The beautiful coastal city of Sibenik, Croatia, was home to “the world’s first NFT-enabled Web3 festival”. Billed as an ‘experience’ rather than a conference, Croatia Blockdown ‘22 hosted speakers from such Web3 enterprises as Theta Labs, OneBit Digital, Neo and many more. Topics included scaling and interoperability in Web3, token utility and the ‘smart economy’.

Web3 scaling and interoperability 

Perhaps the biggest hurdle in Web3 is scaling protocols. As of now it is not possible for a user to transfer their avatar and digital assets from one virtual world to another. To combat this problem, two ecosystems have built their own networks: Moonbeam is built on Polkadot (DOT) and Evmos is built on Cosmos (ATOM). 

Popularly known as the #EthereumKillersRace, Moonbeam and Evmos aim to expand the reach of Ethereum-based applications to users who are barred access due to high gas fees. Projects such as Clipper, Rubik, NovaDAO and DexPad.IO are reaching new audiences via these ecosystems. This makes Layer 1 easier than ever before because it is an entirely new fork that is not overcrowded with users, as Ethereum 1 is right now.

Token utilization

More clarity will emerge about the real world applications of NFTs. NFTs are largely misunderstood because of the spotlight on million-dollar pixelated punks and bored ape images, but NFTs and tokenization are so much more than this. Blockdown showed us how blockchain technology will become much more utilitarian.

Tokenizing has allowed for so many things: finances and payments are not dependent on intermediaries; access to gaming, art and communities through NFT-authentication; global audience reach for brands and charities; DAOs can collect resources and fund projects in a trustless ecosystem while keeping investors anonymous. 

Smart economy

Using an NFT to login and access a community in Web3 is nothing new. What is new is using that same singular NFT to access multiple communities across Web3. This is known as interoperability and it is now possible with projects like RMRK (pronounced “remark”), self-styled as “a set of NFT legos that are standalone but allow the NFT creator to build a system of arbitrary complexity when putting them together.”

RMRK operates on Polygon’s canary network without parachains or smart contracts. Able to grow with a brand or as a game expands, RMRK is a multi-chain phenomena allowing gamers to experience the game outside of the game itself. Similarly, users can now lend and borrow NFTs with reNFT, a platform that sends NFT owners collateral for lending out their token to gamers.

All of these have their pros and cons and, to be sure, are still maturing in terms of their technological capabilities as well as market application. In the near and distant future, NFTs will become a bedrock of digital life not unlike WiFi today. As for NFTs today, Blockdown revealed that as digital assets go, they hold a lot more utility than most people are aware of.