NFT Educational Series — Part 3

Published on:
Jan 29, 2024
Written by:
WWVentures
Read time:
5 min
Category:
Articles

NFTs Utilities Explained

In our previous NFT Series article, we took a deep dive into what it means to mint NFTs. NFT Minting has become nothing short of a spectacle, with mint events driven by so much hype that they can bring an entire blockchain network to its knees. Once an NFT is minted, it now exists and can be traded, transferred, and utilized on-chain. Let’s take a look at some use cases for NFTs!

Community

In Web2, the word ‘community’ isn’t typically synonymous with the word utility. In Web3 however, it’s a utility associated with nearly every NFT in existence. You can read more about NFT community culture in a previous article in this series here.

Social Economies

We’re already seeing creative ways for celebrities, athletes, and influencers to build social economies around their platforms.

An incredible example of this is Blockasset, an athlete and fan engagement platform where fans & athletes mutually benefit from each others’ participation. Through their athlete social tokens and NFTs, they create rewards systems — incentivizing both the athlete and fans to create value and partake in the shared community. So far, Blockasset has launched social tokens for Darren Till ($TILL) and Khamzat Chimaev ($BORZ), which fans earn by holding their respective NFTs.

You can learn more about Blockasset’s vision for athlete social economies in their AMA with NFT Radar here: https://audius.co/nftradar/march-2022-ama-wblockasset

Social economies have the potential to remove middleman services that typically take revenue away from creators. With NFTs and fungible tokens, anyone can create their own economy.

Music

The music industry is under many lenses of scrutiny in its current form: artist royalties, who ‘owns’ content, how artists are compensated by streaming services, and more. NFTs can lend a hand in many ways here:

  • Proof of ownership: eliminates issues with pirating or illegally using songs without attribution rights
  • Artist royalties: royalties are programmed into an NFT’s metadata, meaning the original creator is set to receive a percentage of all future sales of the NFT, which go directly to the artist and not through any middleman
  • True ownership: artists can utilize platforms like Audius to maintain full ownership of their content
  • Concert ticketing, ticket resales & scalping: with inventions like GET Protocol, artists will receive direct revenue from ticket sales including when they are resold on

BoomBox Music Marketplace is a music marketplace on Solana, where anyone can create, buy, and sell music as NFTs.

Gaming

If you’re a gamer, you’ve likely poured hundreds of hours into your favorite RPG or FPS. You also likely know the feeling of a new game coming out — excitement for sure, but a twinge of sadness for the character you’ve level grinded in your current playthrough. In games as we know them today, you leave your character to collect dust on your harddrive as you start a new journey with another.

What if you could trade or sell your leveled-up character to other players, and earn something from your hundreds of sunk hours? This is possible with NFTs. Game characters, in-game assets, armor, skins — anything made available as an NFT can be sold and traded between players. This creates an in-game economy that translates to real income.

The Remnants is an idle game built on Solana, where players send their characters on looting missions. Players can trade, buy and sell their characters and items that they find in the game.

Brand Loyalty & Customer Rewards

Imagine having your coffee shop punch-card on your phone as an NFT — each time you buy your morning cup, your NFT is updated to reflect the day’s purchase. Once you’ve bought your ten to get one free, you can send your NFT in exchange for the complimentary pick-me-up — or, you can send it to a friend, coworker, or family member and they can use it instead.

Take it one step further, where NFTs can be upgraded over time. You buy a cup of coffee every day for a year, become a gold member, netting you a 10% discount on every purchase. One day you wake up and decide to stop drinking coffee, cold turkey. You worked hard to earn that gold status, so instead of letting it sit unused, you trade it on an NFT marketplace and sell it for a few hundred dollars. You can always buy another if your caffeine addiction returns.

NFTs can be used in loyalty programs as well as customer rewards — as a new way of providing discounts, kickbacks, or simply enabling consumers to represent a brand. They are powerful marketing tools and over the next few years, we’ll see social media sites adorned with company-branded NFT profile pictures.

World-renowned fashion brand Vera Bradley has created NFTs featuring a limited-edition bag, which holders will redeem for a physical bag and early access to their new collection.

Utility Undiscovered

NFTs are in their infancy and we’ll continue to see utilities be uncovered in the coming months and years. We will likely see NFTs integrated into supply chains, legal proceedings, real estate, car maintenance records, and more. For now, it’s exciting to see the experimentation and breakthroughs from teams who see the potential in NFTs as a technological advancement.

About the Author

Lauren is the Founder of NFT Radar, one of the largest free communities dedicated to education & research for NFT projects on Solana, Ethereum & other ecosystems. NFT Radar is a great community for NFT newcomers: discord.gg/nftradar

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DISCLAIMER: Content in this article does not constitute financial advice. Cryptocurrencies are volatile assets. Always do your own research and invest at your own risk.

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