There are many people who like to collect antique or unique pieces of art. That piece may be a sculpture, a painting, an artefact, a historic product or any other valuable item. But today the world is seeing the emergence of a new type of item. Until now all the items in the world used to be physical, but with the emergence of the internet and digitalisation, we are seeing a lot of digital items. Music, videos, photos, images, and much more. All these items have no physical existence. They only exist digitally. With the presence of billions of digital items, there can be many such digital items with unique values attached to them just like physical collectable items. So how can somebody collect or buy a digital piece of art? The answer lies in a relatively new thing – The Non Fungible Token!
What Are NFTs?
An NFT of Non Fungible Token is a token that represents something that is unique and cannot be replaced with anything else. The NFTs work in the same way as crypto-currency. There are records that show who owns what and are stored on a shared ledger called the blockchain. The ledger is maintained by thousands of computers worldwide and therefore cannot be forged. These NFTs help us to buy digital assets as digital assets cannot be bought like normal products.
Why can’t digital assets be bought like normal items?
It is difficult to own digital assets because unlike a physical thing, any digital thing can be very easily copied and duplicated and thus millions of copies of anything can exist. For something to be bought, it needs to be something that is unique and not readily available without money. But digital assets like photos or videos are easily available as anybody can copy, download and/or share them with anybody. Therefore to sell digital assets it is important to make them unique.
How NFTs Help?
As mentioned earlier in this article, NFT records are maintained on Blockchain technology and are therefore unique. What we can do is generate an NFT for a digital asset like an image, gif, video, etc. This gives that digital asset non replaceable quality as now its identity is represented by an NFT. Later on, we can buy and sell that NFT as a certificate of owning that particular digital asset.
