The uniqueness of digital assets allows them to be used to prove the ownership and scarcity of digital items, thereby providing new revenue streams for digital artists and creators. Blur has surpassed Opensea by combining various methods such as airdrop incentives, pending order incentives, self-built trading markets and aggregators. Although Opensea was the most liquid NFT market before this, Blur's comprehensive strategy has allowed it to gain more and more attention in the market. Currently Blur's liquidity solution is the best, and the combination of its marketplace and aggregator provides users with a wider range of choices. This is very important because in the NFT market, liquidity is often the key, and Blur's liquidity solution has proven to be very reliable.
In response to the onslaught, Opensea reduced its handling fee to 0%, showing its seriousness to its competitors. However, this strategy could negatively impact Opensea's sustainability. Optional royalties are another strategic area. This allows Blur to offer more options in the market, thereby attracting more users. The subdivided Marketplace hardly has another chance. Although there are still many opportunities in the NFT market, market segments like X2Y2, LooksRare, and Uni V3 (Genie) are hard to come by. This is because these markets are already occupied by large companies and strong competitors, and new entrants will face great challenges.
This time, COSO chose to make efforts in different fields
Domain One: Soul Binding
Soul-bound tokens and naming services have always been popular ways of representing identities on the chain. They all rely on NFTs to carry identities and represent their unique characteristics and properties. SBT was originally proposed in EIP-4671 to create a non-transactional Token as a proof of possession and achievement. It was developed as a certificate issued by an institution and cannot be revoked or transferred. However, EIP-4671 failed to become a standard on Ethereum and was shelved. It didn't dampen SBT's enthusiasm, and EIP-5192 proposes a minimal interface for soul-bound NFTs to standardize SBT's wallet implementation and transfer functionality. It presents the easiest path to the SBT specification interface. This is currently the current standard for SBT on ERC. Through standardization, we will see more developers using SBT, and the creation of more SBT-oriented applications and utilities. COSO has been increasing support for SBT and its ecosystem, and at the same time we expect that the zkID technology stack, the technology stack for on-chain privacy-preserving identities, will be ready soon and in the COSO standardized pipeline.
Field 2: NFT for richer content
Currently, NFTs need to rely on external storage to hold PFPs or other media, which leads to possible interoperability issues when displaying and using NFTs in various metaverses and marketplaces, as linked files may exist in different formats or not use. COSO believes that in the future, NFT itself will be able to accommodate richer content for use in any intermediary platform and multiverse. COSO will use richer content to improve the first step of NFT: supplier metadata extension. It simply adds a new field to NFT metadata so that vendors are free to store app-specific data, and NFT marketplaces and metaverses can leverage NFTs by rendering custom metadata. For example, COSO might display PDF files as e-reader formats, 3D model assets as game formats, etc. Embedding various assets in different contexts directly into NFTs can create a smoother and more fulfilling user experience. COSO always believes that richer content can completely enhance the NFT experience. It creates a larger surface area for the user experience of NFTs and can lead to more innovations and use cases.
Field 3: NFT links more real assets
An important step in realizing the widespread application of blockchain is to connect the real world and the blockchain world. Digi-physical is a common term used to describe the combination of digital and physical experiences and assets. NFTs are a promising vehicle for digital-physical product and service relationships. COSO proposes an interface to represent physical assets through NFTs, and has the ability to generate or restore accounts. It links NFTs to unique physical assets to enable applications related to physical sensors and assets. The specification is a strong indication of the full integration of physical assets into blockchain cryptographic schemes, although more work is needed to achieve full physical layer and blockchain integration.