In 2021 Funko stepped into the world of NFT collectibles with their first release of Wax blockchain NFT’s. It makes perfect sense. While best known for their distinctly stylized vinyl figures, Funko is a collectibles company at heart. It only makes sense to dip a toe in at the cutting edge of the collectible lagoon.
And more than a toe it seems. In 2022, Funko announced a majority stake in Tokenwave, LLC, the blockchain-adjacent development company that built the Droppp.io platform that has managed most of Funko’s NFT drops at this point.
So Funko fans are starting to dig into the world of digital collectibles. And that’s awesome, but all of us fans of old-school, real-world collectibles, haven’t necessarily been brought up to speed on this new meta reality.
If you’re looking for more of an overview on Funko’s NFT line, I have an article that covers the what and how of Funko NFT’s over here. This article will deal with the specific topic of exploring Funko NFT’s on the Wax blockchain.
Contents
What Does it Mean to Explore a Blockchain?
A blockchain is a public database. There are ways to hide this information. But it’s always going to contain some data that everyone can see. I’m going to show you here what makes this is a very cool feature.
Funko NFT’s are all registered to a specific blockchain called the Wax blockchain. Funko did not create this blockchain, and they do not own it. They certainly have a stake in it in some sense, but it’s really only a registration system that helps to enforce the rarity of their digital collectibles. Funko creates the art. The Wax network agrees to store that art for as long as it shall exist.
And the Wax network is available to anyone. If you’ve got some basic command line skills, you can connect to the network yourself pretty easily. What this means is that you yourself can find your Funko NFT’s directly on the Wax blockchain.
But we don’t have to use the command line. The easiest way to visualize your NFT’s directly on the chain is by using a Wax blockchain explorer. A blockchain explorer is just a website that takes the data you find directly on a blockchain and helps you search through it and visualize it. There are often multiple explorers dedicated to any widely used blockchain. For Wax, the first one I could find is wax.bloks.io. Let’s go check it out.
How to Use a Wax Blockchain Explorer
So there’s a lot going on here. But everything you really need to get started is near the top…
Towards the right there, you see a search bar with some categories below it. This helps you sort through all of the transactions that are detailed on the Wax blockchain. Right below all of that is just some current information about the chain: it’s speed, it’s value, how many accounts are connected, etc.
That’s all pretty interesting, but let’s go ahead and get to our Funko NFT connection…
Head on over to whatever NFT marketplace you’ve been using to pick up your Funko NFT’s. That’s probably AtomicHub since that’s the one that Funko seems to promote.
Now find an NFT you’re interested in. It can be one of your own. It can be your dream NFT. It can be the first one you find when you search “funko” and click a collection. Doesn’t really matter, just pick one. I picked this sweet Bluntman with a lightsaber.
When you click on an NFT, you end up at this page that shows you all kinds of details about the NFT. You see the lip. You can see what collection it belongs to. It tells you exactly how many exist. This particular one is #1330 out of 2699 total. One has already been burned. That means someone destroyed it for whatever reason.
But you can also see some numbers and account labels. Take a look at the ID #1099806823712.
If you hover over that number, it should show up as a link to AtomicHubs own integrated Wax blockchain explorer (which is actually better than wax.bloks.io in a few ways). Hover over the different ID’s on this page and look at the url’s they direct to. If you see URL’s that contain the term ‘explorer’ that’s a link to the AtomicHub explorer. Click on any of those, like the ID or the Template ID or the Collection Name and you can get all kinds of interesting info about this NFT.
It’s pretty informative to just click around in here for awhile. You can see how all of the data is managed. If you click on the item ID for instance, it shows you all of the NFT’s attributes.
But we don’t have to trust AtomicHub. Scroll all the way down on the main listing page for the NFT you’re examining. You should see the Sale Logs.
Click one of those little TX file openers on the right side to see some magic.
Those little buttons should pop opened a transaction view directly on yet another Wax blockchain explorer called waxblocks.io. This shows you all of the details about the transaction. If you copy the transaction # and head back over to wax.bloks.io you can paste it in the search bar and find all of the same information.
So this is all overkill, sure. But it’s pretty interesting to start looking into how this stuff works. And I think it’s important to begin to understand the value here in being able to collect this information from multiple different services. Because this data exists on the wax blockchain, it is distributed across a pretty wide network that has buy-in from a variety of players. And while it’s still early days and there’s no guarantee that the Wax network will stand the test of time, it’s reassuring to begin to form a real understanding of its at least partially decentralized nature.