What is an NFT? A fad or here to stay?

The fact that the digital economy is growing so fast means that we can now create value and substantial profit through our creativity; the current technological landscape has created more opportunities for people like you and me to align our chakras, unleash our ultimate creative selves, and possibly make millions of rands overnight. It’s probably less complicated than boiling an egg or more complex than baking your own croissants while reading a copy of “POPI act for dummies”…But before you get excited and start manifesting your profound piece of digital art, allow me to try and simplify/explain what NFTs are, how they work, and ideas of how you can benefit from them.

The latest buzzword seems so confusing and complicated, lucrative and intimidating…more cryptic than crypto and even more perplexing than blockchain, but I assure you that these terms are really simple, well kind of.  

An NFT is a Non-Fungible Token, but what does fungible mean in the first place? Let’s get into it.

Fungible VS Non-fungible?

Fungible is an adjective that refers to something that cannot be distinguished from another thing, it is interchangeable, substitutable or uniform; For example, If I lend you a R10 note and you pay me back as either two R5 coins or another R10 note I won’t mind because it still has the same value as the R10 I gave you.

In the same way, one bar of gold must be tradable or exchangeable for another bar of gold, or two bars that are half the size and weight. Still with me? Great!

Examples of fungible goods include oil, bonds, gold and other precious metals, money, and unopened items of consumer products on store shelves such as boxes of cereal. 

They possess fungibility if they have identical value and properties of other items; Once you damage or crack that box of Weetbix open, it’s over, it’s no longer of the same value as an unopened/undamaged box, it is then no longer….you guessed it! Fungible.

Non-Fungible is the opposite in that, Assets like diamonds, land, or baseball cards have unique qualities that add or subtract value. 

NFT(non-fungible token) in its most overly simplified terms,  attributes ownership of a digital property/asset to one single person. It certifies a digital asset to be unique and therefore not interchangeable. NFTs can be used to represent digital files such as photos, videos, audio etc.

NFTs are made to give you ownership of the work although in some cases the artist can opt to retain the copyright and reproduction rights (hint,hint).

So What’s the fuss?

Well it’s simple for reasons that we might not yet comprehend at this tender stage of the game, that just like a physical art piece the true value is in the original, and essentially the more it is replicated/copied and subsequently popularised, the more the original increases in value. 

“NFTs can work like any other speculative asset, where you buy it and hope that the value of it goes up one day, so you can sell it for a profit” 

anyone can sell their digital work as an NFT  most notably the sale of Beeple’s “Every Days – The first 5000 days” sold for $69 million, and an animated Gif of Nyan Cat (a 2011 meme) was sold for more than $500,000.

So what are you waiting for? Go design a uniquely absurd Jpg or rally up your ultra cool high-school friends to record a one of a kind comeback album, get all your friends and  family to hype it up, get the streets talking and journalists typing frantically on all digital mediums, hailing you for your ground breaking creativity and hey…you might just quit your 9-5 forever and all thanks to the invention of NFTs.

Now that you are suited, booted and want to “tokenize” your genius idea, it’s important to know where you can upload your work and start raking in the big bucs.

There are several marketplaces that were created around the selling and buying of NFTs.  These include OpenSea, Rarible, Nifty Gateway, and recently a South African platform called Momint.

Anyone with an internet connection, marketing hype, creativity and access to a desired program or software can become the next overnight billionaire. You, reading this now could change your fortunes from where you sit. 

So don’t let the big terms spook you out, read a little,  live a little, create your art, upload it, put a value on it and let the rest happen.