There’s nothing like the explosion of new technologies almost every single day. And these advancements get more and more amazing and jaw-dropping every time. Have you ever heard of NFT or the Non-Fungible Tokens? This technology just made waves after the sale of a collage composed of 5,000 digital pieces, auctioned by Christie’s on March 11, 2021, for a whopping US$69 million!
So what is NFT?
NFT is the most recent trend from the cryptocurrency world and it has exploded in the past few months. An NFT is a unit of data stored on a digital ledger, called a blockchain, that certifies a digital asset to be unique and therefore not interchangeable. If something is fungible, it is interchangeable with another good or asset, therefore, non-fungible means it is not. They are digital assets that represent a wide range of unique tangible and intangible items, from collectible sports cards to virtual real estate and even digital sneakers.
Non-fungible tokens prove ownership of a digital item – image, sound file or text – in the same way, that people own crypto coins. Although digital files can easily be copied and reproduced, you can prove you’re the owner of the original with a non-fungible token (or NFT) because the NFT is recorded by a blockchain, a sort of digital, decentralized ledger that also supports cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin.
How Non-Fungible Token Works
If we’re talking about arts, digital files can be easily and endlessly duplicated but with NFTs, artwork can be “tokenized” to create a digital certificate of ownership that can be bought and sold. These are tokens that we can use to represent ownership of unique items. Just like blockchain, the records cannot be forged because the ledger is maintained by thousands of computers around the world.
Here are the top NFT Marketplaces you would want to get familiar with right now:
Offers a wide range of non-fungible tokens, including art, censorship-resistant domain names, virtual worlds, trading cards, sports, and collectibles. You can buy, sell, and discover exclusive digital assets like Axies, ENS names, CryptoKitties, Decentraland, and more. They feature over 700 different projects, including trading card games, collectible games to digital art projects, and name systems like ENS (Ethereum Name Service).
Nifty is a premier marketplace for NFTs, or colloquially known as Nifties. They create collections of limited edition, high-quality Nifties, exclusively available on their platform. It was founded with a mission to make NFTs accessible to everyone. Each of their collection will be opened at a specific time (a drop), and will only be available for a limited time.
Rarible is a community-owned NFT marketplace, with its “owners” holding the ERC-20 RARI token. Rarible buys and sells NFTs in categories like art, photography, games, metaverses, music, domains, memes, and more. Additionally, the artist might choose to then offer prospective buyers a sneak peek of the content – effectively a preview, trailer, or snippet – but only release the full content once a person purchases the relevant NFT.
Super Rare is a social network for art creators and collectors, backed by blockchain where creators can create digital artworks and tokenize them on the Ethereum blockchain. Once the NFT is on SuperRare, it can be bought, or sold. Artists can either put their creation up for an auction-style bidding process or sell it for a set price. Once the NFT is sold to a buyer, it can then be resold at any price on a variety of NFT trading platforms.
AtomicMarket is a shared liquidity NFT market smart contract that is used by multiple websites. Shared liquidity means that everything listed on one market also shows on all other markets. It is a marketplace for Atomic Assets, a standard for non-fungible tokens on the eosio blockchain technology. Anyone can utilize the Atomic Asset standard to tokenize and create digital assets and buy, sell and auction assets using the Atomic Assets marketplace.
NFTs have become hugely popular with crypto users because of the way they revolutionized the gaming, digital art and collectibles space. And it is definitely something to look out for. Its application range is only defined to the nature of the cryptocurrency community and developers. So to know more about its application, get in touch with us!
