

Between Neo, Vechain and EOS, more and more competitors are developing their own solutions to highlight the artists or video games in their own community. We wondered how advanced these new standards were and how they are actually used.

VeChain NFTs

VeChain launched its VIP-181 standard in May 2019 and there are already use cases for it.

Although this standard is still very young in the ecosystem, it already has a community behind it, notably artistic. The VeriArti platform has a very active development and already offers many features such as:

• A certificate of authenticity
• The ability to mine up to 20 NFT without having crypto
• Or, the possibility of buying the artworks in fiat

If you are an artist and are looking for a blockchain other than Ethereum to publish your works, we advise you to take a look at what VeriArti offers!

If you prefer to play a video game, one of the projects that is under development is Block Babies. The game presents itself as an RPG where you can build your team of babies to send on a mission or in combat. The rewards obtained will allow you to improve your team to progress in the adventure.

If you’re more of a board game genre, the 8 hours Foundation team is currently working with Playtable, an interactive table project that will use NFT to work.

Neo blockchain and NFT

Having been one of the first Ethereum competitors to develop its NFT standard (the NEO NEP-5) in March 2019, projects like Blockchain Cuties, 0x Racers or Warriors have turned to this blockchain to take advantage of the audience that was already there.

At the time, many Dapps were developed to offer new projects. Unfortunately, apart from the historical actors mentioned above who maintained their game’s development, the success was not met for the other and most of the projects are no longer online today.

One of the new hopes for Neo is the Phantasma project. First based on Neo with its SOUL token, Phantasma continues to work on its own blockchain to offer interoperability with other blockchains thanks to Sidechain solutions supposedly “unlimited”.

For the moment 3 Dapps have been released related to NFTs: 22 Racing Series, a wallet, and a NFT Marketplace.

Steem

The Steem blockchain already present in 2017, has created many Dapp using the fluidity of the network to operate. Yet it is only since the beginning of 2020 that the announcement of a NFT was made.

Splinterlands (formerly Steem Monsters), since the creation of the game, cards have been used with a unique identification. It is now possible to go through a feature of the game to convert his ERC-721 cards and therefore sell them on the secondary market as OpenSea.

Splinterlands is not the only project to have used this method to appeal to Ethereum users.
Hashkings, a management game based on growing plants, also offers the possibility of buying its land on OpenSea so that it can be used later in the game on Steem.

Since the acquisition of Steem by Tron and the recent community fork to Hive, we are looking forward to knowing how this blockchain will evolve. On the one hand, it is likely that the Tron teams will take advantage of Steem’s technology to develop new projects. On the other, the projects that are migrating to Hive are followed by their community, dropping Steem.

EOS and WAX

We talked last year about NFT on EOS and the dGoods standard that had just been developed. Technical difficulties, unfortunately, continued for EOS after that, not sending a positive signal to the rest of the community.

This prompted many teams to migrate to WAX, a blockchain created by William Quigley, the co-founder of Tether. The promise of this new player is twofold: a specialization in NFT and a possibility of backward compatibility with the EOS ecosystem. Just like EOS has its own NFT standard, CryptoLions developed and maintains the standard for SimpleAssets on Wax in September 2019.

Although Prospectors and 0xWarriors have decided to use the technology offered by Wax, other projects continue to emerge on EOS such as Chain Clash or Upland.

You will, therefore, have the choice between these two very similar blockchains:

• EOS which already has an NFT standard but which will require knowing which resource in your portfolio between RAM, NET or CPU will be used by the Dapp.
• WAX, a newcomer with the same characteristics as his big brother but who seems to favour a cloud-based wallet. Therefore, you can already exchange Wax assets on the SimpleMarket.

A long road is still ahead

Although we remain alert on emerging or promising projects, we firmly believe that the use of non-fungible tokens, like any other case of blockchain use, must meet an identified need. What all of the above projects have in common is that they already have a community of users to support them. 

Although the objective is to democratize access to blockchain-based games to as many people as possible, everyone is developing personalized solutions in their corner and trying to capture users from each other. 

“Alt-ethereum chains” are seen to be making a tradeoff with traditional blockchain values in order to bring high-quality games and their fan-bases are extremely fanatical but, after playing some of the games mentioned here, maybe they are on to something! The projects who continue to develop on Ethereum have been innovating and developing highly optimized solutions in order to build great experiences and Ethereum continues to remain king in the space.