Last week we had the pleasure of co-hosting and sponsoring the NIFTY conference in Hong Kong, so we would like to share some of the highlights and our biggest takeaways in this week’s project update. Then, we’ll wrap things up with some recent updates in the Marketplace and SDK.

Highlights from NIFTY

Last week from July 24th to the 26th, we helped host the world’s first conference dedicated entirely to NFTs and blockchain gaming, and we had an incredible time!

We were thrilled with the number of attendees (over 800!) who traveled from around the globe to talk about NFTs and online gaming. Excitement for NFTs is building around the world and is beginning to span many different industries: we met entrepreneurs, academics, creatives, and engineers, all of whom were eager to learn from, educate, and inspire our growing community.

Beyond simply bringing all of these people together in one space, the conference included a full series of panels and keynote presentations from industry leaders and innovators. We also held our first Decentraland hackathon!

Panels and Keynote Presentations

Decentraland’s Chris Chapman hosts a panel on designing crypto games

NFTs and blockchain tech are rapidly and radically changing the way we look at digital content and online gaming. Never before have users been able to maintain ownership of their digital items. Never before have “rare” in-game items actually been rare.

We were lucky to have so many industry leaders come to present their work and ideas on how exactly these new technologies are evolving and how they’re reshaping the online gaming landscape.

We’ll post more video recordings of all of the presentations and panels in the coming weeks, but we wanted to start by sharing a few of them here.

Blockchain games provide a number of new opportunities (and challenges) to both developers and players.

Our Experience Architect, Chris Chapman (aka m3mnoch on Discord) sat down with Luna Cruz, Co-founder & Creative Director at Altitude Games, Yiyi He, Co-founder at Mix Marvel, Marguerite deCourcelle, CEO at Neon District, and Kyle Lu, Founder and CEO at DAPP.com to discuss some of these opportunities and challenges.

NFTs are both creating new avenues for artistic expression and giving creatives more control over the art that they create.

Watch this panel with Simon De la Rouviere, Engineer of Societies at ConsenSys, Ian Lee, Venture Fund Lead at IDEO CoLab Ventures, and Jehan Chu, Co-founder & Managing Partner at Kenetic to hear their thoughts.

Rare digital art in the form of NFTs present many new opportunities for branding, along with some interesting challenges related to intellectual property and licensing of digital goods

Check out the keynote presentation with David Yu, CEO at Ecomi to learn more.

Hackathon

The hackathon at NIFTY was a wonderful success! We were incredibly excited to see so many different creative uses for NFTs and the Decentraland SDK. We’d like to share the top three teams below, but if you want to check out all of the submissions, visit the NIFTY page on DevPost!

3rd Place: Cryptacious Creatures

CryptaciousCreatures is a blockchain-based augmented reality game that was designed and built to help teach users (especially kids) how blockchains work.

By exploring the real world as viewed through an AR app, players can find and collect different dinosaur fossils, represented by NFTs. Players can then take these fossils and combine them in a lab to create a new dinosaurs that they can play with and battle against one another, earning the player points, NFT tokens, and leveling up the dinosaur.

2nd Place: Mystery Box

Mystery Box is a platform that allows users to buy and sell NFTs in a safe, provably secure, and very transparent way. We’ve all seen how popular mystery boxes are becoming, and combining them with NFTs is a natural pairing.

Building a mystery box platform on top of Ethereum provides users with a trustless way to collect (and sell) their crypto-collectibles: MysteryBox lets users see all of their NFTs in one place, and browse through a list of mystery boxes containing different sets, or collections, of NFTs. Users can then bid on a box if they see something that they want, or they can create their own boxes to sell.

1st Place: Last of Ours

The team behind Last of Ours has built a crypto-collectible economy that digitally mirrors populations of real, endangered species. Their blockchain game empowers individuals to help make a measurable and positive impact on the health of these populations.

How does this work?

Users adopt animals in the real world by purchasing LAST tokens representing those animals and sponsoring monthly “maintenance” for the individual and its habitat. By sourcing data sets from organizations around the world, Last of Ours is able to guarantee an accurate representation of the health of these populations and ecosystems, reflected in their digital renditions. Players can use their LAST NFTs as avatars within Decentraland to help build awareness and demonstrate their support for the project.

The funds from the LAST tokens are given back to the organizations and the individuals out working in the field to help protect these different species and habitats.

What’s next for NIFTY?

We were thrilled by this first NIFTY conference, and want to thank everyone who attended to compete in the hackathon, give a presentation, or simply join in the discussion. We hope to help organize future iterations of NIFTY around the world, so stay tuned!

Other news from Decentraland

We’ll continue to share more recordings of the presentations and talks from NIFTY throughout the week, so keep on eye on our Twitter feed!

Now, for our regular updates from the Decentraland project.

We’ve almost finished all of the work necessary to release LAND estates. The team has just finished implementing the necessary smart contracts, and have begun the final stage of testing.

We’ve also completed the last development phase for LAND mortgages and are wrapping up our audits of the corresponding smart contracts. Once our audits are complete, we’ll begin testing mortgages before releasing them on the Marketplace.

The team has recently released version 4.0.4 of the SDK, which fixes several bugs in addition to adding secure support for Web3 via eth-connect, our TypeScript replacement for web3.js! For specific details, please check out the release notes in our documentation.

We’ve also established a framework for porting Redux games into the Decentraland SDK. For a step by step example of this process, read our latest developer tutorial!