GiD Report#175 — Everyone wants an NFT

Published in

GlobaliD

4 min readAug 31, 2021

Welcome to The GiD Report, a weekly newsletter that covers GlobaliD team and partner news, market perspectives, and industry analysis. You can check out last week’s report here.

This week:

The month of the NFT
Chart of the week
Stuff happens

1. NFT sales reach almost $1 billion in August

At this point, most people have heard of a non-fungible token (NFT), but for the still uninitiated, here’s a quick primer.

Your typical cryptocurrency, much like currencies in general, are fungible. All that means is that you’re happy to accept a like-for-like replacement if you own one. I’m happy to have any U.S. dollar — it’s all the same to me.

That’s not the case for non-fungible tokens, which represent unique assets. Your plane ticket — that’s technically an NFT. Trade your ticket with someone else and it means you’re sitting somewhere else on the plane.

That makes an NFT very suitable for digital art, content, and collectibles. And beyond that, these tokens have potentially countless use cases. Maybe it’s a collectible. Maybe it’s a ticket to an event. Maybe it’s a membership pass, functioning as gated access for a private community. Maybe it’s a way for creators to assign attribution to their work.

After a brief lull after the crypto correction in May, the market is once again exploding.

Visa just bought a cryptopunk for $150,000.

Ripple is leaning into tokenization.

Facebook is talking about including NFT support for its Novi wallet later this year.

European soccer teams have sold over $200 million worth of tokens to its fans.

Justin Sun bought a digital rock for half a million dollars. Yes — digital rocks are now status symbols in the crypto community. Don’t ask.

And the success of NFT projects such as degen apes (again, don’t ask) on Solana has helped skyrocket the speedy, scalable crypto token to over $100. (Hard Yaka is an early investor in Solana.)

All told, August has already seen NFT sales over $900 million.

Let’s not get it twisted — this bubble will likely burst at some point and a lot of people will get left holding the bag. But some will also likely hold lasting value. (Good luck picking the right ones.)

Speculation aside, the concept, the technology — that’s real. That’s sticking around. And we’re only just experimenting with the tip of the iceberg here. We haven’t yet grasped its full potential. But it will forever change the way we interact with digital things and each other on the internet.

GiD Report#175 — Everyone wants an NFT

This week:

1. NFT sales reach almost $1 billion in August

Relevant:

2. Chart of the week

3. Stuff happens

Written by GlobaliD