Beyond Art: NFTs are Showing Staying Power

It wasn’t only bitcoin that boomed this year, reaching all-time highs. Another blockchain player also sky-rocketed and is settling in to stay. The FT previously reported how it is NFTs – or non-fungible tokens – that are luring private offices and individuals alike into the world of crypto. Non-fungible means that the digital token cannot be changed. Each one is unique, laying the perfect groundwork for it to become a carrier of art, be it a painting, a photograph, music, or other form of creative asset. 

Christie’s sale of Beeple’s Opus NFT for more than US$69 million is already old news and the internet has become used to artists such as Snoop Dogg offering their works in the form of NFTs. NFTs as uniquely identifiable tokens have established themselves as the way for the modern world to own and store works of art and to support artists – a nice twist after the advent of file-sharing in the 90s infringed on artistic copyright.

NFT marketplaces

NFTs have opened new avenues for artists to creatively engage and distribute their work. At the start of the NFT boom, the space was dominated by one marketplace, OpenSea. These spaces are now mushrooming and specialising in different types of art and styles. This report offers a breakdown of which marketplace might quench your NFT thirst.

What else is the world using NFTs for other than owning art and supporting artists? 

It turns out quite a lot. Here is an overview of the trends.

NFT collectibles

Remember football trading cards and how the cool kid in school would sell that super-rare one during break for astronomical prices? Well, that type of transaction has now gone digital. Cryptopunks and Bored Ape Yacht Club are two of the more popular examples – with a cryptopunk selling for US$11.7 million in a Sotheby’s auction. The cool kids are still at it. This report introduces the hottest NFT collectibles and analyses the factors influencing NFT traction and success.

Owning gaming assets

NFTs have gone beyond collector value. Some of them are tradable items in the world of gaming. The gaming industry – valued at more than US$173 billion – is an economy on its own. What NFTs have achieved is to transfer ownership to the gamers. In traditional gaming, users can purchase items at additional cost, in-game. But the items de facto remain the possession of the gaming company. With NFTs, the items are fully owned by the gamer and can be sold or traded, another big step into the world of decentralisation that blockchain technology is facilitating. Learn more about popular NFT games here.

Making the metaverse a reality

The metaverse is a persistent online 3-D virtual space co-created and owned by its users. Here, with NFTs, digital assets can be owned, rented, shared, and programmed through mechanisms such as fractionalisation, with rewards including creators royalties. Ultimately, NFTs enable a metaverse where users truly own and control their assets, returning the internet to the open vision on which it was built. Facebook rebranding itself as Meta in October 2021 has brought this phenomenon to public awareness. This in-depth report explores which metaverses already exist and how they will shape the future of web 3.0.

New ways of scaling NFTs

TikTok, the social media video clip platform that has surpassed Instagram in popularity, partnered with Immutable X to immortalise its most popular moments as NFTs. A company as large as TikTok using Layer 2 technology – a second layer of blockchain tech to bypass some of its existing bottlenecks – may give a glimpse of how NFTs might evolve. For those still getting up to speed on NFT tech such as Layer 2, this report gives an overview.

Improved security with better storage options

Storage is one of the hottest topics when it comes to crypto and NFTs. Where do you store your US$69 million Christie’s NFT to keep it safe? While an NFT transaction is completed on a blockchain, it’s usually stored off-chain, on the project’s or another third party server. This report takes a deep dive into the challenges this presents as well as some new solutions.

Crypto.com Research & Insights

The above reports have been provided courtesy of the fastest-growing crypto platform in the world, Crypto.com (Matt Damon can’t be wrong, can he?). The Singapore-headquartered company partners with global heavyweights from Formula 1 to Aston Martin’s racing team and UFC.

Its research arm publishes white papers offering industry-leading insight, available for free to provide education to the crypto community (the last two mentioned in this article are available to VIP members only through a sign-up link). We encourage the NFT-curious as much as the NFT-serious to use this resource and to DYOR (do your own research), as they say in crypto-speak and do some in-depth learning about investing in NFTs.