Since when did it make sense to pay over $10 million for a 24 x 24 pixel picture of a punk alien? Or nearly $3 million for a hand drawn picture of an ape?
Since NFTs (Non Fungible Tokens) stormed onto the crypto scene.
Into the Metaverse
To understand the appeal of NFTs, it’s worth first understanding the role that NFTs play in the emerging Metaverse. As everything in the world is being digitised, proving ownership of an item or an image and being able to bring it with you as you move across the internet becomes increasingly important.
But to really understand the disruptive impact of NFTs, you also need to understand the social element. NFTs are beginning to emerge as a new kind of social network. One that sits separately from the social networks like Facebook that have come before it. These NFT-powered social networks span anything that might capture the interest of groups of people. Whether it’s gaming, art, or community interaction.
The place that NFTs take in these new social networks is well summarised by Eugene Wei, a respected tech essayist who has formerly worked at Oculus, Hulu, and Amazon. He believes that at heart, people are really just status seeking monkeys always seeking out the most efficient path to maximising social capital.
However, people are much more used to thinking about and quantifying things in financial rather than social capital. So the key point Eugene makes is, “Social capital is, in many ways, a leading indicator of financial capital. So analysing social capital dynamics can help to explain all sorts of online behavior that would otherwise seem irrational.”
Hence why it starts to make more sense why people are spending millions of dollars on jpegs of monkeys and NFTs are making their way to the premier auction houses of Christie’s and Sotheby’s.
The future of NFTs
While the first NFTs were created more than five years ago, it’s really only in the last 12 months that they’ve taken off as people have begun to experiment with their complete scope. Which is undeniably huge. In addition to the role they play in social capital and social networks, many also have inherent real world utility or entertainment functionalities.
New use cases are emerging for NFTs that blur the lines with the DeFi space. Or allow you to earn passive yield. One recent example of this is from the profile picture (PFP) project Lazy Lions, which distributes a portion of the royalties that the project earns for each sales transaction of a Lazy Lion back to the owners of the Lazy Lion NFTs.
So since an NFT is just a digital ownership token of what can potentially be almost anything you can imagine, that exists in the metaverse and might also represent something in the real world, the potential for NFTs in the near future is only really limited by the combined imaginations of the world’s 7 billion people.
Just some of the existing and near term possibilities for NFTs include:
DeFi — Protocols such as Charged Particles allow users to deposit any ERC token into an interest bearing NFT.
Gaming — a gaming avatar could act as a container that included special items, traits, or abilities that had been earned in a game. A player could choose to resell the avatar as a packaged item and the buyer would receive all the abilities contained within it.
Metaverse — advertising space in a creative approach that works within an environment ( for example a gaming crossover — having trackside advertising in a racing game in metaverse ) can be fractionally owned as NFTs, with revenue from advertisers shared among holders.
Art — a group of different artists or an art collective could collaborate on a single NFT artwork or create a series or package of multiple pieces in a collection.
Music — artists could choose to add special functionalities to their music NFTs such as time based unlocks so a new song is revealed and becomes listenable after a day, week, or month etc. The NFT music containers could also contain other special items such as concert tickets or merchandise.
With artists like Pak selling $70 million worth of blank pages in his LostPoets project before people really had any idea of what the project would entail, it’s easy to see that NFTs aren’t just a revolutionary idea. They’re also potentially hugely lucrative for artists, owners, and participants in NFT based communities.
NFT integrations into the Amasa ecosystem
With so many exciting developments occurring across the NFT landscape, Amasa will continue to look for the best NFT projects to integrate. This will allow Amasa users in the future to link income generating NFT projects across the gaming, DeFi, or any other space where revenue or yield possibilities exist.
And best of all, just as it does with other micro income streams, Amasa will allow users a simplified process to combine NFT-based income into one single easy to track and access platform. All the possibilities of NFTs distilled into the simplicity of Amasa.
Amasa makes blockchain based income streams easy to capture, combine, and access as stabilised income. The platform then allows people to easily amplify the value of that income. By integrating leading DeFi protocols into the Amasa ecosystem, Amasa is creating simplified pathways for mass adoption by the public of value amplifying opportunities.
Combine. Stabilise. Amplify. All in the background of everyday life.
Find out more about Amasa on our website or social media, or get in touch hi@amasa.io
