[Despite recent downturns in the non-fungible assets market with NFTs being caught up in crypto winter and tightening monetary policy, the mass adoption of NFTs is still strong. This is evidenced as the number of digital wallets owning NFTs has more than doubled this year from 3.36 million to 6.14 million (NexChangeNow as of 9/2022) and with a slew of large companies in a variety of industries announcing more collaborations to further develop their NFT assets and strategies. Firms ranging from Tiffany, VISA, Christie’s auction house, Warner Music Group, Coca-Cola, Budweiser, and Adidas have announced that they are intent on exploring this creative toolbox. Continuing large dollar investments remain a bullish indicator of the long-term prospects of NFTs mixing well with business strategy.
A recent Fortune article by four Bain & Company partners looked through the current market weakness to focus on the more relevant and promising benefits of the underlying technologies for business clients. “NFTs provide an ideal set of capabilities to reimagine how companies engage their customers.” The real value is in the creative ways that NFTs can make any brand in any industry more memorable and inviting.
The article goes on to remind us that we are still very early in this space with the first NFT created in 2014 which was embraced by the artist and design communities. The opportunities and creative applications are just beginning to be explored by the business community. Also, to expedite more mainstream adoption, it is suggested that three components are needed for a robust NFT system to take hold: the user experience is still clunky, nascent regulations have not been standardized, and high transaction fees and a large carbon footprint plague NFTs.
To get a better understanding of where we are and what is the potential for businesses with NFTs, we reached out to our newest Institute member Divya Prashanth, CEO of London-based HQNFTs.xyz — a revolutionary world first No-code advanced NFT creation platform which also provides rarity ranking and sentiment analysis. This essentially makes their platform to NFTs what Wix is to websites. We asked her questions to learn from her active experiences and innovative perspective on the NFT landscape.]
Bill Hortz: What was your motivation for starting HQNFTs.xyz? What NFT industry challenges are you addressing with your platform?
Divya Prashanth: I am an artist and a developer. While talking to my artist friends, it became very evident that blockchain and the skillsets required were the biggest blockers to adoption. There were also cases where artists were unwittingly putting their NFTs on shared smart contracts on the marketplaces and, in some cases, losing their IP. So, there was a need for a No-Code platform where creatives could design their NFT collections without a single line of code and own their own smart contract on their creations.
Hortz: What were your first steps in figuring out how to go about building solutions to those problems and how did you design your technology to address those industry challenges?
Prashanth: Firstly, I spent some time looking at the tech that was available and the points of friction for the artist. I looked closely, examined the process steps of creating an NFT collection, and identified the challenges faced from the perspective of the artist to make it frictionless. Then I realized that even for a developer to create an NFT collection on their own, an NFT smart contract was quite manual and cumbersome at times.
This led me to design a user experience like WIX. Where artists or creators who wanted to create NFTs collections on their own smart contracts could do it without a single line of code. Making the experience like building a website on WIX or Godaddy.
Hortz: Can really anyone, even me who can’t draw stick figures well, be able to create NFTs on your platform?
Prashanth: In this version you will need some photoshop skills to put together the layers for the PFP NFT collections.
In the next release, we will be introducing text to Image AI. This will create the NFT from scratch based on the text description and put it on the blockchain.
Hortz: What tools or guidance do have on your platform that can help people create NFTs that have value or utility?
Prashanth: Besides users receiving a step-by-step guide on how to create an NFT collection on our platform on registration, we built a number of strategic tools to provide further guidance.