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William Quigley – Tether co-founder – is calling it right now that almost the entirety of consumer products in 10 years will be getting their digital versions. A pretty bold statement to say the least, though one can’t deny the fact that non-fungible tokens’ (NFT) popularity has surged this year and it may well seem that these digital pieces will be making a huge impact in the world of crypto.
He mentioned it in a recent interview where he said that all consumer products except for edible ones will be getting these so-called “digital twins” in the next decade. This, of course, can be made possible through NFTs.
For the uninitiated, these NFTs are collectibles that are created virtually and utilize the same technology as cryptocurrencies like bitcoin (BTC) to create a certificate of ownership over a particular digital file. This means that whenever you own an NFT, there will be no copies nor duplicates of that piece.
As mentioned, non-fungible tokens have grown in popularity in 2021. However, there are dialogues about it over the viewpoint of what some deem as an important factor of innovative financing and others considering it as just another one of those digital asset bubbles out there that were devised by “excess liquidity and inflation fears,” Fortune writes.
Beeple’s record-breaking NFT
The hype in NFTs got to a whole new level when one of them dubbed “Everydays: the First 5,000 days” was sold for a whopping $69.3 million. This piece of crypto art was made by the digital artist who goes by the moniker Beeple whose real name is Mike Winkelmann.
However, Beeple may well seem to be one of those crypto folks out there who believe that the NFT market is a giant bubble. Back in March – the month when he sold his record-breaking NFT, said that the new form of digital art is “absolutely” in a bubble. He also said during an interview on “Fox News Sunday,” “I go back to the analogy of the beginning of the internet. There was a bubble. And the bubble burst.” He pointed out, though, that the internet bubble he mentioned “didn’t wipe out the internet adding the “technology itself is strong enough” where he believes that it’s going to outlive that.
‘Crazier than investing in crypto’
As for the $69 million-NFT buyer/owner – MetaKovan (Vignesh Sundaresan), he too has gone wary of these NFTs due to their volatility. During an April interview, he said that anyone who would attempt in making a profit out of it will be taking huge risks adding that such actions would be “even crazier than investing in cryptocurrency.”
NFT pros are ‘playing the long game’
NFT proponents like RippleX and Ripple General Manager Monica Long, on the other hand, are saying they are playing the long game. According to her, they are expecting to utilize cases for NFTs to expand well beyond digital art and collectibles. She went on to say that they are “opening up revenue streams for both creators and artists.
CoinMarketCap stated that from $4.67 billion on January 1, the projects (57 of them) the data provider monitored under their “Collectibles and NFTs” category have skyrocketed to $16.7 billion in market value as of Thursday. On a wider scale, however, 159 projects that were tracked were worth $19.2 billion as of Wednesday which is a 52 percent plummet as compared to its highs in April.