Introducing the Mask Network Election Special NFTs

After Mask Network launched its Twitter trading widget on 24th Sep, the project was very well received by the crypto community and drew us a number of investors.

Mask Network is introducing another product involving Non-fungible Tokens (NFT) and NFT-based e-commerce. But before delving into it, we would like to discuss our view of a tokenized future.

Our view of the tokenized future

First, we have to clarify a few definitions. Items are either fungible or non-fungible. Digital money is fungible. A liter of water is fungible. But in general, most of the physical and digital goods are non-fungible. Although we usually refer to NFT as a relative niche concept, it indeed could include almost everything digital or even physical if wrapped and stored at a custodian.

Macroscopically, we view blockchain as a new type of programmable ledger — a unified global ledger to replace existing isolated ledgers around the world. A global ledger needs to minimize trust to avoid conflict, which is why it has to be decentralized. Items, be it digital or physical, will all be tokenized and can freely transfer and transact on this ledger. Once the blockchain infrastructure is ready, a global unified ledger will be vastly more efficient than the existing fractured ones. Ideally, most things online will become on chain and freely transferable.

While decentralized finance (built on smart contracts and fungible tokens / ERC-20) has become a fully-fledged sector, NFT is still an up-and-coming technology. There are several categories of existing NFT applications — gaming, content (artwork, music, and images), finance (like yInsure), network (like ENS), and data (will be useful when privacy-preserving computation matures).

With these infrastructures, NFT will be able to create a brand new world of on-chain e-commerce; what we are seeing now in NFT applications will only be the tip of the iceberg.

Mask’s role in the future world of NFT

We understand that the current forms of Ethereum or other public chains are far from the idealized version described above. Even if its performance could meet its ideal criterion, the ecosystem around this ledger is not complete as well. Such an idealized ledger is nothing without users and assets.

How are users and assets going to onboard? Many are developing different solutions or components to facilitate the transition. MetaMask and other wallets have done a decent job getting users onboard. However, the user count is still miniscule compared to Web 2.0 incumbents. They are slowly waking up as demonstrated by PayPal and Facebook but not necessarily doing it right in a top-down approach. This is where Mask comes in.

Mask Network is a portal that allows users to seamlessly send encrypted messages, cryptocurrencies, and even DApps (DeFi, NFTs, DAO) on top of social media platforms without migrating, thereby creating a decentralized Applet (DApplet) ecosystem. In short, we want to bridge the new, open internet right on top of the current one.

Last time we demonstrated that cryptocurrencies (payment/red packet), DeFi (Uniswap), and storage (Arweave) can be introduced to Twitter, now it’s time for NFT.

The Election Special NFTs

For the purpose of demonstration, we are going to introduce a series of NFT artworks for the U.S. election and conduct a lucky draw experiment. Each NFT item represents 1 electoral vote so there are in total 538 pieces. And also we will send the last 51 pieces of the final election NFT. NFT packages will be sent out every time the election result of a state has been released. So there are 52 NFT packages in total.

Consider the following scenario: State A has 20 electoral votes, and the result is revealed at 8 pm. If the state is won by Candidate X, we will send a special package containing 20 pieces of NFT that each feature a portrait of Candidate X along with the name of the state. Participants will be able to claim 1 NFT on a first-come-first-serve basis each round just like how red packet works. Users may participate in multiple rounds.

For now, let’s just say that those NFTs will not only be collected for scarcity and its artistic value, they are also going to serve as a certificate to redeem something we are not going to reveal yet. Some could be worth more than others, your participation could affect the outcome of the others, but you never know.

For Dapp developers

We’ve laid the basic structure of the DApplet ecosystem and want to showcase that NFT can be transferable and demonstrable without leaving Twitter. We hope this could spark some thoughts, inject a few lines of code, and propel some user adoptions into the Web3 world.

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Copyright Notice

This picture is adapted from the work of Gage Skidmore and is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.

This picture is adapted from the work of US Embassy and is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.

This picture is adapted from the work of Gage Skidmore and is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.

This picture is adapted from the work of Gage Skidmore and is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.