The Buzz About NFTs

We all heard about the Christie’s auction where Beeple’s famed NFT fetched a whopping $69.3m. Whilst most of us had no idea who a Beeple was or what an NFT stood for, there’s no denying having heard the term a million times since. The NFT market has taken the world by storm and its explosive growth was noted by the English who crowned the term word of the year 2021. So what it an NFT and how can I own one?

NFTs, or ‘non-fungible tokens’ are strings of non-interchangeable data stored on a blockchain. In simple terms, it is a unique identifier that can be used to prove ownership using a public ledger. Think digital art, with each piece having a unique identifier that is stored on an open database to verify ownership.

Whilst NFTs are said to have huge potential in areas of gaming, sport, music etc., its biggest use case until now has been the art industry. From hobbyists to notable artists, anyone can list their work for sale on marketplaces like OpenSea reaching audiences of over 300,000 and daily sales exceeding $180m (at time of writing).

Many NFT projects have amassed quite a following, with owning those NFTs providing users with exclusive benefits. ‘Bored Ape Yacht Club’ consists of 10,000 unique apes with ownership providing membership access to an online club. The lowest price for a BAYC (at time of writing) stands at 83 ETH/$280,000.

One trend making waves lately has been that of women led NFT projects. With women already under-represented in the crypto space, this makes for a refreshing change. Projects like Yam Karkai’s ‘World of Women’ and Maliha Abidi’s ‘Women Rise’ have jumped in popularity among investors, celebrities, and influencers alike, placing them among the fastest growing NFT projects. This uptrend has given a platform to budding new projects like SuperNormal by Korean artist Zipcy and other new players in the space.

An example of one such player such is Indonesian born Ghozali Ghozalu. His collection of ‘Ghozali Everyday’ sold for $3.25/piece at release. Having become somewhat of a meme amongst the NFT community, his selfies rallied to 1 ETH/piece ($3,250), valuing his work at $3m. This is just one example out of many hundreds more, showing the potential power that NFTs and the NFT community can bring to established and budding players in the digital art space.

It is without doubt that NFTs have started to make a move towards the mainstream. Although its use case is still far from certain, it has caused a paradigm shift in the art world as touched upon above. It seems that our friends across the pond were onto something, albeit slightly prematurely. With the way things are progressing, 2022 will be the year of NFTs. Just watch this space.