What Is an NFT? Inside The Next Billion-Dollar Crypto Sensation.
March 8, 2021 6 min read
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
If you haven’t heard of them now, it’s only a matter of time. Whether its digital sports cards or digital artworks, NFTs have been taking the internet by storm and have simply doubled their total volume in USD in the month of February alone. So what are these digital assets selling for fortunes, from niche marketplaces to world-famous auction house Christie’s?
What does NFT mean?
An NFT is a non-fungible token existing on a blockchain. A token is the sign of ownership of an asset. For example, a concert ticket is a sign of ownership of one space for a concert. A Bitcoin is the title of ownership to the underlying value of the Bitcoin. A token is a digital asset, stored on the blockchain. As the blockchain is transparent, it is easy for all to see who is the owner of what token.
Fungible refers to an asset that is easily exchangeable. A dollar is very fungible, you can give me a dollar in exchange for some good and I can then re-exchange it for another service. A neighbor could borrow a pound of sugar to bake a cake and buy me another one in a few days when he goes to the supermarket. It doesn’t matter that the sugar is different, it is easily replaceable and exchangeable.
A non-fungible token is a unique token that isn’t easily exchangeable with another. The foremost use case is artworks. Artworks have been selling on the blockchain for millions of dollars (or in this case a blockchain native currency, Ethereum). Examples abound but the most famous NFT artist so far is Beeple who first sold 21 pieces of artwork on digital marketplace Nifty Gateway for a total of $3.5 million. He then went on to sell his masterpiece “EVERYDAYS: THE FIRST 5000 DAYS” at Christie’s for $6.5 million. Beeple is Mike Winkelmann, previously a graphic designer from Charleston South Carolina.
Artworks are not the only things exchanged in these marketplaces. More and more volume in the NFT space is coming from digital sports trading cards. In fact, fans of basketball have already spent $230 million trading NBA Top Shot cards. These cards represent certain classic moments for the sport and there is only a limited amount of each. The ownership and the scarcity of these cards are insured by the Ethereum blockchain. Recently, a rare Lebron James highlight sold to the highest bidder for a crisp $200,000.
Related: How Esports and Gaming Are Bringing Crypto to the Masses
Why would anyone pay for this?
The crazy thing about these purchases is that anyone can download Beeple’s artwork or Lebron’s highlight. It is as simple as clicking ‘save image’ on your laptop. What buyers are after is not the artwork in itself but the proof of ownership for that artwork. The buyers are akin to art collectors putting their most prized possessions on display in museums. NFTs represent a way for art collectors to encourage financially their favorite artists online.
As humans evolve more and more, especially in lockdown, it seems only natural that we decide to buy art in the digital world as well. One step further, certain platforms such as Decentraland allow users to buy land or real estate in a digital world.
While this has been no more than a niche sector of the internet, in the last six months it has truly exploded onto mainstream media and seems to be here to stay. While the first experiments with NFTs date back to 2013-2014, the market seems to arrive to a certain maturity and mainstream appeal in 2021.
Several issues remain with the NFT market, however. As the main currency of exchange and the network on which marketplaces are built is Ethereum, transaction fees are very high and it is commonplace to have to pay $50 to transfer the property title of an NFT from its creator to the buyer. On platforms such as Rarible or OpenSea, the current market leaders, not only does each transaction (creation of the NFT, bids, transfer of ownership) costs users large sums, they also amount to the terrible carbon footprint of the Ethereum network.
There is hope, however, as Ethereum is planning to change its architecture by the beginning of 2022 to be much more eco-friendly. In the meantime, certain marketplaces have found technical solutions to these limitations. Drops.is, an upcoming NFT project that lets you do a lot more with NFTs than just buy and sell. It allows users to create NFTs, bid, stake, take loans by using your NFT as collateral. It’s also using a Layer 2 solution by building on Polygon network, reducing both the costs of these transactions to a few cents (which are paid for by the platform itself) and the important environmental costs.
Related: This Rainbow Kitten Image Was Auctioned for More Than $500,000
The new creator economy
The most exciting part of the NFT revolution is that artists specialized in digital arts will finally be compensated for their work. Until now, it was very hard for artists to monetize their creations because of the very nature of digital art and its infinite reproducibility. Now, true fans of the artists will be able to directly support them with any middle-men or platform.
Mainstream artists seem to have caught on to this trend with artists such as Grammy-winning Kings of Leon releasing their latest album as an NFT. It’s also the case of Grimes, Lindsay Lohan or even Soulja Boy who all released NFTs representing music, digital artworks or even the ownership of a limited-edition vinyl.
But it is not only artists who can make money from NFTs, the market for digital sports card for example has already exploded. Soccer trading card platform Sorare has seen the unique 2020-2021 Kylian Mbappé card sell for $65,000. Cashing in on sports fans stuck at home has turned out to be extremely profitable for these platforms, so much so that it has brought the attention of gaming giant Ubisoft who has now partnered up with Sorare for future projects.
NFTs are the hottest item in the recent crypto craze and as mainstream artists start to discover them they will only become more popular and coming soon to a digital market near you.
Crypto Coin Outperforming Bitcoin Is About to See Supply Reduced
Bloomberg
(Bloomberg) – Elon Musk is getting into the Texas power market, with previously unrevealed construction of a gigantic battery connected to an ailing electric grid that nearly collapsed last month. The move marks Tesla Inc.’s first major foray into the epicenter of the U.S. energy economy.A Tesla subsidiary registered as Gambit Energy Storage LLC is quietly building a more than 100 megawatt energy storage project in Angleton, Texas, a town roughly 40 miles south of Houston. A battery that size could power about 20,000 homes on a hot summer day. Workers at the site kept equipment under cover and discouraged onlookers, but a Tesla logo could be seen on a worker’s hard hat and public documents helped confirm the company’s role.Property records on file with Brazoria County show Gambit shares the same address as a Tesla facility near the company’s auto plant in Fremont, California. A filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission lists Gambit as a Tesla subsidiary. Executives from Tesla did not respond to multiple requests for comment. Shares of Tesla gave up early gains Monday, falling 6% to $562.31 as of 3:17 p.m. in New York. The stock has fallen for the past four days and is down about 20% so far this year.As winter storms pummeled Texas in February and left millions without power for days, Musk took to Twitter to mock the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, or Ercot, the nonprofit group that manages the flow of electric power to more than 26 million customers. “Not earning that R,” he wrote. Musk, 49, recently moved to Texas and his various companies are expanding operations in the state.The battery-storage system being built by Tesla’s Gambit subsidiary is registered with Ercot and sits adjacent to a Texas-New Mexico Power substation. Warren Lasher, senior director of system planning at Ercot, said the project has a proposed commercial operation date of June 1. The battery’s duration remains unclear, and Ercot couldn’t comment on the project’s capability.While Tesla is known for its sleek, battery-powered electric vehicles, it’s always been more than a car company: its official mission is to “accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable energy.” Utility-scale batteries are needed to store the electricity produced by wind and solar, but they can also become lucrative opportunities. By storing excess electricity when prices and demand are low, battery owners can sell it back to the grid when prices are high. Read More: How America’s Rich Can Escape From an Unreliable Power GridTesla has spent years expanding into residential energy technology. Back in March 2015, Musk unveiled a home battery product, dubbed the Powerwall, with a splashy event at its design studio near Los Angeles. Scores of utility and energy executives attended. A year later Tesla acquired SolarCity, the solar-panel installer founded by Musk and his cousins. Musk then hawked a “solar roof” that has gone through several iterations without becoming a strong contender in the market.But the company’s product lineup already reaches beyond the home and into the electrical grid. The Tesla Powerpack and even larger Megapack were designed with utility customers in mind. Tesla’s battery project in South Australia, launched in 2017, is adjacent to a wind farm and can store surplus electricity generated on gusty nights for daytime demand. At 100 megawatts, it was the largest battery project in the world at its launch.While Tesla’s focus on energy often takes a back seat to the increasingly competitive business of manufacturing and selling electric cars, Musk and his executive team continue to highlight energy as a key part of their growth. “I think long-term Tesla Energy will be roughly the same size as Tesla Automotive,” Musk said during an earnings call in July 2020. “The energy business is collectively bigger than the automotive business.”Tesla’s battery packs are connected to Southern California Edison’s Mira Loma substation, located east of Los Angeles. The 20 megawatt system, which has been online since December 2016, supports grid operation during peak hours and helps the utility make the most of its renewable resources. In the San Francisco Bay Area, PG&E Corp. and Tesla are constructing a 182.5 megawatt system at an electric substation in Moss Landing that should be operational by August.Tesla Energy could represent up to 30% of the company’s total revenue by the 2030s, up from roughly 6% today, according to analyst Alexander Potter of Piper Sandler. His research has highlighted the potential for Autobidder, a software platform Tesla designed for utilities. Tesla Chief Financial Officer Zachary Kirkhorn has described Autobidder as an “autonomous energy market participation system that does high-frequency trading.” Potter has a $1,200 price target on Tesla stock, the highest on Wall Street.“Tesla’s energy storage business on a percentage basis is growing faster than their car business, and it’s only going to accelerate,” said Daniel Finn-Foley, head of energy storage at Wood MacKenzie Power and Renewables. “They are absolutely respected as a player, and they are competing aggressively on price.”Musk’s empire has numerous branches in Texas, and with the billionaire’s recent relocation from California, the Lone Star state now appears set to become the center of his universe. Space Exploration Technologies Corp., or SpaceX, is building and testing Starship, a new rocket and spacecraft designed to take humans to Mars, at a facility in Boca Chica on the southern tip of the Gulf Coast. Another rocket-testing facility is located in McGregor, near Waco. Musk posted a family photo to Twitter on Monday, with the caption “Starbase, Texas.”SpaceX has posted engineering positions in Austin for a “new, state of the art manufacturing facility” for Starlink, a space-based high speed Internet service. Tesla is also building a new factory in East Austin for its forthcoming Cybertruck, an electric pickup. Gigafactory Texas, as the facility is known, will create 5,000 mid-level manufacturing jobs and is supposed to produce the first vehicles by the end of this year.Musk’s focus on Texas comes as the dominant U.S. energy hub—with its abundant natural gas, oil, solar and wind resources—is being transformed by the surging growth of renewables. For more than a century the Texas grid has transported power from large plants to customers over miles of transmission lines. The recent storms have highlighted just how fragile that legacy system is in the era of climate change. With the build out of giant batteries like those made by Tesla’s Gambit project and others, the state’s power grid could be remade around distributed generation that may prove more resilient.About 2,100 megawatts of battery storage and 37,000 megawatts of solar and wind are in advanced stages of connecting to Ercot’s grid. “It’s not only stunning but the financing is already in place,” Jigar Shah said on March 2, a day before the clean-energy pioneer was named as director of the U.S. Energy Department’s loan finance office.The Gambit project was originally developed by San Francisco-based Plus Power, a privately held renewables company that has battery operations in several states. Scott Albert, the former city manager of Angleton, said it was obvious that Plus Power was working with Tesla. A project summary available on the city’s website features images of Tesla’s utility-scale battery products, and some of Plus Power’s principal staffers previously worked at Tesla. (Plus Power confirmed its sale of the project to an undisclosed party and declined further comment.)The Gambit project is not hard to find in Angleton, a small town of roughly 3,000 people in the middle of the Brazoria National Wildlife Refuge. But people on the construction site appear to have instructions to avoid drawing attention or answering questions from passersby. A photographer who attempted to observe from the front gate was told by a worker that it was a “secretive project.” White sheets obscured what appeared to be Tesla’s modular Megapacks.In Texas, Albert said, it’s common for developers in real estate or energy to begin projects with several potential partners or purchasers waiting in the wings. It made sense to him that the project ended up with the state’s biggest billionaire. “Elon Musk has a lot of activity in Texas right now,” said Albert. “It wouldn’t surprise me if Musk is thinking about starting his own power company.”READ NEXT: After Texas Crisis, Biden’s Climate Plan Hangs on Fragile Power Grid (Updates Tesla’s share price in the fourth paragraph. Adds detail about battery duration in the sixth paragraph and Elon Musk’s family photo in the 14th paragraph.)For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.comSubscribe now to stay ahead with the most trusted business news source.©2021 Bloomberg L.P.
OG Status in Crypto Is a Liability
“Bitcoin is rapidly becoming the crypto version of Australian wildlife. We separated ourselves, blocked all cross-pollination, and now there’s an isolated gene pool producing weird versions of everything.”
So security researcher and Summa founder, James Prestwich, contended in a tweet thread last summer.
Is bitcoin complacent? An austere monolith? A hermit kingdom? I don’t know. Bitcoin is probably fine, but underlying Prestwich’s hot take is a larger point that’s relevant beyond BTC: a lengthier crypto tenure does not equate to greater wisdom.
Related: Winklevoss-Owned Gemini Sponsors 2021 Oxford-Cambridge Boat Race
In the crypto culture, there’s a strong tendency for folks to flex about when they bought in. For me, I feel like the right date marking the beginning of my blockchain journalism is September 2015, when I wrote enough about Imogen Heap’s music-rights tracking project to become curious.
This article is excerpted from The Node (formerly known as Blockchain Bites), CoinDesk’s daily roundup of the most pivotal stories in blockchain and crypto news. You can subscribe to get the full newsletter here.
But the allure of greater vintage is so tempting here, so I can date it to December 2013, when I first started following Charlie Shrem, a scrappy young Brooklyn, N.Y.-based tech entrepreneur, though truthfully my interest in bitcoin was really only ancillary then, going no further than the fact that it counted as “tech.”
Tenure yields respect; not as much respect as heavy bags, mind you – but in absence of bags, time counts.
Related: Bitcoin’s 2021 Returns Destroy Everything on Wall Street, Goldman Sachs Says
But it shouldn’t count for that much. In fact, having watched this space roughly as long as the Ethereum blockchain has existed, I’m happy to go a step further: tenure can be a liability.
Tenure is, in particular, a liability for those who have dipped out and come back. But some who never left remain stuck in ancient ways.
Story continues
Time is not data
One way to measure how much data can be gathered in a particular time period is by counting people. Of course we can’t count people in crypto very easily, but we do have counts of active wallets, which is a decent proxy (noting, obviously, that many crypto users have more than one wallet — as they should).
So let’s say you were super early to the space, say from late 2011 to early 2015. You lived in a world that had only a little over 10,000 active bitcoin wallets and faded out when there were under 200,000. There were zero ethereum wallets.
Now let’s compare you to a relative newbie. Say they showed up in early 2017, before the BTC price really started sailing high but close enough that you could smell a change in the air. There would have been 500,000 active bitcoin wallets and 20,000 or so ethereum wallets.
If they stuck around for roughly the same amount of time, they would have the opportunity to meet vastly more people, watch vastly more experiments and learn vastly more lessons. There’s just more going on now.
And lest we assume these new arrivals are just random, it’s worth noting how many blockchains have healthy and growing developer communities.
These days, more people show up for the first time in one year than were ever present early on. Framed like that, it’s crazy to presume perspectives gleaned in those hazy bygone days are inherently superior to more recent ones. This isn’t some fantasy story about lost and forgotten magicks. This is technology.
One of the chief blind spots that I see in the OG’s is dismissing anything that’s new. There’s the Bitcoin Maximalist and the Ethereum Maximalist. The two are largely caricatures, though. Many bitcoiners grudgingly accept Ethereum is here to stay and vice versa, but there’s still a knee-jerk attitude of not just skepticism, but dismissal of any new coin or consensus mechanism.
Moar chainz
“Scam” and “s**tcoin” get thrown around much too flippantly, which diminishes the charge’s impact when it actually should stick (and often enough it should).
For anyone who left and missed the mid-2010s, this is understandable. The space was awash in cash grabs then. But the quality of new blockchain architects has changed: Polkadot is not equivalent to TrumpCoin. Tezos is a more thoughtful piece of software than Bitshares.
Once upon a time, most new cryptocurrencies were lame forks of bitcoin (or forks of forks) with some marketing slapped on. Auroracoin, anyone? Remember potcoin? Dogecoin.
But that’s simply no longer true. Today, many new blockchains are initiated by talented, well-resourced teams. No doubt many of them will fade off into obscurity, but so do many startups. Startups are afforded the benefit of the doubt and new blockchains by well-intentioned creators should be, too.
When they do fail, there are lessons to be learned for the whole industry. Old heads who dismiss them out of hand will miss out on those lessons.
Not every OG has failed to adjust their thinking to the modern reality. For example, consider Boost VC. In 2014, it promised to back 100 bitcoin startups. In 2018 we reported that it hit its goal, but the firm also changed the terms of its pledge. It had funded 100 crypto startups, not just on bitcoin.
Boost co-founder Adam Draper explained at the time that it just wasn’t kosher in 2014 to talk about anything but bitcoin, but times changed and Boost changed with it. Not everyone has. Later in his thread, Prestwich wrote, “Our Core Dev ivory tower is now sitting next to a small skyscraper, and it’s past time we walked out and asked the neighbors what they’re up to.”
Related Stories