NFT art will never be mass-market — NFT licenses may be

On Nov 28, 2021

Visa got itself a fancy new Twitter avatar this August, and even though it didn’t stay up for long, the 8-bit-styled picture of a visibly unamused woman with a stylish mohawk still made dozens of headlines. It was not just about the relatively hefty price tag of $150,000. The mere fact that the financial giant bought a nonfungible token (NFT) representing the image from the CryptoPunks collection set off fireworks in the media. It was the best marketing spend Visa’s done all year — the ROI on news articles alone must have paid for the purchase tenfold.

Yes, even Visa “apes in” on NFTs these days, to use an expression NFT collectors drop a lot in the era of the wealthy pouring millions into JPEGs of apes. But even though the technology’s journey from memes to riches has taken it into the digital art world, I don’t think that this will be its mass-market use case.

Name my ape! Drop your suggestions below @BoredApeYC #BAYC #BoredApeYachtClub #NFTs pic.twitter.com/pwFynGy9QJ

— jimmy fallon (@jimmyfallon) November 17, 2021

By now, everyone knows that NFTs essentially bring uniqueness and scarcity, a feature associated with traditional high art, into all shapes and forms of digital art, which is otherwise infinitely reproducible with the good old copy-paste. A link to a specific picture, audio clip or video is sent to the blockchain as part of a transaction, and there we are — even though the file can still be copy-pasted, only one wallet owns its token. That’s where it becomes a posh thing: Donning an NFT image as a Twitter avatar is like wearing a Rolex watch with your name engraved on it. It’s a status symbol to be appreciated by those in the know.

That said, high art and luxury are by definition antonymous to the mass market, as high price and uniqueness are their key selling points. Someone who’s bleeding money can buy a link for millions, but that’s because they might as well burn their money for fun, and they want to show off their wealth to the world. Good luck charging a Regular Joe $150,000 for a link to a picture, though. The focus on NFTs as art by definition limits a promising technology to a relatively small, albeit inarguably posh and eccentric, niche.

The good thing here is that the big NFT digital art sales are making headlines, which is helping to bring NFTs into the mainstream. However, this will not be the main use of NFTs further down the road, but rather a new and expensive plaything for the wealthy and some especially fervent crypto-personalities and communities.

The real deal

First of all, NFTs already have a mass-market use case — they are very much at home in gaming, with CryptoKitties gathering a ton of headlines back in the day. From Axie Infinity to all the newer titles, NFTs are powering a plethora of digital economies, and there, they bring more than sheer uniqueness to the table.

Yes, it’s nice that your NFT sword is unique and has your name on its token, but what’s nicer is that it can…