NFTs; Non-fungible tokens. What exactly are they? Well, put simply they are not able to be replaced with anything else. One Bitcoin token can be replaced with another. One pound Sterling can be replaced with another. But one NFT cannot be replaced with another, remaining entirely unique to one another.
NFTs are essentially anything digital. This could be a drawing, a video, GIF, thumbnail, music or your entire neurology downloaded onto a computer chip. You can even buy ownership of your favourite tweets. According to The Verge, the founder of Twitter actually sold a tweet for just under $3 million.
The benefit of NFTs is to avoid copyright infringement of digital assets, namely any of the above, or any other kind of NFT. The owner of the digital asset is granted a certificate which gives the owner the rights to that asset. Consequentially, in theory, they benefit from royalties and ownership rights.
This gives an opportunity for artists to sell the work that they otherwise wouldn’t have been able to online, and have the rights to them they deserve. Artists are paid every time they are sold or the NFT exchanges hands.
For buyers, they can now support their favourite artists, as well as gaining rights to use that piece of art. Like with a vintage painting, buyers can admire, enjoy and showcase your collection of art to their peers.
The problem is that there can be (sometimes at least) 50 to 100 copies of your digital art circulating online. So exclusivity isn’t always the bare minimum. As such, many argue the point in entitlement to a digital asset like NFTs for thousands of pounds, if owners don’t own them exclusively?
This is why in a lot of ways, the NFT market seems like a lot of talk and no trousers. A lot of viral hype, and very little applicable substance. But not necessarily. After all, one can buy anything digital with NFTs; stickers, images, videos of YouTubers, but much more can be done too..
NFTs can act as digital certificates of authentication, currently a relatively underresourced area of blockchain technology. House ownership, commuting contracts, business contracts, carbon-credit purchases, land, data and pet ownership. All these more demonstrative applications are where NFTs will begin to strive in the consumer market.
NFTs also have supreme potential in the gaming market, allowing game assets to be portable for the very first time. Gamers who’ve spent hours designing a new gun on Call of Duty, for example, will no longer have to wave their work goodbye when they upgrade their console.
Gamers can simply create an NFT for their new gun and sell it to someone, or keep it for themselves. This concept is utterly untouched, and would undeniably go well appreciated in the gaming industry.
And whilst the functionality of why an NFT needn’t even exist is questionable, with everything going more digital thanks to blockchain, there must be a superior use for NFTs. And whilst we’ve touched the surface in this blog, it's evident that the far reaches of the technology, is still yet to be determined.
