NFTs and Everything About Them

“NFTs function like cryptographic tokens, but, unlike cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin.”

What if I told you that if you think you’re late to the cryptocurrency game, you can still get on the new potential fad that can make you a millionaire in a couple of years? That’s the metaverse of NFTs for you. Non-Fungible Tokens, as NFT stands for, are unique digital assets that represent ownership of items in the physical world. This can range from music, art, videos, and more. As of today, NFTs utilize the same blockchain protocol as that of cryptocurrencies, but they’re not valuable yet. Although there is a lot of debate regarding the same, many can ponder how Bitcoins themselves did not have any value when they first hit the digital world.

Similar to bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, NFTs are bought, sold, and stored using blockchains. Unlike bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, NFTs cannot be interchanged. NFTs may increase in value, but they could become worthless. The future of NFTs is highly speculative. Although corresponding to the world of art and finance, owning NFTs gives one the right to own the original digital copy of the art or music piece exactly in the same fashion as one would get the rights if they could buy the Mona Lisa. Hence, trading with respect to NFTs currently might be profitable to people since payments are done using cryptocurrencies and the metaverse has millions of users at this point.

History of NFTs

The history of the Ethereum blockchain is rich with data, dating all the way back to 2015. Since then, there has been a lot to happen with NFTs and the Ethereum blockchain. From ENS to Axie Infinity, they all play a role in the development of the Ethereum blockchain and the NFT space in the macro.

Some of the earliest NFTs according to the sources available are given in the following points.

• Terra Nullius is the first NFT on the Ethereum blockchain with a mint date of August 7, 2015. According to this Reddit post, it appears that this project was built to allow you to stake your ‘claim’ on the blockchain. When you staked your claim, you got to write a short message, meaning you can customize your NFT. This was a cool idea, especially considering how early this NFT project was.
• Recently, Ethereum Names Service has gained quite a reputation after its ENS token drop in November 2021. ENS was originally created on March 10, 2017, as a way to purchase decentralized domain names. Similar to web2 domain names, you can own these decentralized domain names for a set amount of time but ultimately, it’s more of a lease than actual ownership. Either way, the future of ENS seems promising.
• It didn’t take long for the next NFT cat-wave named CryptoCats. On November 12, 2017, CryptoCats was born as a collectible 8-bit cat on the Ethereum blockchain. The rediscovery of CryptoCats in March 2021 triggered the NFT archaeology movement. Compared to the previous projects, there is a limited number of only 625 CryptoCats NFTs available today.

MetaKovan’s Empire of NFTs

Beeple is an online digital artist who is world renowned for his designs, and quite recently, for a whopping amount of $ 69Mn, his one piece of digital-only artwork was bought anonymously by a user named MetaKovan’s. This man came into the light as an Indian-born entrepreneur, Vignesh Sundaresan, who works with blockchain technology and is based in Singapore. Sundaresan fuelled curiosity after he was heard speaking in Tamil when he joined a Clubhouse chat with the Good Time Show host Sriram Krishnan. He had also revealed that his pseudonym MetaKovan in Tamil means “King of Meta”.

The artwork is a virtual collage of 5,000 images created over a period of 13 years. Sundaresan detailed his journey in a sub-stack blog titled 'NFTs: The First 5000 Beeples - How two immigrants from Tamil Nadu bought a piece of digital art for $69M. And what we’re funding next.' Sundaresan is a Y-Combinator alum and is CEO at software technology firm, Portkey Technologies and is the founder of a blockchain start-up titled Lendroid. He also co-founded a crypto start-up called BitAcces which set up 100 Bitcoin ATMs in 18 countries between 2013-2015. In the blog, he revealed that he developed an interest in crypto in 2013. Sundaresan also announced a $500,000 fellowship for 'crypto storytellers' funded by his crypto investment firm, Metapurse.

This should be enough intel for a young teen or even a retired person to realize the potential of investing in NFTs or building NFT-based groups on multiple platforms which will give them a head-start when the world enters into a fully-immersive Metaverse. With more and more digital art being created and sold, NFTs are your handbook to join an internet fad that you most probably, won’t regret at a particular point in future. Happy Trading!