The surge of NFTs: How much is this article?
“Everything has a price”. People normally interpret it as every action you make has a cost, which the economist can refer to as “opportunity cost”. However, in the age, we’re living right now that everything actually has a price, either a 10 seconds short clip, a jpg file, or even a tweet, yes, and that tweet was sold for 2.5 million dollars. We’re living in a crazy world now indeed.
So what’s happening.
It’s all about the surge of NFTs, Non-fungible tokens, and that probably didn’t explain anything. I wouldn’t go into detail, which is related to the development of blockchain and cryptocurrency. However, just imagine whatever you have in hand, which can be a picture, a clip, or anything else, is one and only that existed across the world. There is no other way to obtain or collect two same NFTs, as long as it’s digital. And as we can imagine how excited all the collectors are by hearing this. With that said, we can also see how NFTs can be perfectly applied to all kinds of creative works, like music, painting, article, etc.
But why now?
The token actually came out around 2017, originated by the project called “CryptoPunks” which have 10K pixel characters and create the feature of uniqueness for each produced character. The player can only trade in the second-handed market. And following that, “CrypoKitties” really bring NFTs to the world, where the player can breed new kitties by having two digital cats. And again every cat is unique, therefore, the value of each kitty will be evaluated by their traits. And that’s when we saw the potential value of blockchain isn’t just carried by cryptocurrency but NFTs as a brand new option. However, if you’re not in the blockchain ecosystem, you probably aren’t so familiar with this history. So what happened that everyone, even people not in the circle is talking about it. It has to trace back to March 9, when the CEO and Founder of Twitch, Jack Dorsey, announced that he wanted to sell his first tweet on Twitter and as we mentioned earlier that’s the tweet that got sold for 2.5 M. And that definitely caught the attention of the world.
What is it really about?
By using NFTs, content creators no longer have to sell their work through agencies or platforms, which might fundamentally disrupt the industry. Recently ARK has mentioned that nowadays if creators were to generate profit or revenue, they’ll need to go through platforms like Youtube, Instagram, TikTok, Spotify, etc. And those platforms inevitably charge a solid percentage of the revenue. However, with NFTs, none of these are necessary. All in all, maybe it’s really about the commission fee.
Although there are already a few extremely promising applications and probably would reach a certain level of maturity, I don’t think the world will adapt to it that fast. By simply looking at the acceptance of the public of blockchain, how long has it been taking to educate the market? I’m pretty sure even till now if we randomly ask a person on the street that person has a pretty low rate to explain blockchain or cryptocurrency. And this is with the craziness of Bitcoin rising rapidly. But I’m looking forward to that becoming the norm and hope that this article can be bought from someone in the future.
