# Being obsessed with utilities

By [Kanji](https://paragraph.com/@kanjiworld) · 2022-07-27

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**Collectibles** made NFTs famous.

For the first time ever, people could **genuinely** **own** and **freely** **exchange** virtual assets - you can read our [previous article](https://mirror.xyz/kanjiworld.eth/biLkKp3EI1CNvRrsUS1zElkDW718uuKRQs4v6OATzrg) 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](https://www.adidas.com/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.

![NFT volume on Opensea highlights it so well.](https://storage.googleapis.com/papyrus_images/3af934b4b3562e8c008394a253b45f73f3375bd55984b3ce27472b27d60edc8c.png)

NFT volume on Opensea highlights it so well.

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!

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*Originally published on [Kanji](https://paragraph.com/@kanjiworld/being-obsessed-with-utilities)*