The NFT hype: latest trends in Blockchain
Why those tokens are worth millions and why they matter in the Blockchain space?
NFT is a non-fungible token being unique and irreplaceable by its nature. The basis of NFT is exactly the opposite of all digital and traditional currencies as they can be traded for another item giving its buyer or seller a fully identical financial item. NFT tokens are based on the Ethereum Blockchain protocol standing out from, for example, the ETH coin itself by storing extra information.
NFTs can stand for anything digital in its origin including pictures, paintings, pieces of music, characters. Until now NFTs have been mostly used for selling and purchasing digital art giving fine arts collecting a new development stage as far as adding more value to virtual creative technologies. Thus, NFT as a concept and as an economical instrument changes the whole attitude towards the digital objects’ ownership and such originals.
By purchasing an NFT, you get both an immutable record of ownership of the asset and access to the actual asset. For now, these are mostly digital artwork or collectible cards. Some are virtual goods that only exist in where they are sold, and some come in familiar to most people formats such as, for example, JPEG or PDF. A small fraction of NFTs are digital records of ownership of an actual physical object.
Some of the Blockchain gurus like David Gerard compare NFTs to trading cards referring to their process of acquisition as to buying official collectables. At the same time traditional auctioneers do not believe or recognize NFTs at all as they do not see any materialistic good behind digital fine arts.
As the first-ever tweet was sold for 2,5 millions of US dollars, the NFT phenomenon showed that it can be worth not only a piece of art but any piece of human and non-human digital creation. Isn’t it close to the way Bitcoin was proving itself as a payment or investment method? Meaningfully, NFTs seem somehow to copy the Bitcoin way as they appeared in 2017 and boomed this year only.
At the same time, NFTs raise another important legal and ethical question of copying others’ creation and the IP related to it. Some are investing millions in digital “originals” which cannot prevent all other Internet users to download those pieces of art for free. Despite all the regulations around the globe, IP still remains vulnerable thus NFTs could probably push the creators’ protection to a higher level.
While economists, traders, art lovers and investors valuate the NFT phenomenon and make predictions, we would still like to remind you of how hype might be overpriced and yet bring a lot of profit to the one trying to play on it. As NFTs are still not supported by most services, a time should pass for these tokens to either recommend themselves as an alternative and trusted method or pass away as the ICOs did some years ago. Being still too young, the NFT market has all the important development stages ahead. And yet, who could fight the human chase for exclusiveness?..
