NFTs for Dummies
Top insights from key opinion leaders every week
Episode #33. Hi there! I'm Gilles, repeat entrepreneur and author of The Timestamp. A few months ago, I remember a friend of mine who asked me what I was thinking about NFTs. It was the first time I heard about NFTs… and I was not sure what to answer. Today, I feel lucky that a selected panel of experts shared their notes with me on NFTs. This special edition will cover what I learnt from them.
Discover this week 5 summaries including 2 in French :
What is an NFT? from the podcast Invest Like The Best,
🇫🇷 Jetons NFT un marché en pleine explosion curated by Marie-Anne decaux
NFT and a thousand true fans curated by Patrick Kervern & Christian Riedi,
Memes for sale curated by Aurore Lanchart,
🇫🇷 NFTs pour quoi faire? curated by Patrick Kervern.
Last week's episode was a hit, I hope you will enjoy reading (and sharing) this special episode as well!
#1 What is an NFT?
Jesse Walden, a Primer on NFTs interviewed on March 23rd 2021 in the Podcast ‘Invest like the best’ with Patrick O’Shaughnessy (listen on Apple Podcast click here).
NFT is a file type (technically speaking it is a token) that lives on the blockchain.
👉 enables to own digital media on the blockchain like you can own a Bitcoin.
‘Non-Fungible’ means making 1 asset be uniquely owned by 1 individual.
NFT is a new way of distributing media vs social media platforms:
👉 it becomes easier to know to which creators the royalties should be paid to (disintermediation).
NFTs reinforce social status related to owning the original creation:
👉creators get more value for highly shared assets thanks to super fans wanting to own
NFT creates property and value in the digital world:
👉 this opens the way to embed NFT creation into existing creators’ platforms (like Substack or Twitter).
Creators’ economy evolves towards an Ownership economy.
With NFTs, “Everyone will become an investor” as well.
Jesse Walden is the founder of Variant, an early-stage venture firm investing in crypto networks and platforms building the ownership economy.
#2 Un marché en pleine explosion 🇫🇷
Les jetons NFT (jetons non fongibles), un marché en pleine explosion published in Cryptonews.com on February 12th 2021 (source article in French click here) and curated by Marie-Anne Decaux.
📈 Le marché des NFTs estimé à 30M$ en 2017 et 1,3Md$ aujourd'hui (Février 2021).
💸 Art numérique, objets de collection, gaming et finance décentralisée sont aujourd'hui les principaux domaines d'application, mais les développements pourraient s’accélérer, soutenus par des polices d’assurance permettant de sécuriser les contrats.
Comment from a friend of The Timestamp: "By the end of the month of August 2021, OpenSea (the largest marketplace for NFTs) reported over $3 billion in trading volume for the first time ever. The company also reported over $322 million in daily volume on August 29th, 2021, recording yet another milestone." Thank you Antoine Bonavita for curating these more recent figures.
Marie-Anne Decaux, works at Bayard Presse, x-Co-founder at Hello Marcel. Passionnée par la transformation des médias : évolution des supports et modèles économiques.
#3 NFTs and a thousand true fans
NFTs and a thousand true fans published on February 27th 2021 in the blog from a16z (source article click here)and curated by Christian Riedi.
1️⃣0️⃣0️⃣0️⃣ Kevin Kelly wrote in 2008 that a creator does not need millions of fans to make a living. 1000 true fans are enough. For example, “on Substack, 1,000 newsletter subscribers paying $10/month nets over $100K/year to the writer.”
The news is that the internet is trending back to Kelly’s vision: creators directly to fans, with social platforms capturing most of the value by playing the intermediaries.
Crypto and specifically NFTs can accelerate the trend of creators monetizing directly with their fans. Social platforms will continue to be useful for building audiences (although these too should probably be replaced with superior decentralized alternatives), but creators can increasingly rely on other methods including NFTs and crypto-enabled economies to make money.
NFTs (non-fungible tokens) are unique pieces of media with blockchain-based records. For creators, NFTs mean to give the power back to creators and users lowering intermediary fees with more pricing and revenue granularity to adapt to user enthusiasm.
NFTs are blockchain-based records that uniquely represent pieces of media. The media can be anything digital, including art, videos, music, gifs, games, text, memes, and code. NFTs contain highly trustworthy documentation of their history and origin and can have code attached to do almost anything programmers dream up (eg: ensures that the original creator receives royalties from secondary sales).
The future “Modern video games like Fortnite contain sophisticated economies that mix fungible tokens like V-Bucks with NFTs/virtual goods like skins. Someday every internet community might have its own micro-economy, including NFTs and fungible tokens that users can use, own, and collect.”
Christian Riedi, Business Angel & Writer at his newsletter Le Wrap Up 🇫🇷. x-Directeur Développement @TF1 with 15 year experience in media. You should check his newsletter as well if you like curation.
#4 Memes for sale
Memes for sale published in TechCrunch on March 9th 2021 (source article click here)and curated by Aurore Lanchart.
Some iconic memes are hosted on booming new crypto art and collectibles platform Foundation, which launched in February and has already hosted $6 million in sales of over 1,000 NFTs.
The original memes are made original by the act of them being minted on the blockchain by the original artists.
Memes should be considered as internet art.
Aurore Lanchart, Head of Care at Clind, part of the startup ecosystem for 13 years, Aurore has been passionate about customer service and learning. In her spare time, she teaches classes at Lion (the school for Startup employees) and Iconoclass.
#5 NFTs pour quoi faire? 🇫🇷
NFTs need an audience: Utility, consumption and building new worlds published on Jarrod Dicker’s blog on March 8th 2021 (source article click here)and curated by Patrick Kervern.
En se concentrant sur les ‘marketplaces’, les transactions et les propriétaires, un système somme toutes très centralisé, les NFT oublient l’utilisateur et l’expérience utilisateur. Ce faisant, ce premier écosystème oublie sa vocation “décentralisée”.
Les NFT ne décolleront auprès du grand public que si l'on crée une communauté d’usage, de remix, et de consommation autour d’eux. En deux mots, faire évoluer leur perception d’ "asset digital" à "phénomène culturel."
Il faut également penser à mettre en scène les propriétaires de NFT, pourquoi (par exemple) ne pas élargir la possibilité à plusieurs propriétaires décentralisés d'acquérir des NFT via les DAO (Autonomous Decentralised Organizations).
Patrick Kervern, Founder at UMANZ. Sense-Maker & Curiosity expert. You can also subscribe to his newsletter 🇫🇷 on Substack here.
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