It is said that an inch of time is an inch of gold. At that time, is NFT facing an opportunity or a challenge?

On February 25th, Newt, the experimental department of Aave, launched the first time tokenization project Aika. Using Aika, time can be minted and sold on Polygon as an NFT, recording events and work on the blockchain.

For guilds, DAOs, and other crypto-native organizations, Aika provides a standardized way to get paid for services. In addition, Aika can also be used for restaurant reservations, personal meetings, and car sharing.

It is said that "an inch of time is an inch of gold", the importance of time is self-evident, and the emergence of time NFT is undoubtedly an innovation, so what exactly is it and what is its role?

Definition of time NFT

As the name suggests, time NFT means that users cast their own time into NFT and sell it. The blockchain will permanently record events and users' work conditions.

Creators can sell their time on the NFT platform, and buyers will pay for the time it takes for the seller to provide services.

Taking Aika as an example, it is like the hot search bar on social platforms such as Douyin, the bulletin board on campus, and the electronic screen on the bus stop. It only exists as a bridge between buyers and sellers, and this is what the platform undertakes. character of.

Creators can publish their time slots for sale to users, and the platform tokenizes and proofs these time slots on-chain for sale.

Vision of the social platform Alfa

In 2019, Tony Tran, the founder of Alfa-Enzo (a blockchain social platform), proposed the idea of tokenizing people's "time".

He believes that there is only one thing in the universe that can help people better understand the blockchain, and that is time , because it can neither be tampered with nor destroyed, and it can also be digitized.

To this end, he designed a social APP called Alfa, where users can contribute their "time" to earn money on the platform.

"Unlike traditional social software such as Facebook and Twitter, people can only browse what happened in the present and the past, and cannot see what will happen in the future, but they can on Alfa." Tony Tran said.

As a simple example, if you took a lot of pictures last week while traveling with friends, but choose to post them today, the platform will actually target the time when you posted the pictures to last week.

In other words, users can post their photos at any point in the past, such as going back to the moment you were born and uploading a photo. In the same way, users can also share their lives in the "future" time.

From food to accommodation, from work to life, from social news to local stories, users can browse the content of "past" and "future" indefinitely, so as to discover interesting people and things around them.

In this process, users contribute their precious time to the Alfa platform. In return, they will get the platform’s token ENZO (also known as NZO), which is the tokenization of time we mentioned at the beginning.

This "incentive" measure is more like a platform set up to increase user activity. As time goes by, the platform has no news, but it provides an idea for the formation of "time NFT".

Possibility of time NFT

The concept of time NFT has developed to a little mature now, but there has been no clear plan for the implementation direction.

Some people think that time NFT may be used in the field of work.

Creators can store their own iconic moments in their work on the chain, such as when a certain project they worked on was a great success, when the team they led received rewards, or when they obtained work-related certificates.

This is equivalent to leaving proofs on the chain all over the world. As an immutable record, it directly reflects the creator's experience. Future buyers don't need to read his resume or do back-tracking. You can understand his ability background and project contribution.

Through horizontal comparisons among creators, buyers can also learn about their reputation, experience, and skills in the market, and evaluate their "cost-effectiveness."

However, this also has certain disadvantages. Are these important moments stored on the chain by creators real and effective, and are buyers’ evaluation standards consistent with them? How can the platform avoid these problems?

Time has always been fair, everyone has the same 24 hours, time NFT brings a new direction to the field.

Unfortunately, it has basically no practical application so far, and the only few attempts have not been widely recognized by users. As for whether NFT will find a new way in the future or will be eliminated, we still don't know.