In the past months, you have passed across the term NFT and you're wondering about what that word is or why the word is trending. Don't worry … In this article we'll break down what an NFT is, what are the use cases of NFTs and what NFTs could become in the future. We'll also discuss why NFTs are a game changer in our lives.

Let's get started

What is an NFT ?

The term NFT stands for non fungible token, this is a unique token on the blockchain and it represents whatever data or value you associate to it. In a more simplified way, an NFT is a token that represents any digital asset and you can verify ownership on the blockchain.

Digital arts

A popular use case of NFTs is ownership of digital arts which are being sold for millions of dollars. This NFT below called "The first 5000 days" was sold for 69M dollars. Yeah you got it right 69 millions.

What is happening with digital arts is that people are creating art pieces, minting them on marketplaces like opensea or airnfts and earning from their digital arts.

What if I just download the JPEG instead of buying ?

The real impressive aspect of NFTs is the ownership aspect. In the case where you only download the JPEG, you cannot digitally prove that the art belongs to you and in that case the art is not worth the money. Let's imagine someone bought one of Picasso's art and that person is trying to sell it. Then the second person who just went on Google to download that same image and printed it out. But fortunately Picasso himself signed the original piece of art that he made. So, to differentiate the original art from the copy, the person buying the piece of art will look for the one that was signed by Picasso and buy it instead of buying the copy even though they look alike. That's the same case for NFTs, if you download an NFT instead of buying the original piece, you cannot sell it neither claim ownership digitally.

NFTs beyond digital arts

Let's explore NFTs beyond JPEGS. The technology beyond NFTs is a game changer for everything that deals with ownership . Let's see some other use cases of NFTs that could/will trend in the future.

Metaverse

We've heard about the metaverse a lot and we'll dive deep into that topic in another article. But since the metaverse is directly associated with NFTs, let's talk about it for a second.
In the metaverse you'll need to own a car, land, clothes, … But since this is a virtual world or virtual reality, you won't have certificates for what you have bought but instead everything will be sold as an NFT so that you can easily prove ownership of your collectibles. And yeah this is happening already, people are buying lands in the metaverse for millions of dollars. But soon you'll be able to buy anything in the metaverse.
Here is a piece of land bought for nearly 1 million dollars on Decentraland

Music NFTs

The same way that digital arts have been trending in the web3 ecosystem, the same way music NFTs will trend soon.
Imagine big artists selling their music albums as NFTs or selling some parts of the song as NFTs, this will make a big trend in the music industry. Let's say Drake is dropping an album and sells that album as an NFT, I cannot imagine the amount of money that project would generate. But as a web3 user would say, we're all going to make it (#WAGMI). EQ music might lead the music NFT world.

Gaming

This is already in place and trending . People are collecting gaming characters or gaming assets as NFTs and this technology is a game changer for all gamers.

NFTs as a service

This is widely wide. Just think about any service provided because you own a certain NFT. Let's say a big company like apple drops 5000NFTs and whoever has that NFT will be testing each apple product 5 months before it is announced to the public. This will be a game changer in so many areas. Another example, maybe a youtuber who drops 10 000 NFTs and whoever owns one of those NFTs will receive a shoutout in each and every video of that creator or something of that kind. If this happens I'd like to get one myself because it would help me get more visibility for my own channel which is Merkim dev.
You can push the imagination as far as you want, the use cases of NFTs are still few and this can be extended as far as our imagination goes.

Car NFTs (my personal idea)

Recently, I have been thinking a lot about this use case for NFTs. Let's imagine a car brand like Mercedes, they create a marketplace where every car is minted as an NFT so that whenever you buy a Mercedes car, you can easily track who owned it before you and how many times the car has been sold and when it got out of the factory. That would save people from buying stolen cars or fake brands. Again this is just something that came into my mind and I think it could be huge if the idea comes to life.

We could talk about this topic for a whole day and still be amazed by this technology and what it could potentially become. We'll see so many use cases of NFTs in the coming years and this will be huge.

Thank you for making it this far as you were reading about NFTs, if there is something you want to talk about or just chat, drop that in the comments below or reach out to me on twitter(@KimMerdi).

We're all going to make it #WAGMI