A Newcomer’s Introduction to NFTs
In today’s digital world pretty much everything is online. You can listen to and download your music, watch videos, TV shows, and movies on platforms, and a bunch of other stuff. Transactions are conducted online and things like cryptocurrencies revolutionise the world of finance.
New things are just around the corner in today’s world which is why we must look to the future. NFTs are the future as they make up a sizeable portion of today’s crypto world. They come in many shapes and sizes, and it would be a good idea to get familiar with them. If you don’t know where to start, then you should familiarise yourself with how they work, and more importantly what they are.
NFTs Demystified
The term NFT stands for Non-Fungible Token. You can think of them as assets with information that’s kept safe in smart contracts. The information that’s kept in this digital asset is what makes each NFT unique. In other words, there are no identical 2 NFTs. So, each one out there is one of a kind. They are non-divisible and have value only when they’re sold or purchased as a whole, not that you could sell a half NFT.
Any image, digital collectable, music and even items in video games can be used as an NFT. These specific assets share links with the NFT. The tokens can be used to prove the digital ownership of an asset. As they can’t be exchanged like cryptocurrencies and fiat currencies, they can be bought and sold on platforms.
In other words, you’ll find plenty of trading platforms like https://tradingplatforms.com/uk/nft/ if you go online and you’re looking to buy or sell NFTs. Some of them focus on art, while others focus on music, artists, photographers and more. As there’s no limit as to what an NFT asset can be, there are lots of platforms that offer a variety of assets you can get a hold of.
If you’d like to you can create your own NFT token. A lot of people do this and create their unique NFTs on blockchains. They can add all sorts of rich metadata, secure file links and naturally the identity of the owner. In that way, NFTs are dependent on blockchain and smart contract technology to be created. So, you’ll need to wait a bit before decentralized apps and platforms for the creation of NFTs are created.
One of the industries that helped popularize both crypto and NFTs in the gaming industry. Blockchain is crucial for NFTs and is one of the many novelties in the world of gaming today.
NFTs and the Gaming Industry
The thing about the gaming industry and NFTs is that they have a history together. A game called CryptoKitties was one of the first games to introduce these tokens. They took the shape of cats in various forms and you could earn these cats while playing the game. You’ll then have a collection that you can exchange with other players. Exchange isn’t the right word as all the NFTs are unique in this game, so you can swap one kitten for another because no 2 kittens are the same.
This established the connection between blockchain technology and NFTs, something that’s a novelty in the world of gaming. There’s no clear depiction of how they will merge, but there are some general points that you need to be aware of.
Players in games can purchase various items and skins for these items. These can be turned into NFTs and the token will be used to authenticate your ownership of an item. Blockchain can be used to go over players’ collections of items and see which ones they own and which ones they don’t.
Skins and items can be earned by playing the game and since they’re NFTs they’ll have value outside of the virtual world. In other words, you can sell them to other players if you want to. Trading is also an option and this is where blockchain would step in again. In other words, the technology can be used to record the transaction, or rather the swap of items from one player’s collection to another player’s collection. Besides this, there are others who think that mixing NFTs and online games isn’t a good idea which goes to show you that the relationship between gaming and NFTs is still in the early stages.
Final Words
Non-fungible tokens are relatively new to the digital world of today. There are clear benefits to this technology, but it’s still in the developing stages which means it needs some more work. NFTs may have started as a proof of digital ownership of skins, art and music, but may evolve into certificates of ownership of things in the real world such as real estate, vehicles and more. In other words, we have yet to unlock the full potential of NFTs.
