Most of us have heard of Beeple’s Everydays: The First 5000 Days Sell for $69.3 million but most of us don’t realize the significance of this astronomical number. To put it in perspective, compared to traditional art, only 100 paintings were sold at a higher price per day. This is all the paintings ever sold! Investors have been in the art world for centuries and NFT investors are just getting started.
There’s no doubt that NFTs are changing the way we think about art, but this paradigm shift isn’t limited to GIFs and JPEGs as popular news might suggest. NFTs represent a turning point in digital transformation, as applications and integrations seep into different sectors: from music and gaming to energy and supply chains.
Understanding the real applications of NFTs
In essence, NFTs are a unit of data on the blockchain, where each NFT represents a unique digital element such as art, audio, videos, items in video games, and other forms of creative work.
Transactions in which ownership of something is changed usually rely on layers of intermediaries to establish trust in the transaction, exchange contracts and ensure that money moves out of their hands. None of this will be necessary in the future. Transactions recorded on the blockchain are trusted because the information cannot be changed. Smart contracts can be used in place of attorneys and escrow accounts to ensure that funds and assets change automatically and that both parties honor their agreements. NFTs convert assets into tokens so that they can move within this ecosystem.
Any NFT is just a digital souvenir, nothing more, nothing less. It can function like any other speculative asset, with investors buying in the hope of increasing value, so that they can make a profit.
NFTs outside the art world
Technically, anything digital can be an NFT. It gives musicians the ability to provide enhanced media and special privileges to their fans. Kings of Leon and Grimes are some of the leading examples in the music industry. With sports memorabilia, between 50% and 80% of items are believed to be fake. Placing these items in NFTs with a clear transaction history back to the originator can overcome the massive counterfeiting problem that exists in the industry.
The potential of NFTs goes much further than that. For example, San Marino, the small country surrounded by Italy, is reported to have created an NFT-based vaccine passport. While still unused, many believe that NFTs provide an ideal opportunity to secure important documents and help prevent any identity thefts.
Lepasa NFTs
Content creators of all kinds can be one of the biggest beneficiaries of NFTs. It is now possible to escape from the central control of platforms like Facebook as the platforms monetize the work of the content creator. Lepasa is one such platform that is centered around creators. Lepasa is a legendary virtual life designed by a team of artists and engineered by blockchain enthusiasts with a vision to create an ecosystem that allows users to create, experiment and monetize their own content and apps.
It offers a social experience with an economy driven by layers of land and ownership of unique creatures, with content distribution. Although NFTs are at the heart of this project, these NFTs are not limited to GIFss and JPEGs only. They have a value proposition for apps and game developers as they can take full advantage of and monetize the economic interactions between their apps and users. The NFT scripting language allows NFTs to handle a wide range of capabilities, including applications, games, gambling, dynamic 3D scenes, and more. NFTs go beyond the gaming realms, add something for advertisers, and add elements of social media and e-commerce.
In many ways, Lepasa is at the center of most use cases for NFTs currently developed.