Several big news came out of the NFT market over the weekend:

According to BeInCrypto, in the past few days, transactions of the popular NFT project CryptoPunks (CryptoPunks) have surged. In the past 24 hours, the trading volume of Cryptopunk soared to $46 million from Friday to Saturday morning, an increase of 667%, which was nearly double that of the second largest NFT project, Axie Infinity (AXS).

According to previous news, Gary Vaynerchuk, an investor in well-known technology companies such as Uber, Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr, paid 1,600 ETH (worth $3.7 million) to purchase the No. 2140 cryptopunk. This is the fourth highest price ever paid for a cypherpunk. A few hours later, Cypherpunk No. 5217 was bought by others at the third highest price of 2,250 ETH (worth $5.4 million).

As of writing, the lowest selling price of a single cypherpunk has exceeded 29 ETH.

Obviously, more and more traditional investors and big names in the technology industry are starting to enter the NFT space.

To participate in the NFT field, we must first understand the price and purchase method of NFT. Today I will specifically introduce to you how to purchase NFT tokens.

There is a fundamental difference between NFT tokens and other well-known DeFi tokens or public chain tokens: because each NFT token of the same type is unique, the price of each token may be different. For example, CryptoKitties (CryptoKitties), each CryptoKitties is different due to its rarity, so the price of each cat will be different.

Therefore, the prices and purchase methods of many NFT tokens are different from what we are familiar with before.

Let's take BAYC, which has been very popular recently, as an example to see how the price, sale and purchase of this token operate.

At present, the largest sales platform for NFT tokens is opensea.io. On Opensea, the BAYC section we see looks like this:

The "Bored Ape Yacht Club" displayed on the top is the name of this project. There is a skull on the project name, which is the trademark of the project. There is a tick mark in the lower right corner of the skull, which indicates that Opensea is on this board The BAYCs listed are genuine BAYCs and not counterfeit ones.

Here I would like to emphasize again: In the NFT field, since the pictures of many projects are public, everyone can use them.

So many people took some public pictures of well-known projects, and then wrote an Ethereum contract by themselves, made NFTs and sold them on Opensea. This kind of NFTs are counterfeit and shoddy. Therefore, in order to prevent such accidents, Opensea has marked well-known projects. So everyone should pay attention to this when buying NFT, and don't be deceived.

Speaking of BAYC, on the above page, there are four numbers in the bottom row: 10.0K, 5.0K, 6.95, 43.2K. The meanings of these numbers are: this project has a total of 10,000 BAYC NFTs, a total of 5,000 addresses own BAYC, the minimum listing price of BAYC is 6.95 ETH, and the total trading volume of BAYC is 43.2 ETH.

The lowest listed sales price of 6.95 ETH here will generally lag behind, and we need to sort again to really look at the lowest sales price.

Pull down the top page a bit, and we'll see the following page:

There is a drop-down box of "Sort" in the upper right corner. In this drop-down box, we select "Price: Low to High". You can see the following pages:

Continue to scroll down the page a little bit, and we can see the prices of apes from low to high. There are two ways to sell on Opensea: auction and direct sales. These two methods are mixed together, so the price is also mixed together.

If the price of an ape shows "Top Bid", it means that it is still being auctioned and has not yet been sold; if the price of an ape shows "Price", it means that the ape can be purchased immediately, and the purchase price is " Price" displays the price.

The lowest direct selling price we saw was 6.9 ETH, as shown in the picture below:

The ape on the far left in the picture above shows "Price", 6.9.

When we click into this ape, we will see the following interface:

Here again we can see the certification mark. The button "Buy now" is the button to buy. When we click this button, the MetaMask wallet will pop up. If there is enough balance in the wallet, we can buy it.

The above process is the whole process of how to buy an NFT on Opensea.

Next, answer some recent questions:

1. How much TPS is needed to support Metaverse on the blockchain?

——In the book "Blockchain: The Soul of the Metaverse", I have a more detailed explanation on this point. I think the metaverse of the future must be a combination of blockchain technology and traditional centralized information technology.

Blockchain technology is by no means a panacea, let alone a "panacea" that subverts everything. The key to its role lies in the confirmation of value and the execution of contracts. Therefore, in the metaverse of the future, I think blockchain technology will play a central role in behavioral decision-making and confirmation of digital asset rights. However, places in the metaverse that require high-frequency actions and display cool effects still rely on traditional centralized information technology.

In fact, many blockchain games now do this. For example, the famous Axie Infinity is a typical example: the fighting scenes and animation effects in it are all traditional IT technology, and only the parts related to assets use the blockchain.

2. Is the soil for the survival of the Metaverse Ethereum or the second layer of expansion?

——For the main battlefield and main ecology of the metaverse in the future, I am most optimistic about Ethereum and its associated second-layer expansion. Among the projects I have participated in in recent months, almost all top NFT projects are on Ethereum, and a few projects that are not on Ethereum are also on Ethereum’s side chains or second-layer extensions, such as Polygon (Matic).

Therefore, in the book, I directly expressed my point of view: the future Ethereum and its associated side chains and second-layer expansion technology will carry the entire Metaverse.

So from this perspective, the current DeFi is just the beginning of the ecological explosion of Ethereum, and the ecology of the Metaverse will also explode on Ethereum in the future.

Therefore, in the long run, the value of Ethereum is unlimited, and a single coin exceeding 10,000 US dollars will definitely be seen in this lifetime. Everyone must hold the Ethereum in their hands.

3. How will DeFi and NFT perform in the bear market after this round?

——If you look at the price alone, I think that in the bear market after this round, the prices of all tokens, including DeFi tokens and NFT tokens, will become lower. But the DeFi application will never wither, on the contrary it will still flourish. Because DeFi has now become a rigid need. Not to mention other things, at least everyone will have financial management and transaction needs in a bear market. For this alone, everyone needs DeFi.

4. Is it appropriate for NFT tokens to be used for leasing of real estate or shops and office buildings?

In fact, there are already examples of such applications overseas. Overseas companies have begun to try to sell real estate as tokens, but whether the tokens are ERC-20 tokens or NFT tokens has not released too many details. There are also teams in China trying to make bills in the real economy into NFTs.

Such applications are collectively referred to as on-chain physical assets.

In the application of these physical assets on the chain, there is a key point: that is, the process of converting assets into tokens requires the intervention of a centralized organization to ensure the openness, fairness and credibility of this process. In the end, if the assets on the chain are to be realized, they must be returned to the entity off the chain. This process requires the intervention of a centralized organization to ensure that the process is open, fair and credible. Then in the process of going up and down, you need to rely on a centralized institution, and this process is extremely important for the realization and circulation of assets. And wherever there is a need to rely on centralized institutions, there will be problems with all centralized institutions. Especially in the financial field, whenever a centralized institution is required to intervene, it will attract strong regulatory attention, and in some countries it will cause many legal and financial regulatory issues.

Therefore, I am not very interested in this type of application, and I am cautious about its application prospects.

The best application scenario of the blockchain is to solve problems on the pure chain. For example, decentralized exchanges that exchange pure tokens for tokens, decentralized banks that lend tokens (such as Compound, AAVE), etc.

Of course, in the field of NFT, the current blockchain technology cannot solve all problems, such as artworks expressed in the form of NFT. The deposit certificate of this artwork is NFT, but its picture still cannot be stored on Ethereum, but most of it is stored on IPFS. In this application, its key is the NFT deposit certificate, which guarantees that the most authoritative certificate and certificate of authenticity on the chain, so generally speaking, everyone can accept this partially decentralized model.