Q&A from KuCoin
Q: Can you give a brief introduction about Unifty? What it does, and what its vision and mission are?
Colin: Unifty is a multichain infrastructure platform for NFT creators and the digital creator ecosystem. Currently operational on Ethereum, Binance Smart Chain (BSC), xDAI, Polygon (ex Matic), Celo and Avalanche. Unifty seeks to offer accessible and affordable no-code solutions to mint NFTs, and enable functionality. We also offer marketplaces on a number of networks, and offer native support of the first “interactive” NFTs (iNFTs).
Our mission is to build flexible and decentralized *creator owned* NFT infrastructure to empower creators to build sustainable businesses.
Today, we had a big announcement, launching a first-of-its-kind tool to allow creators to build and manage their own NFT marketplaces. We believe that this will be a big step forward for the NFT market as before NFT creators had to rely on centralized parties to sell their NFTs or code everything themselves. You can read more about it here: https://uniftyio.medium.com/introducing-the-unifty-market-builder-tool-e85f5c1e17b3
Q: Can you tell us the background and story of your team? How did you guys get together to found this project?
Colin: Unifty was founded in 2020 by Markus Bopp, a software engineer based in Germany with over 20 years of experience. He built a number of enterprise platforms for content management systems during his career and led research at a European software company looking at crypto since 2017.
I have worked full time in crypto since 2014, I set up research for a large French investment bank for cryptocurrency and blockchain and became a crypto entrepreneur in 2016.
Markus and I met each other when I was trying to develop an NFT platform and could not find any good tools, and I was very impressed with what he had built. We started working together actively in January and turned Unifty from a small project to a fully developed company with revenues and partnerships in a few months. We're gaining partners with top-quality projects on a nearly daily basis. It's been quite the ride.
Q: Can you tell me why Unifty chose to focus on the NFT sector? What are the opportunities there?
Colin: To answer that, first, I’d like to briefly touch on NFTs themselves. This is a topic that has been widely covered in the media but is still misunderstood by many. “NFT” is an abbreviation for “Non-Fungible Tokens”, in short this means that tokens have some unique features which mean they cannot be traded directly amongst each other, contrast this with something like USDC or ETH where each token is as valuable or useful as the next one.
Given this “unique” property, many early use cases for NFTs were around securing artwork or items within games. What’s important to remember is that the NFT is just the token, not the underlying files attached to it, which is why adding content management is important.
At Unifty we see the opportunity as much wider than just artwork and games, but can be viewed as a data structure with files, legal rights, and community around the token. This can extend to financial agreements, intellectual property, or even entire companies. The NFT opportunity is massive.
What Markus and I both noticed early on was that, like what we saw with tokens in 2017, much of the space didn't have the tools to deliver on what was being promised. People bought NFTs without knowing what they should do with them. Our goal at Unifty is to make strong and usable utilities to help support and make this asset class sustainable.
Q: Please briefly describe the product features of Unifty.
Colin: Our features fit into three categories: 1) creation, 2) distribution and 3) utility.
Creation allows content creators to mint NFTs, we are unique as we have working products on six (6) production blockchains, and our approach is more decentralized and gives the creator the power to own the contract which is not the case with other NFT minting platforms.
Our distribution offers are also decentralized and help content creators get their products to collectors and community. We have marketplaces across our supported platforms, but also have NFT farms which can be created with no coding experience needed. This feature is used by hundreds of crypto projects and is extremely popular because of how it combined NFTs with DeFi.
Utility is where we believe the future of NFTs is. As I mentioned, people want NFTs to be sustainable, to achieve this they need to be useful. We have tools to make NFTs more social, like NFT<>NFT swaps which create greater engagement than simply selling NFTs. We also have tools to develop webpages that integrate NFTs and NFT stores. In addition, we’re building DeFi-like tools around lending/borrowing, valuation and communications tools (imagine NFTs + WeChat or TikTok).
Q: What is the bottleneck for the NFT market on blockchain for the time being? Will Unifty bring us some breakthroughs?
Colin: The NFT space is growing and already has many great platforms and products. We are working with several of them and look to help broaden the offering with a number of others.
We see three major bottlenecks in the NFT market today.
First and foremost is the cost of using Ethereum, while it has been cheaper over the last couple of weeks, at times gas is very expensive and stops all but the most expensive NFTs from being viable, this is why we use other blockchains like BSC and Polygon.
Next are tools, like wallets, for NFTs are still weaker than they are for tokens. We have had lots of good discussions with wallets lately and are excited about how this problem is being solved in the near future. This is particularly interesting for matching NFTs with functionality directly in wallets.
Finally and very key, the communication about why NFTs are important has been poor. The crypto community uses too much technological jargon and doesn’t explain why an average person should use an NFT. This is why Unifty focuses on building useful tools that allow creators to build products that show people why they need an NFT to do something they want to do.
There is a lot of innovation in the NFT space, and we are working on some very interesting things and with great innovators to push the NFT and wider crypto market forward.
Q: What role does Unifty play in the entire NFT ecosystem?
Colin: We are an infrastructure, we build things that support other businesses and creators. This makes Unifty very attractive to a variety of partners because we bring something new rather than competing directly.
Our tools are useful, and lots of NFT projects, and non-NFT projects that want to use NFTs as well can use our tools. We have hundreds of crypto partners building on our platform, sometimes we only hear about projects using Unifty after they have been on the platform for a few months, which —while hard for internal management— is really cool.
Q: So far, what platforms does Unifty currently support? Which well-known projects Unifty has reached cooperation with? What is Unifty’s next step？
Colin: We work with six mainnet blockchains: Ethereum, Binance Smart Chain (BSC), Polygon, xDAI, Avalanche and Celo. We have formal partnerships with Polygon, Avalanche and Celo, and cooperation with BSC and xDAI. We have also announced partnerships with RMRK.app to bring Unifty to Kusama, and with the Elrond foundation. We have some more news coming on this front in the next week or so, so stay tuned.
I should also mention that this month we announced that we partnered with leading crypto news Coindesk to build their NFT platform on Unifty for the Consensus conference. It was a huge success and saw tens of thousands of users on the platform over the week.
Q: What are the functions of Unifty's token? How do $NIF holders participate in the entire platform? How does it capture value?
Colin: NIF is our utility token. It serves several purposes in our platform, the first is to reduce/eliminate fees for NFT contract creation and NFT farm creation. It is also used to pay fees for our NFT bridges. Our new Market Builder tool requires staking of NIF to activate the marketplaces and additional features, this is a new use case for the token and something that we will expand on in other products over time. We've also launched an NFT swapping platform, and NIF acts as a "Store of Value" of sorts, where two people swapping NFTs don't have exactly the same value.
To explain this briefly SoV use case, imagine you have an NFT worth 100, and I have one worth 50, you can give me your NFT, I give you mine and pay you in NIF for the remaining difference. As you've seen some NFTs are very valuable so this needs to potentially scale to very large values. We're also planning some other major product advancements which will leverage the value of NIF to offer a governance function for the platform, and collateral asset for DeFi-like functionality for NFTs.
To conclude on this point, we are also building a DAO structure and NIF will serve a central role in managing this DAO, capturing value from assessing NFT values, providing liquidity and earning platform revenues. The token has an ever deeper use case with every product that comes out, and we have lots of products coming.
Q: What is Unifty’s current target market? What are the plans for rapid growth in terms of users, global markets and partners?
Colin: One of my favorite topics. At Unifty, we have a two-fold approach. The first is with the crypto native community, where we operate unifty.io. This is a lab for NFT experiments and to test the market. It is currently very successful and allows creators and NFT projects to build businesses.
In addition, we will shortly announce our enterprise focused offering on unifty.com. This will cater to larger businesses which need tools to build NFT offers. We receive a lot of interest from big companies who see Unifty’s offer as more suitable than our more centralized competitors because we offer greater control and flexibility to these partners. You can naturally see how the Market Builder tool we just announced today fits in here.
Free-Ask from KuCoin Community
Q: Give us a brief about the experience your team had with the partnership with KuCoin.
Colin: I obviously have to answer this in this group.
Working with the KuCoin team has been great. The entire team is very professional and thorough. Everything went smoothly and they also provided many opportunities to improve our offering and build community.
Q: Security is the priority of every investor. So, how do you ensure your investors that their investment is secured in your project so that they can invest without any doubts?
Colin: Security is absolutely important. We've had our token and Farm Builder smart contracts audited by a top-rated external smart contract audit firm Omniscia. KuCoin's own processes also give another layer of assurance as they conduct an in-depth vetting process.
Q: Until what corner of the world do you plan to arrive? That is, to what extent in the world do you think Unifty will be solving people's problems with their infrastructure?
Colin: Geographically we hope to cover as much of the world as we possibly can. We have regional groups targeting several linguistic groups, most recently we successfully launched communities in Korean and Arabic.
Q: NFT is getting so much hype and growing rapidly. But individual artists and promising new NFT projects still can't get the hype that they deserve. What can Unifty do for them? What are the facilities you guys provide to make them successful?
Colin: This is one of the core theses of Unifty. Our tools are designed to make it easier for artists to build their own tools for their communities.
Q: Has Unifty built the user interface and security yet? I think this is the most important aspect that users see on a platform.
Colin: Yes, you can find everything on unifty.io
Q: So many NFT projects came to the market in the last 3 months but very few of them actually contributed to the NFT technology. What will Unifty add to the NFT world? How will Unifty create a difference and become better than the many NFT projects in the market?
Colin: All of our tools are open source and infrastructure, many other NFT projects build directly on our platform. We also build tools to help cross blockchains (bridges) to contribute back.
Q: Does your great project support staking program? If yes, how does your stake system work, what is the requirement for users if they want to stake in your platform?
Colin: Our farm product is staking at its core, this allows third parties to easily build staking for NFT products. In addition, we just launched the market builder which requires staking and have DAO staking coming.
Q: Why should I create collections at Unifty? How is it different from other NFT projects?
Colin: Creator ownership. Would you prefer to manage your NFTs or have a centralized platform do it for you?
Q: I'm new to crypto, and I trust a project. I ended up investing my hard-earned money and some of them turned out to be scammed. What guarantees will you give to a lay investor like me that you won't scam? Is your project audited?
Colin: This is an issue for a lot of investors, especially with projects that are new and only on DEXs. We have been audited, are on KuCoin, and have a company (in the EU) backing the development.
Q: Can I use the Unifty platform easily? Is there a practice guide?
Colin: Yes, you can find guides on uniftyio.medium.com and use the platform directly at unifty.io
Q: Unifty released L2 Marketplaces. What facilities can we get in this marketplace? What update did you make in L2 Marketplaces compared to L1?
Colin: All of our marketplaces work the same on all chains, L2 and L1. The main difference is the underlying currency (e.g. MATIC vs ETH) and the cost of using it.
Q: Are you related to Uniswap because your logo is kinda the same as Uniswap? If not then why should I choose your platform rather than using Uniswap?
Colin: Not related to Uniswap, we just like unicorns.
Q: Without proper marketing and capital infusion, the project dies, how do you convince us you have adequate marketing power and capital to push this project to the top project?
Colin: Our investors are very supportive and bought into the vision of Unifty. We have runway, strong connections and lots of energy to get it done.
Q: I understand that Unifty is cross-chain. Will you intend interpolation with Polkadot, Solana or other chains?
Colin: Yes, yes, and yes.
Q: What is your strongest advantage that you think will make your team lead the market? In contrast, what is your weakness? How do you plan to overcome it and tell us about the goals of your roadmap?
Colin: Our two big advantages are that we were first to bring NFT functionality to many chains, and that we offer actual decentralization. This gives us a lot of stickiness with products.
Our biggest weakness (and something I'm passionately working on) is our UI. We focussed on decentralization and making things work, now we need to make them prettier.
