NFTs: What are they, why do they matter, and how will they disrupt our future?
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“NFTs are digital real estate and it is going to be worth a lot more than real estate”
― Anuj Jasani.
Jasani is an influential figure in the Non-Fungible Token (NFT) world because he buys and speaks about many NFT projects. NFTs are unique assets in our digital world and have the potential to affect and change our future in many ways. NFTs have the ability to increase efficiency in various industries such as digital status, payments, music, and gaming. In this paper, I will explain how industries could work better using NFT technology, in addition to discussing the important aspects of the underlying blockchain technology that NFTs rely on. Continued, I will tell you about the history of this new technology, especially in the past year’s exponential growth. This paper was written using research done of my own accord and from my own interest. I include research conducted in many different sectors by looking at NFT projects in those spaces, the possibility for growth, the technological future in the space, how these sectors are currently working, and the areas for improvement.
What Are They?
An NFT is a digital asset that is bought and sold with cryptocurrency.
According to investopedia.com, cryptocurrency is “ a digital or virtual currency that is secured by cryptography, which makes it nearly impossible to counterfeit or double-spend. Many cryptocurrencies are decentralized networks based on blockchain technology — a distributed ledger enforced by a disparate network of computers. A defining feature of cryptocurrencies is that they are generally not issued by any central authority, rendering them theoretically immune to government interference or manipulation”
The most popular cryptocurrency used for NFTs is Ethereum. NFT stands for “Non-Fungible Token” and Non-Fungible means it cannot be exchanged for anything else and Token means it can be traded on the blockchain. For example, something fungible would be a one-dollar bill. This means that if I had a one-dollar bill I could trade it with another person for their dollar bill; there is no real difference. The second example of this is a candy bar. If I traded bars with a friend we would have the same product. Unlike a dollar bill or a candy bar, NFTs are one-of-a-kind or part of a limited set. This is unlike most other digital images/files which can be “copy-&-pasted” many times and anybody can “claim” ownership. They are stored, bought, and sold on a blockchain, like Ethereum. NFT’s can be different digital items such as art, music, in-game items, virtual land, and videos.
NFTs are run on blockchains but not every blockchain is NFT compatible. Bitcoin is the original cryptocurrency and the first blockchain to be invented. Bitcoin was anonymously created by someone named Satoshi Nakamoto in 2008. It has continuously been accused of being a Ponzi scheme or a bubble that will ‘pop’. Bitcoin has been criticized for being horrible for the environment, for involvement in illegal transactions, and for its extreme volatility. Personally, I believe that in the past some of the scrutiny around Bitcoin might have been justifiable but now all the technology is more widely used and accepted. The previous accusations that might have been reasonable in the past are now just shots in the dark for people who may not understand the tech.
The first NFT was created in 2014 by Kevin Mckoy, it’s called “Quantum” and it now sells for 7 million dollars. Quantum looks like an octagonal portal that statically and continuously changes colors almost like a GIF. Then later in 2017, Crypto Punks were created and given for free to whoever wanted one. They are art pieces that look like pixelated humans with outlandish traits. Punks became popular because they are the first of their kind. They are now worth around 300 thousand dollars a piece. The other project that made it big in 2021 is Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC); these two projects are the biggest NFTs currently. They both became big because they were released very early compared to the NFT boom and the projects were the first of their type to be created in the space. BAYC is a project of 10,000 original art pieces of animated apes each with a combination of different traits. All of these projects made it big in 2021 along with thousands of others. Throughout 2018–2020 NFTs gained momentum because of NFT videogames and metaverses. A metaverse is a virtual-reality space in which users can interact with a computer-generated environment and other users. The most popular video games and metaverse are Decentraland, Enjin, and Axie Infinity. These videogames and metaverses use NFT technology so that players can own land in the game, wearables, weapons, accessories, and even playable characters or game modes. Later, the real boom came in 2021 with multiple blockchains coming out such as Cardano, Solana, Tezos, Flow, etc. These blockchains became popular because of the fascinating new emerging technologies of decentralization and the projects being created on these blockchains. Amazon AWS has a good quote explaining decentralization, “In blockchain, decentralization refers to the transfer of control and decision-making from a centralized entity (individual, organization, or group thereof) to a distributed network”.
The reason the boom came at that time is that during the covid-19 pandemic many more people were spending their time online. NFTs became a 40 billion dollar market with thousands of new projects being created each month. Christie’s and Sotheby’s started auctioning NFT art, which turned out to be more profitable than their traditional art auctions. Even companies started creating NFT marketplaces, NFT social platforms, and even some well-known companies such as Facebook (which rebranded as Meta), Alphabet, and even Amazon. These companies have either turned their focus to the meta world or adopted some technology that involves web 3 and its by-product, NFTs. According to Wikipedia “Web3 is an idea for a new iteration of the World Wide Web which incorporates concepts such as decentralization, blockchain technologies, and token-based economics.” Many big companies and famous people also started to sell their own projects such as NBA, MLB, Gucci, Tiger Woods, Snoop Dogg, and Paris Hilton.
Bitcoin transactions are executed through a network of nodes and they are noted in a blockchain. These networks of nodes are made up of miners who verify transactions and update the blockchain. It is in reality just computer processing power run by humans. In turn for ‘mining’, the people that run computers get gifted a partial amount of bitcoin. The mining/node system that cryptocurrencies use, makes it so that it cannot be hacked because, in order to do so, thousands of computers would have to all simultaneously have their ledgers (list of all transactions made) changed. This is called a Proof of Work (PoW) system which means that miners compete to solve blocks (transactions) and cryptographic puzzles and in turn get rewards. A good analogy comes from Murch on bitcoin.stackexchange.com:
“Imagine News City, where everyone is a newspaper editor competing to create the next day’s newspaper. Only one newspaper editor’s draft will make it into print, and its editor wins a fat check. Over the course of the day, there is a lot of events happening. […] Each newspaper editor will eventually gain knowledge of each event through word of mouth, but they hear about them in different orders and with different delays. Upon receiving news about an event, each newspaper editor will verify the event’s validity, then discard bogus events and any events that were already previously published. If there is exceptionally many events, he might also need to select which ones are the most newsworthy and rewarding, as there are only so many pages available per issue, leaving the remaining events to be published the next day. Because the news editors as a group would never be able to decide without envy whose news selection should be printed (since everyone put at least one draft in), News City has hired a notary in Monte Carlo that randomly picks some words from a dictionary for each upcoming issue, of which one must be used somewhere in the draft in order for it to qualify. Every editor may turn in one draft at a time, but when it doesn’t qualify, follow up with another as often as he wants. […] The incorruptible notary will forward a winning draft to the printer immediately, and also publish the list of words that would have won. He is contracted to aim to have one issue per day. […] The events here are Bitcoin transactions, the newspaper editors the miners, the incorruptible notary is the Bitcoin protocol, “a day” the 10-minute block interval and the word-picking scheme portrays the difficulty.”
What makes a blockchain special?
The first reason why blockchains are desirable is that they are decentralized.
- Decentralization: According to AWS (Amazon Web Services), “In the blockchain, decentralization refers to the transfer of control and decision-making from a centralized entity (individual, organization, or group thereof) to a distributed network. Decentralized networks strive to reduce the level of trust that participants must place in one another, and deter their ability to exert authority or control over one another in ways that degrade the functionality of the network.”. Decentralization is so desirable because there is no one ruler of a given system, it rewards validators (miners), provides a trustless environment, reduces points of weakness, optimizes resources and the owners of the crypto make the decisions (not a board of directors making decisions). This is why blockchains are increasing in popularity because people are tired of “big brother” ruling and controlling everything related to web 2 and the government. As a result, web 3 (blockchain) was created.
The second reason blockchains are so desirable is that they solve two main issues caused by centralization. They are called The Byzantine General Problem and The Double Spend Issue.
- The Byzantine General: The problem illustrates the issue of how a person can trust something without knowing whether the original message/goal has been changed. For example, a commonly recognized analogy is to imagine that there is one city that the army wants to take over. Since it is a large city there are 5 main generals all working together but they need messengers to communicate. How can they be sure that the messengers are not traitors, the other generals are also not traitors, and that the messengers won’t get captured by the city’s allies along the way? Many engineers and scientists have been looking for a way to solve this issue and one has come to the forefront of this issue which is blockchain. The reason the blockchain has the ability to solve this issue is through the use of Proof-of-Work (PoW) or Proof-of-Stake (PoS). These are different ways that blockchains are run and managed, but they solve the issue of a multi-pronged system agreeing on a single truth.
- Double Spend Issue: This problem symbolizes the issue of being able to ensure that digital money cannot be duplicated. For example, the American dollar has security against duplication by creating bills with security fabrics, watermarks, microprinting, raised printing, and serial numbers. A real-world example is let’s say you spend $50 dollars on a new pair of shoes. Once you hand the bill to the store, you cannot just take the same $50 and buy something else. Solving this problem with cash is easy because it is a physical thing that can have tangible securities and visible differences. But, in the digital world, it is hard to have those securities and proof while staying decentralized but, blockchain solves this issue. Many things online can be duplicated such as images or files. What blockchain does to solve this is by using a digital ledger. This means when something is created, sent, destroyed, or received it is logged. All of the information pertaining to it is saved and it is accessible to anybody who might want it. The ledger makes it so that once a miner verifies a transaction, the transaction is time-stamped which makes it impossible to go back and edit.
So where are most NFTs today? Look no further than the second most popular blockchain, Ethereum. Ethereum was created in 2015 by a young Canadian programmer named Vitalik Buterin. He got involved in cryptocurrency in 2011 when he co-founded Bitcoin Magazine. He states that the reason he created Ethereum was that he wanted crypto where he could leverage the underlying blockchain technology for other uses. He invented it to be very different from Bitcoin. Here are a couple of the differences, it has the ability for smart contracts, developer possibilities, has infinite supply, and doesn’t use PoW like Bitcoin uses PoS. Ethereum is used widely for NFTs because it is the blockchain where the first NFT was created. Also, the blockchain has a highly-secure network. Another important thing is that the token metadata and transaction history is publicly verifiable. Verifiable meaning that anyone can go online and check every transaction made and check the history of a particular NFT and all of the relevant information pertaining to it. Trading NFTs on the Ethereum blockchain does not require an outside platform, it is portable across platforms and products, and it never shuts down. Here are some pros and cons between Ethereum and Bitcoin.
What ways can NFTs disrupt our world?
Profitability- this means the degree to which a business or activity yields profit or financial gain. This is the epitome of an NFT. For both parties (buyer and seller), NFTs can be profitable because they can be an investment. Since they have many benefits they can be used to diversify any portfolio and increase the risk-to-reward ratio. They can foster efficiency because of the conversion of physical assets to digital assets because of streamlining, eliminating middlemen, and enhancing security. Due to its identification abilities, it has the potential to store passports, IDs, certifications, ownership proofs, and tickets. If we could actually use those identification abilities NFTs we could save time, and money and streamline all processes. Also, since NFTs are on a blockchain, it is uneditable and non-removable so it gives a level of security we have not seen in the past. Another thing is that blockchains are more transparent about who has bought and sold specific items. NFTs also let people retain their copyrights easily for whatever it is they own.
NFT technology is the future. The tech is industry-disrupting.
Gaming
NFTs have also made impactful changes to the video gaming industry. Currently, NFTs represent in-game content such as avatars, weapons, and other cosmetic items. Often these tokens are unique, rare, one-of-a-kind, and indivisible. This helps to promote player ownership, in-game scarcity, and player assurance in the game. Player assurance is important because it promotes trust in the game which helps players feel that spending money is “safe”. Especially with the ability to resell the NFT, it helps the player feel better spending money during the game because then they might feel as if they are not completely wasting money. This is because it may help them have a way to escape the asset and make their money back. If players are able to view in-game asset NFTs as investments, that provides the game with high profits from direct asset sales and percent profit from resales. It provides players with profit from resales of NFTs after the asset raises in value.
Music
Another industry that is disrupted by NFTs is the music industry. This industry is highly likely to blow up because the music marketplace has too many middlemen, and NFTs reduce the lost profits to middlemen. To stress this, on average artists only make about 10%-20% of all profits from their music sales because the record label takes a significant position of the profits. On top of this, the musicians lose profits to the people that work for them privately such as managers and lawyers. If the musician was able to release their music directly to the people that want to buy it instead of through record labels and outside platforms, they would be able to profit much more. Using NFTs, the musician could sell limited or infinite copies of their album/songs depending on how they want to release them. The artist 3LAU for example did this by releasing NFTs marking the 3 year anniversary of his album. The NFT included a custom song, access to never-before-heard music on his website, custom art based on his music, and new versions of his album's 11 original songs. His release earned him more than $11.6 million dollars.
Art
A third important NFT industry is art. “Non-fungible tokens are so important for artists because they verify the authenticity and originality of the blockchain representation of the artwork. This means that with the help of non-fungible tokens, the representation of the digital artwork is completely resistant to forgery and countless replicas being made. The legitimacy of the NFT for the artwork will never have to be questioned (Yonatan Ben Shimon, investor)”. This is because it is becoming increasingly popular that people are producing digital art pieces. NFT technology is an efficient way to appraise and store digital art which would be non-unique images if not turned into an NFT. NFTs allow the artist to sell their work directly to collectors, of which there are many. NFTs facilitate the verification of authenticity and ownership, which has led to a strong community of supporters. Artists can represent themselves and showcase their art without a gallery. For example, Damien Hirst, the UK’s richest living artist since the 90s, recently created an NFT project with his art after seeing the technology and benefits of web 3.0.
Virtual World
Virtual worlds are an important aspect of the NFT space. NFTs have a lot of possibilities for the future, especially when companies invent an in-depth, high-tech virtual reality that “feels” like real life. Once technology advances enough, the virtual world will become even more profitable because people will want to own digital real estate to show off their NFT art pieces, call a place their own, for bragging rights and reside in a world with unique digital experiences. Ownership of land gives the user the ability to create whatever they want, even paid experiences for others and parties and events that people from all over the world can go to. For example, Slotie has a metaverse called Slotie Verse and they are building casinos and much more. Consumers can buy land in the Slotie Verse and can create whatever personalized installation they choose. Once land appreciates in value, the consumer can sell and make a profit just like actual real estate. Currently, some virtual world land plots have reached values above 2 million dollars.
Event Ticketing
NFT event ticketing is an important advancement in a web 3.0 future. This has many uses from virtual event ticketing in metaverses, product release events, concerts, early access events, etc. This is one of the biggest uses for NFTs. Currently, ticket sales are 45% dollars per year for theaters and the system is old and relies on technology that doesn’t make it easy to prove that you own the ticket.
Insurance Policies/Contracts
Insurance policies and financial contracts can be bought, sold, and traded as NFTs.
There are so many more uses for NFTs such as domain names, NFT marketplaces, DEFI, fractionalization, and sports collectibles. While the five that I listed here are the ones that have shown as having the most potential to change technology and be profitable for many people.
Activity, Scams, Money, and History of the NFT marketplace?
As of January 2021, $52 billion dollars were spent in the NFT marketplaces worldwide. The past year-and-a-half has had 520 times more money spent in the NFT market compared to 2020 which had 100 million dollars spent in the market. Over 20k new wallets are being created each week. This signifies a massive growth of people showing interest in the NFT world. One thing not being discussed is how many people are losing money in the space, especially now that the market is down. For example, for anyone who bought a Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT anytime in the last 90 days for the average price of 120 Ethereum ($360,000 USD), as of June 22, 2022, the average price is 88 Ethereum ($101,735 USD) which is a 30% Ethereum loss and 70% USD loss so far. This is not only happening with the BAYC project, but it also is affecting other projects which have fallen severely under the NFT first release price. Many people who saw the NFT space when every project was taking off got FOMO (fear of missing out) and “aped” into many random projects. “Aping-in or aped-in” references how when Bored Ape Yacht Club was released many buyers would buy an NFT from the project without doing research as to what an NFT is or even what the project really was. They would just invest without doing any thorough research with the hope of enormous financial gain. Later, after the project started to see exponential gains this term was coined and used for any people who “randomly” bought new NFT projects or cryptocurrencies. (reference how this comes from BAYC). Many people dumped large amounts of their savings if not all of it into the space and now NFTs that they bought are now worth considerably less than the price they were launched at. The decline in the NFT market activity, combined with the fact that the crypto market has crashed significantly means that many people have seen their investments plummet in value.
This shows the danger of investing in something without a clear understanding or intention behind its investment. People bought these NFTs that don’t have any real use except for digital “art”. If these people know this before investing then they shouldn’t be surprised that there was the potential for the investment to lose value. If they didn’t know, this could have been a rude awakening. Once people saw a couple of projects become worth outlandish prices, thousands of other art-based NFT projects sprung up, and many “made it big” but, some failed. Eventually, interest died down, and people were left with an NFT worth basically nothing. For example, Tyler, a 35-year-old property manager in Miami saw an NFT project called “Bored Bunny” advertised by Floyd Mayweather. With the help of his mom, he raised $12,000 and invested in the project. After investing, the value of the NFTs he bought became worth much less than he originally paid and they “financially crippled him”.
Along with investing in bad projects, another negative component of the NFT market is scamming. Some examples of scamming are wallet hacks, people impersonating real projects with fake mint links, artist impersonation, pump-and–dumps, rug-pulls, and fake giveaways. A rug-pull is when a project is created and minted and then the creators disappear and the project becomes useless; it is called a rug-pull because the creators are pulling out a rug from under your feet causing you to fall down. A pump-and-dump is when a certain NFT project’s floor price is artificially raised by the sellers causing people to see the value and buy. After all the buying takes place the “pump” is over and the project starts to lose value because nobody wants to buy it anymore and eventually you are left with a worthless piece of art that you overpaid for. An example of a scam is when 10,000 “Evolved Ape” NFT project investors got scammed after mint. The project’s developer “Evil Ape” stopped appearing on social media platforms and discord and all of the project’s accounts, website and servers went down. The only explanation for all of that was the fact that the project’s crypto wallet mysteriously had lost 800 Ether ( $2.7 million). After the community found out about this the project’s worth dropped significantly and thousands of people’s investments became worth next to zero.
Despite the scams and negative outcomes many people also made serious money. Most of the people that profited were the creators of the NFT projects. This is because they would create a discord channel (online chat rooms/message board) while the project was in production and because so many people just “aped” into projects and many became big projects. The creators would get over 100k people joining the channel with typically only 10,000 NFTs. Once this hype happens, consumers compete to get on the VIP list of the project and this brings in even more people because of the hype and FOMO (fear of missing out) it creates. Then comes the mint; a mint is when the project is first released. The price of a mint is typically between 0.3–2.0 Eth. This multiplied by the average amount of NFTs minted per project (10,000) and the value of Ethereum at the time would result in hundreds of thousands of dollars of profits. That is not the only way for them to make money. Often project creators would release a second set of NFTs that are still part of the same project. The last main way for creators to make money is when someone resells one of the NFTs. After minting it, the creator usually takes 5%- 10% of the resale profit. Typically when someone sells their art, that is the only time they make money, whereas with NFT the creator makes money each time it changes hands. This is allowed because when someone buys an NFT they are agreeing to the contract that the creator makes and it can have many stipulations from commercial rights of the NFT to commission from every sale.
In Closing
NFTs are unique resources in our digital world that have the power to influence and shape our future. These NFTs are created on different blockchains, the main one being Ethereum. With the explosion of NFTs and crypto over the last few years, it is clear that people have recognized several of the benefits that blockchain provides. Two of the main reasons are that blockchains solve the Byzantine General and the Double Spend problem. Along with solving these issues, NFTs are promising because of the possibilities for profitability and technological advancement. NFTs are able to do this by making many current business sectors more efficient and profitable by streamlining processes, eliminating intermediaries, and making it easier for people to access different media. Some of the industries that have the most NFT potential for disruption are gaming, music, art, virtual worlds, event ticketing, and insurance policies just to name a few. 2021 was a big year for NFTs and many art-based projects were created and sold for thousands of dollars. However, 2022 has been a very different story. It was this year that many of those projects had their valuations exponentially decline, and as result, many people in the space have also lost thousands of dollars. Despite this, the future of NFTs has a lot of potential to change the way we live and conduct our society, and I believe their impact on them in the next 10 years will be significant.
Thank you for reading!
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