So here’s something new that my intern alerted me to last week: NFTs. Now you may be asking yourself (just like I did), what are NFTs? NFT stands for non-fungible tokens, which in itself, still doesn’t quite answer our question. According to Forbes, an NFT is “a digital asset that represents real-world objects like art, music, in-game items and videos.”
So again, what does that mean? Basically, you have a digital asset such as a cat GIF. You purchase that GIF from the creator for say, $100,000, usually in cryptocurrency. You now own that asset. But you may be asking yourself one of several questions:
- Why buy it?
- Why does it cost so much?
- If it’s already spread across the internet, how do you own it?
- What’s the point?!
I’m still struggling with understanding this whole NFT thing. The only thing I can attribute to this phenomenon is to say you have bragging rights. That’s all it is: BRAGGING RIGHTS. Now, yes, you can make money off of being the owner of the asset, but it begs the question, how to monetize that ownership? That’s a big question and beyond my comprehension at this time. I’m still trying to let this all sink in but I thought it was worth having a conversation.
The very first tweet was sold for in excess of $2.9 million. NFT ownership is actually confirmed through the blockchain, usually Ethereum. Even the NBA is taking advantage of NFTs by selling videos of their Top Shots. So you can own a piece of the NBA by collecting the videos. It’s almost like a modern trading card.