Creator Dilemma

 In the traditional fine arts world, the owners of the major auction houses and collectors over the years have regulated and identified the prices of rare pieces. Millions of dollars are being auctioned off but the original creators or even the families of the artist do not see a fraction of the proceeds. With the assistance of blockchain technology, users are not only able to authenticate, but also retain royalty earnings every time the item is sold. Moving forward, artists and collectors will be able to distribute ownership towards their family members in case they were to pass away. 

Over time, NFTs have become a massive movement within the blockchain industry due to their various use cases. Builders in the space must continue participating in developing the space, but most importantly, making it accessible to the rest of the world. One by one, major platforms will begin focusing on onboarding new users and generating effective steps for people to understand, create, and purchase NFTs. 

Adoption of NFTs

The Music industry diving into the web3 space has forced many new users to jump ship and learn about NFTs. Since music is one of the most consumed digital products, building a bridge between music and web3 has become easy with a few products in the market alongside artists adapting those tools. 

 Many musicians struggle to maintain ownership of their masters and publishing due to the predatory nature of the music industry. Blockchain technology provides tools for artists to use to become independent from labels by allowing them to fundraise within the web3 community, platforms to distribute music and maintain ownership, and engagement mechanisms to enhance and moderate their fanbase. NFTs have already become a tool for artists such as Kings of Leon, 3LAU, Nas, Steve Aoki, and many more. Not only have major artists adopted using web3 tools, but upcoming artists have also leveraged their communities to engage with their content via NFTs by curating public releases and auctions. A great example of this is that an artist named Vérité auctioned 2.3% of her master recording rights in perpetuity for a single track at the price of 11 ETH on Zora. 

Beyond Art

NFTs have become a case study for various organizations outside of the art communities and major organizations and even governments are gaining interest. New developments of NFT protocols such as Soul Bound tokens in the Ethereum ecosystem, open doors for identification issues to be resolved. Generally, NFTs can be sold or given away for free via airdrop or on an exchange. Currently, NFTs aren’t tied to one specific person or organization. Soulbound tokens are just permanent, non-transferable NFTs, meaning that they can’t be given away or taken from your private blockchain wallet. In various situations, SBT can be used to authenticate a user's digital identity, verify previous data attached to a user's public wallet, and also provide a method of keeping personal information safe. Some governments are exploring how to use SBTs as a method of distributing digital identities, even though it is in an early stage of development, the opportunities are limitless. 

In the sports industry, various sports teams have collaborated with blockchains such as Chiliz and Socios to create fan tokens and collectible trading cards. Amongst these examples various other professional sports organizations have tested ticketing becoming more effective with blockchains transparent layers to battle fraud. In the U.S Dapper Labs has teamed up with the NBA to create NBA Top Shot, which is an interactive digital card collecting marketplace. NFTs have only scratched the surface of the traditional card collecting market share, but will only continue to grow over the years. 

Over the last couple of years, NFTs have shifted from being identified as digital art to ownership of content. With blockchain technology rapidly changing, we can only expect NFTs to continue to impact how ownership of digital assets is tracked and identified. Beyond art, we will continue to see how NFTs can disrupt various industries with the transparent data processing network built on blockchain.