The online environment is constantly changing with new trends and new interests and excitements – many different online forms of entertainment for example have been thriving due to tech trends as Disney+ recently announced they had hit 100 million subscribers in just 16 months and many of the biggest online gaming services have been growing as you can find a list of casino sites here that are certainly benefitting from the latest tech trends too – but the newest entrance into the world can be a little difficult to wrap your head around, even if you fully understand what is really going on.
As part of the Ethereum blockchain, the recent entry of NFT’s is the latest move in the crypto world as it continues to gain steam, but NFT’s are a little different – they serve as a method of digital collection, largely targeted at the moment towards digital art and similar products, but with the potential to expand outwards. They’re called ‘non-fungible tokens’, and whilst at it’s core the concept is quite easy to understand, it does leave you scratching your head a little. A non-fungible token is something unique – if you trade a unique playing card for example, you’ll receive something completely different with a different value, this is a non-fungible item – for comparison, a fungible item is something that isn’t unique and holds the same value, trading a $1 bill for another $1 bill gives you the same item with the same value.
For the NFT itself, the concept is that when buying an NFT you own the original rights to that piece of work as a sort collectible item, it doesn’t matter if this something that has been reproduced, recreated, or redistributed later on, by buying the original NFT you hold the original item – but this is where the waters are muddied – existing sales have happened for media that has been popular before such as the Nyan Cat image of a flying pop-tart cat with a rainbow behind it, but given the image has been reproduced so much and many different versions exist, where is the value held in the original rights, and is it even at all verifiable that the original does now belong with you? It opens up a whole different bag of snakes and is a market that will need to go through many changes before it’s able to be in a strong position.
(Image from twitter.com)
Reading all about it certainly does little to help, it’s easy to see where the many holes are, and where potential issues could arise in the future, but given huge sales have already been made it seems as if NFT is certainly here to stay, and those who have jumped on board early on may be able to reap the benefits.
