Good morning!!! I have exciting news. Steem-Engine hired @cryptomancer to write up the NFT contract. He's completed the scope of work, and it's now feature complete for V1 and live on the testnet.

When doing web development there's usually a couple stages.

• Scope of work and planning
• Back end work
• Front end work
• Launch
• Ongoing maintenance and upgrades

We're finishing up "front end work" for V1 now. We're building NFT creation forms and a market for NFTs. We've been working on this for a month or so as well, so if it all goes swimmingly we're probably 3-4 weeks from launch.

When the testnet forms are ready and the QA site is usable, which is hopefully in 1-2 weeks, we should have NFT creation and a market ready for use. Sounds like a good 2020 to me!

Why should I use NFTs here rather than ethereum?

I'm glad I asked. Ethereum has several problems as far as I can tell. I don't work on it or live there, so my knowledge is anecdotal and prone to inaccuracies. Verify it all yourself.

1. Ethereum has scaling problems
   If you're going to make a AAA game with NFTs that are going live to masses at some point you have to worry about how many people can use the system. Right now Ethereum has a lot of challenges in front of it for scalability. Kitties nearly brought it all crashing down at the market highs. What happens when a game with a huge following lands here?

2. Fees
   Ethereum is a fee based system. You pay gas for transactions. As it turns out fees for transactions right now seem to be in the 25-50 cent range. Well, a lot of low level NFTs or undesirable NFTs end up costing pennies. So, it costs you more in fees than what you can sell the card for. That's bad! It kills the secondary market for 60%+ of your cards (the commons) in a game, which is a major reason that players would switch to a blockchain game. If you can't take advantage of the secondary market does having one really help you?

3. Account names
   It's not the end of the world... but ethereum uses wallet addresses as the name. On eth you're E1324sMalL82783484P3ni5asdl5aDpaNDa. It turns out it's a lot more fun to beat someone with a human name like matt or aggroed than it is to beat a wallet address. You can code names in, but not everyone does and so the extra human elements that come with steem appear to help.

4. Development environment
   On steem we're using just regular web development. Python, javascript, ruby, and a few others. On Ethereum you're using C++ through Solidity. That's a much more niche field than the millions of web devs spread out all over the world. It gets expensive, and it's hard to find them.

Now to be fair Ethereum has a few things going for it!

1. Money
   For now if you're trying to raise funds Ethereum and ERC20s are still where it's at. So, that's appealing. We're trying to cut into that, but I do for sure have to tip my hat to those fellas.

2. Media presence
   I haven't really been able to find or tap into an ethereum community. I think Steem has a more integrated community that's a little easier to find. But this is more towards influencer. Vitalik has some following. I'm sure if he shows up at a crypto event everyone and their mother stands around waiting to take a pic with him. So, ethereum has a good chance to garner some attention especially if you can get the dudes with the influence to share your material.

Overall

It's entirely possible I'm delusional, but I see this as massive potential for Steem and Steem Engine.

People will build games here and share their art to monetize their community. That's how it will start, but these things will advance. Real estate and cars ownership will be proven by the block. Shipping and amazon competitors will live here. There will be so many businesses that make the transition it'll blow your mind?

Why? Because with NFTs and blockchain you have unparrallelled access to information. Where is my package? check the block. What year was this house build? Check the block. What type of engine does this particular Chevy Impala have? Check the block. Who owned this before me? What did they do to it? All the possible information will live in a place where you, the user, have access. You'll have more knowledge about the products you're buying than ever before.

It'll come with the ability to:

Create inexpensive NFTs
transfer them quickly
free NFT transfers between users

Are you seeing it yet? I think this will be huge!

I see artists creating art NFTs. I see games coming to Steem so that they can trust their system will grow and scale. I see a vibrant NFT trading place and with that liquidity and other tokens as well as I see the amount of trading growing rapidly.

Nearing launch

Anyway, we're in the final stages before launch and I'm stoked. Here's hoping you are too!

Look out for a few more detailed posts on steps and how-to soon. Should have one from @cryptomancer regarding the backend, and in the not too distant future should have one from @beggars regarding the front end.