What are NFTs? Why I should learn about them?
NFTs have been the talk of the town, you see them popping it on social media. Every day you see people coming up with newer collections and you heard people making millions. You may have heard the names Bored Ape Yacht Club or Crypto Punks or Azuki. Additionally, you also see influencers or celebrities endorsing or launching their own collections. NFT space provides bigger opportunity to artists, creators, developers, marketeers and many more verticals.
Before you read further, There is no structure to the blog, I just have gathered multiple aspects of NFT space and wrote this.
In general, NFT stands for Non-Fungible Token (you probably know this already), Non-Fungible means not replaceable (you can exchange a dollar for a dollar but cannot replace Mona Lisa’s painting with some other image) and in simple words token means to publish it on the blockchain. Tokens that we can use to represent ownership of unique items.
Go ahead and see this video to learn the basics.
Some of the most famous NFT marketplaces are as follows:
1. Opensea
2. Rarible
3. Super Rare
NFT collections I love:
Streetwear Culture
Apart from everyone doing NFT because of making profits, there is a culture of ownership and community to understand. Additionally, NFTs take the limited supply rule from the streetwear playbook. Learn how skateboarding culture works, sneaker culture works, what pokemon cards are, and what NBA cards are. If you want to understand more about it then explore what streetwear culture is, NFT community gets its roots from it. Watch this show on Netflix called Sneakerheads and you will understand what this is all about.
Community Building
Every NFT collection relies on a strong community that usually resides on discord and has its own Universe down there. The members are super interactive and conversations are rapidly evolving in the space. Community Building is the essential part of making, marketing or selling comes from a strong community. Building a community, having a value-creating mission and roadmap, and a credible team to make people trust your collection. Additionally, engaging people in multiple conversations, gamify the experience, actively asking artists to contribute with their fan art, Giveaway competitions, and Twitter conversations to incentivize members of the community. There are way more things to build a strong community but explore a few of the communities by joining these discord. Also, there are jobs for running these communities and you can find such opportunities on the collections’ website.
Some of the discord channels to start off with:
- Roboto
- Hape
- RTFKT
$69 Million Dollars JPEG
You may have gone through the news about an NFT selling for $69 million. Here is the podcast link from the creator of that NFT. He talks about his journey, how NFT levels the playing field for artists and how it makes it easy for artists to sell their artwork.
Beeple podcast — https://www.npr.org/2021/03/12/976513031/the-69-million-jpeg
PFP Mania
A lot of interest in NFT came from influencers/celebrities putting NFTs as their profile picture and it got a lot of people intrigued about the characters in it. One example is crypto punk which started at 0.08eth and jumped to more than 60eth currently. Another example is the bored ape yacht club. Eminem and Snoop dog has been showcasing their BAYC NFTs in their music videos.
Broskees: A million-dollar collection from Pakistan
NFT space is growing at exponential speed in Pakistan too, a lot of artists are working and collaborating with international artists on many NFT collections. Having said that, Ramish Safa alongside with his team came up this collection Broskees, which is a collection of 1691 individuals inspired by fashion, food, and popular culture. They have worked tirelessly to create a wonderful community alongside a roadmap facilitating financial independence education for artists and young people. With all that effort, on their launch, they were able to sell NFTs worth a million dollars in total to be used to execute their roadmap.
Brands
Brands have been exploring NFT space and finding use cases to use NFT for marketing and as a medium to sell their products. For example, NIKE acquired RTFKT to develop digital versions of their products that can be used in the metaverse. Likewise, Adidas has its own NFT drops on this link. Moreover, Samsung has this building in metaverse with the name 837X Fashion brands are also joining the movement — Recently a fashion show was organized in Decentraland where multiple brands like Dolce & Gabbana, Etro, Elie Saab participated.
Newer use cases are coming every day and different organizations are implementing them depending upon the problem they are solving.
Games
Games — NFTs have been talked about in the gaming community. Gamers were reliant on the Ownership of the characters by a centralized owner and monetizing from the games by their players was not straightforward. What NFT does is, allows gamers to own their characters on the blockchain (ownership can easily be traced) alongside any purchases they have made in the game, which can easily be transferred to anyone else and peer-to-peer payment makes way for easier transactions and transparency in the process.
To have a deep understanding, go through this link:
Axie Economy & Long-term Sustainability
There is a lot more to write about NFTs but these topics are a good starting to start your NFT journey.
If you want to understand Blockchain, then you can go to this article.
