Run Interactive’s Miguel Duarte explains NFTs and its utility at BSV Global Blockchain Convention

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NFTs have been a massive trend in the last 18 months, and while the hype might be dying down, there’s still a bright future for NFTs with utility. On Day 2 of the BSV Global Blockchain Convention, Miguel Duarte, Product Engineer at Run Interactive, speaks about how we can do better with NFTs.

Non-fungible tokens: the rise and fall

Duarte begins by explaining the core mission of Run: to allow users to turn their dreams into reality using the Bitcoin blockchain. He describes how, while Run has had all sorts of apps and tokens, some with wild success, the big trend recently has been related to NFTs.

Duarte notes how it’s human nature to collect and proudly display things, and he pays homage to the creators involved in making NFTs to date—however, this view is limited. He gives the example of the NFT of Jack Dorsey’s first tweet losing 99% of its value to show that this speculative frenzy is cooling off. He notes how this didn’t happen to traditional collectibles like Pokemon cards since they held their value through time. Why so? He believes that Pokemon cards have utility; you can play a game that many people enjoy with them.

Run Interactive’s Miguel Duarte explains NFTs and its utility

What will the next generation of NFTs look like?

Bringing up the point about Pokemon cards having utility turns out to be a perfect segue into the next part of Duarte’s presentation—what NFTs will look like in the future. Before painting a picture of how NFTs could look in the future, he identifies a problem that the currently fragmented blockchain space with limited scaling capacity doesn’t allow for utility NFTs that can be easily and cheaply transferred between users. This limits what we can do with them right now.

Duarte then calls for a new generation of NFTs, and he says Run has developed them: jigs. You can combine these NFTs, mix them, shape them, and can even make them interact with each other. This is all possible with simple code. He gives the example of Duro Dogs, a popular BSV app with jigs that users can feed, grow, and interact with.

Delving deeper, Duarte explains that jigs are portable. This means they can interact with each other even when they belong to different apps. This also makes them extremely easy to buy and sell on sites like RelayX. This portability is essential if large-scale NFT marketplaces are to become a reality.

Run Interactive’s Miguel Duarte explains NFTs and its utility

Speaking more about jigs, Duarte explains that their upgradability is one of their most essential components. This is what truly empowers creativity. He notes how finding the right idea is difficult and often comes from multiple iterations and improvements. Jigs are flexible and upgradeable, allowing this creative process to occur. He notes how the RUN protocol, SDKs, and APIs all play a role in this.

Underpinning all of this is the infinitely scalable BSV blockchain. Duarte notes that this is the key to allowing users to interact with, use, and transfer jigs at scale. He gives the example of CryptoFights to highlight how BSV can scale better than any other blockchain by far. To drive this point home, he illustrates how one relatively inexpensive Ethereum transaction cost him more than 130,000 Run token transactions would have. This gap will be even more magnified when RUN 0.7 goes live with even cheaper transactions.

Multiple new releases from RUN: Jig City, TokenKit, RunBot, and Run-db 2.0

Duarte announces several new releases from Run. He and his team are incredibly excited about all of these:

Jig City is a new jig explorer designed with user-friendliness in mind. It can be used by developers to find out the state of their apps, and users can also use it to keep track of what jigs they own, how they look, and what they can do with them.
Duarte also announces that RUN wants as many people as possible to use tokens for all kinds of purposes, so they’re releasing TokenKit, an open-source library that makes it easy to mint, upgrade, and manage both fungible and non-fungible tokens.
Perhaps an even more exciting release in the pipeline from RUN is Runbot. It’s a CLI tool that will deploy and ship your code no matter how many jigs you have, making it much easier to manage code.
Lastly, Duarte tells us about Run-db 2.0. It’s virtually the same as the existing run-db, but it has a new architecture that allows you to distribute loads across several machines. This will be released in the next two or three weeks after a few final tests.

Run Interactive’s Miguel Duarte explains NFTs and its utility