Time & Minting
The introduction, adoption, and success of Cash Account exposed another instance of mirroring, where phenomenon evident in the world of physical collecting begins to appear in Quidd’s world of digital collecting.
More is happening than just the digital equivalent of revisiting one’s attic to retrieve old baseball cards and see how much they are worth.
As cash clearing prices rise in Quidd’s aftermarket and, more generally, the value of items in one’s collection are expressed in real-world terms, like USD, collector expectations change. Suddenly, Quidd’s OG collectors can fit their Quidd collections more squarely in the context of their everyday lives. A valuable gem from the past could help with rent one month or pay down student debt the next.
Chief among the expectation changes are notions of security, safety, and preservation. In the era of Cash Account, collectors are asking “my collection has real-world value, how do I protect it?”.
Enter NFTs and the blockchain.
First, it is important to note how Quidd got here. Quidd’s vector into blockchain is very different from others in the NFT space. Members of the Quidd team, unfortunately, did not buy BTC in 2012. The team is not made up of blockchain veterans.
As a result, Quidd is not working “from the blockchain on out”, looking for new applications of this revolutionary technology. Instead, for five years Quidd has cultivated an off-chain product, business, and community that has a new problem, one which can only be solved by the blockchain. In other words, Quidd will keep doing what it has been doing on the front-end, except the experience and proposition will be greatly enhanced by connecting blockchain to the back-end.
Interestingly and as an aside, the end state of this vector will likely overlap with blockchain purists that have come to digital collectibles and NFTs from an initial starting point of the technology. To use a metaphor, the nail looking for the hammer and the hammer looking for the nail will likely converge on the same spot: a hybrid solution where much of the front-end of an experience exists off-chain, in order for it to be accessible to “no-coiners”, but with a rich and varied on-chain back-end experience to extend and enhance it.
Second, in order to understand why the blockchain is the clear technical solution for meeting the new needs of Quidd collectors, it is important to first understand these needs in greater detail.
At any point, Quidd could disappear. While the risk of this occurring in the past and in the future has, naturally, ebbed and flowed, what is persistent and unchanging is the following: with each day that Quidd gets older and with each unit of time, energy, and money that Quidd’s community pours into it, the cost of disappearing increases.
In fact, the probability of this risk materializing has never been lower, but the cost of it materializing has never been higher.
Moreover, in the spirit of achieving parity with physical trading cards, even with Cash Account, digital collectibles are relatively lacking. When one buys a physical trading card, it is theirs. They own it and can do what they want with it.
Collector Activities | Winner |
Buy Participate in and buy new releases | Digital Open packs from anywhere 24/7 |
Complete Track and manage collections towards completion of goals | Digital Dynamic checklists and progress tracking |
Display Show-off precious items and receive feedback | Neither Nobody does this well today |
Edit & Affect Interact with your item in ways that could permanently alter it | Physical Digital preserves condition of item but should be mutable for collector |
Authenticate & Grade Prove scarcity and authenticity, and assess condition and value | Physical Better third-party services for cardboard today |
Store Long-Term Insure and vault with confidence of 100 years of custody | Physical Still more trust in long-term holdings for physical |
Sell & Profit Get instant liquidity at higher price points from bona fide buyers | Digital Trading of digital is 24/7, instant, and entertaining |
As a result, the needs and gaps that Quidd has identified are the following:
Permanence: the ability to own a collectible forever.
Agency: the freedom and ability to do what one wants with a collectible.
Freedom to Travel: the ability to bring one’s collectible where they want.
The blockchain, as a decentralized network of computers without a single governing organization, is the best solution for meeting these needs.
Third, Quidd’s approach to NFTs is best described as “minting.” Importantly, the term is a verb, which implies there is an entity that takes that action. With Quidd, it is the collector, not the company, that mints.
Minting of NFTs on Quidd is not necessarily something that is applied to newly-issued digital collectibles. Instead, it is a capability or service that can, at the collector’s discretion, be applied to years’ old vintage items. In this model, the best analogy is as follows:
Minting a vintage digital collectible that a collector owns on Quidd is like authenticating, grading, insuring, and vaulting a prized physical trading card.
That is, Quidd’s approach to NFTs is as a way for collectors to preserve the value of their items over the long-term. It is a decision taken by the collector, and it also may be a decision that is never made, as collectors may be fine with certain low-value items remaining off-chain, stored on Quidd’s servers.
In short, Quidd wants its collectors to own their collectibles forever, and Quidd wants to give them the agency to determine what *and where* that happens, which means not only a choice of collectible, but also a choice of chain. Like a physical trading card, it is the collector’s choice.
With Quidd, collectors can collect off-chain for fun, or mint on-chain for permanence or profit.
This approach, the company believes, is both beneficial and superior for the following reasons:
Zero Constraints For No-Coiners: buying a digital collectible on Quidd that can be minted as an NFT to that collector’s chain of choice requires no prior knowledge of crypto, no crypto wallet, not even a credit card. A traditional physical collector or typical super-fan can get their hands on their first NFT in 60 seconds or less. As a result, Quidd’s off-chain mintables makes continues Quidd’s legacy of always being “mainstream-ready.”
Accessibility, Sustainability, And Liquidity: collectors can buy, hold, sell, and even cash out of their digital collectibles on Quidd before minting on-chain, contributing to lower prices and greater liquidity when gas fees are high, and reducing environmental impact.
Chain Agnosticism: who is Quidd to know the best chain out there? How does one even define “best” in this case? Is it Ethereum, Flow, Binance Smart Chain, WAX, Harmony, Tezos, Solana, Near, Polkadot, Cardano? The individuals that do know the answer are probably staked in the success of the underlying chain…or worse yet, the ones that built it! In enabling as many custom smart contracts, per brand and per chain, as humanely possible, and leaving the final decision up to the collector to determine what matters to her and why she wants to mint is, Quidd likes to think, a superpower.
While still in their infancy, pilots of NFT mintables on Quidd run in April 2021 are beginning to bear out these advantages, supported by actual data.
Admittedly, there are some differences to Atari “drops” on WAX and on Quidd, including the count of sets released, the timing of each drop, any “crowding” that might exist with competitive drops, etc. that make a true apples-to-apples comparison difficult.
In spite of this, this data is a useful, early data point to inform Quidd that it is on the right path with NFTs.
However, this is not enough.
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