CryptoPunk to be split into pieces: Nifty Newsletter, Aug 3–9

Published at: Aug. 10, 2022

In this week’s newsletter, read about Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin’s proposal for stealth NFT ownership. Check out how a CryptoPunk will be split into thousands of pieces to enable smaller investors to access it, and how the NFT play-to-earn game Axie Infinity plans to double down on South Korea despite regulatory hurdles. In other news, learn about how NFT storage works according to two NFT experts. Lastly, check out how a Redditor turned criticisms of the NFT space into NFTs.

Vitalik Buterin proposes stealth addresses for anonymous NFT ownership

Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum, proposed what he dubs a “low-tech approach” to adding privacy to NFT transactions. According to Buterin, smart contract wallets can add a method that allows senders to mask their addresses to third parties.

In a tweet, Buterin wrote that, for example, one can send an NFT to an address like vitalik.eth without anyone except the new owner being able to see where the NFT was sent. However, with this method, senders need to have enough Ether (ETH) to pay five to 50 times in fees.

A slice of the punk: CryptoPunk NFT to be split into thousands of pieces

With NFTs becoming more expensive, fractionalization is becoming a solution that lets smaller investors have a share of popular NFTs like CryptoPunks. Through a new campaign, a Punk’s ownership will be in 56,000 wallet addresses that signed up to get a share.

This effort gives NFT users a chance to participate in an NFT collection that was once out of their reach but has now become more affordable through fractionalization. The campaign is facilitated by Unique Network, an NFT infrastructure built on top of Kusama and Polkadot.

Axie Infinity looking to ‘double-down’ on the South Korean market

Jeffrey Zirlin, co-founder of Sky Mavis — the company behind the NFT play-to-earn game Axie Infinity — spoke to Cointelegraph at the Korea Blockchain Week. He said that despite regulatory hurdles in South Korea, the team is still looking at the region and how the team can tailor the game to serve its players in the area.

Zirlin noted that their team wants to “double-down” on the region. He said that as Koreans don’t really speak a lot of English, there are barriers to Korean players getting their hands on the game. Because of this, the Sky Mavis co-founder said the company wants to localize.

Nonfungible tokens don’t live on the blockchain, experts say

In a Cointelegraph interview, NFT experts Jonathan Victor and Alex Salnikov talked about the misconceptions surrounding NFT storage. According to the two, NFTs are not stored on the blockchain but on other decentralized storage platforms, such as the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) and Filecoin.

Salnikov explained that because NFTs are a relatively new concept, there are many people who don’t know how NFT storage works. Clarifying the topic, Salnikov said that the NFTs that are in a user’s wallet only point to the file that it represents. The actual file, called the NFT’s metadata, is stored somewhere else, according to the CEO of NFT marketplace Rarible.

Worthless JPEGs: Redditor turns NFT criticism into NFTs

In a mission to mock NFT critics, a Reddit user who goes by the name u/busterrulezzz introduced his NFT collection in the r/cryptocurrency subreddit to entertain community members as critics rejoice in the bear market.

Compiling a collection dubbed “Worthless JPEGs!,” the Redditor curated quotes from the internet along with lines from prominent critics, such as Warren Buffet, Peter Schiff and Dan Olson, minting their anti-NFT sentiments into NFTs.

Thanks for reading this digest of the week’s most notable developments in the NFT space. Come again next Wednesday for more reports and insights into this actively evolving space.