How do you sell a tweet for a million bucks? How can your genius kid create a doodle on their phone and sell it for a value equivalent to your whole house. Who buys that stuff, how is the money exchange happening, where is all this coming from and what the hell is NFT!
To start with explaining what that was all about, let’s first understand what the acronym stands for.
NFT: Non Fungible Token
Non-Fungible as in something that’s irreplaceable, unique in identity and its proprietorship. You buying an Apple iPhone for yourself might be unique to you but it’s not the same within the whole wide world outside. What you now own is just one of the million other mobile devices currently being circulated. It’s not a unique product. But it’s a whole nother thing if one morning you get up and decide to buy Vincent Van Gogh’s “Starry Night” or the whole damn Facebook. It’s what is unique amongst the whole world market and what gives it a certain unique value and that’s what makes any product non-fungible.
Now that we have got clear on what the first half of that acronym means, let’s move on to the second part, The Token. Token is a very interesting term thrown around casually these days amidst the internet world. It’s a quantity of some object that sums up to become equivalent to the value you pay for something on the Internet. It’s the cash reward an e-commerce organization offers to you in their own name by offering you a token equivalent to the amount of the real world bucks. So, now the question arises if the organization is transferring an amount to you, how are they keeping a record of it? It’s nowhere likely to be that a team of cashiers keeps the books for that huge no of transactions happening in a day on the internet. Though banks do it all the time amongst themselves, how do we as two independent entities sell and buy anything without involving a third party. Well, the answer lies in the Blockchain.
A public ledger based on the internet, kept on the internet and maintained by the internet itself. A record kept by a number of computer and smart devices all across the world going through billions of micro calculations for maintaining the ledger correctly. In a sense, a truly democratized way of dealing with transactions. Every transaction you make here is kept in a public record and no one owns it, so thereby cutting the whole middle-man scenario.
Now, coming back to the Barter trade in the NFT Marketplace world, it is analogous to the whole art world where people in a group decide for a painting or a sculpture or any piece of modern art as valuable. This basic human psyche that’s creating the hype for these tokens of the internet age to be traded, under the name of what we now know as NTfs. They can be anything, from digital art to snippets of your favorite NBA moments. Everything, anything that holds an inherent value beyond the basic human amenities is tradeable. The current exchange of digital art, that makes up for the majority of the NFT world is a start and there’s a whole nother realm of possibilities waiting for them to be explored in this new age of internet.
