Many laughs were shared across the viral spaces of internet meme culture when Logan Paul revealed one of his NFTs purchased for $623,000 had dropped to just $10 in value.
Schadenfreude is not exclusively the domain of crypto-skeptics on Twitter, but they clearly work the hardest at achieving the state of nirvana only found when a disliked project is found wanting.
For those in the know, glorified profile pictures are barely going to be a footnote in NFT history; merely more than a curiosity for 10th grade classes around the world. Grandpa will sit in his corner armchair and mutter darkly about the Bored Ape he never sold and realized gains on. This will not define the era of NFTs, however.
Projects in the crypto space are quietly building infrastructure for a groundbreaking new world underpinned by NFTs. There may be use cases for artworks, but this is nowhere near close to the overall thrust of the future industry.
Nearly any asset can be tokenized and turned into an NFT. What this represents is an immutable and verifiable piece of code denoting ownership of something worth money. See where we’re going with this?
Don’t worry if not, subtext is not my greatest attribute.
What some startups envision is a global network of rentable, buyable and saleable assets based on the blockchain and, you guessed it, making full use of NFTs to ensure safe and secure transferring of assets if even only for a limited period of time. Smart contracts work out the finer details automatically so there is incredibly little room for scams and fraudulent activities.
Short answer: everyone, pretty much.
Gamers are resisting NFT integration: they can’t really be blamed, we don’t expect anything more than cash grabs from the largest developers. But there is opportunity for players to actually own their in-game items and trade them freely to profit when the time comes. This’ll require significant evolution in the current financial models of the most popular titles.
Secondary ticket markets could be positively huge for NFT adoption meanwhile. Dealing with resellers and scalpers comes with inherent risk because they might simply rip you off and there is little to no recourse in most cases. If the ticket is on the blockchain, funds are held in escrow and only released when transfer is confirmed by the smart contract and registered on blockchain.
Rentable assets are also a big use case; do away with all the paperwork and conduct everything from a mobile application. Supply chains can further abolish mountains of paperwork with considerable exposure to fraud and do it all on the blockchain, with shipments registered as NFTs.
These are just a few options for the explosion of growth in NFT adoption. Many more exist and probably aren’t all conceived of yet. Keep an eye on developments; the reputation that precedes NFTs will swiftly change once it becomes too useful to ignore.
