SparkWorld's Horsfall: Predict a Price, Win an NFT Whitelist Spot

Ashton Addison: What is SparkWorld building, and what problems does it target?▶ 00:20

Jolyon Horsfall: Our first solution focuses on randomized minting and whitelisting for NFTs. We'll initially focus on the GameFi industry because it's very scalable in terms of the number of drops. Common problems are lottery-based participation, mismanagement, and a lack of transparency about how people are chosen for the whitelist and how spots are distributed. We use these fair predictive launches as a community-based solution for that transparency and distribution. People aren't outbid by sniper bots and front-running bots, and real users get into these gaming projects. There's added security too, because we pre-vet the teams and doxx them, privately or publicly. The second solution works after launch. People can use predictive events to leverage their knowledge of NFTs and earn SPARK and AVAX rewards. For example, will project A have more volume this week than project B? There's a reward pool of SPARK and AVAX tokens, which keeps people engaged after the launch.

Ashton: How do the fair prediction launches work in practice?▶ 03:12

Jolyon: We combine prediction events with launchers. Prediction markets often aren't sticky in crypto, for reasons like liquidity and APY expectations. So we went back to the ideation phase and asked how you create an ordered list of people on-chain where the project itself doesn't whitelist anyone. We don't want to choose the polling method or use some off-chain random number generator. You predict something, such as the price of AVAX or a project's governance token in seven days, and the 100 closest predictions are on the whitelist. We can be supplementary or exclusive. If you have a 2,500-NFT drop, we can help whitelist 500 people, or we can handle the whole drop. We want that blockchain ethos, a smart contract that whitelists people without us controlling it, because that's fair access from the ground level.

Ashton: Is this the ultimate solution for fair NFT minting?▶ 05:20

Jolyon: There's never a perfect solution to anything. When people say they have the ultimate blanket solution, whether it's an L1 or a fork of Arbitrum or Optimism, I think it's untested, and there's going to be some tinkering and tweaking. We can't satisfy both the whales and the people with relatively small holdings who all want access to these NFTs. Pareto efficiency is normally unachievable. Like a government making policy, you have to compromise and decide what benefits the majority of stakeholders, which are the projects, the communities and the people getting into the NFTs. We're making an enhancement on the current situation, and we'll improve it over time with more features and more routes.

Ashton: Prediction markets have struggled to gain traction. Could access to whitelists change that?▶ 06:51

Jolyon: The prediction element is a means to an end. It isn't the whole concept of the platform, because plenty of prediction markets have come through without getting traction. We're combining NFT minting, which people are very interested in, with predictions, and using that to produce the ordered list of people. On a normal platform you either mint the NFT or you don't, with no extra benefits. Here there are staking yields and prediction rewards as well as the minting. Even if you don't get into the top 100 or 200 and miss out on the mint, you still get those other rewards. In either scenario you probably get a larger benefit.

Ashton: Where is SparkWorld on partnerships and the platform launch?▶ 08:44

Jolyon: It's an incredibly crowded and crazy space. Innovation is happening at a rate of knots, which is amazing to see, but it's hard to know what will be successful. We're launching in the next month and speaking to a lot of NFT projects, both launch partners and projects that will do subsequent drops on our platform. I can't give away any names yet, but hopefully we have some big ones. We on the team are quite bullish on gaming NFTs in the medium to long term. They're potentially slightly more resistant to a bear market, although that theory is yet to be tested.

Ashton: What are the plans for SparkWorld NFTs and the SPARK token?▶ 09:49

Jolyon: We're going to have a one-of-100 NFT series, the founders council, with quite heavy governance rights. It will be released in batches. People who take the time to predict on the platform get experience and levels by entering the fair predictive launches. We're also building an NFT hub. We have partnerships with Arcades, which does mission pools for NFTs, so games on our platform can create missions that let people earn yield from the games without necessarily playing them. Blockchain Space has the most guilds signed up of any project in the world, nearly 11,000 I think, and we want to collaborate on getting those guilds playing the NFT games that come across our platform. We also want to work with something like IQ Protocol for NFT staking, renting and lending. The goal is utility and usage for the SPARK governance token in as many ways as possible.

Ashton: Are NFTs undervalued or overvalued right now?▶ 11:38

Jolyon: It depends on how you explain what you're valuing. If you say people are valuing JPEGs at hundreds of millions or billions, it's easy to conclude they're overvalued. But explain anything in the simplest way and it sounds mundane or silly. If I said someone gets paid 300,000 pounds a week to kick a leather ball into a net, that sounds crazy, but that's the world of football. NFTs are memberships and gateways to high-alpha groups. If you buy a Boo or a Near, a Bugle on Solana, an SMB, a Punk or an Ape, you're getting into an elite section, like paying for a members' club. You get access to the whitelists and the ideas that can push you forward. A lot of people who understand that think they're undervalued, and the people who see only JPEGs think they're overvalued. I personally think a good chunk of blue-chip sets deserve to be where they are. There are also a lot of whippier or scammy sets being artificially pumped, because wash trading is much easier in NFTs.