Did you get the memo Everyone is talking about NFTs. If you are a late-stage user, let us initiate you into the exciting world of NFTs. Everything can be tokenized in 2021. It’s a way of turning an object, contract, or simply an asset into a token that can go up or down in value. Most crypto coins are fungible. This means that you can swap one for another, e.g. When you have an Ethereum coin in hand, you can exchange it for another. There’s really no difference between the two. However, NFTs or non-fungible tokens are different. These are unique tokens that cannot be replaced by others, just as the Mona Lisa cannot be replaced by the night watchman.
And as for works of art, this is one of the most popular new styles from NFT. They take a digital work of art or even a song or digital medium like Jack Dorsey, the CEO of Twitter who turned his first tweet into a token and is currently auctioning it off (it’s somewhere around $ 2.5 million). Would you pay $ 2.5 million for this?? Probably not, but someone would. In the world of art, the price of a piece is what someone is willing to pay for it.
There are many other cases of NFTs spreading the news that someone is using a piece of Banksy artwork as a token and then burning the original. Genius? The jury is out. Other examples include; Tag Cuban with Tokenized Tweets, which shaped NFTs from tweets and are based on a decentralized platform called Polygon. Aavegotchi, a DeFi-staked crypto collectibles marketplace that has sold 10,000 portals for its DeFI + NFT game and raised more than $ 5.5M +, and another polygon-based marketplace called Arkane that you can find yours on Game items or creations selling can take the form of NFTs.
Slow it down! DeFi, decentralized, what?
We missed a key piece in this puzzle. What is DeFi? Everything in the blockchain is decentralized, which means there is no middleman, just you as the buyer and me as the seller. DeFi is decentralized finance, which is basically any type of finance app that is on the blockchain. So when I’m looking for a loan, I no longer have to go to a bank and meet an actual person and sign a contract. I am doing it now through the blockchain and smart contracts checking every transaction for me, eliminating the need for an intermediary such as a bank or broker, and eliminating the element of human error and even fraud.
Back to the interesting world of NFTs. All of these auctions and all of these marketplaces have to be somewhere. We mentioned Polygon earlier, and it’s one of the main platforms that marketplaces and developers can use to build decentralized apps. Polygon is an interesting company. It was known as the Matic, but it changed its name as the company developed. The aim is to bring the world of blockchain one step closer to mass adoption. They do this with their multi-chain approach to the blockchain, with their 2-layer chains known as the “Internet of Blockchains”. They allow developers to link chains together and basically create anything they want. So far they have hosted over 90 dapps (decentralized apps) and have over 200,000 users so they are definitely busy. Like most blockchain projects, this project has its own central coin, the MATIC. The better the company does, the better the coin will perform, with value increasing or decreasing depending on the utility behind it. So, Polygon is an important player in NFT game and a player worth knowing.
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay
