How are NFTs Tearing Down the Wall between the Blockchain and Real World

In March, the NFT titled “Everyday: The First 5000 Days” by Beeple sold for $69.35 million, caught the attention of the art world and beyond.

What is NFT?

Major cryptocurrencies in the blockchain world, such as BTC and ETH, are fungible tokens which are interchangeable and divisible. For example, one BTC hold by you is completely the same as the BTC in my hand in essence. This means fungibility.

NFT stands for Non-Fungible Token which is irreplaceable and indivisible, such as the auctioned NFT by artist Beeple. Recently some American artists have started transformed their works into NFTs.

NFT might Enable the Blockchain to Hit the Mainstream Market

Blockchain has contributed to some controversy since its birth. In April 2020, National Development and Reform Commission specified the scope of “New Infrastructure Creation” for the first time and blochchain technology is included. Thus blockchain has become a part of our national strategic technologies. Blockchain technology has been applied in multiple fields including financing, government administration, trading, and warehousing logistics.

Local governments of cities such as Shenzhen and Guangzhou, internet giants such as Alibaba and Tencent are adopting blockchain proactively. In spite of the increasing scenarios where blockchain are applied, there is still a long way to go before the mass adoption of blockchain.

NFT’s application in the art world fully shows its uniqueness and indivisibility. These two features make NFT the ideal candidate as a digital anchor of value for physical goods and services. NFT offers a brand new and unique way of producing value for the digitization of physical objects on the blockchain. In this way, blockchain can facilitate its integration with the real world.

NFT might be applied in all kinds of industries. For instance, NFT can register the copyright of every unique “knowledge” so that the patent can be identified; physical assets such as houses and cars can be tokenized into NFT and the trades of these NFT assets might form a subset of financial markets; NFT can also be employed to verify and store digital identification in a safe way to prevent abuse and modification; the ownership of diversified accommodation papers can be verified and tracked if they are tokenized into NFT; tickets of concerts, movies are normally of the same appearance but with different seat numbers, .... NFT is able to represent almost everything in our daily life.

Gao Zelong, the deputy Secretary General of Blockchain Committee of China Mobile Communications Association, believes that NFT would challenge the position of most tech giants including TikTok, Facebook, Youku, TouTiao, Blizzard, Tencent, Alibaba, Amazon, QQ music, and Netflix.

As NFT is able to be applied in every scenario, it is potential to lead blockchain’s evolution into a universal technology.

Mass adoption is still on the way

There are two essential factors driving a technology to be universal: to be used by a large amount of people and to be applied in multiple scenarios and industries. Apparently, there is still a long way to go before NFT blockchain becomes a universal technology despite the fact that NFT has attracted unprecedented attention in the recent frenzy caused by the participation of celebrities, such as Yao Ming and Jack Dorsey, in the NFT world. However, what matters is that the in-depth exploration of NFT’s application is always in progress.

Recently I have noticed a decentralized trading platform called CHAIR. CHAIR focuses on tokenizing rights and benefits into NFT. With the underling blockchain technologies, CHAIR is able to ensure the security of data. CHAIR allows anyone from any industry to tokenize their own rights and benefits into NFTs as well as enjoy the profits from it so that users can achieve ownership and management of their own privacy, identity, data, assets and other rights and benefits. Currently NFT is mostly applied in art industry, which significantly constrains its development. In the future, the application NFT will be reaching all groups and industries. As the world’s first decentralized NFT trading platform for rights and benefits, CHAIR is striving for the mass adoption of NFT in the mainstream market, laying a solid foundation for large-scale commercial use of blockchain technologies.

When the Internet was born, it was only used by a small number of people. Later, it expanded into the infrastructure of the entire society and became an indispensable part of our lives. The development of NFT may also have to go through this. When NFTs become universal, virtual products can be matched with items in the real world. It is not only the artist Beeple who sells NFT digital works at sky-high prices, but may be any average person.

In the 21st century, there has been a desire for a new technology in human civilization that can lead the progress of the times. Blockchain is considered to be an important underlying technology of the Internet of Value, and people expect it to be like a steam engine that leads mankind into an industrial society. Although it may still need the help of other technologies such as the Internet of Things, the Internet, big data, cloud computing, artificial intelligence, etc., NFT must be a very critical role among them.