NFT. The latest FOMO in the Crypto World.
Non-fungible token. Unique. Can’t be replaced with something else. NFTs can be used to represent easily reproducible items such as photos, videos, audio, ticketing, gaming, memes, GIFs, sports, and other types of digital files as unique items.
What does non-fungible mean? For example, a bitcoin is fungible, if you trade one for another bitcoin, and you’ll have exactly the same thing. A one-of-a-kind trading card, however, is non-fungible. If you traded it for a different card, you’d have something completely different.
The NFT concept seems to be the building block of the internet of the future. And like it or not, the internet has become our default context. Today, one’s job, wealth, relationships, sense of self, are all often more mediated through our digital contexts than our physical ones. We’re uploading photos and videos and even cat memes to the internet for free. Not only that but the content we upload to these platforms is trapped there. And not only do they make money from our content, but they also control it. Until NFTs.
Before NFTs people have tried to foist copyright to protect our ideas and to restrain their distribution, but none of the approaches have really worked. Why? Because information wants to be free. This is what allowed the internet to succeed in the first place.
From a copyright point of view, NFTs are a technological breakthrough. They offer us the opportunity to break away from a broken system. So what exactly is an NFT? It’s a certificate of ownership registered on the blockchain for everyone to see. It denotes ownership of a file on the internet.
The obvious question here is, why would anyone pay to own the ownership of a simple JPEG file, that you can just “right-click” and “save file”. Is this a scam? In order to answer we need to put it in terms of physical art collecting: anyone can buy a Monet print. But only one person can own the original.
The beauty of it is that NFTs are internet native. They are born of the internet, for the internet. Unlike most things one can own in the physical world, with NFTs, owning something doesn’t prevent or forbid others from enjoying it. In fact, it’s the opposite. The more an NFT is seen, appreciated, and understood, the more possibility it has to increase in value. So you can still like, reshare, remix an owned NFT and by doing so, its popularity will grow and so will the value of the NFT.
NFTs have grown into a multibillion-dollar industry, fuelled by art lovers and memorabilia hunters buying up millions of dollars worth of rarefied digital creations and souvenirs of celebrities from the fields of music, art, movies, and sports, among others. The most expensive NFTs of all time were sold in 2021, demonstrating serious investor appetite.
Here are this year’s top 5 NFT art pieces, that have been most searched online according to Google Trends:
- The first tweet, sold for $2.9 million
- Hashmasks, sold for $16 million
- Doge NFT, sold for $4 million
- Grimes NFT, sold for $6 million
- Everydays: the First 5000 Days, sold for $69 million
Whether you are an NFT enthusiast, you flirt with the idea of becoming a collector, or you’re simply looking for a place to buy or sell, the worldwide internet has just what you need: Random Arth, Know Where, Solanart, Terra Virtua — just to name a few. The last two are the marketplaces of Solana and Terra, two of the blockchains that Easy2 Stake validates on.
Solanart is a full-fledged NFT marketplace based on the Solana network that allows anyone to buy or sell Solana-based NFTs. Solanart’s goal is to help promote artists and creators by providing them with a trusted marketplace to share their art.
What is different about Terra Virtua is that it has existing partnerships with the likes of Paramount Pictures and Legendary entertainment as well as the notorious horror comic book artist, Nick Percival.
The five trending NFT sectors that are becoming more and more popular with investors, seem to be the following:
THE ART SECTOR. During the pandemic, art lovers were forced to find a new way to feed their passion. The introduction of NFTs to the art world provided just that. Not only that, but NFTs also gave artists the potential to make money from their artwork in ways previously unavailable.
THE MUSIC INDUSTRY. Musicians are also exploring NFTs as a new way of releasing albums. Kings of Leon became the first band to release an album as an NFT, tying special perks and features to its purchase. “NFTs gave me an opportunity to finally merge art, collectible culture, and music in a way I’ve never been able to realize before” declared the dance music icon, Steve Aoki, after launching “Dream Catcher”, a psychedelic collection made up of 11 unique works.
SPORTS MEMORABILIA GAME. Sports franchises such as the NBA were quick to capitalize on NFTs. One highlight of a LeBron James dunk recently sold for $210,000 on the platform.
COLLECTIBLES. Investors who collect rare, limited-edition pairs. Digital collectibles have become a natural extension of physical entities.
PROPERTY MARKET. A piece of online land in the blockchain-based online world of Decentraland was scooped up for more than $900,000, according to Reuters. It was the most expensive sale of NFT land yet.
But not only certain industries became interested in the NFT world and what it has to offer. Brands like Coca-Cola, Taco Bell, Visa or Marvel quickly followed the trend and wanted a slice of the cake.
One thing is clear, with property rights baked into its code, NFTs most likely will reshape the internet as we know it, in the coming decade. So what does the internet of the future look like with NFTs as its building blocks? An internet where economic control rests in the hands of creators, not platforms. An internet where our ideas and creativity can be directly supported. An internet where information can be free, but where we get paid for the work we do with our minds.
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