“1 in 3 investors do not understand cryptocurrency” and even less NFTs (non-fungible tokens)
The list below is a teaser of plausible NFT examples to broaden the horizon of the NFT use-cases, lucid because of various restraints from each industry.
Hoping this post will give insights into the potential beyond Avatar/Collectible NFTs that we see scrutinized so much in mainstream media.
The idea of this post is to evolve our collective understanding of NFTs, to know where they could be applied to help improve industries at large for the better.
These ideas are, to some extent extreme because of their dependency on industry/infrastructure changes, but with the adoption velocity these days, most are not far-fetched. The ideas can also be approach from multiple angles, utilizing “soulbound” NFTs, fractionalized ownership etc.
Let’s fast-forward to the near future, where NFTs are embedded everywhere
You own a BMW motorcycle, and when you purchased it from the dealer, you received an NFT transferred into your digital wallet as a verification of ownership. You then downloaded the BMW app, from which you have connected your digital wallet. By connecting your NFT to the BMW app, you can get insights into things like service history, insurance, and start your motorcycle. When you want to sell it, all the bureaucratic steps that generally would manually follow can be automated through the smart contract. The transaction is complete and verified; the new owner can now connect their wallet with their installed BMW app, inspect historical data, and start the motorcycle. This also can give governments and brands broader control over vehicles in action. Another topic is renting out vehicles with NFTs to be explored in future posts.
As you are now the sole owner of your data points, and Meta is a thing of the past, you are now connecting and disconnecting from social platforms, as they have transitioned into aggregators of users' identities (NFT), also known as "Soulbound" NFTs. You as a user connect your digital wallet to the platform allowing it to enrich your experience with the data connected to your identity NFT. As you navigate/use various Social media platforms, each action is confirmed on-chain and the NFT os populated with data-points. In this day of age, users don't own their online identity because of centralization, and as long as this is a fact, then online privacy cannot prevail. Also, this would ultimately change/fix the regulatory issues surrounding transatlantic data storage. Our social record could even become a valuable metric to be assessed, that next-level influencer. Think of it as the CV/work -timeline of LinkedIn, but on-chain.
Rolex has opened up for minting an NFT for your precious Submariner Date watch. They wish for you to authenticate the ownership of your asset, to empower you as an owner. Minimizing one of the main and dominant concerns of the secondary market for jewelry, which is fraud, how to trust, how to validate authenticity? By using NFTs as the baseline for a transaction then these factors have to some degree been removed from the buyer/seller interaction. You now belong to a group that owns a Rolex that is more worth than the metal it is made of. Owning an NFT also acts as a Rolex membership allowing Rolex to interact with their clients persistently.
Oh it happened
You own an incredible Damien Hirst physical art piece with an associated NFT. With this, you have become a persistent member of his club. This can give access to; future tangible and untangible drops from the artist, have the artist keep clients involved in the process; tightening the link between value created and value captured, connecting artists with fans. With this you can go to various curators which can pre-screen you as a potential client because you can validate your art purchasing history beforehand with the art NFTs you own, removing the assessments part of the PoS interaction between curator and client.
Your real estate agent that holds escrow for the house you are about to sell is a thing of the past; instead of a third-party managing the money, the third party is now replaced by an NFT (smart contract), having the smart contract act as escrow, protecting buyer and seller. NFTs reduce the friction of the sales process, needing less personal financial and KYC information, rendering legal tenants obsolete. Low practical things like; keys which will be all digital with a house-app (similar to BMW example), various subscriptions like; WiFi, electricity, insurance, etc.: Can be updated automatically while the deal is going through, this might open up for a whole new real-estate agent format. Only the imagination limits what can be automated in the process.
As a journalist, you own your published content in the form of NFTs — similar to managing your digital identity — and can now move freely around platforms, keeping your legacy intact. Users who like your content can easily support you by making crypto payments at intervals or one time. As a media aggregator, you are incentivizing journalists on your platform by paying them for published content. With the tokens they get, they can start to utilize various earn models, or reward users. On top of this, journalists can allow consumers to co-own content, empowering consumers to share around the web by proving they co-own the content before sharing, keeping the share circle in a trustful yet trustless manner. As a journalist, you will be able to reward your consumers with tokens or NFTs for their comments or reviews, one new chain of value amongst many for journalists.
As a gamer, you tend to collect items as a natural thing of playing games, you now have the possibility to sell these items as they are NFTs, either that be in-game, in other games or marketplaces. Game assets ultimately are general properties (or stats), and usually, properties that can be transferred from one game to another ex.:
+16 Cold Damage +4% Critical Chance
...
This means that moving your item cross-game (+game studio) is done with ease, making your assets much more lucid and more valuable to collect and consider keeping. Another element that we might see emerging is so-called “unique quests”; as a gamer, you have a unique path that can unlock unique quests where the reward, when completed, could be an NFT that also contains your unique data-points, these quests can be further evolved by multiplayer features, allowing groups to connect and complete unique quests, collecting even rarer NFTs that can utilize fractionalization of collected NFT within a group.
Physical and central-theater movie tickets are a thing of the past as now all tickets comes as an NFT {time, venue, movie ..}, with this a viewer can now not only use their digital wallet to access a specific event, they can also cross-venue be targeted with other events catered their preference, we might even see aggregators where a user can connect their digital wallet to get cross-venue/platform suggestions from the data-points in their NFTs. This also goes for nightclubs, restaurants, and festivals etc.
As a dedicated CrossFit member, you track everything. At every session, these data points will become a persistent history, cross-tracker (Apple health, Oura, Whoop, etc.), easy for you to move around other gyms and trackers, as you own the data in the form of an NFT. As you are the owner of the data, you are then able to collect rewards for your participation and effort as you go along, these rewards you will further be able to utilize inside the communities in the forms of governance, earning, identity etc.
As a musician, you are now in monetary control of your content. With this, you are freely able to move your music to various aggregator platforms that fit your individual needs, either that be streaming or sharing snippets as you work on an album. As an artist, you are finding new ways to earn money, natural to your workflow rather than the final (anxiety-infused) release of an album, fans can now donate and buy your explorative content, and you can easily include fans in your progress by airdropping content to them. With royalty baked into the NFT of each item, then having fans mix the samples they got from you on a 3rd party platform will naturally have royalties flow back to you, music will see a trust-revolution happening with NFTs, distributing music will be a monetary thing, for both artist and fans. New aggregators have emerged that allow for fans to earn money on their collections (playlists), as they own the NFT to a track they rights to distribute. The new aggregator platforms will be earning money by incentivizing fans and artists to share through clever tokenomics rather than strong-holding artists.
Brands like SUPREME, Nike etc. will now be able to reward their early adopter consumers with early access to a product line, utility tokens, digital airdrops, events, VIP treatment, rewarding their early adopter consumers for their years of loyalty, this even goes across brands and more on a certain “style”. This enabled by NFTs linked to owning a physical products or digital (metaverse..)
As a student, you had a non-fungible token minted when you started your educational track, a “soulbound” NFT, allowing you to move around freely from course to course either digitally (Web and Metaverse) or physically, as the data is persistent on-chain, you will not be bound to a specific university, country or educational-track, but can mix everything freely together because of the cross-institution data persistancy that Web 3.0 enables.
The list really goes on, and each industry has a plethora of possibilities enabled by Non-fungible tokens that will have community at its core, making transferability a breeze, and what this will mean across the board is fewer middlemen and less bureaucracy, empowering communities and people at large.
Your digital wallet can then, in theory, hold anything, quite an upgrade from the physical one.
I can also recommend going through the incredible resource that is the Ethereum documentation on NFT usecases.
I will, in the near future, dive into each of these subjects, outlining the technical aspects, concerns, infrastructure requirements to further evolve the understanding of the industry-disrupter that is NFTs.