The sale of NFTs is flatting… But, why am I still looking into it？

Here is why…

NFT is a solution to a problem, that’s the strongest reason for its existence and potential to further grow.

NFTs now are symbolic building blocks for the future internet. NFTs are digital assets with smart contracts in various forms. However, NFT is far beyond its current forms.

Current NFTs include:

• visual art/content in the form of pictures (e.g. PFP), GIFs, videos, audio, and texts.
• utilities in the form of tickets, memberships, tradable in-game assets, etc.

🪐WHY does it exist with huge VALUE?

🌟Because it is a SOLUTION to a problem that long existed when the internet was born.

It is magnified and exaggerated through the form of visual art at the very beginning of the NFT era. Such virality attracts enough attention from the world and enables larger adoption and application, so as to unleash its infinite value as a solution.

Analogically speaking, it’s like NFTs are having this HYPE PERFORMANCE ART on the internet now in collaboration with humans to tell the world, “Hey, here I am!”

— —

NFTs are not scams, NFTs are not fad.

In fact, NFTs are the building blocks of the internet of the future.

But, in order for us to see this future clearly, we first need to go back into the past.

The year is 1992, the World Wide Web(www) is only 3 years old. This is what it looks like 👇

For the first time in human history, we share a global commons, where, irrespective of where we are in the physical world, we can convene and share information freely.

Most people at that time couldn’t see what it meant to be connected by a network of computers. In fact, many people thought the internet itself was a scam or fad. (🌍 History is strikingly similar)

But a few early internet pioneers saw the potential in this burgeoning technology. One of those internet pioneers, John Perry Barlow, saw both the opportunities and pitfalls inherent in our new digital world.

And of early cyberspace, he posed a prescient riddle, all the way back in 1992 that I will paraphrase for you:

“If our property can be infinitely produced, and instantaneously distributed across the planet without cost, how are we going to protect it? how are going to get paid for the work we do with our minds? and if we can’t get paid, what would assure the continued creation and distribution of such work?”

A lot has changed since 1992. The internet itself is an alive and evolving technology. And as predicted by its earliest champions, the internet has increasingly become our default context. Today, one’s job, wealth, relationship, and sense of self, are all often more mediated through our digital contexts than our physical ones.** 🚨Yet, Barlow’s riddle has remained vexingly unsolved. Concepts like property and ownership, ideas that have been with us for centuries in the physical world have evaded us in our digital spaces. We’ve tried to foist copyright, DMCA, DRM, and watermarks onto the internet to protect our ideas and restrain their distribution. None of these approaches has worked. WHY? ❓**

Because, as Steward Brand, another early internet pioneer, famously coined: “ Information wants to be free. It wants to travel effortlessly without hindrance, without encumbrance. This is what allowed the internet to succeed in the first place.”

Since 1992, we’ve uploaded trillions of photos and videos and even cat memes to the internet for free. And what business model has allowed this information for free? Advertising.

Advertising is the internet’s default business model. Not because that’s what we want, but because it's what pays the bills. Right now, the few large corporations that run the most effective ad networks control MOST OF THE VALUE on today’s internet, NOT the people creating its content.

On today’s internet, we don’t get paid for the work we do with our minds.

And what’s more, the content we upload to these services is trapped there. These services not only make money from our content, but they also control it.

Until NFTs.

NFTs are a technological breakthrough. They offer us the opportunity to break away from that broken system.

So you’re asking yourself: what is an NFT?

It is a certificate of ownership registered on the blockchain for everyone to see. It is not dissimilar to the deed you get when you buy a house in the physical world. But instead of a house, an NFT denotes ownership of a file on the internet.

And unlike copyright or watermarks, which are ancient technologies rooted in bygone eras,

NFTs are internet native. They are born of the internet for the internet.

And NFTs don’t simply port our existing model of ownership from the physical world, they improve it. In the physical world, ownership actually fences people out. It precludes others from enjoying what you own. I wouldn’t expect to feel welcome in your home uninvited. Digital space, however, is expansive. It’s home to the infinite, the exponential, the instantaneous, NFTs offer a system of ownership that reflects this expansiveness.

With NFTs, my owning something doesn’t preclude others from enjoying it. In fact, it’s the opposite. **The more an NFT is seen, appreciated and understood. The more possibilities it has to increase in value. **(NFT success flywheel)

Let’s take an example:

Nyan Cat, a wildly popular instantly recognizable cat meme. Since it was uploaded to the internet a decade ago. It has accumulated hundreds of millions of views. And precisely because of that virality when it was auctioned as an NFT, it sold for 300ETH or the equivalent of over 600,000 dollars. And the person who now owns this NFT, they are not preventing anyone from liking, resharing or remixing Nyan cat. Nyan Cat is free to travel the internet as it always has, what’s different now is that as Nyan Cat’s popularity continues to grow, so can the value of the NFT. Because of NFTs, Chris Torres, Nyan Cat’s creator, has received direct compensation for his creation. But what’s more is he’ll continue to receive compensation, every single time the NFT is resold. This is because of the royalty system baked into the smart contracts that govern NFTs.

NFTs are software, they can be programmed. And with something as complicated as royalties, which require enormous amounts of legal and manual labor to implement, in our analog world, we can now express them in a few simple lines of code.

This represents a breakthrough innovation.

For any industry predicted on royalty payments, such as publishing or music, and just as blogs and MP3s re-architected, these industries in decades past, NFTs will catalyze their next evolution.

The internet dissolved our geographical boundaries. NFTs dissolve economic boundaries.

Yathreda, an Ethiopian artist collective, created these beautiful portraits of heroines from Ethiopia’s past. They sold them as NFTs. And in one weekend, they made 13 ETH or the equivalent of over 40,000 dollars. And they were paid out instantly. No customs, no foreign exchange, no international wire transfers. An artist collective based out of Addis Ababa, has the same economic tools at their disposal now as an artist in LA, NYC or London.

And while the NFTs for Nyan Cat and Yatreda were created and sold on the same platform. They are not confined there — remember: information wants to be free.

Unlike the current internet where information is made available through proprietary apps and platforms, NFTs are portable. Instead of living on a company’s private servers, they live on decentralized infrastructure that is peer to peer, open and transparent. But understanding this complex, decentralized infrastructure, is not a prerequisite to understand what NFTs unlock for the human experience.

Once digital value and ownership are no longer the sole domain of a few corporations, radical new responsibilities emerge.

In other words, 30 years later, NFTs finally solved John Perry Barlow’s riddle.

And this isn’t science fiction. The technology already works. NFTs are already being used by the next generation of the internet pioneers. And in the coming decades, NFTs will reshape the internet as we know it with property rights baked into its code.

So what does the internet of the future look like with NFTs as its building blocks?

An internet where economic control rests in the hands of creators, not platforms. An internet where our ideas and creativity can be directly supported.

An internet where information can be free, but where we get paid for the work we do with our minds.

Highly recommend this TED TALK: Kayvon Tehranian: How NFTs are building the internet of the future | TED