Emblem Vault

From NFT History
Jump to navigation Jump to search
Emblem Vault
Emblem Vault Logo.png
Blockchain Namecoin, Bitcoin, Dogecoin, Ethereum, Solana, Tezos, BSC, Stacks, Polygon, Monacoin, Litecoin, Digibyte, Bitcoin Cash/SLP, xDAI
Creation Date October 16th, 2016
Fungibility ERC-20, ERC-721, & ERC-1155
Developer(s) Shannon Code, Dawn Code
Explorer(s) Emblem Deployer, $COVAL
Marketplace(s) OpenSea (Ethereum), OpenSea (Polygon)
Social Account(s) Twitter, Medium, YouTube, Sales Bot
Chat(s) Community Telegram, Technical Support Telegram, Discord
Website(s) CircuitsOfValue.com, Emblem.Finance

Emblem Vault (EV) is a Web3 tool that allows fungible and non-fungible assets to be stored and exchanged in vaults across blockchains without the requirement of a bridge. Vaults are standard ERC-721 or ERC-1155 tokens that can be utilized as a transferable multi-asset wallet that has the ability to store a wide array of cryptocurrencies, NFTs, and digital assets from Proof-of-Work (PoW) and Proof-of-Stake (PoS) blockchains. Since February 2021, Emblem Vault has been principally utilized to store Historical NFTs from Bitcoin, Dogecoin, and Namecoin and trade them on modern marketplaces in the Ethereum ecosystem such as OpenSea. As of December 2022, Emblem Vault NFTs have traded more than 40,000 ETH in volume across 6,900 owners, with more than 30,000 vaults created.[1]

Early history

Emblem Vault was founded by Shannon Code, who began writing code when he was just 8 years old[2]. As a young adult, Shannon began farming in-game currencies in massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPG), learning skills that proved to translate well in the blockchain industry. He then landed his first job in Crypto, as head of Security for Mastercoin in 2013. During his time at Mastercoin, he became "intrigued by the idea of creating a wallet that could be sent to someone without knowing the keys, easily transferring a basket of cryptocurrencies."

During this time, Shannon developed a relationship with Sean Dennis and Gregory Simon, the founders of ribbit.me, a company that built its Ribbit Rewards (RBR) program based on its native token RBR to encourage Bitcoin adoption[3]. When RR struggled to find early adoption,[4] Sean and Dennis rebranded ribbit.me to Loyyal [5]and agreed that Shannon would rebrand Ribbit Rewards as Circuits of Value and RBR as COVAL [6].

On October 16th, 2016, Shannon shared his vision for Emblem Vault on a BitcoinTalk forum, stating the ability to "Fit an entire crypto portfolio into one #NFT token with Emblem Vault!".[7]"Emblem Vault is the second dApp that is powered by COVAL, and with this you are able to combine different blockchain wallets into a single tradable NFT token. It will add a new dimension in the world of crypto. You can even choose if you want to make the contents of your Vault open to the public or private. Boundless of new possibilities will emerge with Emblem Vault. Think about selling complete portfolio's, S&P 500 style contracts for the top 10 crypto projects. Or even sending Bitcoin in a private way, off-chain. No miners fee or long wait times required!" - BitcoinTalk.org [October 16th, 2016]

Circuits of Value

Circuits of Value is the underlying platform that operates CircuitBuilder [8]and Emblem Vault.[9] CircuitBuilder was the project deployed under the Circuits of Value brand.

"We built CircuitBuilder to be the Web3 Integration Platform we wanted to use. Borrowing from the world of functional programming and network/workflow orchestration, CircuitBuilder allows builders to use a drag and drop interface to wire together a multitude of different blockchain logic & systems quickly." -CircuitBuilder Website

"By componentizing Blockchain API and common cryptography and cryptocurrency functions, CircuitBuilder makes rapid experimentation easy and is a simple way to automate otherwise complex tasks without the need of an expert development team." - CircuitBuilder Website

Following the launch of CircuitBuilder, the team deployed their first CircuitBuilder Dapp known as CloudRunner.[10]

"CloudRunner gives you all of the fun of CircuitBuilder, with the addition of being able to run your circuits in the cloud without the app open on your local computer." -CircuitBuilder website

COVAL

COVAL is the native token of the Circuits of Value ecosystem. Beginning as the Ribbit Rewards token RBR in 2014 as its own blockchain and cryptocurrency, it was rebranded to COVAL in 2016. When Shannon took over RBR, he realized that the forked Bitcoin blockchain had significant issues and eventually underwent a 51% attack that rolled the blockchain back 10,000 blocks. This led Shannon to formulate a new strategy and eventually migrate COVAL to Bitcoin and undergo a redeployment. On August 7th, 2016, COVALC was minted on Counterparty, a Bitcoin Dapp, with a supply of 1,200,000,000 tokens[11], matching the original supply of RBR. A migration bonus of 15% was offered to any users who moved their RBR to COVALC.

During the transition, the U.S. Cryptocurrency exchange Bittrex agreed to delist RBR and list COVALC in its place, pending a smooth migration. On May 31st, 2019[12] COVALC was delisted from Bittrex, due to the exchange announcing the removal of all Counterparty tokens from the platform. Shannon then announces that COVALC would be migrated to the Ethereum blockchain and become ERC-20 tokens.

On September 29th, 2020, Emblem Vault announced the launch of COVAL and FUEL, a dual token economy[13]. FUEL is a transactional token meant only to be used within the Emblem platform. COVAL is a utility token to be used within and outside of the Emblem platform. COVAL is currently used to create Emblem Vaults at a cost of 250 COVAL per mint. During each vault creation, the vault creation fee of 250 COVAL is sent to the Emblem Handler contract [14]which is then sent to a burn address.[15]

Emblem Vault

Launch (2020)

The first test Emblem Vault was created on September 8th, 2020[16], and Emblem Vault publicly announced the release of "the blockchain's first composite token[17]" on October 2nd, 2020. Nearly four years after Shannon had first explored the idea of a transferable multi-asset wallet on BitcoinTalk, the product had finally arrived. The initial deployment would include integrations of Ethereum's ERC-20 (fungible) & ERC-721(NFTs) tokens, as well as Bitcoin and Counterparty assets.[18]

2021 Updates

By the end of February 2021, the Emblem Vault team had been building momentum with new feature updates, technical improvements, and gained interest from the Counterparty NFT communities.

"We are working on most of our roadmap items in parallel, and delivery of these milestones can happen out of order as opportunities are discovered. Our current effort is focusing heavily on fully decentralizing our infrastructure. Hosting our front end on IPFS, and attaching an Unstoppable domain. Currently, vault contents are calculated using direct API calls to blockchain explorers like Maticvigil, Etherscan, blockchain.info, and more. While this is okay for now, we will move to use Chainlink for these calls. This move will be most beneficial for two reasons. By providing balances via Chainlink, other smart contracts can calculate the contents and value of vaults, and by placing this function on-chain, we no longer have to rely on hosting platforms such as Google cloud for this data (Making it more decentralized)" -Emblem Vault [February 17th, 2021][19]

Historical NFTs

On February 17th, 2021, GOXPEPE was vaulted and "cracked open" by Mr703[20]. Just a week later, on February 25th, 2021, PEPECASH was sold for .01 ETH[21], marking NFT history as the first Bitcoin-created NFT to sell on any Ethereum marketplace. This simple transaction would be the beginning of Emblem Vault finding a product-market fit in an NFT classification that would be born a month later, Historical NFTs.

Historical NFTs are generally regarded as non-fungible assets that were created between 2011-2019, although collectors may vary in their definition based on timestamps or technical parameters. After the rediscovery of the 2017 NFT project MoonCats on March 13th, 2021, "NFT Archaeologists" began searching for earlier NFTs on Ethereum[22]. By the end of 2022, tokenized non-fungible assets were found on Bitcoin, Dogecoin, Namecoin, and many other early blockchains.

As the Historical NFTs space boomed during the NFT bull run of 2021, so did the demand. So when collectors realized that the Bitcoin NFT PEPECASH had been sold on OpenSea, they approached Emblem Vault and requested the team to integrate NFTs from early blockchains. Dogecoin and Monacoin were added in 2021, followed by Namecoin in 2022, establishing Emblem Vault as the go-to platform to buy and sell non-Ethereum-based Historical NFTs.

Blockchain Integrations

As of December 2022, Emblem Vault has integrated:

  • Ethereum
  • Bitcoin - Counterparty
  • Namecoin
  • Dogecoin - Dogeparty
  • Monacoin - Monaparty
  • Digibyte
  • Polygon
  • Litecoin
  • Solana
  • Tezos
  • Stacks
  • Binance Smart Chain
  • xDAI
  • Bitcoin Cash - Bitcoin SV - SLP Tokens

Notable Events & Sales

As of December 2022 these are the highest sales of individual assets:

  • RAREPEPE: 200 ETH - $687,152 USD value at the time of sale (September 18th, 2021) [23]
  • SATOSHICARD: 140 ETH - $466,039 USD value at the time of sale (September 19th, 2021)[24]
  • FDCARD: 120 ETH - $399,462 USD value at the time of sale (September 19th, 2021)[25]
  • Blockhead: 110 ETH - $356,435.20 USD value at the time of sale (January 11th, 2022) [26]

Team Members

As of December 2022 Emblem Vault is a team of five members:

Recent Events & Upcoming Features

On November 15th, 2022, Emblem Vault announced the addition of Adam McBride and Jake Gallen to the team[27] with a refined focus on Historical NFTs. Their press releases stated that the long-term vision is to build a Historical NFT marketplace and increase blockchain integrations that allow for cross-blockchain trading of NFTs. To achieve the long-term vision, the immediate focus will include the rollout of NFT Curated Collections, ERC-1155 Vaulting, and Batch Minting, among other features.

Their verbal roadmap includes the launch of an ERC-1155 EMBLEMTEST NFT collection, which is expected to accompany a bug bounty program in December 2022, followed by the launch of Rare Pepe and Spells of Genesis Curated Collections in January 2023.

References

  1. https://opensea.io/collection/emblem-vault?search%5BsortAscending%5D=false&search%5BsortBy%5D=LISTING_DATE
  2. https://hillbillydeluxe2020.medium.com/ama-circuits-of-value-and-emblem-vaults-founder-shannon-code-february-2021-cd4abb40040c
  3. https://cointelegraph.com/news/ribbitme-worlds-first-blockchain-based-rewards-program-a-tool-to-mainstream-bitcoin
  4. https://bravenewcoin.com/insights/ribbitrewards-starts-their-airdrop
  5. https://www.econotimes.com/Blockchain-Startup-Ribbitme-Rebrands-As-Loyyal-200254
  6. https://steemit.com/crypto-news/@dcsignals/blockchain-loyalty-rewards-rbr-rebranding-to-coval
  7. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1652345.0
  8. https://www.emblem.pro/cb-register#CircuitBuilder
  9. https://emblem.finance/featured
  10. https://www.emblem.pro/cloudrunner
  11. https://xchain.io/asset/COVALC
  12. https://medium.com/@shannonNullCode/circuits-of-value-delisting-update-858109fd732d
  13. https://emblem-vault.medium.com/circuits-of-value-tokenomics-9a0f5d72789b
  14. https://etherscan.io/token/0x3d658390460295fb963f54dc0899cfb1c30776df?a=0x1ec6b294902d42fee964d29fa962e5976e71e67d
  15. https://etherscan.io/token/0x3d658390460295fb963f54dc0899cfb1c30776df?a=0x0000000000000000000000000000000000000000
  16. https://opensea.io/assets/ethereum/0x82c7a8f707110f5fbb16184a5933e9f78a34c6ab/1337
  17. https://emblem-vault.medium.com/announcing-emblem-vault-d47e7ea54703
  18. https://emblem-vault.medium.com/what-is-an-emblem-vault-ad3f2c90af18
  19. https://emblem-vault.medium.com/circuits-of-value-2021-updates-8914c6e530fa
  20. https://opensea.io/assets/ethereum/0x82c7a8f707110f5fbb16184a5933e9f78a34c6ab/662377
  21. https://opensea.io/assets/ethereum/0x82c7a8f707110f5fbb16184a5933e9f78a34c6ab/699058
  22. https://medium.com/@jakegallen/nft-archaeology-i-front-running-history-821af00b59b3
  23. https://opensea.io/assets/ethereum/0x82c7a8f707110f5fbb16184a5933e9f78a34c6ab/2281901
  24. https://opensea.io/assets/ethereum/0x82c7a8f707110f5fbb16184a5933e9f78a34c6ab/3738801
  25. https://etherscan.io/tx/0x0cc8b97e8f7157d4b009078fb167a921d520f60196a56b58c07b59463679f3f1
  26. https://opensea.io/assets/ethereum/0x82c7a8f707110f5fbb16184a5933e9f78a34c6ab/25710712718553231
  27. https://twitter.com/EmblemVault/status/1592572031199219712