Speaking at the 14th World Blockchain Summit MARVELS, the Chairman of BigONE Exchange Anndy Lian said that key to success for NFT startups was a supportive community and a compelling user case. As a guest speaker at the event on February 22, under the theme of ‘NFT META Korea 2022’, Lian agreed that the global market for NFTs was very active currently but wanted to share his thoughts on how NFT projects can be successful in the longer run. One key factor that should be with a team from the outset is to ensure the NFT has utility, which is closely tied to the importance of community.

Lian illustrated the importance of getting this relationship between the NFT and its community, between creators and fans, with the example of starting a NFT around a well-known soccer player. While on paper the fans of a soccer player appear to be automatically part of the NFT community you are building, that isn’t necessarily the case. What was needed was a strong bond to be created between the fans and the soccer star and the platform for it to work. This was related to the importance of ensuring that when you see a new project in the NFT space you should as an investor consider whether it has utility. Lian added that for NFT creators it was important to be transparent about their offering to investors, not only to better convey its value, but also to ensure that when regulators start to enter the space in 2022 the quality of the NFT industry stands up to scrutiny.

With so much money, energy and creativity going to NFTs its clearly going to throw up some significant issues, and mistakes will be made. Just recently there was a legal battle over CryptoPunks, sparked by an issue with the original version of the code. The makers Larva labs attempted to ban the faulty V1 version, which had been replaced due to faulty programming code, and had the NFTs removed from OpenSea. While LooksRare, the rival to Opensea, was recently reported as experiencing significant wash trading.

But perhaps more worrying was the recent Wormhole bridge attack, when hackers managed to steal more than $320m from the bridge which connects the Ethereum blockchains. A ‘bridge’ is a protocol which allows crypto and NFT holders to move their assets across different blockchains. Wormhole’s bi-directional NFT highway provided a portal between Solana and Ethereum was only launched a few months ago, was designed to connect both communities and enable them to trade each other’s assets with ease. As reported in CNBC, analysis shows a hacker exploited a vulnerability on the Solana side of the bridge to create 120,000 so-called ‘wrapped’ Ethereum tokens for themselves. It appears that they then used these tokens to claim ETH that was held on the Ethereum side of the bridge.

This is indeed troubling on several fronts, not least because these bridge vulnerabilities have long been known about. Indeed, no less a figure in the crypto world than the inventor of Ethereum, Vitalik Buterin, posted early this year that so-called cross-chain devices such as bridges had “fundamental security limits”. The first reason is down to the fact that if a native blockchain suffers a 51% attack, which reverses a cross-bridge transaction (involving a transaction to another blockchain) then the asset could be left stranded in the non-native blockchain. Moreover, this vulnerability could potentially mean a successful 51% attack could threaten an entire crypto ecosystem. Clearly, the issue is as these handy bridges grow in volume, with the growth in DeFi and NFTs, that these issues will only increase. “Your data layer must be your security layer,” summarized Buterin in a tweet thread accompanying the Reddit post.

One neat solution to the threat posed by bridging hacks to NFT transactions was unveiled on February 18 by Ethereum-based platform Harmony, with a Bored Ape Yacht Club Passport. This allows users to import their NFT into play-to-earn game DeFi Kingdoms, which is also built on Harmony and boasts o