NFT’s have been taking over the world.
With the advent of blockchain technology, the 21st century has seen a paradigm shift in the way money and assets are valued. Today’s cryptocurrencies have taken out the middleman. The banks have been the vanguards of our wealth and worth for centuries. These banks have not always done a good job and this has caused problems eg. the 2008 economic crash or any PSU bank scam in India. With so much riding on just a single player, naturally, people have been looking for alternatives to the elephant in the room. Fat banks that don’t do such a good job of keeping our money safe. By decentralizing transactions and storage, blockchain technology has touched the most important industry of today’s world- Banking. But is that all that can change with blockchain?
At the risk of sounding like that annoying friend at the gym who can’t shut up about crypto, I can firmly say no. Blockchain is revolutionary & not just for banking but for everything. What blockchain essentially is, is a public ledger with the ability to efficiently execute & maintain records of billions of transactions. Part of the reason blockchain is understood by so few people is that it can seem like a complex idea that just blows over your head. But at the risk of oversimplifying it, blockchain can be understood with a simple analogy. Imagine you’re back in elementary school. Your teacher has got a bunch of fancy pencils for the whole class, everyone got a certain amount of pencils from the teacher. Now considering that these little kids are free-market enterprising capitalists, they start exchanging these pencils (which are totally super valuable by the way) for a better seat in class or a samosa at the canteen. The terms are agreed to by both students and whenever someone gives the other person a pencil or pencils. The whole class gathers around to witness the exchange, so tomorrow no one can cry that they didn’t get enough pencils for the exchange or that they fell short of the agreed amount.
In today’s digital age, it’s not a bunch of kids in the classroom anymore. It’s actually a bunch of kids on the Internet and their computers are the ones talking to each other. These exchanges are then observed by other computers on the network that maintain a common record or “ledger” of the exchange. This small change cuts out the teacher or the “Big bank” that was needed earlier to validate or mediate the exchange.
So how do NFTs tie into this? Well, NFTs do the same thing. Except they do it with digital art or the “tokens” in an NFT. A big problem in the modern art world is counterfeits. The ability to tell apart an original from a counterfeit is extremely difficult with physical art. You need an expert to come in and tell you the truth, and even then it’s pretty hard to trust another person’s opinion when you’re paying such a high price. With an NFT, an entire record is maintained on a network. The Ethereum network is by far the most popular blockchain. But its popularity has almost rendered it unusable for reasons such as its high gas fees (Think of it as a Blockchain processing fee); however, Ethereum is making amends with the announcement of Ethereum 2.0. For the time being, Diginoor is on the Polygon network, which essentially helps Ethereum scale in terms of cheaper & faster transactions. For context, one of our users paid a $0.001 dollar gas fee for an iconic Rajinikanth dialogue NFT. Had we sold it on the Ethereum blockchain, it would have cost him ~$100. With a record of the creator & every purchase laid bare to be seen on the blockchain, you know exactly what you’re buying. That’s where the “non-fungible” in an NFT comes in.
An argument that’s very common when talking about NFTs is “why can’t I just take a screenshot of the NFT?”. A very simple answer to that line of questioning is, well, you can. There’s nothing stopping you from taking a screenshot of NFT artwork or taking a picture of Van Gogh’s starry night. But having a picture of Van Gogh’s painting to use as your desktop wallpaper & a screenshot of an NFT doesn’t mean you own it. An NFT is not about who gets to see the art. An NFT is about the experience of owning a rare one-of-a-kind, counterfeit-proof piece of Digital art. But even if you think NFTs or Digital artwork isn’t for you. There’s another reason why you should consider it.
Money.
NFTs have been on a rise as their attributes of authenticity & rightful ownership are bringing the brightest creative minds and the biggest collectors into the industry. Think Rajnikanth, Amitabh Bachan, Kamal Hassan, LeBron James, Steph curry, or even Salman Khan. The biggest names are here in the NFT space and it’s filling up fast. The early bird catches the worm & the early collector catches millions. NFT success stories are everywhere, a simple google search can tell you how big the industry is. But the one thing that has always lacked in the Indian NFT space is a platform to create a safe and vibrant marketplace for you to buy and sell NFTs. Well, that’s changed too.
Finally, let’s address the elephant in the room — the bubble. NFTs are at the early stages of the boom that even crypto had. No doubt, we’re headed for a bubble burst but that didn’t stop Google in the dot com bubble and it definitely didn’t stop many cryptocurrencies. It’s a correction that’ll keep happening so we, at Diginoor, are on our toes — innovating and striving to bring sustainable value to the NFT space.
If you’ve made it this far, here’s a meme for the effort!
