ChainChamps: WAX’s First Real-Time Marketplace Where You Can Score the Best NFT Deals

Discover the AI-driven marketplace that can help you understand which
NFTs are worth collecting and more.

The NFT market is poised for another explosive run throughout the remainder of 2022 and beyond. With millions of NFTs for sale across various marketplaces — and what seems like thousands of new projects launching daily — is it possible to cut through all the noise? How can you keep tabs on what’s dropping and ensure you’re not leaving money on the table?

ChainChamps is setting itself apart as the marketplace to be if you want to score the best deals on NFTs.

In fact, it’s WAX’s first real-time marketplace that features sales the moment they’re listed, and leverages AI to estimate the value of NFTs, so you can quickly secure the top bargains before they’re gone.

In a recent interview with ChainChamps founder Justin Simpson, we dive into how the marketplace has evolved since first launching, the innovative features it has brought to the WAX ecosystem and where the NFT market is headed.

What’s It Worth?

“Being a marketplace was the core concept of ChainChamps in the beginning. Then we began asking ourselves what else we could be doing in this space to inform people about the NFTs they own. A huge problem for a lot of users is that they don’t know what their NFTs are worth,” explains Simpson.

“Whether they were looking through their own collection or browsing various marketplaces to purchase or bid on NFTs, they didn’t have that crucial knowledge to make informed decisions.”

Simpson and his team realized that the technology remained largely confusing and people were making plenty of mistakes, especially when it came to things like mint numbers. One scenario in particular occurred when WAX launched Topps MLB cards as NFTs. People were selling low mints for the same price as say a mint number 3,000. It was an error that collectors don’t often realize they’re making.

It was also a defining moment for ChainChamps, which led to the team building an AI that basically analyzes all the sales on the blockchain that are happening on WAX. Using a neural network, the team is able to predict what the prices should be to give users the opportunity to find what they’re looking for at the best price.

“We wanted to offer features that didn’t exist but we felt should exist in the WAX ecosystem, especially on a blockchain that prides itself on being fast and resilient,” adds Simpson. “It seemed crazy that we didn’t have a super fast, active marketplace that users could constantly refresh. Our live feeds let users know the second something has been listed.”

The Fastest NFT Marketplace Out There

In terms of differentiation, for ChainChamps it’s all about speed. They’re billed as the fastest and the only marketplace that uses AI to help people understand and predict what things are worth. Those are the two big driving factors that make its market offerings significantly different from everything else out there.

According to ChainChamps’ most recent data, the best sales on WAX tend to happen in the first 10 seconds a listing goes live. “If you don’t buy something within that first 10 seconds, then you’re generally paying somewhere between 15% to 20% more for that item on other marketplaces,” says Simpson.

This is where the ChainChamps real-time feed comes into play, specifically for high liquidity collections. The feed looks at different factors for every single sale that pops up on the marketplace. So, when you look at the estimated value over on ChainChamps and aggregates of the previously sold items on other marketplaces, there’s a neural network prediction that pulls what it thinks the next item will sell for.

The network uses all the data that’s streaming in on the blockchain — hundreds of transactions per second — to estimate those numbers and account for the value of particular NFTs.

“We want everybody to have a great experience buying NFTs, and when you don’t know what you’re buying or selling, and you don’t have that information available to you, it’s not fun anymore,” he says.

“It can start out fun but when you start making mistakes and kicking yourself for things you missed out on that’s all over. Hopefully, if people are selling on our website they don’t make the mistake of accidentally listing their #1 Mike Trout mint for $10 or something like that!”

One of the Most Popular Ways to Display NFT Ownership

The PFP Maker is an offering the ChainChamps team thought was missing on WAX. It’s more than just a profile pic. It’s something that the community was asking for over and over again.

Obviously, PFPs and avatar projects are a huge part of the NFT ecosystem as a whole, not just on WAX, but everywhere.

“More broadly speaking, we wanted to create a tool that would make it incredibly quick and easy for anybody that wanted to mint their collection on WAX to just take all the layers they created for their art project and put them together in a really easy to use web interface,” adds Simpson. “Our PFP Maker does all the work for you and it’s completely free.”

In partnership with WAX, ChainChamps is launching a free to use and export, no code, PFP Maker tool that is 100% web based. Once you’ve generated your PFP, it’s hosted for free on the servers. The first week the tool was launched, a Telegram game called Shifty Bears generated 250 PFPs using the tool.

“Our PFP Maker is one thing that we’re really pushing very, very hard right now,” explains Simpson. “It handles the generation, hosting and minting. It’s not only something great for the WAX community to make it easier for them to build their projects, but we think it’d be great to get something like this out there to other people in general who are looking to create PFP projects that may have never heard of WAX. It’s a nice kick in the pants to get someone over to discover what you guys have going on.”

The Mystery of an Unopened Pack

Pack opening experiences are exciting. ChainChamps knows that. The Pack Simulator is a way for you to look at what the possible outcomes are for packs you’re potentially going to open.

More specifically, with the click of a button it takes a deep dive into all the popular contracts for packs and aggregates the most important data stored on the blockchain for any collection that ChainChamp’s supports.

“There are two common kinds of packs: Mint on demand packs and pre-minted packs, right?” asks Simpson. “So, with a mint on demand pack, when you open it up, NFTs are randomly chosen based on a set of rules that the user who is opening the pack will get. When that pack is opened, those NFTs are minted. With a pre-minted pack, basically you have someone prior to the launch of the pack mint all the assets and they get stored off in another account that we’ll call a pool. This pool holds every single NFT that could possibly be in any of the packs. When someone opens a pack, it transfers one of the existing assets to the user. Why am I saying all this? Because one of the coolest things about the Pack Simulator is that with mint on demands we’ve run the odds. With pre-minted packs, we actually go and look at the pool for that pack so when you simulate it, it only draws from the items that are still in the pool.”

For example, let’s say one of the pools runs out of super epic cards, the Pack Simulator won’t show you any super epic cards in the pack because they don’t exist in the pool anymore. It’s an amazing tool if you’re looking at packs that have specific pools to know if there’s still a chance you’ll potentially get a rare NFT without having to go and comb through the data yourself. Additionally, users can see the estimated value of the packs based on the current estimated value on the market.

“We run the simulations on the average value every couple of hours. So it’s relatively up to date and it’s generally a good indication of whether the estimated value of a pack is above or below the average value of that pack,” says Simpson.

It’s by far one of the most popular features on ChainChamps at the moment. Based on analytics, the marketplace literally has hundreds of people per day use the tool. You can try it out here.

Where Is the NFT Market Headed?

According to Simpson, opening packs and having fun with NFTs is what will keep them valuable in the long-term. He doesn’t believe it’s all about making money and flipping collectibles.

“I think actually enjoying the projects that you’re buying and wanting those projects to grow is what defines what the space will be in the future,” he adds. “ChainChamps will just be a cornerstone of whatever everything else becomes. I really love the angle of gaming as a whole, and collectibles make a lot of sense. With NFTs, you can collect them and enjoy them whenever you want versus having to worry about maintaining their physical condition. I see the market growing exponentially because people want collectibles they can preserve. Having the ability to combine NFTs with collectibles to preserve the ever-growing history of the internet is something that I think will become really cool and relevant.”

ChainChamps Is Just Getting Started, What’s Next?

The “what’s next” is the exciting part.

For starters, the marketplace has begun a complete overhaul of the selling process, so that users can better leverage those estimated values that we spoke about earlier. ChainChamps would also like to help users identify and highlight items in their collection that they may have forgotten about.

Currently, ChainChamps supports buying NFTs, but has plans to include the ability to sell your NFTs in the near future. This will make it a one-stop marketplace for everything relating to buying and selling WAX NFTs, finding great deals, browsing your collection and more — all in a live format.

“The biggest thing for us is the pricing of NFTs and what they’re worth,” says Simpson. “We realized that there are not any fantastic ways of pricing truly unique items that are often associated with PFP and avatar projects to say what they’re worth. Our team is expanding our neural network to try to understand the unique pieces of art and figure out what their potential range of value could be. There’s no easy way to pull up the sales history of something and compare it, you know?”

Second, ChainChamps is excited about what they call the “Collection Score,” where their team will be evaluating projects and giving them scores to verify authenticity. The score won’t specifically say a particular project is or isn’t trustworthy, but it will convey how one project compares to others where community, market traction and successes/failures are concerned.

As the crypto and NFT worlds have proven numerous times, in a global ecosystem it’s extremely difficult to hold someone accountable. You can do your due diligence, but somebody can still run away with a bunch of money from a project and thwart well-intentioned collectors’ dreams along the way.

“ChainChamps wants to develop a system that lets people understand what merits that project has that are verifiable and data driven,’’ explains Simpson. “As long as you’re building a community that enjoys your project, even if you’re not making a million dollars in sales, you can have a decent Collection Score. It’s going to be a great way for people to discover new projects they would not have heard about otherwise.”

The Future of NFTs Begins to Take Shape

Ready or not — the NFT space is projected to continue its meteoric growth and ChainChamps is focused on making a tangible difference as the market shifts and evolves.

Simpson and his team are showcasing what’s possible via WAX’s first real-time marketplace, and we can’t wait to see how our community benefits from it!

Interested in learning more? Check out the marketplace, use the PFP Maker or Pack Simulator or join the ChainChamps community over on Discord.

06, May 2022