NYC Seaport Scavenger Hunt Brings NFTs Into the Real World

Peering at a QR code by way of my cellphone’s digital camera like a spyglass, I zoomed in on a pearlescent purple orb to acquire my digital prize—preserving my fingers crossed that an NFT collectible landed in my digital pockets.

It’s a part of a scavenger hunt being held in New York Metropolis, designed to encourage engagement and exploration round a tourist-friendly a part of Manhattan. For the subsequent couple of months, crypto funds supplier MoonPay and actual property developer Howard Hughes Company are pairing NFTs with the true world.

The Seaport Scavenger Hunt runs by way of October. However the probability to search out 10 purple “pearls” that yield NFTs and a shot at weekly prizes—corresponding to live performance tickets or a curated present field from native companies—beckoned me to the Seaport, a historic enclave situated close to the southern tip of Manhattan, on the hunt’s first day.

In keeping with MoonPay CEO and co-founder Ivan Soto-Wright, the hunt’s advantages are primarily twofold. The occasion is a low-stakes option to spur crypto adoption—onboarding members with digital wallets—and it additionally offers its winners extra management.

“Think about you win and the prize is tickets to a live performance, however you’re not in a position to go,” he instructed Decrypt. “Now you can take that prize, which is on-chain, and put it on OpenSea—and anybody may go purchase it within the secondary market.”

For non-crypto natives, navigating NFT marketplaces like OpenSea could sound superior. Nevertheless, MoonPay has established itself as an organization that fills gaps within the present crypto panorama, serving to clients make cryptocurrency purchases utilizing a credit score or debit card.

“You would do that, in concept, utilizing lots of Web2 expertise,” Soto-Wright stated, alluding to present web expertise that predominantly isn’t primarily based across the blockchain. Nonetheless, Soto-Wright stated the hunt is unlocking “worth past only a closed system.” 

There’s one other aspect to the hunt, Soto-Wright famous, that advantages native companies on the Seaport. The scavenger hunt collects information on members, like the place they’re from, and paints an image of foot visitors for advertising functions, he defined. It may additionally push guests to have interaction with native companies for the primary time.

As a collaboration with Howard Hughes, the scavenger hunt is billed as being broadly accessible. An commercial for the hunt on the Seaport’s entrance makes no point out of crypto, NFTs, or Polygon—the Ethereum scaling community that powers the NFT minting course of. It’s only a digitally enhanced scavenger hunt.

The shortage of lingo is completely by design, Julie Allen, Howard Hughes’ senior vp of digital and artistic instructed Decrypt. It aligns with the initiative’s simplistic and streamlined nature, in her view.

“If my mother cannot determine it out, then I do not wish to implement it,” she stated. “As a result of it must be that straightforward and simple for folks to choose up.”

On the hunt

I’m not the common “normie” who could also be stumped by the underlying crypto tech, however I gave myself a 30-minute window to find and scan as many pearls as doable. Every scanned pearl earns you one of many 10 free NFTs, represented by art work from Johana Kroft, and accumulating the entire set opens up the potential for incomes prizes.

Whereas I didn’t anticipate to gather all of them, I hoped my endeavor may yield a handful. And with a tour of the Seaport from MoonPay underneath my belt, I knew my odds have been fairly good, already armed with the information of the place a couple of QR codes have been tucked away.

It turned out that discovering the pearls was the straightforward half; I situated six of the ten inside that half hour. Technical points, then again, turned the method of claiming my digital collectibles through MoonPay into an actual problem.

The webpage on my cellphone froze repeatedly and stifled my search’s progress with every QR code scanned, presenting a black display screen every time—aside from one event. Each time I attempted to say an NFT, I additionally needed to retrieve an emailed verification code to log again into my MoonPay account, which added to the clunkiness.

At a cocktail celebration celebrating the scavenger hunt’s kickoff, MoonPay’s Director of Web3 Engineering, Chris Choyce, tried to assist me out. After some troubleshooting, he admitted {that a} repair was warranted. One other member of the media instructed me that he had skilled an identical problem on the day.

Not lengthy after, a member of Mayor Eric Adams’ pro-crypto administration used the gathering as a chance to spotlight what he sees as town’s tech prowess, talking alongside others like Soto-Wright.

“We won’t thanks sufficient for displaying the world a chief instance of why New York Metropolis continues to be a worldwide hub of innovation,” stated Kevin D. Kim, town’s commissioner for the Division of Small Enterprise Providers. “We’re thrilled to see the Seaport activated on this method.”

NFTs in NYC

Considering the tech hitches is perhaps a comparatively remoted problem on opening day, I enlisted a random Seaport customer named Sandy Lal. After guiding him to a pearl, Lal’s scan labored flawlessly. Nonetheless, there was a second of confusion.

“What the fuck is an Ethereum account?” he requested, observing a transaction preview for minting his Polygon-based NFT. After explaining to him that an Ethereum account is basically a digital pockets, he tapped “settle for,” and that was that. The tech is abstracted, however not completely invisible. Nonetheless, folks have been in a position to determine it out.

A MoonPay consultant instructed Decrypt that the technical points have since been resolved and stated that they weren’t associated to the agency’s minting tech. As a substitute, MoonPay pegged the problems on web site glitches, firewall hurdles, and additional wanted cellular optimizations.

If all is certainly working nicely, may MoonPay’s scavenger hunt function the blueprint for different location-based experiences, from the Seaport to Central Park and past?

The idea was wealthy and offered a real-world use case for NFTs, with potential advantages for all concerned—an modern option to bridge the hole between crypto and the true world. Alas, as with many issues in crypto, the early person expertise could have wanted extra time to meet up with the imaginative and prescient.