What lies beyond Art and Gaming NFTs?

Unless one has hit the snooze button on social media channels, we all would have caught snippets floating about Art NFTs and Gaming NFTs over the past few months. A few of them were bought and then sold for millions!

But for the uninitiated – What are NFTs?

Bored Apes NFT collection

NFTs or non-fungible tokens are digital assets that denote ownership of any real-world object – could be creative work like art, music, comic, tweet. Yes, even a tweet.

Jack Dorsey actually sold his first tweet as an NFT for over $2.9 million!

Now for an example of an art work that went for millions. The digital artist, Mike Winkelmann, better known as Beeple, sold his artwork – The First 5000 days for …

$69 MILLION.

But for those who aren’t interested in such applications of NFTs, what else can the token offer in the real-world? Here’s a rundown on what may be coming your way:

1. Identity verification – NFTs can be utilized as identity proofs as these transactions get validated by multiple nodes on the blockchain and are immutable. e.g.- Babies can be issued NFT Birth Certificates by healthcare providers.

2. Sensitive Medical Information – Storage of sensitive medical information in the form of patent specific NFTs can help reduce paperwork for hospitals and ensure that accurate data regarding the patients reaches the healthcare providers. Such NFTs will act as a lifelong trail of medical ailments and allergies and provide a holistic view into the person’s medical history all at one place, while maintaining patient confidentiality.

3. Academic Certificates – Certificates on paper would soon be a thing of the past as NFTs start recording academic merit for students. Verification and ease-of-access would help students in situations where they have to transfer from one university to another or mark their academic prowess for a particular job application.

4. Data NFTs – With the onset of Web 3.0, talk of Ownership Economy has taken over. In Web 2.0, Big Tech got complete access and control over user data that was later monetized for profits. But with Data NFTs, users can actually own and monetize the data that they create on Web3 by their presence, participation or labour and can decide to sell or lease it out to big corporations for a specific time period.

5. Safeguarding against Counterfeit products – NFTs can help in the supply and logistics chain by showcasing the journey of a product from the initial manufacturing stages to sitting on the shelf of a superstore. It validates the authenticity of the product and also gives the user insights into the supply chain of the particular product.

The applications are wide-reaching and hope the Governments regulates the space keeping in mind the various use-cases that NFTs can generate.