At ETH Denver’s virtual conference, non-fungible tokens were in the spotlight with seven main stage presentations addressing utility, adoption, and novel use cases – a sign of growing niche or lesser use of blockchain technology.
While the seven presentations were overshadowed by the 14 decentralized financial institutions (not to mention a dedicated four-hour summit), stage time is set against the backdrop of a notable year for NFTs. Sales have routinely surged to over half a million, several NFT-sponsored games have come a long way in terms of player base and governance, and recently even celebrities have used the technology to distribute art of sometimes questionable quality to die-hard fans.
Games and collectibles aren’t the only arena where NFTs play a role, however. In a talk titled “Bridging the Gap Between DeFi and NFTs,” Rarible’s Alex Salnikov noted that creative smart contract engineering is driving a boom in DeFi use cases for non-fungible tokens.
Fractional ownership, wrapping up ERC-20, using NFTs as collateral, and NFT funds are pushing NFTs into the similarly hot burgeoning finance industry – and Salnikov believes the trend won’t continue until newer projects hit the market .
“I think there will be a lot of new projects popping up lately as we’ve seen a huge surge in activity since September, but it takes half a year to a year to build a really good project […] So NFT project activity will explode. “
Likewise, John Crain’s presentation “NFTs: Trends in 2021” focused not only on the growth of well-known NFT industries, but also on how NFTs can help facilitate traditional meatspace arrangements like mortgages, and not just in the Metaverse (which is also makes promising progress)).
These advances in technology impact the number of addresses involved in NFTs, as well as the total volume for popular NFT marketplaces like Opensea. According to Dune Analytics, the traffic on the Opensea platform is starting to curve parabolically:
NFT growth this month @opensea pic.twitter.com/57L6ppHPGi
– Nick Tomaino (@NTmoney) February 10, 2021
However, some commentators believe the space could do more to attract a larger following. Mintable’s Zach Burks said in his talk “Pioneering NFTs Mainstream” that the number of NFT users is dwarfed by the number of participants in the broader Ethereum ecosystem.
“Let’s say there are 300,000 [NFT] Users, there is a volume of $ 300 million and 10 million Ethereum users. If you take a ratio of 10 million to 300,000, that’s miserable, ”said Burks. “We should have at least half of all Ethereum users using NFTs, and why don’t we? Because your gateway for interacting with NFTs isn’t there yet. “
He called for more marketplaces tailored to make developers stand out, as well as greater simplicity so that “your grandma” can efficiently browse blockchain assets.
Even if there is still much to be done, the exhibition at ETH Denver shows that a use case that was once ridiculed as secondary is now being more embedded in mainstream development. Additionally, in a post-panel Q&A, Crain said that while some people will never “get” NFTs, non-fungible tokens will inevitably attract their own batch of acolytes.
“Haters will always hate, so that’s not surprising,” he said. “It’s like Bitcoin where you first say, ‘this is too crazy, this won’t work’, but then you dig in.”
