Collectibles made NFTs famous.

For the first time ever, people could genuinely own and freely exchange virtual assets - you can read our previous article to get a deeper understanding of what actually is an NFT.

Seen as a promising industry, numerous brands dove into this industry and tried to capture new revenues through NFTs drop and Adidas is the epitome of this trend since they made 24m $ the day of their “into the Metaverse” release.

However, due to macro-economic conditions (quantitative tightening) and more intrinsic causes such as the lack of maturity of the ecosystem (poor UX due to wallets, tremendous scams, and absence of game-changing utility for NFTs), the blockchain industry has been losing speed over the last 7 months.

This quick state of play leads us to wonder: how could NFT be attractive again?

At Kanji, we think that the greatest mistake made by the crypto-guy over the past few months has been to reduce NFTs to being objects that can only be bought and collected when our connexion to real-world objects is much more complex:

• Most of the objects we are proud owners aren’t purchasable (1) - think about your driver’s license.

• Most of the objects we use or consume daily aren't even our property (2) - think about the condo you rent, or the music you play on your iPhone.

This industry treats every human as a very dedicated collector. Yet, how many numismatists or philatelists do you know?

Not that much right… Indeed, passionated collectors are a niche market and isn’t enough to support the over-announced hyper-growth of this industry for the next cycle.

Let’s be pragmatic:

Most of us have only a utility-driven connexion with objects: We didn’t buy a 1-on-1 exclusive ticket that offered access to watch the latest Christopher Nolan.

Not at all.

We’ve just bought access to a movie theatre, represented by a little card that will potentially gain sentimental value if the experience was great, and that we will most likely throw out 99% of the time - not even thinking about extracting financial value from this piece of paper.

UTILITY COMES ABSOLUTELY FIRST IN THE HUMAN MIND!

Dematerialized tickets piling up in our smartphone wallets are the epitome of this human obsession for utility over everything: we can’t even transfer or display the ticket of meaningful shows as we would with their physical version, since they’re stuck in our mobiles.

Dematerialized tickets, powered by WEB2 giants, were so life-changing because they focused only on improving the user experience even if it meant removing the collectible dimension from the object.

NFTs have disappointed so many people precisely for having focused way too hard on a not-really-wanted feature (object as a collectible) at the cost of the highly-wanted utility trait.

In a nutshell, NFTs have now to deal with merging those two dimensions of the objects - useful and collectable - to be interesting again and potentially reach mass adoption.

Yet, as we briefly mentioned in (1) and (2), NFTs will also have to replicate real-life object’s features - some are rentable while others aren't even buyable - to fulfill their first goal: to make the virtual part of our world more comfortable and efficient.

We’ll release this week dedicated articles about those two absolutely essential characteristics, stay tuned!

Collectibles made NFTs famous.

For the first time ever, people could genuinely own and freely exchange virtual assets - you can read our previous article to get a deeper understanding of what actually is an NFT.

Seen as a promising industry, numerous brands dove into this industry and tried to capture new revenues through NFTs drop and Adidas is the epitome of this trend since they made 24m $ the day of their “into the Metaverse” release.

However, due to macro-economic conditions (quantitative tightening) and more intrinsic causes such as the lack of maturity of the ecosystem (poor UX due to wallets, tremendous scams, and absence of game-changing utility for NFTs), the blockchain industry has been losing speed over the last 7 months.

This quick state of play leads us to wonder: how could NFT be attractive again?

At Kanji, we think that the greatest mistake made by the crypto-guy over the past few months has been to reduce NFTs to being objects that can only be bought and collected when our connexion to real-world objects is much more complex:

• Most of the objects we are proud owners aren’t purchasable (1) - think about your driver’s license.

• Most of the objects we use or consume daily aren't even our property (2) - think about the condo you rent, or the music you play on your iPhone.

This industry treats every human as a very dedicated collector. Yet, how many numismatists or philatelists do you know?

Not that much right… Indeed, passionated collectors are a niche market and isn’t enough to support the over-announced hyper-growth of this industry for the next cycle.

Let’s be pragmatic:

Most of us have only a utility-driven connexion with objects: We didn’t buy a 1-on-1 exclusive ticket that offered access to watch the latest Christopher Nolan.

Not at all.

We’ve just bought access to a movie theatre, represented by a little card that will potentially gain sentimental value if the experience was great, and that we will most likely throw out 99% of the time - not even thinking about extracting financial value from this piece of paper.

UTILITY COMES ABSOLUTELY FIRST IN THE HUMAN MIND!

Dematerialized tickets piling up in our smartphone wallets are the epitome of this human obsession for utility over everything: we can’t even transfer or display the ticket of meaningful shows as we would with their physical version, since they’re stuck in our mobiles.

Dematerialized tickets, powered by WEB2 giants, were so life-changing because they focused only on improving the user experience even if it meant removing the collectible dimension from the object.

NFTs have disappointed so many people precisely for having focused way too hard on a not-really-wanted feature (object as a collectible) at the cost of the highly-wanted utility trait.

In a nutshell, NFTs have now to deal with merging those two dimensions of the objects - useful and collectable - to be interesting again and potentially reach mass adoption.

Yet, as we briefly mentioned in (1) and (2), NFTs will also have to replicate real-life object’s features - some are rentable while others aren't even buyable - to fulfill their first goal: to make the virtual part of our world more comfortable and efficient.

We’ll release this week dedicated articles about those two absolutely essential characteristics, stay tuned!