Recently, a tweet by one of the co-founders of Twitter Jack Dorsey was bought for 2.9 million dollars. Crazy, right? Who would want to buy a tweet? But similar equally insane purchases keep happening now. Jpeg and little moments of NBA basketball are being sold for thousands of dollars, In fact, versions of any digital thing are being bought and sold. To understand this, we need to understand what are NFTs?
NFT stands for non-fungible tokens. Non-fungible simply means non-replaceable. This means anything that only exists as a single piece like the Mona Lisa will be called non-fungible. Unsurprisingly, these items have skyrocketing prices because they are scarce. There exists only one of them.
Tokens are basically digital certificates that tell who owns a tweet or cat a cat gif or whatever. There are tens of thousands of NFTs that are being transacted. Some pieces of music, art pieces and top shots of NBA players. It is crazy how everyone is putting such high amounts of value on things that inherently have no value.
What makes an NFT valuable?
NFTs are valuable if they are first of their kind (like the first edition of pokemon cards is more valuable than any other), has real-world benefits (maybe it acts as a membership card), is one of their kind (again, like the Monalisa), or has a significant ownership history (for example, you would pay 4 times the actual amount of a jacket it is owned by your favourite celebrity).
Buying an NFT without any real-world benefits has absolutely no utility. It only makes sense if you are thinking of selling it in the future for a higher price. In this sense, it is basically an investment.
Where can you buy NFTs?
Some of the most popular NFT marketplaces are mentioned below.
OpenSea
OpenSea is a decentralised platform for buying and selling digital goods. It includes collectibles, in-game items, digital art, music, domain names and other forms of digital assets that are developed on a blockchain such as Ethereum. It is also a digital asset aggregator and includes digital assets available on other marketplaces. It is one of the largest NFT marketplaces with an average 7 days trade volume of approximately 800 million dollars
Opensea was founded in New York City in 2017 by Devin Finzer and Alex Atallah and has been a pioneer in the NFT space since then. It has been backed by famous angel investors.
Solanart
Solanart is an NFT marketplace built on the Solana blockchain network that allows users to buy and sell Solana based NFTs. Solana is a blockchain network similar to Ethereum and has picked up a lot of steam due to the NFT craze. Due to the Ethereum gas fee being very expensive at the moment, the Solana NFT ecosystem has grown tremendously.
The average 7-day trading volume of Solanart is 89 million dollars which are commendable for such a new network and marketplace. The platform charges 3% transaction fees on each transaction. In addition to this, a creator of NFT may also charge a creator fee on the transaction. This is solely discretionary for the creator. The platform is currently in its BETA version
Rarible
Rarible is the first community-based marketplace where you can create, buy and sell digital collectibles. The project is based in Moscow and was founded by Alex Salnikov and Alexei Falin in early 2020. Users can access the marketplace to create and display their artwork. Rarible is a non-custodian marketplace and hence a user has complete custody of his assets. In addition to this, the platform also offers Intellectual Property Rights to the user.
Super Rare
This is a digital art gallery that makes single edition digital artworks. Each artwork is authentically created by an artist in the network and tokenised as a crypto collectible digital item that you can own and trade. Basis Super rare, collecting is inherently social. Since digital collectibles have a transparent record of ownership, they’re perfect for a social environment. Super Rare was founded in 2017 by John Crain, Charles Crain and Jonathan Perkins. The platform is built on the Ethereum blockchain and a standard ERC 721 token is offered against all digital arts. As the art is completely unique, the fee charged by Super Rare is on the higher side.
Conclusion
NFTs are usually recorded on the Ethereum blockchain. They were invented in 2014 and enjoyed a miniboom in 2017 when ‘cryptokitties’ that is collectible images of digital cats began selling for thousands of dollars. Today the sum total of NFTs issued on the Ethereum blockchain is 14.3 billion dollars. Some analysts expect the value of NFTs to double by next year and reach 80 billion dollars by 2025.
Written by- Anika Sharma
0 Comments