How NFTs Are Waiting For The Right Platform To Truly Shine

The NFT market is the latest blockchain application to have captured the imagination of investors and collectors alike. Popular influencer Gary Vee has weighed in, giving away NFTs to bulk buyers of his new book, Mila Kunis and Ashton Kutcher have used their NFTs as tickets to access their irreverent new cartoon Stoner Cats, and William Shatner has made an NFT of a dental X-ray of his teeth – so there’s that. To the devoted believers, NFTs are a new form of digital art and media possession that connects artists and celebrities with their fans and give savvy investors and collectors a new “digital antique” to get a hold of. To others, the fact that 24x24 JPEG pixel pictures can be worth $7 million elicits only a disbelieving shake of the head.

What are NFTs?

An NFT is a blockchain-recorded certificate of ownership over a piece of digital media. When an NFT is minted, a record of it is immutably inscribed on the blockchain. That record can be transferred, akin to a traditional token, to whichever wallet pays for it. Of course, although a picture or piece of digital media is copyable as all computer files are, only one person has the “code” that asserts that their wallet is the true proprietor of the piece. This “code” is what holds the value. Think of it as the Mona Lisa. Hundreds of thousands of prints of the Mona Lisa exist in every form imaginable, but only the Louvre has the original. NFTs offer the same for digital media.

Individual artists have found success minting and selling their pictures NFTs, and certain celebrities and individuals have wasted no time auctioning off their digital wears for extravagant sums. Jack Dorsey famously flogged his First Tweet for $2.9 million. However, the real growth engine in the NFT space has been the creation of collections. These were made famous by the now-legendary Cryptopunks, and have set the current tone for the market.

The Rise of Collections

The Cryptopunks, like many collections that have come after them, are a set of 10,000 generative pieces of art, randomized out of a set of art assets fed into an algorithm. They have become extraordinarily popular and, as a result, exceptionally valuable. They may not look like much, but Visa forked over $150,000 for their own Cryptopunk – and that was one of the runts of the collection. A legendary alien punk smoking a pipe (some attributes, like a shiny trading card, are rarer than others) went for $7.57 million. Even Jay-Z has one.

The success of these new collections has led to a stampede of copycats. The Bored Ape Yacht Club is another collection whose pieces are being traded for enormous sums, anthropomorphic Sushi populates the Sushiverse, and a 7-year old kid from London made $250,000 selling his Weird Whales. The appetite for these collections continues unabated, with more being launched every day through ferociously competitive “mint races”, where purveyors open up a minting link to their communities and fastest finger first gets one of the NFTs for a fixed, and often low, price. This desire for people to invest in have a piece of or simply collect these generative galleries has created a bustling and thriving aftermarket, where people who miss out or who expect a collections value to rise trade furiously to get the NFTs they want.

Challenges in the NFT market

It’s not all fun and games though. One pointed criticism of the current state of the NFT market is that it is a bit of a whale’s playground and is inaccessible to the average user. Although not entirely true, the fact that each NFT transaction is saddled with punitive Ethereum gas fees makes quickfire trading for small-sum pieces virtually impossible. More worryingly, an artist minting their NFT on Ethereum will have to pay significant sums of money to do so.

This means that if a starving artist (as any good artist should be) wants to turn their painting into an NFT, they might have to pay $100 in gas fees, not to mention listing fees and gallery commissions. This means an artist must be seeking to sell their piece for several times that for it to be worth the effort. This not only excludes certain artists but also excludes certain types of art. As only NFTs worth significant sums are currently worth listing for financial gain, it impinges upon the naked creativity of the market and doesn’t let a bustling low-level market flow. The creation of the market would go a long way to boost the overall space.

Also lacking is a truly reliable aftermarket. Opensea is the frontrunner (for Ethereum-based NFTs). Yet the platform has been plagued with bugs, bots, and botched security - which has led to real collateral losses due to inefficient screening of listings and nefarious automated behavior. Finally, the lack of blockchain interconnectivity for NFTs hampers the liquidity of the market.

NFT Tech’s All-In-One NFT Solution

NFT Tech is soon launching their new platform and promises to solve many of the issues hampering this inspiring new market, and thus open the door to the masses to get involved in the minting, making, trading and collecting of NFTs. NFT Tech will allow creators - the lifeblood of the space - to mint and list their collections on the market for free. Once listed, NFTs will be released in a seamless and fun-to-use marketplace that even the layman user can enjoy being a part of, snatching up cheap collectibles and relisting them for a profit, or assiduously searching for the pieces of a collection they are painstakingly putting together.

First off, NFT Tech has its own super blockchain, which means that artwork is finally free from the financial shackles of the Ethereum network. Minting costs exactly $0, the same as creating a storefront. This empowers artists to actually publish and sell their artwork without having to mortgage their homes.

Moreover, by assigning a value to NFTs within its system, it allows for more fluid trade between NFTs. Powering this market is the token, $NFTT, which is due to be listed soon on the open market. $NFTT will be the easy-to-use token that users can rely on in the marketplace, but also utilize to make governance proposals and decisions on the future of the project. Moreover, those who provide liquidity to the marketplace (which is effectively creating a bid-order book for NFTs) will be rewarded in the token for doing so. It’s an intriguing attempt to bring a more holistic marketplace to the world of NFT collecting, letting artists and collectors trade freely without the hamstringing effects currently found in other NFT marketplaces.