What if you had an exclusive virtual sword for your online game avatar that awarded you certain benefits? Or if you could own a unique digital artwork created by your favorite artist or even esports team? Just a few years ago, the idea of owning digital items might have been futuristic and impossible to achieve – but not anymore.
All this and more could soon already be possible thanks to a new form of virtual ownership known as Non-Fungible Tokens or NFTs. This blog post explores how Non-Fungible Tokens work, and discusses how they can change the way we engage with online games, digital art ownership, and more.
From In-Game Items to Esports Memorabilia: NFTs Revolutionize Online Gaming
Popular in-game items, skins, and ‘collectibles’ have, to date, existed in virtual economies that were, essentially, the property of the owner of the game. But NFTs promise a new paradigm of digital ownership in the gaming world – a world that has expanded remarkably in the past decade.
Online casinos were very quick on the uptake of cryptocurrencies, making them a basic offering in the majority of games. Whether someone is playing a round of poker, watching a live dealer in front of them handing out the cards, or playing jackpot slots, using cryptocurrencies and potentially receiving an NFT in return has become a mechanic for some games. There are so many slot games now, all with different mechanics, and NFTs are involved in some of these new games.
Players can own genuine unique items within the game that would be impossible to acquire elsewhere, including rare weapons, character skins, or virtual land, which are represented as NFTs on a blockchain, an immutable, transparent ledger of all transactions on the network, and trade or sell those NFT assets to other players on the same gaming platform or externally within digital marketplaces.
One of the other main pulls of NFTs is the increased scarcity it creates. NFTs can be programmed to be in limited supply, assigned specific rarity rankings, and so on. This scarcity would elevate players who own rare or limited-edition in-game items into new social classes, by giving them a sense of exclusivity. It would also attach a monetary value to their assets, which could potentially be appreciated the same way some physical collectibles do.
Beyond Gaming: NFTs for Digital Art, Music, and More
NFTs aren’t only being used in online gaming. Here are some other applications of NFTs that demonstrate how they’re changing the way we use digital assets:
- Original Artwork for Artists. NFTs are changing things for good. No matter how much recent years affected humans from one end of the world to the other, it turns out that digital art is the only kind of art that has been flourishing. It happened, by the way, just when artists had completely lost control over their work. Galleries no longer wanted famous artists as much, but they wanted the work that used to in the past to be safe and protected by the traditional system of ownership, contracts, and unique signatures on canvas. NFT changed all of that.
- Music Ownership and Fan Engagement. NFTs are giving musicians an unprecedented opportunity to connect with fans in a more meaningful way, as well as rewarding engagement. Limited-edition digital albums, never-to-be-released tracks, or custom experiences can be tokenized. Fans not only own the art or the music, they have the chance to get a piece of a token’s ever-increasing value too.
- Fractional Ownership of Expensive Assets. Fractional ownership of an expensive digital asset has not been very easy so far. Think about co-owning a rare digital piece of art or a piece of land inside a popular metaverse environment. Now imagine that those pieces of content, which could be highly expensive, can be divided into smaller fractions so that instead of one singular entity owning these pieces of content, NFTs are being split up and co-owned by several different individuals.
The Future of NFTs: A New Era of Digital Ownership
NFTs are still pretty primitive but it’s understandable why so many industries are quaking at the thought of their use cases disrupting traditional ways of doing things within other domains. With time, and increasing use by more people, it’s likely that we’ll see even more layers of the tech applied to innovative use cases.
As the migration into new virtual worlds called metaverses ramps up, users increasingly need digital assets that can represent ownership of land, unique avatars, or other exclusive items within those metaverses. An NFT might even key the metaverse, allowing users to assert their digital identity and ownership. Similarly, using blockchain technology, NFTs can help provide credentials about the origin and ownership of physical goods, such as high- should help logistics players get an edge over others.
Owning the Future: The Importance of Understanding NFTs
While it’s easy to get lost in the weeds of NFT ownership, the core principles of NFTs are grounded in providing the technological means for digital items to be verifiably owned and controlled online. Whether you’re a hardcore gamer, digital art fan, or simply someone who wants to better understand the direction of the internet, you’ll want to gain insight into NFTs. NFT technology has the potential to reshape the world of creation and ownership, giving power to creators and turning digital objects, once considered mere data and bits, into valuable assets.
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