NFTs— Empowering the Digital Revolution One Token at the Time
Pt 2 — The disruption of the standard model
In the previous article, we answered various questions such as what NFTs are, the concept of fungibility, the characteristics behind some of the NFTs in the world of gaming and collectibles, called ‘digital collectibles,’ and why someone should be interested (or at least considering looking) into investing in this rapidly evolving digital ecosystem.
Let’s now uncover the full features of this application of Blockchain tech.
The journey into the reality of the NFTs continues…
SO, WHY NFTs TRENDING?
To put it simply, anybody can tokenise their work to sell as an NFT, but interest has been fuelled by recent headlines of multi-million-dollar sales.
The rise of crypto-rich billionaires and deep-pocketed investors play a significant role, given that owning a piece of digital art is constantly making the headlines for some astonishing price tags $ going for millions of USD $ like in the case of the artist Mike Winkelmann (aka Beeple) who sold his work ‘Everydays — The First 5000 Days’ for USD 69 million.
Everydays — The First 5000 Days — is a collage of Winkelmann’s work starting at the beginning of the project, when he was posting somewhat crude sketches. It runs through years of evolving digital shapes and sceneries up through the beginning of this year, when he was posting extremely crude political illustrations.
Also, the fact of owning NFTs is gradually becoming more mainstream culture, even a status symbol to some extent.
Take the ascent of bored ape avatars on Twitter accounts of
The Bored Ape Yacht Club:
Much like with cryptocurrencies then, the idea behind NFTs is to remove intermediaries and enhance security.
Crypto aims at eliminating banks or at least weakening their power and influence in the world of finance.
NFTs serve a similar goal but in the world of intellectual property: instead of going through agents, artists can directly connect to their audience.
One of the major reasons the NFT trend is so spectacular is because it transforms the value proposition for creators. Instead of enlisting a publisher, gallery, or record label to monetize creative works, artists can carve out a larger slice of the total pie.
This paradigm shift also breaks down the traditional stratification between consumers and creators.
The list of nonfungible tokens does not end with artworks. They can revolutionize identity management and replace physical passports that cost money to produce and pose a threat to security. Physical IDs can be lost, stolen, faked, etc., whereas digital documents will be safely stored on a blockchain.
Besides, NFTs can make investments more accessible and affordable to the general population. Dividing a digital asset among several investors is much easier than dividing a property like a house. Tokenization of the real estate industry will disrupt the investment market and put an end to the exclusivity and unattainability of real estate investments.
All of this has further cemented NFTs as a relevant sector in the blockchain universe
Let’s now look in-dept into two of the sectors that are in the process of a major transformation due to the NFTs technology being applied to their industry: the ART and MUSIC Industry.
ADOPTION OF NFTs IN THE MUSIC INDUSTRY
Today, NFTs collectibles are invading the world of music. For instance, Canadian DJ Deadmau5 has greatly welcomed the use of NFT collectibles by partnering with Worldwide Asset Exchange (WAX) and released a blockchain drop.
This shows that the music industry is anticipating a great change where rare collectibles will be shifted from mere physical assets to digital items.
In the future, we might see event organizers and sponsors handing out rare Fortnite skins to people attending concerts. The NFTs proposed by Deadmau5 would operate like virtual stickers where fans can collect and trade amongst themselves, just like baseball cards.
NFT ART
There is an enormous application of NFTs in the creation of NFT art and not only for the upside potential of monetary benefit revolving around the creation, purchasing, and selling of such assets.
The growth in the market value implies that people have shifted to perceiving collectibles as a huge financial entity rather than just a hobby.
They’re just a different form from what you’d see in traditional art, and many more artwork and artists are coming into the spotlight for embracing this new artistic current and form of expression for their creativity.
Many artists working in groundbreaking and sometimes controversial styles are also receiving unprecedented interest from NFT collectors. Art with whirling 3-D renderings, street-style oversaturated color schemes, and hyper-referential (and often crass) cartoons are thriving. These Internet-fueled aesthetics are grabbing the attention of both a younger generation raised on Instagram and a rather ‘emotional’ crypto clientele.
THE REAL WORLD CONCERN FOR LEGITIMACY — a possible solution via Blockchain and NFTs
ANFT code has a signature from its creator that authenticates the token on any server, browser, or platform, making it verifiable in a decentralized way. Therefore, no one entity is responsible for hosting an NFT.
So Who verifies that the NFT is legit?
It can be verified through any blockchain, which we already established its unique capacity to guarantee reliability, security, and legitimacy of any transferal of information.
But for as much as it sounds hydilliac, they come with some downsides, and there are also two main security risks with NFTs at the moment:
- Copyright. Someone tries to create an NFT for a digital asset that they did not create.
- No permanent storage solution. After an NFT is purchased, the content is not stored on the blockchain but stored on a server, leaving it open to the chance that it could inadvertently be deleted.
ARE NFTs HERE TO STAY?
Short answer: Yes.
Fueled by the pandemic and the influx of easy-to-use and cost-efficient NFT minting platforms, protocols, marketplaces and the rising demand of the gaming industry, the NFT market adapts to the creative preferences of a new digital generation.
We are in an intense gold rush right now that is turning a jpeg of a scribble into a million-dollar product, but once those ‘outrageous’ valuations and hype around the space settle down, the idea of having tradable digital collectibles will be here to stay and be the catalyst to a limitless array of uses for such unique and scarce assets.
