The Next Blockchain Tech That Will Revolutionize Smart Contracts as We Know Them Today

As more brands enter the NFT market, different crypto sectors are booming. According to Market Decipher, the sports NFTs market size in 2022 is estimated to be $2.6 billion. In 2032, it is forecasted to reach $41.6 billion.

Demand for trading cards and limited education videos (all in NFTs) are surging according to the study. The sports that are in high demand, include the NFL (popular in Latin America), football, basketball, baseball, cricket and ice hockey at the time of writing.

The NFL is a helmet collection, which is available for minting at RarityLeague for 0.14 ETH may provide some indication of the current demand.

Aside from the sports sector, TicketMaster has recently announced the launch of NFT tickets via Flow. Even organisers can mint NFTs, that may provide the holder with a better experience such as VIP privileges.

source: elliptic

Ethereum-based NFTs are dominating the market despite the high gas fees. Although the Ethereum merge is due next week, the Ethereum Foundation clarified that the merge may not reduce the gas fees at all.

The sole intention of the merge is to shift from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake. The ETH merge, which is a key milestone for ether is expected to take place on 14 September, 21:00 ET.

The Bellatrix hard fork has been activated, which means as soon as terminal total difficulty (TTD) reaches 58750000000000000000000 the first proof-of-stake block will be created.

As we near the merge a spike was noted in ENS.

During ApeCoin's NFT lands sales, ETH gas fees have exceeded $1,000 for several years. The average gas fee at the time of the sale was hundreds of dollars.

In the event the gas fee will remain elevated following the merge, other blockchains may gradually become more attractive. Choosing the right blockchain for your business is fairly significant.

Let's explore some of the blockchains that large brands have chosen for their NFTs.

LG Chooses Hedera

LG Electronics announced a new NFT platform integrated into its smart televisions based on Hedera. The NFT marketplace is only available in the United States for LG TV running webOS 5.0 or later.

The platform can be accessed from the home screen.

Chris Jo, the Senior Vice President and Head of platform business at LG Electronics home entertainment, said that transactions on Hedera are extremely low.

source: hedera

Minting a 10,000 NFT collection on Hedera costs $76.80 (fixed price). Although the blockchains in the above image have lost their value in current market conditions, Hedera is still a cost-effective solution for NFTs.

In addition, Jo said that less energy is consumed on Hedera compared to other chains:

“The Hedera Network consumes vastly less energy than any other public ledger, making it the ideal choice for sustainable initiatives and meaning that it can meet the ESG of modern businesses and investors."

Millions of Americans will have the ability to purchase NFTs from their smart TV. The NFTs will be enabled via Wallypto, LG's wallet for smartphones.

Why Hedera?

LG's partnership with Hedera began in 2020 when it joined the council along with Deutsche Telekom, IBM and others. Wallypto development began in 2021.

At the time, Hedera surged from 4 cents (approx.) to over 30 cents and looked promising. Crypto winter and other factors have led to a significant drop in Hedera's value.

The number of projects on Hedera is relatively small compared to other projects, however, large brands may still shine on the chain. LG NFTs may bring new investors into NFTs and could very well rekindle an interest in Hedera.

source: hedera

As a result, LG may be 'the star of the show' in Hedera as it is a large brand with little to no competition on the chain.

Coca-Cola and Mercedes Benz chose Polygon (with EVM compatibility) for their NFTs as opposed to Ethereum. Adam Neumann's project, Flowcarbon was launched on the Celo network.

EVM compatibility allows ether developers to migrate their smart contracts to an EVM-compatible chain with no need to re-write their code.

Ticketmaster partnered with Polygon in November for issuing tickets. Flow was recently chosen for the NFT collectibles.

Choosing a blockchain that is not as 'mainstream' as Ethereum adds a prestigious scent to the brand. There is less competition against other projects on the blockchain, similar to how BAYC dominated ETH NFTs.

When CryptoPunks threatened the top position of BAYC, Yuga Labs purchased the company behind CryptoPunks.

Different blockchains offer different solutions to businesses. We would like to explore two new chains that may serve your business and maximize its brand awareness.

Ultron (ULX)

Ultron Foundation is a relatively new blockchain that uses Lachesis Consensus Algorithm (LCA), leaderless PoS (LPoS) that supports asynchronicity, leaderless consensus, byzantine fault tolerance and Fast finality. It is also EVM compatible.

The blockchain uses public-key cryptography based on elliptic curves over finite fields. The technology allows Ultron to support both hardware and software wallets. The blockchain offers permissionless decentralization that is allowing anyone to operate a node.

The NFT marketplace in Ultron is expected to launch in Q4 2022 or early 2023.

source: ultron

According to reports, Ultron Foundation has partnered with Devla GmbH, one of the largest metaverse development companies. A football metaverse will launch on Ultron, which is inline with the current forecasts that sports NFTs' popularity will increase.

Aside from GameFi, the lending and borrowing protocol using ULX is expected to be launched. Native DEX was already released.

Ultron is offering low transaction fees in a secure environment. As opposed to Hedera, ULX is available on BSC and ETH where it can be swapped to the Ultron mainnet.

Ivana Belakova, also known as Ivana Tattoo Art will launch her NFTs on the Ultron Foundation with the assistance of Devla and Cosmic Wire.

Some of Belakova's clients include Chris Brown and Lil Wayne. Her tattoos are certified as contemporary fine art by the Macro Museum in Rome, Italy.

On top of that, NFT holders will receive VIP tickets for Ivana's events in Dubai, Europe and Los Angeles.

Launching NFTs in a brand layer 1 mainnet may garner the attention of many ULX investors where little competition is expected at the time of writing.

Massa

The Massa team is working on a new layer 1 blockchain. The scaling is based on 'Blockclique,' which employs transactions sharding in a multithreaded block graph. AssemblyScript (which is compiled to WebAssembly) was chosen as the programming language as opposed to Rust (which is used in Solana, Polkadot, Near and other chains).

source: massa

Massa's developers are striving to reach over 1,000 in Nakamoto Decentralization Coefficient.

Nakamoto Decentralization Coefficient was first described by Balaji Srinivasan (a former Coinbase executive) in 2017. It measures the decentralization of a cryptocurrency.

Some of the factors that are taken into account are the number of global nodes (spread over countries), the volume of exchanges in a specific time frame, the number of commits made by developers and more.

The concept was to combine the Gini Coefficient and the Lorenz Curve and use the result to study other factors.

It is worth noting that the majority of blockchains score less than 50 (Solana scored only 19).

In the Paris Blockchain Week Summit and Ethcc Paris, the Massa team revealed that they succeeded in developing Autonomous Smart Contracts (ASC).

Also, at the time of writing, there is no blockchain offering ASC.

The majority of DeFi apps are regularly updated to maintain their functionality. In lending, under-collateralised trades are required to be liquidated.

Central systems are relied upon to automate the contracts (via bots).

In Massa, the smart contract can be configured to listen to certain events, such as price and date. The event then triggers an arbitrary execution in the contract, such as liquidations and price feed updates.

As there is no need for human interaction with the smart contract, Massa achieved greater decentralization (striving for 100%). Smart contracts can request information from various sources on their own.

The testnet is already available with over 7,000 nodes in the network. The current TPS in the testnet is 4,000, but it is expected to reach 10,000 by the end of the testnet phase.

The mainnet is expected in early 2023.

Autonomous NFTs and Decentralized Web Hosting

Launching NFTs on autonomous smart contracts provide developers with greater flexibility. The immediate thought may be on the gaming industry; for example, Pets can be raised and evolve on their own.

Besides gaming, as smart contracts can fetch data from external sources on their own, NFTs can be used for lending and borrowing and other financial products as well as real estate.

Dynamic NFTs or dNFTs (which are similar) can fetch information using Chainlink data feeds Chainlink Any API.

Similar to Ultron, launching autonomous NFTs in a new blockchain will gain the attraction of investors. Whether it's gaming, artwork or financial products, due to its unique tech Massa is a blockchain to consider.

Additionally, Massa is developing a decentralized web hosting solution. Websites are stored directly in the blockchain. To access websites hosted on the blockchain, a browser plugin is called.

The Massa browser plugin is currently compatible with Chrome and Firefox and acts similar to MetaMask (wallet). When an address is typed (xxxx.massa), the plugin will check if it is an address, and if it is, it will attempt to load the website.zip file, unzip the file and load it as index.html.

If a domain name is typed, the plugin will use 'Massa Name Service' to search for the domain's address. It is similar to how the popular Ethereum Name Service (ENS) functions.

Should the website require larger files such as videos, the plugin can be configured to search for external data on IPFS or the standard web, however, users can disable fetching off-chain files for security.

Blockchains Future Outlook

Both blockchains, Massa and Ultron are offering innovative approaches as technology is continuing to evolve. The next step will be decentralized operating systems (OS).

One of the most known projects for a decentralized OS is Quant Network. Their OverLedger system is designed for capital markets, insurance, financial institutions, banks and more.

OverLedger is a cloud-based Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) operating system that connects to numerous DLTs and API systems through a single API. Only 3 lines of code are required to begin using the OS.

PraSaga foundation, a Swiss company, is developing its own layer one blockchain and OS, called SagaOS. The company was granted a patent by the US Patent and Trademark Office for its operating system.

Patent number 20200348963 covers the systemic extensible blockchain object model comprising a first-class object model and a distributed ledger technology.

SagaOS will run on the SagaChain while storing the class trees and logic for smart assets on the chain. David Beberman, the CTO and Co-Founder of PraSaga said: "This is going to improve the ability for developers to create applications, manage their codebases and address real-world challenges.

"We set out to address parallel processing of transactions and in the process built a method for writing blockchain applications that more closely matches other applications environments."

Other companies are also in the process of developing their operating systems.

According to Verified Market Research, the blockchain in the manufacturing market was worth $40 million in 2021. In 2030 it is expected to reach $766.2 million.

We are likely to see blockchain technology implemented in numerous sectors aside from virtual reality, which will bring us a step closer to being fully immersed in a digital world.