Скачать или смотреть The Rise of NFTs and What It Means for Marketers

Ifyou’ve been online these days, you’ve probably come across some incessant buzz about something called non-fungible tokens (NFTs). Lindsay Lohan and YouTuber Logan Paul both created some sort of digital collectibles based on NFTs; Post Malone teamed up with a startup called Fyooz to launch a celebrity beer pong league using NFTs; and the first NFT artwork just went on sale at major auction house Christie’s.
So what exactly is a NFT? How do they work? Why are they suddenly everywhere? Looking beyond the intensifying hype and investment frenzy, is there something about NFTs that may actually be useful for brand marketing in the long run?
NFT 101
Non-fungible tokens are a special type of cryptographic token that represents a unique digital asset. It is based on blockchain technology and works similar to bitcoin (and other cryptocurrencies), with networked computers racing each other to solve complex mathematical functions to encrypt a set of data and generate a private cryptographic key, except that they are non-fungible, meaning that the tokens are not mutually interchangeable.
Think about it this way: if bitcoin tokens are like blockchain-verified dollar bills, then NFTs are like blockchain-verified artworks. No one cares which particular five dollar bill they own, since all five dollar bills hold the same value and are therefore interchangeable, but we’d sure care which particular piece of artwork we own, since different artwork has drastically different value, both monetarily and artistically. So, during the encryption process, each NFT is assigned a digital hash that distinguishes it from every other NFT of its kind. They are like snowflakes, each one unique in its own way.
NFTs have been around since at least June 2017 when CryptoPunks, a collection for 10,000 unique digital characters, launched on Ethereum¹, but CryptoKitties, a virtual cat trading game, was the first project that made NFTs widely known among the crypto crowd when it went viral later that year. Since then, people have spent $174 million on NFTs. OpenSea, an NFT marketplace, has this detailed chronicle of NFT development if you wish to dive into its short yet storied history.
The brilliant thing about NFTs is that they turn the most popular use of blockchain on its head and use the cryptographic ledgers not for logging transactions, but for registering a particular piece of digital assets to a particular cryptographic token. NFTs are often created to represent image files in various formats (jpeg, gif, etc.), although they can also be attached to tweets, MP3s, or any other type of digital file. With NFTs, people can own and trade digital assets, which are typically, by design, easily copyable and widely shareable.
In a way, NFTs are like the serial numbers that a luxury brand would issue for each of their products to verify their authenticity². Except in the case of NFTs, there’s no central authority (aka, the luxury brands) issuing those serial numbers, just like there’s no central bank issuing new bitcoins. Instead, most NFTs in circulation today are built on Ethereum, and each NFT is created to represent a particular piece of digital asset and verified by the network. When people sell and buy NFTs, their unique identifier gets encrypted into the token to denote ownership. This is then encrypted and distributed throughout the entire network, meaning that everyone with access to the network can see the ownership information, but can’t access the NFTs without the cryptographic key that the owner has.

For brand marketers, the rise of NFTs brings exciting new possibilities in the realms of digital goods, digital media distribution, and access management. Let’s look at the impact NFTs have on each of these domains one by one.
Creating Scarcity and Value for Digital Goods
Digital goods have been around for a while and are especially popular in video games. Fortnite, a free-to-play game, generated $1.8 billion in revenue in 2019, a big portion of which came from selling in-game items. Yet digital goods have not been seen as carrying much value to collectors because they can be easily copied, until now.
In short, NFTs make digital collectibles possible. In a digital world of abundance, where copies are easily created and distributed, NFTs make it possible to create digital scarcity. And scarcity, as the economic principle goes, creates value. An NFT also makes digital goods easily tradable, which, in turn, makes them more likely to accumulate value through trading. Interestingly, because the chain of ownership is also visible to everyone in the network, the value of NFTs may change depending on who previously owned them.