A new mania is opening the doors of business. The blockchain, this famous encrypted protocol based on distributed ledgers over a peer to peer network, that make transactions totally disintermediated while ensuring their safety, immutability, and uniqueness is now, after the bitcoin, at the heart of the tokenization revolution.
Assets in their diversity are being tokenized, and traded on blockchain-based platforms.
Two of these tokens are particularly surfacing as bringing a new paradigm: the NFT (for Non Fungible Tokens) and the STO (for Security Token Offering).
Today, we will focus first on what is making the news: the NFTs.
Non Fungible Tokens relate to those tokens that cannot be exchangeable with other assets as bitcoins do.
The NFTs became on the cover page of all the media including the mainstream since the sale at auction by Christie’s of the first digital artwork NFT, “Everydays: The First 5000days, authored by Mike Winkelmann (well known as Beep) for $69.3 million. This has been perceived as a huge amount for a computer-made artwork.
The blockchain, thanks to its crypto-basics offers all the mathematical sophisticated tools, in terms of algorithms and encryption, to ensure that the piece of digital asset is original, unique, and authentic.
Artworks for instance are tokenized as a unique or a fractional ownership, and the NFT is akin to a virtual deed.
Yet, and to make it short, the Non-Fungible Tokens while actually embracing all type of assets regardless to their nature, the sight is more focused on artworks to see whether the NFTs are going to out pass the traditional art perception of scarcity, uniqueness, and value or will they be no more than a hype that will no longer attract investors’ appetite over time.
I am of the belief that NFTs are here to last and very likely will fuel the emergence of a generation of what I would name it ‘crypto-artists’ empowered by the millennium generation, itself being the crypto generation that will shape the future.
History will not deny my assumption. Remember the enthusiasm that followed the e-commerce startups at its outset. All of them were listed through IPOs that made their owners very rich but factually they recorded year after year abyssal losses. Among them, a startup named Amazon.
After the Internet bubble no one would have continue to bet a dollar in these startups. Game over indeed but not for all.
The idea, and the business model of e-commerce proved to be innovative, coherent, and a key enabler of our lifestyle. The booming of e-commerce since the Covid 19 pandemic reinforces this idea.
That’s our point.
The NFTs whatever will happen to the market behavior, rationally and emotionally, will shape the future of Art (among other assets) because not only they comply with all the ingredients that make traditional art valuable – scarcity, uniqueness, authenticity – but also because they conciliate the feature that make the traditional art a secular investment: uniqueness ownership with the ‘use and sharing’ of the artwork through its editions rendered through 2D, 3D, augmented reality, virtual reality which have proven to be the key driver of today’s mindset.
In addition, I would say that there’s no other choice but to believe that investing in digital artworks, mainly now at its infancy stage, is the best option to qualify for high returns, and enjoy emotion with this new style of art that translates into reality, more than with the traditional art, the deep feelings, the dreams, and the exuberance that our emotion can convey.
And it’s not going to be a vain investment.
Our future is irreversibly a digital world, shaped by blockchain, artificial intelligence, Internet of Things, quantum computing, cloud computing, big data, mobile 5.0 for mentioning the few technological breakthroughs that are revolutionizing our world and lead it to the Industry 4.0, and the Society 5.0.
At MIA Consultancy, we are working in this area since a while with our clients mainly in Switzerland, France, and Japan to anticipate these trends, designing for them a bespoken strategy to successfully enter this market, help them to achieve an effective implementation of their blockchain-based trading platform, and introduced external strategic partners, and investors.
Follow us at www.miaconsultancy.com
