Victor Tang: Making NFTs more nifty

CoinGeek Conversations

The mission of NiftyCo, where Victor Tang is CTO is to “democratise” NFTs (non-fungible tokens). As he puts it, “we're basically creating a platform that makes it possible for anyone, not just crypto enthusiasts, to create and transact NFTs on the blockchain.”

Speaking on this week’s CoinGeek Conversations, Victor explains that users won’t need to create wallets, use exchanges to convert from fiat or transfer assets between accounts.

Instead, NiftyCo’s customers will only need to know “how to create a user account, how to upload documents or image files and how to pay for that with a credit card or a bank account.”

As a result, “hopefully we will be able to have hundreds of thousands of users ...creating and selling and trading NFTs as opposed to thousands of crypto enthusiasts.”

New users would still need to complete the usual KYC and AML procedures, but “after that, you simply click a button that says, I'd like to mint this piece of art. You enter in the title, your name, as the artist, and then the files that you wish to upload. You could upload just one image or you can upload some supporting documentation that goes with that - some certificate of authenticity that you've signed. You could even include a little audio file as your narration of this piece of art - what inspired you etc. And they'd all be combined and bundled up within this one NFT and you can then proceed to sell it or you can hold on to it and just licence it so that you still retain ownership.”

From then on, the main responsibility for the user will be to avoid losing their passphrase - just as you must be equally careful with your 12 seed words for any digital wallet.

The leaders of NiftyCo are split between Seattle, Washington and Toledo, Ohio, home of co-founder Phil Runyon. Victor says today they have “just a handful of developers” but they’re “working feverishly” on one particular launch project, which is at the high end of the NFT market.

Their client is “a major museum” which wants to create “an NFT for a 17th century Dutch masterpiece”. NiftyCo’s approach is to make their NFTs more secure than others by encrypting every document or image that is included with it and giving the owner the private key. That means “anybody accessing the blockchain can certainly find the URL pointing to these documents, but they cannot view it. They cannot access it in any way.”

That overcomes some of what people have found hard to accept about existing high end art NFTs: that the purchaser has no better access to the work than anyone else on the internet.

As Victor explains the added value NiftyCo’s security will provide: “if you pay hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars for this piece of art, you want it to be able to show it in your hotel or in your private residence on a large screen TV and know that you know it's yours only.”