A few hours ago the creator of Zcash, Zooko, published a series of posts on Twitter talking about the concept of NFTs – Non Fungible Tokens – with a tone that actually seems rather critical.
An NFT for every web page. An NFT for every sentence. An NFT for Michael Huemer's theory of epistemology. An NFT for every NFT, issued by someone else, adversarial to the person who issued the original NFT.
— zookoⓩ🛡 (@zooko) March 21, 2021
In his tweets, Zooko lists a number of possible applications for NFTs, at the limit of the real, saying that every website, every sentence, every concept or even every person could have its own NFT.
Certainly, the use cases for NFTs are endless, so much so that one might think of creating an ad hoc non-fungible token for each person in which they could invest according to their merits, awards or year-end tax returns.
I especially like the part about how you can create and use an NFT to discover valuations for a thing that you don't own, have no rights to, and the legitimate owner strenuously wants to *prevent* you from being able to do that. But they can't. That's interesting.
— zookoⓩ🛡 (@zooko) March 21, 2021
Zooko goes further, explaining that it is possible to create an NFT for everything and that people are creating non-fungible tokens even of objects and artworks they don’t actually own or copyright. At the moment, although there might be problems and legal actions in the future, everyone is tokenizing everything, such as Michelangelo’s “The Creation of Adam”, Homer Pepe or Pokemon cards, all without regard to any copyright rules.
NFT, the concept that is the latest bubble
So, on the one hand, NFTs make it possible to tokenize anything, but on the other, it is perhaps also the latest bubble, as Beeple himself explained in an interview for Fox News today.
A bubble that would be related to prices and absurd applications, of course, but certainly not to the technology, which is here to stay and could really change every rule in the world of art and collectibles.
In fact, what Zooko is perhaps trying to say with his series of tweets is precisely this: although it is true that NFTs have unlimited potential, the bubble of the moment is getting to the point of exaggeration, especially if we think that it would seem that an original Banksy has been destroyed and then tokenized and sold as NFT.
