A smart contract is the only thing that makes a Dynamic NFT possible. Conditions are derived from outside sources known as 'Oracles' and incorporated into the contract.

In order to bring the dynamic elements to NFTs, “Oracles” act as a fundamental. Oracles help in accessing sources of data that exist on the blockchain along with legacy systems, and advanced computations. An oracle network also helps in creating a hybrid smart contract. Creation of a dynamic NFT majorly takes place in Solidity.
It is an object-oriented programming language which puts smart contracts into play on the blockchain. In this case let’s take the earlier mentioned example of a football scorecard Dynamic NFT based on the Polygon network to understand the basics of creating a dNFT.

The first step will involve setting the variables. In the case of a football scorecard, those will be the timer and the individual team score.
The second step would involve coding these variables into the contract and therefore having a changing metadata.
The final step would involve getting started with repo by executing commands which will deploy the dynamic NFT on the Polygon chain.

As easy as these steps are to read, the process is somewhat complicated and requires precise coding; solidity tools Truffle (a smart contract development framework) and Hardhat; along with the crypto wallet MetaMask. Post implementation and matching of conditions the final product (dNFT) can be seen on Etherscan.

Examples and use cases of Dynamic NFTs

The number of projects involving dynamic NFTs are significantly lesser than that of static NFTs but they mostly exist on the Ethereum blockchain and Polygon network. Moody Ghost is a collection of dNFTs on the Open Sea. This project’s smart contract evaluates the On-chain data and results in making the ghost change its mouth expression. Based on the changes in the metadata the ghost changes its expression from happy to sad to laughter etc.

Another example is that of the LaMelo Ball NFT project. LaMelo Ball is an NBA player, each NFT in his project records a different set of LaMelo’s player statistics. This includes points scored, rebounds etc. Presently there are eight NFTs in circulation and they get updated depending on LaMelo’s stats. Hence it shows how dNFTs can change depending upon external data.

Even though there are very few dNFTs in circulation, there is no doubt about the fact that dynamic NFTs project a new wave of evolution in this already evolving space. As the world transgresses itself to the “own” aspect of Web 3.0, owing an evolution would naturally constitute the ‘next big thing.’

While we were able to list only two projects as examples, that in no way doubts the potential these dNFTs hold. In fact, there are millions of use cases which will slowly find their way to mainstream adoption eventually succeeding the era of static NFTs.