We have built a new piece of technology that delivers true dynamic NFTs that open the door to real world utility for non-fungible tokens.
Up until now the term “dynamic NFTs” meant regular NFTs that could communicate with external databases (mostly via off-chain transactions), bringing interoperability at the cost of compromising true digital ownership to NFT technology. This would allow NFT creators to build platforms where different NFTs could be used in different ways, based on their metadata.
Our technology is built differently as our dynamic NFTs are capable of algorithmically updating different properties of the NFT themselves through a series of nested NFTs minted as one. This means that NFTs on Next Earth can have attributes that can be created, read, updated or deleted based on smart contract transactions.
This allows for truly trustless operation of games, (think durability or in-game equipment that can change over time) or even NFT based loyalty point systems. With the current technology available in the Web3 space, any creator be — an artist or a Fortune500 company — would need to create a Web2 layer that handles these properties, completely eliminating the trustless and permissionless nature of NFTs and placing the creator back into the seat of a central authority as they are the ones who control the Web2 database.
Next Earth dynamic NFTs operate differently. New properties are minted as new tokens and then attached to the original token. These new properties can be stored as ERC-721, ERC-20 or ERC-1155 tokens.
The dynamic properties of a truly dynamic NFT rely on the chain and be stored on the chain so the owner of the NFT owns its properties too.
Nth Dimension Layers
New properties minted via Next Earth and attached to original land tiles (ERC-721) can be done through the creation of a new Layer on top of the Next Earth Map. Any developer who wishes to create their own application can generate their own Layer, select which tiles, regions or locations are active on their application and build their own solution without the need for deep Web3 knowledge. This new Layer is the developer’s own “realm” where any rule can be set based on what their application does.
However, as developers are using Layer 0 (the original Next Earth Map) as their baseline, the smart contract allocation system will automatically pay royalties to owners of Next Earth land from the use of their land in another Layer.
This structure is scalable to millions of applications in a trustless and permissionless way. While dynamic NFTs allow for virtually unlimited use cases (as opposed to regular NFTs which are difficult to work with and mainly have been limited to static use cases such as art), multiple layers allow for the creation of the Next Earth App Store. Therefore every dApp built on Next Earth will use its own Layer.
These layers can be displayed on top of the Mapbox map thanks to the Next Earth Map Engine. This engine is responsible for the tile system which is the base of all Next Earth’s features from the beginning.
Technically when you open the map, the engine is calculating all the tiles you can see on the selected map area in real time. This can be done by a mathematical algorithm which can convert any geo location (described by latitude and longitude coordinates) into a unique tile id. The reverse calculation is also the task of the engine, so when you have a tile id (or several tile ids like in your Land NFT) it can calculate the exact latitude and longitude coordinates of the tile from its id. The on the fly calculation is essential because of performance and storage. You can’t store approximately 5 trillion tiles and their coordinates in a database and queries it every time the map shows up for each user.
When you take a look at the Next Earth map you can see several layers driven by the engine.
- The grid layer just draw a simple line around every tile in the area you currently see.
- The land layer (above the grid) draw a polygon around the lands (purchased and owned by someone) and give them a color.
- The land art layer (above the land layer) draw the art onto the lands.
- The campaign layer (above the land art layer) draw a polygon around the campaign area (which consists of many tile) and gives it a border.
All layers use the tiles calculated by the engine and draw somehow something around / inside them and gives a possibility to the user to interact with them (such as clicking on a land and seeing its details). Besides that the mentioned layers are separated from each other so can be switched on/off depending on the use case (just like Mapbox layers such as satellite view, street view etc).
There is another layer which is a technical layer called ‘selection layer’. This allows the user to select the tiles that are available for selection. When the user selects them he/she can mint the Land NFT from the selection.
With the Nth Layer concept Next Earth developed a generic solution to create new layers. As a developer you can
- create your layer on the surface of the Earth
- switch off any non relevant other layer
- mint a standard or dynamic NFT with arbitrary attributes and metadata from the selection on your layer (with or without the geo data coded inside the selected tiles) with Next Earth’s smart contract system
- connect your layer with other layers (just like all layer connected to Layer 0 by default)
- draw anything on your layer
- add the possibility to any kind of user interaction on your layer.
As a technical summary Nth Layers on Next Earth means anyone can create an own web3 layer on the surface of the Earth.
Example: Mines and resources
To give an example, a Mines layer has developed and will be added to Next Earth as we pass through our Event Horizon. This means that using our Nth layer technology, a new layer exists that complements the current Map, where users are able to deploy Mines with specific resources.
As seen on the screenshots, deploying a mine means selection of an area on the map, defining high, medium and low yield tiles for said resource and depositing NXTT into the Mine itself to determine the amount of resource the Mine will have.
In order to do this, you don’t have to own the tiles where you’re deploying a Mine, but the original owner of the land will get a royalty of the resources generated. This will generate income for original landowners while also allowing developers to make use of Mines and Resources as part of their development. Mines will be minted on the new layer as dynamic NFTs and developers can set their own rules for extracting resources out of the Mines
