Some say that 2021 will be the year of NFTs.
Sure enough, 2020 was the year of DeFi, while 2019 was the year of stablecoins, dominated by the news of Libra’s launch. 2017 and 2018 were the years of ICOs and smart contracts.
Will this time around be the turn of Non Fungible Tokens (NFTs)?
This is what the CEO of Ngrave, Ruben Merre, claims on LinkedIn, where he posted a long article supporting this hypothesis.
The 2021 of NFTs, from gaming to collectables
The key point of the argument is the use of NFTs in two particular areas: gaming and collectables.
First of all, NFTs have already started to make their way into the online gaming sector in 2020, with blockchain-based game developers starting to attract venture capital due to the very long lifecycles of their products, and above all their ability to offer truly innovative monetization models.
This is probably the sector where the spread of NFTs is already the widest, especially for those games that also include collectables, such as the iconic CryptoKitties.
The other hot sector for this technology is precisely collectables, and even in this case, several similar projects have already been launched in 2020, often integrated with a good level of gamification.
In particular, a number of so-called ‘virtual worlds’ projects have literally exploded in 2020, and have demonstrated their ability to grow well.
But from this point of view, there is still a lot to be done, for example in the field of collectable cards, such as Pokémon cards, stamps, books, posters, and everything related to valuable collectables.
In fact, as Merre says, NFTs can represent very well what is unique and rare in the world, in a way that is not only innovative but above all immutable and not falsifiable. Moreover, they are transferable, and their possession is uniquely certifiable, without any doubt.
In fact, NFTs already achieved their first major success in November 2017 thanks to the CryptoKitties, but their potential actually still appears largely unexplored.
For example, other areas where they could spread a lot are art, document tokenization, or the governance tokens in the NFT sector.
Although it is very difficult to imagine how this sector will evolve in 2021, it is nevertheless plausible that it could expand further, perhaps well beyond its current boundaries.
