You can buy assets on the internet, the name is NFT
J C Payne from Valley View, Texas is the owner of an interesting world record. The record he amassed is that his ball of string of 4.03m diameter and 12.65 m circumference is the largest of its kind! It took him 4 years from 1988 to 1992 to collect it!
Payne is certainly a collector, isn’t he?
In a world where collectors range from novice to professional and collections range from stamps and cars to gigantic balls of yarn, the internet has come up with a new collectible. Sure, there were all those stars you could get a certificate for from the internet, but this one takes it a step further.
Known as NFTs or Non Fungible Tokens, this latest rollout from cyberspace are digital files with unique signatures that differentiate it from everything else on the internet. Completely yours and existing purely in digital forms, these could be traded or handed over like any other collectable.
Talk about collecting without filling up your garage, eh?!
How Do They Work?
As we saw earlier, NFTs are data files that have unique signatures. These data files could contain any kind of digital information from audio and video files to text and even tweets! Because of the unique signature, an NFT becomes different from any other entity on the internet, making it a digital artefact worthy of collecting!
The concept of NFT and its uniqueness is actually one of the many possibilities of Blockchain technology.
Blockchain is a digital ledger that stores and keeps track of information on a network in secure groups with specific sizes known as blocks. These blocks close when their maximum size is reached and gets linked to the previously filled block on that network.
This creates a chain of such information that is safe, trackable and visible to members of that network.
An NFT functions along similar lines with its unique signature and the ownership of that signature being tracked by blockchain technology. So if you buy an NFT, it not only gives you its ownership but also the details of the owners whose ‘hands’ it has been through!
Is it Worth it?!
So, is NFT worth acquiring or investing in? It can only be natural to have suspicions about something so new and virtual. In fact, questions have already sprung from around the globe about the long-term value of NFTs.
But what if you were to consider them like normal artefacts? Like paintings, cars, sports memorabilia or antiques? The highest values acquired by such an auctioned artefact stands at a whopping $450 million after all!
While NFT is yet to acquire such a huge amount, an NFT digital art by the name “Beeple’s Everydays” was auctioned off for $69 million, a considerably huge amount that shows investment possibility.
Also, the possibilities unlocked by NFTs are vast, as shown by Twitter founder Jack Dorsey’s first tweet being auctioned off as an NFT for $2.5 million. There is huge potential to be harvested and being new obviously hasn’t hurt the evaluation of NFT artefacts. And if you are wondering why would you want to buy an object that does not physically exist for that much money, ask yourself this…
What’s life without a bit of whimsy?!
