NFTs, Gaming and Crypto for the Masses
Ready Player One
What do Lindsay Lohan, Gary V, Mark Cuban and Chamath all have in common this week? If you’re even ankle deep in crypto Twitter you’ve probably heard the term NFT or Non-Fungible Token.
NFTs, or #NFT if you’re Lindsay Lohan, are essentially scarce digital assets that you own on the blockchain. This means that no central authority can ever take these away from you. NFTs are unlike the digital assets we are accustomed to today which are the property of a centralized authority and not the individual.
Imagine collecting virtual art, sports cards or gear in your favorite RPG and it actually being worth something in an online marketplace. My brother was a huge gamer growing up and my parents always said, “you’re wasting your time!” and “there’s going to be an indent of your ass in our couch!”. They were right at the time about gaming and we did have to get a new couch. However, the year is 2021 and we have paid professional gamers, celebrity Twitch streamers like Dr Disrespect and gaming is a $150B+ industry. The concept of a digital asset is not new either, it just wasn’t desirable to the masses under a centralized model. Sure, you could’ve sold your World of Warcraft avatar on e-bay for dollars but there was the serious risk of being defrauded by an anonymous person on the other end of that transaction. We know there is demand for digital assets today. Just look at how players convert dollars to V-bucks to purchase skins and costumes in Fornite or the use of COD points in Warzone to buy in game skins, weapons and attachments. When my brother and I were growing up, there wasn’t a marketplace for players to sell their in game items safely to other players. There is now.
Today you can store your digital assets in a crypto wallet and trade them via smart contracts to other players or collectors in a way that ensures a safe transaction. Just check out the biggest online NFT marketplace OpenSea where people are selling virtual art, sports cards, virtual land, in-game avatars, gear, domain names and much more. OpenSea’s volume is in the tens of thousands of ETH per day. Even Gary V is hopping on the NFT bandwagon!
The second Twitter post shows Gary V purchasing a digital sports card at auction on the site Sorare. Football clubs like Bayern Munich and Juventus have registered their players on the site as NFT cards which create an additional revenue stream for the clubs. The famous street artist Banksy is now selling digital art for hundreds of thousands of dollars via NFTs. Even Mark Cuban recently minted ten virtual art NFTs on Rarible, two of which sold for $81,000 USD to a buyer who virtually burned one of the copies. You can read about it here.
Chamath went on Bloomberg this week where he stated that he’s been amassing a portfolio of NFTs consisting of digital art and trading cards which he will be revealing soon.
NFTs don’t stop at the marketplace level either. Imagine the possibilities in merging virtual reality into virtual worlds built on the blockchain in games like Decentraland. In the virtual world of The Sandbox, brands now have a whole new frontier to interact with customers. Companies like Atari, Roller Coaster Tycoon, Smurfs and Binance are already buying up parcels of virtual land for tens of thousands of dollars.
On the infrastructure side of NFTs, you can own a .crypto or .eth domain name which is able to replace your wallet address for easier peer to peer crypto transactions. These domain names can also be stored in your wallet as they are also digital assets. Claim yours before it’s too late!
At the enterprise level, companies such as Enjin are paving the way in integrating existing gaming developers and their in-game assets with blockchain technology. Enjin essentially infuses the Enjin token into a game’s digital assets through a process called minting. This process can be reversed by the player so that every asset can be melted back into Enjin coin. Since Enjin coin has real life value, all assets created with it also have real life value. Currently one Enjin coin = 0.51 cents. Like all NFTs, these assets exist on the blockchain. To extrapolate this further, your entire gaming inventory can be accessible on your phone through the Enjin app and traded in the Enjin marketplace or even in game. The team at Enjin are going one step further and creating a multiverse where digital assets are usable across different games built on the Enjin platform. If it sounds a bit Ready Player One, that’s because it is. They’ve even landed a partnership with Microsoft to mint Azure Heroes badger avatars. These avatars can be used in Minecraft and other games built on the blockchain.
Just imagine for a second if Blizzard, one of the worlds largest gaming companies, started minting assets on the blockchain. The internet would break from the flood of teens quitting their minimum wage jobs to stack NFTs in order to sell them for beer money. Needless to say, the NFT rabbit hole runs deep. The beauty of this ecosystem is that creators can be rewarded for their art, collectables, games and virtual experiences if their NFTs gain adoption and popularity. You can track the popularity of these projects in the weekly rankings by volume on OpenSea and Enjin.
Bitcoin is now mainstream but much of crypto is not there yet. Of all the use cases noted above, my money is on gaming being the thing that brings crypto to the masses. All it will take is one top developer minting assets on the blockchain and the rest will capitulate. The revenue potential is far too great to ignore. What does crypto going mainstream look like you may wonder? If people who don’t know anything about blockchain are interacting with something built on the blockchain, then we’ve successfully brought crypto to the masses. Gaming and NFTs are likely to be that fun, silly, easy to pick up medium that drives adoption to the billions of gamers worldwide.
If you’re still skeptical, remember that NFTs are scarce assets. We already know what happens when you mix human behavioral psychology with an asset limited in supply. The result…number go up. As I write this article, bitcoin just hit $50,000 for the first time in history and I can’t help but wonder where the market cap of the NFT space will be in a few years.
