The NFT Gold Rush Which Everyone is Talking About This Non Fungible Tokens Today
source medium
With the Bitcoin starting to new crypto market moves in waves where major banks and investment funds company start to accumulate Bitcoin, the retail investor always tries to look out for the next big thing which can repeat the unparalleled success of the original cryptocurrency.
At first, it was altcoins that were ICOs or another name of altcoins. In 2020 it was Defi which also another name of altcoins and in 2021, NFTs becomes the most popular crypto trend 2021 and NFTs are just rebranded of altcoin but they have a unique use case that will stay here for longer. NFTS which are the Non-Fungible Token which is a typical cryptocurrency token like thousand of altcoins launched on the Ethereum network which are all fungible. This simply means that 1 XYZ token in your wallet is worth exactly the same as 1 XYZ token on other people’s wallets. While the non-fungible means that NFTS is unique and you can simply put it as NFTs are collectibles very similar to traditional rare baseball trading cars where a common card can be worthless while a very rare card can worth millions.
The first NFT project called CryptoPunks was launch in 2017 which this 10,000-pixel art character named CryptoPnks created and anyone could claim one for themselves for free back then. Then the first NFT project which gained wider recognition was CrytoKitties which isn’t much different from CryptoPunks where the only difference was that instead of collecting pixel art the users collect digital pets. And in the past, NFT’s were really considered an investment back then which they were just fun collectibles that utilized the new blockchain technologies.
However, the whole situation changed in 2020 where the advent of DeFi solution which the developers reinvented Non-Fungible TOkens and started to find new applications which is considered a mere novelty and with much more advanced than the original CryptoPunks and CryptoKitties, almost anything can be tokenized and stored on the blockchain today and NFTs that are created now can be very complex.
A good example is the NFT virtual painting of Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin, EthBoy which were sold for 260 ETH which is almost USD $500,000 with today’s price where EthBoyis just an image stored on the blockchain which is a fully interactive work of art that changes it appears every day based on external data such as the ETH price and Ethereum gas fees.
Other than this, in the history of NFTs happened when Twitter founder Jack Dorsey sold the NFT of the first tweet he ever made for USD $2.9 million which suddenly everyone realizes that there’s money made with Non-Fungible Tokens and celebrities like Lil Pump, Lindsay Lohan and Paris Hilton started selling their own NFTs.
As NFTs are getting more advanced and complex, many companies are working on utilizing NFTs to create blockchain-based video games which could make the Non-Fungible Tokens even more popular. Who knows, maybe in the future owning an NFT project will become as common as owning a website.
source theguardian