Ok, well, we've been talking about this and planning it for what seems like forever, but it's finally starting! We're planning on bringing NFTs live this Monday!!!

@yabapmatt put together the initial scope of work
@cryptomancer has done an excellent job coding the contract.
@beggars working with @bait002 and @lion200 have coded up the site for creation and the market. She's lookin' great!
@harpagon is going to update the node and get this baby working.

Logistics

We're planning on updating the contract and the nodes on Monday around 10-11 am Eastern. This could lead to some down time as we upgrade the site for NFTs.

If you're planning on doing any major trades I suggest you steer clear of Monday.

Once the node is back up we should be up and running. There could be problems, and it's worth noting that @beggars who leads the site development is on the other side of the world. So, if there are some challenges it may take a few hours simply due to timezones to get everything working right.

Anyway, we're expecting NFTs live on Monday and potentially some "chop" as we switch everything live.

What are NFTs?

NFT stands for non-fungible token. Tokens like bitcoin and steem are fungible. If I send you steem you don't ask me "which steem did you send?" because they are all the same.

If I send you a Splinterlands monster you might ask "which one?" And if I say "Lord of Darkness" you might even ask again "which one?" and then I could tell you the exact ID of that one specific card because they are all different and uniquely tracked. When the tokens are all different like that they are NFTs.

What we're adding is the beginning of a new age for Steem-Engine where NFTs are available. Personally, I think this will have a big impact on Steem as a network too!

What can I do with an NFT?

NFTs can represent anything that needs to be kept track of with its own ID.

You could trade promissory notes for gold bars tied to individual serial numbers and track each token for each gold bar (or portion).
You could track mortgages.
You could track titles to vehicles.
You can make games with collectable components like card collections or inventories for RPGs.
You can create and collect art.
You can enable things like" can Jimmy watch this video?" based on token ownership.
You could register the birth of people.
You can form a club with different tokenized roles.

That's just what you can do with these off the top of my head!

Why would I do this on Steem Engine?

On Steem-Engine creating NFTs are relatively inexpensive. There's a starting cost, and some fees for upgrading them with things like staking, but the fee per token is set to be 0.001 ENG. That's cheap. For Splinterlands we minted 4.5M cards in the beta edition. That would cost 4,500 ENG, which is ~$450. Considering that 900,000 beta packs have a face value of 1.8M dollars it's a small price to pay.

Transactions themselves are free. Yes, there is a market, yes we will charge a fee for trading (5%), but to give tokens back and forth or to trade privately is free. So, one example that comes to mind is another game on another chain, where the common cards are worth less than the transaction fees to transfer them (let alone the exchange fees too). Here you can list the cards for free,, send them for free, and moving things around just costs a few resource credits that automatically regenerate over time (as long as you have some steem power on the account).

We can scale. Imagine if just one game was enough to bring your entire network to a standstill. Well, Steem is actually really well setup to grow. With MIRA on the backend shoving data out of ram and onto the hard drive, Communities on the frontend allowing for cheap interest groups to form, and SMTs coming along with Tribes there's a lot of opportunity to build businesses and communities here with a chain that can handle the growth.

Any way I can get involved?

Sure, as of Monday you can create and trade NFTs.
If you want to build an exchange you too can tap into the market fees as the whole thing is a dex and more than one website can get in on the trading.
If you're a dev you can build your game or project using these NFTs.

Why the fee?

As much as I would love to make everything free it costs money to develop things. There are fees on token creation. They are very inexpensive compared to other alternatives. There are market fees. We're setting them to 5%. This is in part to make sure there's enough incentive for us and other groups to build and maintain markets.

Ok, well, please be patient with us on Monday, and come celebrate by making your own NFTs

Should be fun!