The NFT Landscape

More than just ape and bull avatars

You may think you’ve seen it all when a collection of jpegs sells for $69m.

You haven’t.

You may even be somewhat surprised that a European girl can package up her virtual love as an NFT and sell it for $185,000.

Brace yourself.

Or you may have gotten wind of investors paying more for virtual land and mansions than you or I would spend on real-life bricks and mortar.

Believe me, we are just at the foothills of where we are going with NFTs!

The beauty of these non-fungible tokens is that their application is limited only by the imagination of their creators. And some of them are getting exceedingly creative.

Pak turned the non-fungible into fungible by letting his purchasers burn their artworks in exchange for a general-purpose currency token called Ash.

Daniel Arsham created a work that could only really function using this medium, where the nature and surroundings of the piece change very slowly over time, in line with the seasons.

Mad Dog Jones created a Replicator machine that churns out its own derivative NFTs on a strict timetable, but also allows for machine jams and repairs being needed.

You only need to spend five minutes in the space to start losing your preconception that this is all smoke and mirrors, and no rational person would invest real money into a bunch of pixels or soundwaves existing only on the blockchain.

People had similar misgivings about crypto coins and tokens, yet shed those prejudices very rapidly when they saw the real world gains to be made.

NFTs at heart are just a cryptographically secure way of proving ownership and provenance of an item. Their application to artistic endeavour was obvious and for this reason the art community was among the first groups to embrace the technology.

But proof of ownership and an unbreakable audit trail have far wider ramifications. Why can’t land registries and real estate transactions be transformed by use of these immutable records? Business records such as invoices and proof of payment can no longer be tampered with if they are digitally…