NFTs are non-fungible tokens, a type of token that represents something unique, like a painting, music, or book. While there are ways for you to get the contents of the token without having purchased it, only one person, or a set of people, owns it, and you can sell them if you get sick in the future.
fungibility
Fungibility is the ability of something to be replaceable. A coin, for example, is, in essence, fungible, because they can be exchanged with each other, and each of them will have the same value and price, representing the same thing. The fungibility is, in essence, that.
A non-fungible thing is a unique thing, or, in certain cases, limited. If you sell Monalisa, for example, you won't be able to buy another one like it, unless you buy the original back. Likewise, an original Super Mario Bros game for the NES has a very limited quantity, and historical value, if you sell your game, you might even receive a similar one, but it won't have exactly the same properties, it's not something replaceable.
Now we can bring it to the world of cryptocurrencies. Fungible tokens are tokens created to be used as currencies, such as Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin, among others, while non-fungible tokens represent things that cannot be easily replaceable, such as digital art, a game, a movie, a song , etc. Each unit of these tokens is considered an individual asset, and cannot be simply replaced.
The NFT market
Technology is constantly advancing whether we like it or not. Ten thousand years ago, no one would dare to imagine that one day human beings would be able to create such realistic designs that they could perfectly represent human emotions. Today a similar evolution that we have is the NFT. NFTs, by having an intelligent contract based on blockchains, as well as specific details of each one that prevent you from simply copying their data to have an equal copy, end up following a logic similar to the real world, where you can even print a photo of Monalisa and put it in your living room, but she will never be the real Monalisa.
With NFT's, an artist can publish an original work that only has a certain number of copies, like this pixel art of the astronaut from Among Us that I made and put up for sale on OpenSea , define in the contract a certain percentage of the transactions as royalties about art and even evading state control and regulation of the market, since, as transactions are defined by blockchain contracts, it is possible to know exactly who created that token and all the way that the token took to reach your hands without not even be an art expert.
Although not a traditional form, NFTs are becoming popular with virtual artists both because they can maintain credits for the work and because they are much more scalable than street sales and the like, as well as allowing enormous control over the units sold.
Imagine how innovative this is: you can have, for example, a game store whose license is an NFT, or even the game itself, and resell the games after you get tired of playing them, saving your money. You can buy an NFT movie from your favorite creator, and keep it in your account, or resell it if you don't want to watch it anymore. You can turn concert tickets into NFTs, and so on. The applications are endless, you just have to have your imagination.
What can we turn into NFT?
We can turn almost anything into NFT. A text, a movie, a book, a dataset, even if you could transfer your consciousness to a computer you could NFT it.
For this reason there are games that transform in-game items into NFTs, NFT avatar stores, among many others. For anything you want, there is an NFT.
Some NFT Markets
Even though NFTs only emerged around 2017, there are already well-formed markets for buying and selling tokens. Some of the most famous markets are:
NFT based games
There are several games based on NFTs, which can render game items to players and these items can be freely traded between them. Some of the titles available are Plants vs Undead and Axie Infinity . Although it's a new sport, it's already quite popular, and you can have a lot of fun.
Other sales modalities
The Cos.TV , despite its many faults, was one of the streaming video companies saw potential in NFTs, and lets you create a NFT from a video and its sale by the platform crypto (COS).
Epic Games has already announced that it will not present barriers to creating and selling NFT products within games on the platform, as long as the developers act transparently , which can be a good idea if you want to venture into the world of development. games, other than that soon we may have famous games running on top of NFTs on the platform.
The BitClout social network tokenizes your posts on social networks, and the more famous you are, the more tokens you earn. It's an interesting, albeit confusing, way to monetize the social network, as some tokens are fungible and some are not (personally, I don't understand this social network, but that's ok, anyone who wants to can venture there).
Reddit is also entering the NFT market , so in the future you may have a Reddit NFT platform. Not much is known about this at the moment, but it is speculated that it will be related to the platform's Community Points.
There are also several projects that sell NFTs out there, such as Cryptorastas and Frogverse , which sell collectible sets of NFTs with a high degree of exclusivity.
So, were you interested in the market? Put your opinion there in the comments.