What’s Really in Your Wallet? Decoding NFT Values Through Certifications
The $18 billion NFT market is not a joke, even if Keanu Reeves famously thinks so, but the erratic way NFT values are often determined might leave you shaking your head. The marketplace has seen a 21,000% rise in value in just one year and much of that growth has to do with how NFTs themselves are promoted and sold. Many NFT values are driven by hype alone rather than any value tethered to real-world economic projections about how an NFTs value or the marketplace might evolve.
There are no consequences for making outrageous claims about an NFT and no certification bodies that allow small, vulnerable buyers to certify the information they are receiving. Many people purchase NFTs based on guesswork and good faith (insert laughing Keanu Reeves gif here). This makes it easy for bad actors to create rug pulls — where unscrupulous developers can, for example, call their NFT “Squid Game” and abscond with millions. Because cryptocurrency and blockchain technology can operate anonymously, crypto thieves can literally vanish and reboot scams untainted by their past misdeeds. That makes the NFT marketplace a candy store for cybercriminals — with far less risk of discovery than a complex Wall Street scam à la Bernie Madoff.
While Wall Street brokerages and art auction houses run on hype, there are also layers of authentication involved in sales through both channels: stockbrokers are licensed, and art auction houses and galleries must authenticate the origin of the art they sell. Selling worthless art as work from a famous artist or selling stock known to be bad can cause the seller to lose their license or end up in jail.
Until now, no one had attempted to make the world of NFTs friendly for purchasers who couldn’t afford to lose their life savings on a rug pull.
Arkius, a startup, is changing that. Arkius has developed a new way for NFTs to be promoted within an ecosystem built around transparency and authentication, providing a single source of truth for community members. According to Arkius, Certifiers are individuals who have been vetted by the community and are permitted to share content through the service. Community members can then select which type of information they receive based on their preferences. The certification process is transparent, so people know what criteria were used to create the certification. That means new NFT project info is tethered to people who community members know and can trust.
Determining how an NFT should be valued isn’t a job for a single organization, but Arkius has created a way to empower ordinary individuals with certified information.
