This punk is worth $400.000, and the picture is the cheapest one available out of ten thousand NFTs in this collection only. The reason why these pieces are so expensive is that they were the first NFTs collectibles of their kind. Investors are betting that even though they are ignored by most people today, they absolutely will matter in the future. However, you must consult with experts like Blaine Graboyes before taking any decision. ‘Future’ implies the nearest time when the NFT space grows from 0,5 million people to hundreds of millions of people. Moreover, the largest network corporations such as Facebook stick to the same idea: they are currently rebranding themselves as a metaverse (‘meta universe’) company by showing NFTs as a central part of their visiinon.
However, why did so many people become so obsessed with this new trend? And are NFTs indeed such a revolutionary modern technology?
- The primary function of the innovation
Now let’s take a reasonable step back and dive right into the origins of NFT (or ‘non-fungible token’). It will help us understand why they are such a big deal. Looking into the Internet today, we can find many similarities to the real world. There are town squares (‘Twitter’) where you can socialize, shopping districts (‘Amazon’) offering you to buy real-world items. There are endless entertainment opportunities, such as movies, books, or video creation. However, until now the Internet has lacked one huge component which exists in the real world. It is the concept of personal property and ownership. For example, if Twitter decides that you’ve breached their terms of service, they can easily kick you off their platform and delete your account entirely, so you don’t own it.
In short, NFTs are tokens that confirm your ownership of a particular object on the Internet. Also, you can attach data files (image, song, game) to these NFTs to prove you have a title to them.
- Two major upcoming developments
Numerous interrelated changes are coming up with such innovation, but there are two biggest ones. The first one lies on the new market supply-side. As a result, an entirely new class of creators that can produce digital assets will arise. Digital artists will benefit the most from this transformation. For the first time, they may add verifiable scarcity to digital goods.
The second one refers to the buyers’ side. Having NFT in your wallet means exercising control and ownership of an asset. It means that you’re free to do anything that you can do with real-world property: sell it, transfer it or even rent it out and get a loan based on the property value.
This trend will inspire people to invest in such activities more. Many people will get rich when they figure this out. Frankly speaking, many already have.
In this way, in a few years, we may have tons of online applications that interact with crypto tokens, and a wallet like ‘Metamask’ may become a so-called passport or a login to explore these applications.
- Fake NFTs
That was a quick overview of how powerful this innovation may be. But several people have the following question in their minds: ‘Why cannot I just right-click and save these images to my desktop getting the same benefits?’
Nevertheless, there are ways to recognize NFT ownership which is used by all of the related platforms and as it turned out, that takes less than a second. Moreover, pretending you own something that you don’t is going to hurt your reputation. It’s going to be like wearing a
fake watch but in this case, there will be a giant sticker on the watch which says ‘this is a fake’. And you will not get any of the additional utility which you could in case of actual holding of an asset.
- Opportunities created
Taking into account all of the facts mentioned above, let us move to the potential opportunities for any person who is courageous enough to jump into this emerging and unknown space right now.
For better or worse, the whole blockchain industry is still in its earliest stages. Talking about ‘non-fungible tokens’ and the Web 3.0 cycle as a whole, they are even younger. The most popular NFT platforms in the world combined makeup about three billion dollars in volume. At first glance, it sounds like a lot until you look at other industries.
According to industry experts, this sphere will grow from half a million monthly buyers today to tens of millions in the upcoming years. Furthermore, the amount of money going to flow into this industry will exceed all possible expectations.
It goes without saying but still worth mentioning that such a massive and perspective innovation with worldwide potential will also create a great number of job-related opportunities. It is rather surprising, but there are numerous NFT industry-related positions appearing every day: ‘NFT experts’, ‘NFT & investigator’, ‘NFT platform engineer’ etc. NFT is a part of blockchain technology. It is skyrocketing these days and attracts more and more professionals. So, in case you have a solid knowledge of digital production and digital engineering, today is a perfect time to grab this opportunity. Just have a quick look at any of the well-known job-seeking sources and find exciting opportunities for blockchain developers or engineers.
- The secret weapon of NFTs
In conclusion, we would briefly mention the secret weapon of NFTs and Web 3.0, which ensures that it is developing faster than any other technology. It is so-called ‘Open source development. NFTs means that all the codes and Smart Square Mercy contracts are already available to the public. This primarily implies that innovations may be immediately copied into other projects and the space moves at light speed compared to what we’re used to from the traditional tech world.