NFTs Reimagined
When NFTs are first created, they are just code that prove it's "non-fungibility", that it's unique, and nobody can copies it (those who copies the exact information is non-verifiable). It's a (unique) object containing some metadata. Most NFTs looks like cards, though, with an image, a title, and some other information. It makes sense to first sell art and photography with NFTs. This is the first step: "Can we prove its non-fungibility?"
As NFT sphere matures, innovative usage emerges. People starts asking more questions: "how can I use this in ____ sector?" Fill in the blank with music, gaming, etc. Overall, it's still on-chain, everything is still inside the computer, but applied to other spheres.
Then, people starts thinking, "how can we link NFTs to physical object?" Now, we start reimagining things. NFTs can't really link per se to a physical object. We need to make the link ourselves, via the linker (a person, usually), and ensures others to trust us that their NFT is linked to a physical object. In the future, though, this may be fulfilled via a smart contract, I don't know.
An example is Raiz Vertical Farming. In the past, you buy a share of the company and earn when the company decide to pay share. Nowadays, you can buy a share of Raiz, by buying an NFT. Each NFT represents a slot in the Raiz. Buying an NFT represents that slot is yours. It's also a way to fund Raiz for its vertical farming mission. If Raiz doesn't have enough money to do so, aside from applying for funds and finding investors, you could buy a slot and take care of it. Many people buying a huge amount of NFT, even if each bought only one, results in lots of funds for Raiz. In the future, Raiz also use NFTs for subscription on vegetable deliveries.
Open Forest Protocol (OFP), on the other hand, uses NFTs as representations of forestation projects. They use NFTs to store information on the blockchain, so anyone could view transparently what they're doing, when transparency is important. People could watch how many trees grow by watching the blockchain information.
That's just a few. Imagine land estates and supermarkets and stores linking their objects to NFT. When you buy an object, it's a transfer of NFT from the store owner (or whoever previously owns it) to you. How the physical part will be fulfilled, though, is unknown. Do you send it? Do someone else come over, knock on your door, and say, "hey, you don't own that anymore, please transfer it to its new owner"? We don't know.
Maybe not every single object will be minted as NFT. Land and property, it sounds right. It requires proof that it's owned by someone. Others, especially usable objects, requires "burning" of NFT each time it's being used, which just doesn't sounds right minting as NFTs. Furthermore, if every single object in your house has an NFT, it'll be similar to what you encounter in games: too much objects. (In games, OOP isn't the best way to design games, as there are too much objects to render; Data-Oriented Design is. Imagine you have a million NFTs on your wallet: you'd either flood your wallet, or you'd take up a lot of the space on the validator's hard disk).
Conclusion
Just because NFTs stay within the network doesn't mean it can't link to real-life objects. We just have to rethink what NFT represents, and what we're trying to achieve with blockchain and NFTs with our actual problem, hence NFT will find its way to how it can be used. Raiz and OFP are just two: we can do more!
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