NFTS Are For Everyone and They’re Here to Stay

By Jeremy Born, Co-founder and CEO at NFT Genius

At NFT Genius, we are revolutionizing the world of digital collectibles. As the larger digital marketplace continues to evolve, two of the most talked-about, high-growth areas are blockchain technology and Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs). Chainalysis quotes 2021’s NFT market valuation at over $40 billion, and, according to a Deloitte study, sports NFTs alone are expected to generate more than $2 billion in 2022. Our NFT Genius team consists of storytellers, technologists, and innovators focused on delivering a world-class digital experience and NFT marketplace technology. In addition to our Rebel Rabbits, Bitcoin Origins, and Tezos Origins NFTs, we’ve created some of the most popular sport-themed NFTs, partnered with top athletes such as golfer Bryson DeChambeau, Shareef, and Shaquille O’Neal, and the Miami Heat’s Duncan Robinson. We also developed the Gaia NFT marketplace, one of the fastest-growing secondary markets for sports-themed digital collectibles in the world.

We dropped the hugely popular Ballerz collection in November 2021, a generative collection of 10,000 basketball-inspired NFTs that sold out within three hours. Since Ballerz hit Gaia’s secondary marketplace, it has generated more than $12 million in sales, second only to NBA Top Shot.

But why should NFTs and blockchain technology matter to you? To start, the underlying technology is arguably on track to becoming the most impactful technological shift since the introduction of the Internet and the World Wide Web. Nearly every global industry is likely to feel the transformative effect, and the current hype around the space is likely only the beginning. Ultimately, in the same way the iPhone or social media permanently altered consumer behavior, it’s likely that everyone will eventually hold and interact with NFTs in some way on a regular basis.

Whether you are an early adopter, a luddite, a full-blown skeptic, or an avid investor, the ubiquitous adoption of NFTs will likely begin as a method of connecting with one of your favorite brands, athletes, or musicians, but the monumental shift is developing around the fact that we all have digital identities, and we’re moving into this digital world at an accelerated pace. Blockchain technology and NFTs are becoming the ‘rails’ and ‘tickets’ of our world: the personalized, enhanced, and customizable access passes that will streamline our future.

COVID saw the world stuck at home, and we were all essentially forced to interact with others exclusively online, and now, whether we are fully aware of it or not, most of us have become extremely comfortable with this hyper-digital existence. Consumers have high expectations, and NFTs are fast becoming quintessential to the future of our unique online identities. Our ’on-chain’ interactions with artists and brands are quickly becoming extensions of our identities. As a result, we are being faced with more opportunities for in-depth and meaningful brand experiences. NFTs have just begun to alter the entire concept of “digital identity”, but in the near future it’s possible even practical information such as car titles and property deeds, government bonds, patents, and birth certificates could be impacted by this notorious non-fungible tech.

I wasn’t on the very cutting edge of blockchain technology, but I had an analytical background that gave me a natural curiosity for it and inevitably drew me into the space. I worked in digital marketing and consulted for Fortune 500 brands. I saw the growth of artificial intelligence and machine learning as it related to autonomous chatbots and worked on teams focused on creating human-familiar conversational language applications.

This naturally progressed to a focus on the analytics surrounding machine learning, and by a certain point I was working on ML technology that was trained to make logical assumptions regarding conversational responses, focused on predicting customer needs. It was the incredible developers on this specific project who encouraged me to take my first deep look into Bitcoin and its underlying blockchain technology.

This was around 2015 or so, and what I saw was atrocious. At the time, most blockchain applications felt like the Internet in 1995. The data was all over the place, transactions were slow and expensive, and I immediately knew that I wanted to make a small dent in cleaning up the mess and contributing to some sort of consistency across the space became a passion. The analytics platform and underlying technology we built with CoinGenius was really meant to clean up on-chain data and we hoped to offer transparency and insight to the cryptocurrency trading community by taking advantage of deep market intelligence.

That role led me into the event space; I created Collective Intelligence and focused on bringing people from the crypto space together in person. NFTs had been talked about in the space as early as 2015, but in 2019 we created one of the first virtual NFT conferences, NFT Day, to bring together some of the brightest minds in the space. We like to think that this event was key in elevating the conversation around NFTs and positioning the ‘non-fungible token’ concept as equally transformational and worthy of discussion alongside Bitcoin, Ethereum, and other impactful cryptocurrency innovations.

At that point, I really caught the NFT bug. My creative background in digital content made NFT-backed art a natural next step. I saw so many opportunities in the space, and, with NFTs specifically, there is no better approach than creating and minting your own series. So, we created Bitcoin Origins, a project I am proud to say represents one of the first times that storytelling was used as a crucial element in an NFT series. Today, NFTs are no longer just status symbols for tech-minded early adopters, influential athletes, and artists on Twitter. Instead, everyday consumers are beginning to actively embrace unique tokens as a way to express themselves, store value and generate wealth, connect with like-minded peers, and form strong communities. We are now telling our own stories with previously unimaginable creativity. NFTs are an entirely new medium that is rapidly being equally embraced by creatives, technologists, and everyday people around the world. Today, NFT Genius is known as one of the industry leaders for marketplace technology and utility-based NFTs that have mass appeal.

At NFT Genius, we’re continually pushing the limits of NFTs, and we believe in building strong communities and creating seamless peer-to-peer marketplace solutions for NFT creators, collectors, and traders. While we approach NFTs as art, first and foremost, they are so much more than that, and, in many ways, average consumers are just starting to wake up to what is possible with NFT technology.

William Quickly, the CEO of Wax, says that NFTs are “mini supercomputers”; they can be programmed just like any other smart contract, and developers and artists are only just beginning to scratch the surface of what is possible. Variables like time, location, and buy/sell transaction history are already being integrated into NFTs. Couple in external parameters like the other assets within a wallet, real-time analytics, oracle data, or previous holder activity, and consider the reactive changes that can take place — and the subsequent end-user experience — and the possibilities really begin to seem endless.

Jeremy Born is the Co-founder and CEO of NFT Genius. Learn more at www.nftgenius.com.