The Echo-nomist

Mowing lawns, bagging groceries, becoming a waiter/waitress… These are things of the past. Gen Z kids have found new ways to make money. Think: NFT art…

We wrote about NFT’s back in March, when they suddenly received a lot of attention. At the time, it was considered another internet fad because people were bored at home. But there is a possibility that NFT’s are here to stay.

Let’s start with a brief about NFTs.

Non-fungible tokens or NFT’s are one of a kind digital assets that are not manually transferable. They’re the crypto version of collectibles. When you’re buying an NFT ( it can be in the form of a song, gif, meme, tweet etc.) the ownership of the intangible asset is transferred to you. There is a record of past and current ownership of every NFT ever on Blockchain. Each NFT contains unique encryption because of which no two NFT’s can be traded, exchanges or divided into smaller quantities.

Since NFT’s continued to become popular, opportunities began to emerge in the industry. Duncan and Griffin Cock Foster had the idea of creating a platform to sell and buy NFT’s easily and to allow artists to find the right audience. Hence, Nifty gateway was formed (it has nothing to do with NIFTY 50). Nifty gateway is an online platform to auction NFTs. Many popular NFT artists like Grimes, Beeple, LOGIK and more use Nifty as a platform to auction their digital art. Soon other websites like this started emerging. For example: atomic hub, Nefty Blocks, OpenSea, SuperRare etc. Even in India, WazirX, a crypto exchange, launched an NFT marketplace.

Their mission was to make Nifties accessible to everyone and it kind of worked.

Remember when the youth discovered Robinhood and cryptocurrencies during the pandemic? Young people were cashing in on shares and having fun with crypto trading (especially meme stocks like AMC, GameStop and meme-crypto like dogecoin). Now, with the establishment of Nifty gateway, teens are also cashing in on NFT.

This time it’s a little different since they’re on both sides of the sale: they’re selling and buying! Nifty gateway provided artists, who were negatively affected as a result of the pandemic, a platform to showcase and auction their art. Young artists in specific were able to hop on to the trend. And by young, I mean REALLY young. A lot of them are barely old enough to drive.

It’s also a lot of fun to buy and bid for art, like a game. Some websites even have leaderboards and those with the most NFT holdings are on the top. They give you badges on the basis of value of NFT’s owned by you and more. It’s a way of making people buy more on their website and well, it seems to be working considering sales worth $2.5 billion were made in the first 5 months of 2021 (source: Aljazeera). This is up from just $13.7 million in the first half of 2020. It clearly shows the boost given to the industry by the pandemic.

NFT is not limited to Art. Music, Movies, Sports…

In fact, in goes hand in hand with sports.

NBA Top Shots, for example, are basically digitally traded cards. They have cards for famous players, famous shots. popular moments etc.

Paris Saint-Germain (PSG) is using NFT as a medium to interact with fans. They release limited sets of NFT’s and have tokens for their fans. These tokens can be used by them to purchase official merchandise and pay for PSG events. The players are also paid a percentage of their salary in the form of fan tokens. Even Messi, who recently signed a 2-year contract with PSG, was partially paid with these tokens. In fact, this initiative by PSG became popular after Messi joined the team. Fascinated by the world of NFT, Messi went on to release “Messiverse,” his collection of non-fungible tokens, designed by BossLogic. It consists of 4 pieces of art. As Messi says, “Soccer is like Art. It’s Timeless.”

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Sorare is an NFT based fantasy football game, where players manage a virtual team with digital player cards. The person playing the game is the manager and they can buy and sell cards to hire or fire players. They have cooperated with over 100 football clubs in the world, including F.C Bayern Munich, Liverpool, Real Madrid etc.

F1 Delta Time is a blockchain-based platform for F1 fans to collect official NFT’s and participate in a play-to-earn gaming system with rewards.

No sport is out of the NFT loop. Much like NBA Top Shots, Cricket has Rario. It’s an NFT platform to trade and collect iconic moments in cricket history and player cards. They have already teamed up with various players including Faf Du Plessis, Shakib Al Hassan, Shafali Verma, Smriti Mandana and Zaheer Khan.

NFT’s have led to fan loyalty and player and fan engagement. According to Wadhwa, founder of Rario, transactions worth $2.5+ billion are expected this year in the sports collectibles space. (source: Moneycontrol)

The music industry is also embracing the NFT trend. When artists Ritviz and Nucleya put up their NFT on WazirX, it sold out. They released photographs and art work converted in clips of 10-15 second with some music. Even Sunburn Music Festival released NFT’s with pictures and gifs of the concert and the fireworks on the main stage. Tory Lanez, a Canadian rapper, recently released an entire album as an NFT.

There’s no denying that non-fungible tokens are becoming popular and everyone is having fun. But, will they die out?

I don’t think so. I believe they’re here to stay. In the past few months, this industry has grown and it’s branched out beyond owning art. We’ve only explored a few application of NFT’s, there are still many more ways in which it can be used and. Cinema has just started exploring the market with DC Comics creating tokens for their characters and showcards of the classic Hindi film, Sholay. There’s no denying that the future of NFT market might be very different, if they’re here to stay. Even if they’re not here to stay, they are definitely having their moment in the limelight.