NFTs: Use cases beyond Digital Art

Last time we were talking about what is an NFT and gave examples of a few utilities. Many people think that the only use cases of NFTs are digital art and collectible spheres. Besides this, there are many other utilities for NFTs and we are going to talk about them today. Let’s dive into it:

1. Creative industries (Music, Art, Films)

NFTs and art has been related since the very beginning, not just in terms of verifying ownership of digital art, but also in terms of giving back the power to artists in the process of selling their art, especially those which are not yet quite famous and are trying to make a living of it. With blockchain technology, NFTs provide a way for the artist to directly engage with its fanbase and offer the art without any intermediaries.

Basically, artists can build entire economies or ecosystems around their fans directly, offering them not just the art represented through a token but also embedding within the token other forms of utility which are deemed valuable by the community and enhance engagement, such as exclusivity rights for art displays or access to the artist itself for instance.

In other sectors such as music and film, NFTs give musicians and film makers the opportunity to directly monetise the copyrights of their material through royalties as well as use them as mechanisms to engage their fanbase with exclusive items, rewards or experiences for their token holders as previously described.

If you wanna get more into it, check this article Music NFT: How NFTs Can Transform the Music Industry

2. Sports

In Sports, NFTs can be very useful. We all know that fake tickets and fake merchandise is quite common. With NFTs we could avoid the reselling of tickets by checking the real and only owner in the blockchain. Also, we could use it to give exclusive discounts and offers to holders.

On the other hand, athletes are also creating their own NFTs collection to represent themselves, with its value tied to the success or failure of their sporting career. The tokenisation of athletes gives another dimension to monetise their successes, whilst sharing their success with their token holders.

To bring another example, even players are starting they kind of “metaverse” like Stephen Curry with his Curryverse. And lately we have Kun Agüero with his Kuniverse. Check it out!

1. Gaming and Esports

Video games and its items have about a total market value of $200 billion. With all this, NFTs are opening new doors for players to monetise off this incredibly market, through new games created on the blockchain. With the blockchain players can now personally own their in-game assets and generate profits by selling them on secondary NFT markets.

Think about kids who pay lot of money for a Fortnite’s skin, they don’t own it. With this new technology every item/asset/skin that you buy in game, you own it so you can resell it! That’s game changing. Check this article to get another view on this industry!

4. Real Estate

With transfer of ownership of real estate being predominantly a lengthy and paper-driven process, across many countries globally, NFTs can provide a solution to ease transfer of ownership, through the tokenisation of real estate as NFTs. As was mentioned with art, NFTs also facilitate the financing of real estate, with these largely increasing the liquidity capabilities of this asset class to a borderless market.

With blockchain technology you could tokenise a $ 1 million house, let’s say in 100 tokens. If anyone wants to buy a part of that house they can buy 1 token for $ 10 000 and then he would own 1% of that house. If that house is rented that person would get 1% of the monthly income.

There are a few companies that offer this products and honestly, it is going to explode sooner than later. To bring an example, Reental is a Spanish company that works in this sector. They have tokenised buildings across Spain and offer the possibility to invest in those buildings with just 100 dollars if you can’t afford more.

Check their page in order to understand it better if you want but this sector is going mainstream and is gonna provide many people a new way of investing.

5. Licenses and Certifications

NFTs can be used to provide an easier approach for the verification of any type of license or certificate. Seen as a revolutionary concept, educational certificates may be issued through the blockchain, using NFTs, tailored to a specific individual’s credentials, which in turn may be easily accessed and trusted by any other 3rd party institution needing this information, without the added resources needed to search for records and verify their authenticity. If a student receives its degree’s title, anyone could corroborate it is real and that the university did send it so its valid. This way we could avoid fake certificates.

Many universities are already using NFTs for credentialing. For example, Duke University provided certificates through NFT for its Master of Engineering in Financial Technology degree. MIT was one of the first institutes to give virtual credentials using NFTs. NFTs, which contain unique information about student performances, can act as academic tokens after students graduate.

Issuing the degree certificates and other achievement records is mainly a manual process in colleges and universities. It is always a huge problem to verify the authenticity of these critical documents. Universities and educational institutions of all types are looking for solutions to confirm and authenticate the credentials provided.

If they are stored on the blockchain, as NFTs, it becomes easy to verify their originality. It makes it logical to have a verified digital certificate that cannot be tampered with. Employers may use the blockchain to check qualifications and academic records without relying on a third party. Simply submit a duplicate of the document to a portal, where the fingerprint is compared to the original, and the document’s integrity is validated.

6. Tickets and exclusive community clubs

The ticketing world is on its way to see significant adoption of NFTs, with the capability of minimising the very real issue of ticket fraud or fake tickets and facilitate event organisers and promoters by lowering distribution and other upfront costs of event tickets.

Museums are a perfect use-case for such a scenario, whereby tickets can be tokenised and sold to customers digitally. Through the use of the blockchain, museums have a reliable way to verify the exact amount, price and transaction properties of all their tickets, including to whom the ticket is sold.

This can prove to be highly beneficial in preventing occurrences of fake ticket use and scams, as well as minimising fraud through the ability to monitor and verify any exchanges made for a ticket on the secondary market, thus ensuring a greater level of trust and transparency with customers. Moreover, NFTs can create community clubs with NFT holders benefitting from exclusive access to an event, person or experience. Such a use-case could lead to ownership of certain NFTs being construed as status symbols and deriving intangible value from that.

With all the information exposed before, you should now have a better understanding of what are the real utilities of NFTs and how it is gonna affect our lives. I really hope you liked and learnt a bit about NFTs. That is all for today.