NFTs: Enter the Metaverse

NFTs. Non-fungible tokens.

I’m sure you’ve heard of them by now, they’re having a bit of a moment in the spotlight and making their way through the news cycle. So what what are non-fungible tokens? It means that they aren’t fungible, fungible being easily replicated or replaceable. So for example a dollar bill is fungible because you don’t care which dollar you have cause they’re all interchangeable. So to be non-fungible would be something unique like the Mona Lisa and in the case of NFTs we are specifically referring to unique pieces of digital art or a digital product that is verifiably unique on a blockchain due to its public ledger status.

Why are they getting so much hype? Well, because hype and speculation in crypto assets markets is rampant at the moment.
I don’t know if Beeple’s The First 5000 days is truly worth $69 million, though being 13 years of his life condensed into one sale, but on the flip side I also don’t know that the Mona Lisa is worth what it’s worth.

Will NFTs survive into the future? Yes, I think so. I think they have lots of potential use cases, real world practical use cases in our future. Firstly, virtual worlds, digital universes, meta-versus. A real-world example of this at the moment is Epic Games’ uber popular Fortnite; they’ve created a place where people can not just play an online games but go to hang out with their friends. And especially during a global pandemic, people have been at home it helps peopled stay connected and just last year Travis Scott held a virtual concert within the game. A concert within a game! The meta-verse is here. It’s not just Fortnite, its other platforms like Roblox and Decentraland but how does all this relate to NFTs? Well, I see unique items being built for these meta-verses where it’s verifiability unique on a public ledger so that special sword or weapon or costume could be a one of one and you can prove it’s the original not just a hacked version.

So how does an NFT prove ownership? It proves it via the idea of smart contracts which is what NFTs, at their core, are, distributed across a blockchain usually Ethereum. But what is a smart contract?

Here is what investopedia say:

A smart contract is a self-executing contract with the terms of the agreement between buyer and seller being directly written into lines of code. The code and the agreements contained therein exist across a distributed, decentralized blockchain network. The code controls the execution, and transactions are trackable and irreversible.

We could provide mortgages, drivers licenses, passports, vaccine status, these all could be published at through smart contracts and NFTs without the need of a governing body.

Another driving force for the meta-verse would be the rise of virtual reality, augmented reality and mixed reality which if you don’t know is a digital objects interacting with reality. There are massive companies involved in the space driving forward, Facebook’s Oculus have been working on VR for the longest time, targeting VR gaming. Microsoft with Hollow Lens are working on mixed reality headset and they’re going for more practical uses like helping of businesses around the world link up and share a common space and medical fields with education. Also, Apple have been dabbling in AR in a consumer capacity in the iPhone and iPad so you can use the Measure app which uses AR and is very accurate especially with LiDAR but they are rumoured to be working on a full VR headset and AR glasses.

I think the growth in these technologies and platforms will grow demand for a metaverse where we can’t physically be in the same space but we could be virtually in the same digital space anywhere in the world or anywhere in the solar system once we’ve colonised Mars as well. NFTs would be used to facilitate deeds and ownership on all digital assets and property.

The future is wild.

NFTs are over hyped and crazy right now and some see the space as a “bubble” primed to burst but I feel NFTs and smart contracts are a fundamental technology, along with blockchain, of the future and that will play out in the years to come.