2021 is known as the "Year of NFTs".

NFTs opened the door for Crypto to reach a wider audience, with more and more celebrities and well-known brands entering the NFT space. In 2022, the popularity of NFTs is bound to increase, and the competition will begin to intensify. For projects that are already riding this wave, the most urgent task is to think about how to build a solid on-chain infrastructure, create a good ecosystem, and provide better interaction experiences for NFT creators and traders, preparing thoroughly for the "Cambrian explosion" of NFTs.

This time, Catcher Insight invited Evelyn, the market leader of Unique Network, for an AMA session. During the session, Evelyn shared with community users the operational mechanisms of Unique, the development status of the Polkadot NFT ecosystem, and the main pain points in the NFT space, among many other valuable insights. The full text is organized below, hoping to help you gain a deeper understanding of the Polkadot NFT ecosystem.

Catcher: Please introduce yourself and give us an overview of Unique Network.

Evelyn: Hello everyone, I am Evelyn, responsible for the operation of some regional markets in the Unique Network marketing department.

Unique Network is a scalable blockchain built for the Polkadot and Kusama networks. The canary network Quartz has successfully auctioned to become a parachain on Kusama. Unique is designed for NFTs with advanced economic models, helping dAPP teams, game teams, galleries, and others to build the next generation of NFTs.

Unique Network is committed to providing users with feature-rich and flexibly configurable solutions, including multi-level authorization, an economic model that supports freemium application marketing, various management options, and advanced anti-fraud protection. Our goal is to provide a wide range of technical solutions for NFT application development needs while ensuring maximum flexibility and low costs. We have established a team of over 20 developers, and the number is still growing, with these developers having a strong background in web3 development.

Unique has received five grants from the Web3 Foundation. We are a team focused on development, and we take pride in that. For years, our developers have been working hard to build and provide blockchain-based solutions. We have also built a team of professionals from various fields, including consulting, marketing, metaverse, business development, financing, and law, to create one of the strongest teams in the industry.

The core team of Unique Network is passionate about creators and builders and is eager to roll up their sleeves to contribute to the future of this crowded and challenging industry.

Catcher: What are the main pain points in the NFT space currently? Please provide some examples.

Evelyn: 2021 was a year of NFT explosion, where we witnessed massive media attention on NFTs, participation from top artists and celebrities, the integration of DeFi into the NFT industry, the emergence of high-quality NFT projects, NFT platforms and public chains, the rise of major brand IPs, and the introduction of new NFT application scenarios, among others. Of course, the NFT space also faces many issues, such as speculation.

The limited issuance and scarcity of NFTs can easily lead to speculative hype and price bubbles. For example, Mike Winkelmann, the creator of the digital artwork "Everydays: The First 5000 Days," which set a world record for the highest price of a digital artwork at $69.34 million and the third-highest price for a living artist's work at auction, stated in an interview with Forbes that the prices of NFTs are undoubtedly a bubble.

There is also the issue of native assets being difficult to verify ownership. For instance, in an article published by Caixin Weekly in July this year, a photo of a Tibetan woman holding a Bitcoin mining machine went viral, leading to a large number of NFTs of that photo appearing on major NFT trading platforms like Opensea, with prices ranging from tens of thousands to millions.

Additionally, there are energy consumption issues, as NFTs and the crypto market often receive the label of being "unsustainable." We believe this is not entirely accurate. This label stems from the perception of NFTs being energy-intensive, as NFTs on Ethereum are using a proof-of-work consensus mechanism.

Looking back from Unique's perspective, the biggest challenges facing NFT development include high gas fees on Ethereum and limited scalability, as well as the high barrier to entry for blockchain knowledge (which affects both developer teams and users). This is also why Unique Network chose to build on the Polkadot network.

The Polkadot relay chain is a POS network with a carbon footprint much lower than Ethereum's PoW, and the interoperability, innovation of Substrate, and shared security brought by the Polkadot network are expected to help everyone overcome the inherent barriers on Ethereum. At the same time, Unique is committed to developing a series of advanced features for NFT games and art projects, allowing everyone to create more advanced and widespread application scenarios for NFTs.

Catcher: What is the operational mechanism of Unique Network? What are its characteristics and advantages?

Evelyn: Unique, as an NFT public chain, currently mainly serves game and art projects. For art projects, we have created NFT minting and collection tools, a whitelabel marketplace for projects to customize their unique front-end and branding, and NFT wallets.

Next are a series of features that truly change and upgrade NFT technology, including: advanced economic models that will exempt B2C users from transaction fees, promote the evolution of NFT forms, help artists unleash their full creativity, and bring a democratic NFT ownership structure to art creators and consumers. The relational model of NFTs will completely upgrade the entire NFT to a higher level, ultimately achieving connectivity to other chains for true interoperability.

Regarding the interactivity of NFTs, at Unique Network, we believe that communication and interconnection are key to sustained success. Any NFT minted on Unique Network can actually own other NFTs, communicate with each other, and influence the properties of linked assets, presenting a moment of "Cambrian explosion" in the NFT world with infinite possibilities.

In addition, we have launched a freemium gaming program. It will provide dapp game developers with token sponsorship, technical, marketing, and resource support; secondly, there are various development toolkits, including APIs/SDKs - Unity, Ethereum migration tools, fiat gateways, Blockexplorer, etc.; thirdly, there is a corporate program that makes account management, custom design programs, and investment options easier.

In summary, our vision is to cover all potential needs of NFT projects, helping them not only technically but comprehensively. We believe that together with the projects using our chain, we will become a strong NFT community and ecosystem, contributing to continuous innovation and long-term development in the NFT industry.

Catcher: Since its launch, Unique Network has made significant progress. What is the current status? Can you introduce the roadmap to us?

Evelyn: First, from a technical development perspective:

• February 2020: Completed NFT Pallet;
• August 2020: Completed TEST NET 1.0, NFT smart contract Pallet, NFT wallet, NET API, Unity SDK PoC;
• November 2020: Completed PoC, SubstraPunks, Marketplace, Bridge to Kusama, and alternative economic models; TEST NET 2.0, Substrate 3.0, Ink 3.0, audits, complete test coverage, production readiness;
• February 2021: Completed Kusama Chiba Art Museum (http://chiba.bit.country/), Whitelabel project;
• March 2021: Completed Marketplace (https://whitelabel.market/#/market), Minting, and NFT wallet.

As you can see, we started technical development in 2020. Now, let me briefly talk about the major events in 2021: In October 2021, Unique Network raised $11.3 million; and won second place for Best Whitelabel Marketplace at NFT.NYC; In November 2021, Unique Network's canary network Quartz won the 14th Kusama parachain slot; announced the Unique Network token community distribution event "Diamond in the Rough"; In December 2021, it was confirmed that the whitelist round for the UNQ sale would take place on January 11 and 12, 2022, with the public sale date set for January 12 to 13.

Catcher: Governance has always played an important role in the crypto world. What designs and measures does Unique Network have to incentivize community users? Previously, you issued NFTs to the community; do you have similar plans in the future?

Evelyn: I would like to first review the two NFTs we previously issued to the community: Substrapunk and Chelobricks.

First, let me introduce Substrapunk: Inspired by the iconic NFT collection Cryptopunks, we launched our first NFT series, Substrapunks, which showcases innovation and alternative spirit, driving Unique Network to develop NFTs that are more practical, interoperable, and sustainable than those on Ethereum.

Substrapunks is the first NFT series on Polkadot. The purpose of creating Substrapunks is to demonstrate how NFTs on Polkadot can overcome some limitations of Ethereum-based NFTs (high gas fees, greater environmental damage, and lower flexibility). The success of Substrapunks helped us push forward the design and soft launch of our marketplace in November 2020. This is also an antique NFT on Polkadot.

In September 2021, after several milestones and even having its own Twitter fan account, all 10,000 Substrapunks were claimed and traded thousands of times on the Unique platform, reaching historical price highs, such as Blondie #3354, which was recently sold for 38.5 KSM.

Next is Chelobricks: Chelobricks is the second NFT airdrop in collaboration with Polkadot Decoded, which indeed helped build a growing community of supporters and investors.

Chelobricks is a collection of 10,000 NFTs based on Substrate, currently active in our marketplace. Most of the 10,000 unique, randomly generated character images in the Substrate-based Chelobrick collection (the term "Chelobricks" means "people" or "men" in Russian) were claimed in less than 20 hours. This airdrop also attracted various new users to the Polkadot network and showcased to users that NFTs on the platform can overcome many limitations encountered when running on Ethereum. We created a community trading market UNQNFT for these two NFTs.

Everyone can go and play; you just need to link a POLKADOT.JS account. Last September, we announced that all addresses holding at least one Chelobrick and one Substrapunk would be entitled to 50% of the total profits from the marketplace. At the time of the announcement, about 300 addresses shared a total profit of nearly 50 KSM.

This reward provides more value to the owners of Chelobricks and Substrapunks while encouraging healthy market activity. Now this reward grows with the increase in trading volume and transaction amounts. In the upcoming UNQ Token community sale, any community member holding these two NFTs can enter the whitelist round. We will continue to bring more benefits to Unique NFT holders and will consider continuing similar NFT airdrop community activities in the future.

Catcher: Establishing partnerships is very important. Who are your current partners?

Evelyn: Of course, first I want to talk about our digital art and NFT collaboration with UN-Habitat and IAAI Glocha.

Unique Network is the exclusive blockchain partner of the UN-related NFT climate initiative—DigitalArt4Climate. This initiative aligns with the UN's declaration of 2021 as the "Year of Sustainable Creative Economy," which emphasizes the value of creativity as a unique and powerful resource for implementing and achieving the UN Sustainable Development Goals.

We believe that our NFT chain can not only enhance the efficiency and capabilities of creators through our scalable proof-of-stake solutions but also reduce the energy consumption of blockchain and ensure that artists can showcase and monetize their work to the world. As part of the collaboration with UN-Habitat and IAAI GLOCHA, Unique Network will create and host the NFT marketplace for DigitalArt4Climate, where artists and web designers can showcase their work.

This marketplace will be built on Unique Network's ready-to-use NFT solution suite, which is optimized for energy efficiency and low carbon impact.

Other partners include:

• Sovereign Nature Initiative: The Sovereign Nature Initiative will use Unique Network's NFT marketplace infrastructure for ecological conservation and regeneration projects as part of an upcoming hackathon.

• Vernisage: We will provide technical support for the community-driven art market Vernissage, including marketplace platform, wallet customization, low transaction fees, sustainability, and scalability.

• SupraOracles: SupraOracles and Unique Network are exploring multiple collaboration opportunities involving NFTs and the metaverse.

• Forever Has Fallen: Forever Has Fallen is the world's first social game combining story exploration, podcasts, and NFTs, utilizing our NFT developer tools and marketplace, allowing players to experience unique interactive twists in the first season finale of Forever Has Fallen.

• Artpool: The art discovery platform Artpool will build its new NFT trading market on the infrastructure provided by Unique and begin using many advanced features on Unique chain.

• Subsocial: The decentralized social network based on Substrate, SubSocial, integrates with Unique's Marketplace.

• RMRK App: We collaborated with RMRK to build composable, permanently liquid, multi-resource NFTs that will not only stay in your wallet until the next NFT craze makes them popular but will also increase liquidity and utility in the future.

• Seedify: Our partnership with Seedify allows Seedify's incubator projects to benefit from our infrastructure and marketplace.

Catcher: The economic model is very important. How is the token economic model of Unique Network designed? What are the application scenarios?

Evelyn: UNQ is the token of Unique Network, the NFT chain of the Polkadot Network. The UNQ token will facilitate value exchange between users, the Unique treasury, and the Unique protocol. Utility and governance in the ecosystem are achieved through the dual functions of UNQ:

The first function of UNQ is to pay transaction fees, which will primarily arise from NFT transactions and smart contract transactions.

The second function is staking. The three main staking scenarios on Unique Network are: App promotion staking, reputation staking, and voting staking (governance). The total supply of tokens is 1,000,000,000; the circulating supply at genesis is 67,770,563; and the inflation rate will decrease from 10% in the first year to 4% in the tenth year.

The following two images show the specific distribution of tokens: Many parachain projects on Polkadot use a dual-token mechanism. The token of Unique's canary network Quartz (which has already become a parachain on Kusama) is QTZ, and the main functions of QTZ and UNQ are similar. For specific details, you can click here.

Catcher: We know that the entire crypto market changes very quickly. With more and more entrants, what do you think will be the main trends in the NFT space next year?

Evelyn: We can divide the development of NFTs into several stages: marked by the birth of Cryptopunks, 2015-2016 was the budding period, 2017 saw the launch of Cryptokitties, and the following four years (2017-2020) were the development period, while 2021 entered the initial explosion phase. We believe that NFTs will continue to explode in 2022.

Now, let me briefly predict a few small trends: 1. The formal entry into the multi-chain era will begin. Large NFT trading platforms and other projects on Ethereum will start seeking multi-chain solutions and strive to land, which will also be an opportunity for the Polkadot ecosystem and Unique; 2. Community governance based on DAOs and NFTs will become more prosperous and user-friendly; 3. NFT games and the metaverse will continue to explode and bring greater out-of-the-box effects; 4. The application of NFTs in digital identity, decentralized domain names, copyrights, and data markets.

Catcher: Compared to other public chains, how is the overall development of the NFT ecosystem on Polkadot? What role does Unique Network play?

Evelyn: NFTs on Polkadot and Kusama can be referred to as NFTs 2.0. By allowing the existence of specific heterogeneous application shards, builders can locally optimize complex NFT use cases without compromising the efficiency and high costs of interactions in other environments. In addition to Unique, there are other NFT solutions in the Polkadot ecosystem that exist and are being developed, including:

The NFT protocol RMRK, which is also our partner. Efinity, a bridge chain for NFTs, plans to connect to Kusama and Polkadot. Moonriver / Moonbeam, which allows for runtime-level NFT-specific optimizations while maintaining EVM compatibility of tools, and optimizing the storage and interaction of rich NFTs, etc.

Unique is the first NFT public chain in the Polkadot ecosystem and hopes to closely collaborate with other NFT projects in the Polkadot ecosystem to jointly build the Polkadot NFT ecosystem.

Catcher: Looking ahead to 2022, what are the specific plans for Unique Network? What are the goals?

Evelyn: Regarding 2022, the first upcoming event is the whitelist round for the UNQ sale on January 11 and 12, followed by the public sale on January 12 to 13. (You can see the details on this page)

Our key tasks for 2022 include: Unique bidding for Polkadot parachains, launching advanced features on Quartz and Unique, and attracting more dApp development teams and various NFT projects to start using Unique and Quartz. At the same time, we are working hard to realize a multi-chain metaverse, where game developers can select components from 10 (or more) ecosystems and utilize them to create games.

The future of NFTs (technical standards for digital assets, such as artworks or virtual homes) is multi-chain, which is a more diversified approach that can address the limitations of blockchain art galleries and expand their use cases, presenting previously unimaginable opportunities that touch various corners of culture and commerce. In summary, our vision is to cover all potential needs of NFT projects, helping them not only technically but comprehensively. We believe that together with the projects using our chain, we will become a strong NFT community and ecosystem, contributing to continuous innovation and long-term development in the NFT industry.