Crazy Man Sun Yuchen, using NFTs to preach the digital economy

Image source @ Visual China

Text | New to science and technology

In June 2021, Sotheby's, one of the world's three largest auction houses, auctioned off a picture – the source code originally written for the World Wide Web by Tim Berners-Lee, the father of the Internet, was auctioned online via NFT for a starting price of $1,000, and finally sold for $5.4345 million.

Interestingly, some netizens soon pointed out the code error in the picture. Sotheby's said it would work with buyers to correct the error. Others argue that this "error" may actually add value to the NFT, similar to misprinting of collectibles such as stamps.

This vignette brings not only a discussion of the value geometry of the wrong version of NFTs, but also a borderless imagination of the scope of NFT coverage, which broadly empowers the infinite possibilities of the digital economy.

NFT leader Sun Yuchen has practiced this spirit in another way.

Grenada's Permanent Representative to the WTO and Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary represented Grenada at the WTO meeting, which is Sun Yuchen's latest development. At the beginning of his term of office, he visited Barbados, Panama, Switzerland and other countries, and met with the ambassadors of the United States, Russia, Singapore and the European Union to the WTO by video, focusing on the issue of "the combination of virtual currency and sovereign countries" in the field of digital economy.

On a recent Weibo post, Sun Yuchen expressed his vision for this status more than once: "As Grenada's ambassador to the WTO, I strive to uphold the highest standards in my activities in the public and industry sectors. ”

From the earliest participation in the NFT auction, many shots of well-known crypto art collections, to the accumulation of strength to the expansion of the circle, and then to the development and growth of Tron, the attention of the outside world to Sun Yuchen has now shifted from Buffett's lunch bidder to blockchain, NFT and Grenada's ambassador to the WTO.

It seems more meaningful to break the circle with the NFT and grow into a force to be reckoned with in the global digital economy than controversy, after all, the review of existing achievements is far more than the empty accusations and the war of words between you and me. What magic is there in the NFT that is worth the flag waving and shouting of a number of technology giants, including Sun Yuchen?

01 NFT point alchemy

On New Year's Day 2022, Jay Chou and his friends co-founded the Chao brand PHANTACi to sell a limited 10,000-piece NFT project "Phantom Bear", with an issue price of 0.26ETH (Ethereum) of about 6200 yuan, and all of them were sold within about 40 minutes, with a revenue of about 62 million yuan.

Ten days later, Phantom Bear 9999 was sold at 148ETH, or about 2.92 million yuan, which was just a "general operation" in the NFT world.

When NFT avant-garde artist Beeple's digital work Everydays: The First 5000 Days sold for $63 million, no one dared to believe that a new era of art had arrived.

In less than a year, the word "NFT" beat the "metacosm" to become the hot word of the year 2021 published by the British Collins English Dictionary. Although he regretted missing this epoch-making NFT work, Sun Yuchen still spent $6 million to become the ultimate winner of Beeple's other crypto art, "OCEAN FRONT".

Each generation must have a generation's collection, and Picasso's greatness lies not only in the magical combination of messy lines, but also in the rebellious spirit carried by the postmodernism he expressed, and NFT is perhaps the best inheritance of the contemporary Picasso spirit.

While many people are still waiting and seeing, NFTs have developed by leaps and bounds. According to market research firm Chainalysis, the size of the NFT market will reach at least $26.9 billion by 2021. In addition to growing as fast as cryptocurrencies, an industry with a COMPOUND annual growth rate of 12.8%, NFTs also have storage, display, trading, and more, providing the perfect solution for converging crypto and culture.

With cryptographic signatures, exclusive account binding, and support for tracking and verifying ownership of digital assets at any time, NFTs help form a complete digital reality and overcome the basic obstacles to building a virtual and digital future.

If CryptoPunks, the first NFT digital collection project in history, is just a product of the right time, then the Bored Ape Yacht Club is the best example of breaking down prejudices, and this digital innovation based on blockchain technology is a full affirmation of the future of art.

Sun Yuchen also did not miss the hot boring ape project, and took a portrait of Justin Sun Tpunks numbered 3442 for $10.5 million, and said that he would donate to the APEFT Foundation.

No one can stop the change from happening, and what is more exciting is that the emergence of NFTs marks the landing of the next generation of digital economy based on digital currency to specific ecological content, which greatly reduces the technical threshold for investment in digital currency.

As the pace of NFT expansion accelerated, Sun Yuchen's status in the NFT field quickly transitioned from a participant to a leader. From past experience, he has always had a "restless" factor in his bones, who comes from a top university, has a multi-disciplinary background, and pays attention to the latest developments in the world.

It is also these achievements that he has accumulated a valuable value that is difficult to replicate. Digital art has grown in a spurt, and the NFT's digital empowerment of art works has been fully verified.

For the art market that is bound to become NFT, Sun Yuchen chose to increase investment, and successively photographed Picasso's Lying with a Necklace, Andy Warhol's Three Self-Portraits, Beeple's Ocean's Front and other collections, with a total value of more than 1 billion yuan, and completed the NFT treatment in the Tron public chain.

02 Tron and WTO representatives

In 2021, digital art trading is the basic and out-of-the-loop means of NFT, and this year, the virtual asset economy is more open, and nearly 100 "phantom bear" holders have exchanged physical objects in Jay Chou's Chaopai store.

In addition, NFTs have also brought more non-traditional coin circles to the metacosm. Jay Chou fans, NBA fans, programmers who know the significance of the World Wide Web to the development of the Internet... The small circle layer drives the large circle layer, and it is only a matter of time before the NFT breaks the circle.

Another big problem in the digital world is the true confirmation of personal digital assets. At this stage, it is also an excellent application scenario for NFTs. For example, the release content and social trajectory of an individual's account on a platform seem to belong to an individual, but the right to delete and cancel is actually in the hands of the platform, and the NFT solves the problem of virtual wealth ownership that cannot be controlled, and every digital interaction can be recorded in the chain, and transactions can occur point-to-point.

Open finance, the DeFi and its applications currently active on the Ethereum network, has made cross-generational advances in providing a new, permissionless financial services ecosystem.

DeFi's pledge loan model can check bad debts every 15 seconds, and is equipped with risk buffer measures such as bad debt reserve pool and user insurance fund. According to PwC, 47% of traditional hedge fund managers are considering investing in cryptocurrencies. Another survey revealed that hedge fund managers may allocate 7% of their assets to cryptocurrencies. As a bridge between reality in cryptocurrencies, the value of NFTs will be more widely confirmed.

The creation of Tron is based on the unstoppable digital currency trend and the reality that NFTs are gradually sweeping across all walks of life. "Allowing transparent and compliant digital assets to circulate freely around the world" is no longer a piece of paper.

For the development of the NFT market, a sustainable and fast-growing ecosystem is the foundation for empowering all things, and it is also a solid backing for distinguishing the advantages of the project from the mixed NFT projects. Internationally, TRON and its layout of the NFT underlying technology have been endorsed many times for many NFT projects.

Miles Anthony, CEO and founder of metaversal project Decentral Games, spoke highly of the team after reaching a partnership with Tron: "We are excited to partner with Trontron to accelerate the application of NFT and EV-positive gaming technologies in the long term."

His performance in the blockchain field has created new opportunities for Sun Yuchen. Ambassadorship to the WTO means that a comprehensive and efficient infrastructure is combined with the identity of members of international organizations, and NFTs have broader development prospects and more convenient circulation space.

First, for the Caribbean, advanced digital tools and leading economic perspectives have been introduced, with Grenada as the fulcrum, and cutting-edge technology will cover the virgin land of the digital economy. Secondly, from a global perspective, the identity of the ambassador to the WTO, combined with the achievements in the digital field, is helpful to a certain extent to boost the confidence of countries in the global trading system boosted by blockchain technology.

Sun Yuchen, who frequently meets with ambassadors from many countries, has also repeatedly emphasized the importance of virtual currencies in fighting economic security, such as discussing topics such as the use of blockchain technology to help civilians without access to the financial system with Russian ambassador to the WTO, such as Dmitry Lyakishev. The customs clearance code of the global economy has gradually been revealed in one exchange and collision after another, and the new pattern evolution is quietly coming.

03 Deconstruction and reinvention

Many brands at home and abroad have entered the NFT, the meta-universe is hot, digital assets have emerged, and Sun Yuchen, who focuses on the investment of head artists and top art works, sits on a digital collection of one billion scale, leading the NFT wave at the same time, he has not forgotten the idea of returning art to the public, and reshaping the layout of the art trading market with NFT.

From the $78 million Giacometti sculpture to the EtherRock NFT in 187ETH, different and more avant-garde art collectors have emerged, and have gradually broadened the imagination of crypto art.

Benefiting from NFT's distributed digital ledger, transactions, ownership, and validity of each work can be tracked. Based on the validity of smart contracts, everyone in the transaction chain, not only creators and publishers, will continue to receive a certain percentage of the sales amount in the transaction, which means that the artist's creative subject status is fully endowed and permanent from the birth of the work, and the collector obtains the wealth brought by the appreciation of the collection at the same time, in a way that is held continuously or not, because when the work is resold multiple times, they can also make a profit.

For the low-transparency and poor-security art market, a new trading model and unprecedented transparency have finally been born.

It is conceivable that in the future art market, every ordinary person can choose the right price of NFT art for trading and collection according to their own purchasing ability, and NFT will become an increasingly popular way of art trading.

In less than two years, NFTs have landed on the art market. In 2021, NFT sales reached about $25 billion, and many well-known auction houses set up special NFT auctions, and 70% of the NFT buyers at the auction were newcomers and 50% were under the age of 40, which greatly promoted the acceptance and recognition of digital art.

At the same time, as the most flexible asset allocation means in the field of blockchain ecology, NFTs can be combined with various digital forms. The popular NFT game Axe Infinity in the Philippines, the use of deFi protocols to achieve decentralized NFT financialization, etc. The economic value behind NFTs and the continued liquidity of assets they can provide will reshape the entire business world if successfully configured with more portfolios to form a practical business model.

NFT crypto art has almost betrayed the entire art world with "touch-type ownership" as the core, and truly practiced the confrontational nature of art. Similarly, the opening of a new era requires rebels and a spirit of change. They take it as their duty to respond to the impulses of the times, shocking and self-sufficient, and complete the reshaping of the existing system with an almost self-destructive deconstruction. The times chose Sun Yuchen as this evangelist, and he also pushed the wheel of history forward with an attitude close to "desperate bets".

It is foreseeable that becoming Grenada's ambassador to the WTO is far from the end of Sun Yuchen's pursuit, a new identity, a new opportunity, and a new form of change in the global economy, which is in the near future.