Have you ever heard of blending NFTs together?
Blendable NFTs
This is post number 4 in my "What is an NFT?" series here in the LBI world. The first post was a sort of general overview of NFTs as a whole for noobs, the second post was a deep dive into how vIRL NFTs can be used for commerce, and the third post was an overview of how musicians can sell music as NFTs. If you wanna learn more about NFT technology and some of the use cases, I encourage you to take a peak at those posts.
As always, the goal here is to highlight some things that can be done with NFTs aside from just profile picture JPEGs. The technology has a ton of use cases that are being overlooked by people trying to get rich flipping over-hyped collectibles. Today, we're taking a look at some potential uses for blendable NFTs.
So first off - blendable NFTs are NFTs that have the ability to be combined with other NFTs to create a new one. They technically aren't actually combined, both NFTs are burned and a new one is minted. Sound completely useless to you? The first thing I imagined when I found out about this was "wow, this could be used in games".
For example - a new game I've been playing with on the WAX blockchain is Zombie Outbreak Survival. It's still being developed so there isn't much to it yet, but you're currently able to send survivor NFTs on missions in order to find food. Your characters, weapons, armor, and even food for your characters are all NFTs. Clearly that doesn't have to be the case for every game, but it's pretty interesting.
In this game, you have to blend NFTs to heal your characters. You select the survivor NFT and based on how much health it needs, you select food NFTs. The NFTs are "blended" together to add health to your survivor. The food NFTs are burned, and the survivor's health is updated. This is a very basic way of how blending NFTs can be used, but it's a great example.
I could see this kind of thing being used in games where your weapons are NFTs and addons like scopes and whatnot are too. You blend them together and you get the fresh minted new weapon with the addon. That NFT has now been upgraded for the game, and could be traded because it's a digital asset on any NFT marketplace.
This can be used for art, trading cards, music, and much more. Check out @reseller's project Blockchain Cards. He creates high quality digital trading cards of all sorts. He even creates vIRL NFTs that can be redeemed for physical trading cards, which I did and it was really cool. I've seen this blending feature used in all kinds of ways with art. I hope to see more of it used in games in the future, but I know it will take time.
I know, those don't sound too exciting, but imagine this for a real world use case. We live in a world where more and more things are becoming digital. More things are becoming automated, and more things are being linked to you digitally. Something that comes to my mind that blenable NFTs could be used for in the real world is festival passes or amusement park passes. You buy the NFT pass to get access, and scan your wallet to enter. The system verifies that you hold a pass NFT, and you enter.
You decided to only buy a 1 day pass instead of a 3 day pass or whatever for the event. Instead of having the go back and buy and additional pass or interact with someone to try and exchange, you could simply buy the upgrade straight from your phone. It would also be an NFT that's tradeable so if you decided not to use it, you could sell it on the market or transfer it to someone else that might be looking to upgrade their pass.
The pass NFT and the upgrade NFT could be blended in a second right on your phone. Then you have a new pass NFT that grants you access for the additional days. I know, it's kinda out there but think about it. People sell fake tickets quite often, especially physical ones. If it's all NFTs on the blockchain, you can verify that it's a legit ticket in a couple seconds by looking at the blockchain. If you bought the upgrade NFT and decided you didn't want to use it, you could list it on the marketplace for someone else to purchase.
Sure, a lot of this can already be done without the need for NFT technology. I do think it would eliminate a lot of scams and shit though. With the ability to do it in a very efficient way via purpose built blockchains like WAX, it kinda makes sense. You want everything to be verifiable and you want your customers to have true digital ownership of their asset? You can do it with blockchain.
This post is getting a little lengthy, so I'll leave it there. I'd love to hear about ways you guys could think this could be used. Let's talk about it in the comments.
Post written by: @l337m45732 aka NiftyPhill.