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Digital Asset Summit 2021, New York City — The non-fungible tokens (NFT) craze has taken the world by storm. In recent months, certain NFTs have sold for $69 million, along with their marketplaces such as OpenSea reporting monthly trading volumes of over $3 billion.
Skeptics question why someone would pay a large sum of money for what appears to be a digitized image, but Ikigai Asset Management Founder Travis Kling described holding the asset similar to “owning a layer of innovation” during a panel at the Digital Asset Summit Tuesday.
“If you’re heading in that direction, where people are spending more and more time in the digital world, then you’re going to start somewhere [and that’s with NFTs],” Kling said.
In the session, featuring Horizon Kinetics’ Peter Doyle and Grayscale’s David Grider, panelists touched on the future of the asset class as well, discussing its potential capabilities.
Matt Hougan, Chief Investment Officer of Bitwise Asset Management, said NFTs are far more than just “digital rocks”. They can revolutionize digital property rights. “As goofy as [buying] $3 million for a digital rock may seem, these are just the first instantiation of digital property rights,” he said.
Although NFT use cases are most commonly associated with the arts and entertainment industries, the same framework can transfer to healthcare as well. Using NFTs via a decentralized ledger and blockchain networks, holders can track health data like pharmaceutical drugs and blood donations, making tracking medical records potentially faster and more efficient.
“[NFTs] are the beginning of something that I think is highly unlikely to go away. In the future, I believe it’s going to be a major part of everybody’s life,” Kling said.