In March 2021, a work of art called Everydays: The First 5000 Days sold for $69 million at Christie’s Auction House. It’s not out of the ordinary to see eight-figure art sales, but this one received a lot of attention because the piece was sold as a non-fungible token (NFT) – an electronic record corresponding to an image that lives entirely in the digital world.
Put differently: Someone paid almost $70 million for a picture on the internet.
Since then, NFTs have started to permeate pop culture in various ways. They’ve been spoofed by Saturday Night Live and embraced by high-profile celebrities like rapper Snoop Dogg and NBA superstar Stephen Curry. There are now hundreds of millions of dollars of NFT sales each week through public marketplaces like Foundation, OpenSea, and Nifty Gateway, as well as custom-built applications like NBA Top Shot and VeVe.
Yet at the same time many people wonder how tokens on the internet could be worth money at all — especially when many of them just represent “ownership” of an online image or animation that you could, in principle, download a copy of for free.
It’s easy to see why NFTs inspire both excitement and deep skepticism: They’re a completely novel asset class, and we don’t see new asset classes appear that often. But what drives the value of an asset that’s really just a digital token people can pass around? To appreciate NFTs properly, we first have to think through what they actually are and the types of market opportunities they enable. And once we unlock that, we can understand how to build businesses around them.
NFTs as a Tool for Market Design
NFTs have fundamentally changed the market for digital assets. Historically there was no way to separate the “owner” of a digital artwork from someone who just saved a copy to their desktop. Markets can’t operate without clear property rights: Before someone can buy a good, it has to be clear who has the right to sell it, and once someone does buy, you need to be able to transfer ownership from the seller to the buyer. NFTs solve this problem by giving parties something they can agree represents ownership. In doing so, they make it possible to build markets around new types of transactions — buying and selling products that could never be sold before, or enabling transactions to happen in innovative ways that are more efficient and valuable.
As the name “non-fungible token” suggests, each NFT is a unique, one-of-a-kind digital item. They’re stored on public-facing digital ledgers called blockchains, which means it’s possible to prove who owns a given NFT at any moment in time and trace the history of prior ownership. Moreover, it’s easy to transfer NFTs from one person to another — just as a bank might move money across accounts — and it’s very hard to counterfeit them. Because NFT ownership is easy to certify and transfer, we can use them to create markets in a variety of different goods.
But NFTs don’t just provide a kind of digital “deed.” Because blockchains are programmable, it’s possible to endow NFTs with features that enable them to expand their purpose over time, or even to provide direct utility to their holders. In other words, NFTs can do things — or let their owners do things — in both digital spaces and the physical world.
In this sense, NFTs can function like membership cards or tickets, providing access to events, exclusive merchandise, and special discounts — as well as serving as digital keys to online spaces where holders can engage with each other. Moreover, because the blockchain is public, it’s even possible to send additional products directly to anyone who owns a given token. All of this gives NFT holders value over and above simple ownership — and provides creators with a vector to build a highly engaged community around their brands.
HBR
