NFTs: Here to Stay (With or Without Blockchain)

Ever since a conversation with a German Bitcoin evangelist back in 2014 (!) where I learned about some of the radical ideas of the blockchain world, crypto has been a topic that has fascinated me. I kept up with the main developments in the space over the years, I was a financial journalist after all, but it was not until last year that I decided to take the space seriously, both as a creator and as a tech founder. Specifically, my interest has been captured by non-fungible tokens.

Much has been happening in the space, but the numbers don’t lie:

• The market went from 0 to $40 billion by end of 2021
• January 2022 started equally strong, with $7 billion in sales recorded

Eye-watering numbers for sure, which probably explains why the current landscape of NFT observers and users is divided between very vocal worshippers and haters.

As a cautious optimist on the potential of NFTs, I think both approaches fail. The former group fails to see that, indeed, the space is being held captive by the rampant fraud and speculation of many of its players, and ignoring the climate concerns that NFTs and other uses of the blockchain raise.

The haters, however, refuse to see the simple fact that creators are, indeed, finally able to monetize content through NFT sales. This is largely achieved by artists targeting fans and communities directly, often without having to play the algorithmic lottery of platforms like Facebook, YouTube or Instagram. That, surely, must be ruffling some feathers and may explain some of the hate.

That being said, we are just at the beginning. A jpeg image or an ebook being sold as an NFT is a rather static, primitive use of the blockchain or any of the amazing technologies available to us.

If the current evolution of NFTs stops at “I sell a digital item, you buy it”, then we are not adding much to what Amazon has been doing for 15 years. And, as many critics like to say, you do not need the blockchain for that.

That is why the concept of “NFT utility”, meaning leveraging the ability of the blockchain where those NFTs sit to act as a shared, trusted ledger of interactions between holders of a certain digital currency and related NFTs, will be key.

The “ledger + utility” piece will be key to the next evolution of NFTs. These utility features are, in fact, already being used for anything from playing crypto-enabled videogames to unlocking access to special communities to providing discounted lifetime access to sales of music or art by a specific artist. Utility tokens are also being used to engage in creative, collective storytelling exercises.

Will all these projects succeed? Absolutely not. But the seeds have been planted for new ways of giving value to so much amazing work done by writers, illustrators and other artists that I do not think NFTs will disappear, even if they end up evolving into something that is not intrinsically tied to the blockchain.

Storya’s NFT Plans

The implementation of an NFT marketplace on the Storya platform in the coming months has two primary goals resulting from the above:

1. Help authors monetize. This has always been a priority for Storya, and NFTs will be just another tool that creators on Storya can use if they so wish.

2. Fill the gap: the tech skills gap is something that plagued the old creator economy platform and Storya is built to fix that. We will do this for NFTs by allowing creators to ignore a lot of the complexities inherent to the “minting” of these tokens (e.g. understanding differences between tokens, selecting which blockchain to use, what features to include in a smart contract). Through Storya, creators will be able to dip their toes in NFTs (and specifically on the WAX platform) with minimal knowledge at first, then choose for themselves if they wish to build all the technical knowledge required to help them do more complex NFT projects.

And, given Storya’s emphasis on collaboration, we will also work directly with ambitious creators that want to use NFTs to help them build the NFT projects that work for their specific storytelling experiences.

All in all, despite a lot of the negativity, NFTs are here to stay. And, as platforms offering Metaverse experiences multiply and continue to rely on blockchain-related technologies to power their marketplaces and events, NFTs will continue to soar. Storya is already working on testing what the Metaverse will mean for storytellers, but the dream is to see static storytelling experiences (an eBook, for example) transformed into an engaging, interactive “experience” within the Metaverse. The possibilities are endless. Topic for another post!