If you’re wondering what the hell this NF-Tee craze is all about, you’re likely not alone, and if you came looking for answers, you’ve come to the right place.
NFT stands for „non-fungible token” and what this essentially means is that that one picture of a cat you saw selling for hundreds of thousands of dollars somewhere online, is unique and irreplaceable, at least on the blockchain.
This non-fungibility trait reflects in the fact that if you trade a singular Bitcoin for a singular Bitcoin, you end up with the same thing, whereas an NFT is more akin to a baseball rookie card, where the values vary from token to token, and they’re usually dictated by the hype surrounding the said token.
So to start things off, Ether is a cryptocurrency on the Ethereum blockchain and is what is usually traded for NFTs. A blockchain is a kind of like a digital ledger that stores information in spaces commonly known as blocks, which are all added to a structure known as a chain once each block is filled up completely.
What this technology essentially allows is to cut the middleman, the banks, from the process of acquiring your money, and their structure makes them innately more secure than banks, and they’re fully detached from a country’s standard currency.
What makes Ethereum stand out among other, numerous blockchains, is the fact that they also allow for the creation and storing of these digital tokens, which you’ve often heard are called NFTs.
NFTs creep into the physical realm
As long as it’s digital, and NFT can be almost anything, ranging from a JPEG of a cat in a cute outfit to a fully fleshed-out animation or an audiovisual experience, this is exactly what’s pushing this booming market forward.
However, this doesn’t mean you can just go online, right-click save an NFT, and start rolling in money, as NFT’s are somewhat of a certificate of authenticity more than the actual artwork itself, and what you’re paying for is practically a receipt for an artwork showing that you own the original.
Since blockchain technology has evolved to the point where even physical properties have been sold as NFTs, there’s no telling how infinite the applications of it are, and it’s infinitely more secure than any sort of transaction you could do elsewhere.
However, not everyone has succeeded in selling NFTs, especially if they jumped on the hype train without actually understanding how to sell the product, which is shown by a failed auction for a duplex NFT, where a man created a digital rendering of a house and tried to sell it on the ETH marketplace, offering the physical house as an added bonus, and it somehow fetched 0 bids.