NFT -- The Beginning (Day 482)
My first official job in crypto was with BitGuild as a blockchain engineer. One of my tasks was to write an NFT marketplace smart contract for blockchain games.
I was surprised that the site is still around--the company had pivoted from Ethereum to TRON during the "crypto winter" in 2018--they still keep the Ethereum game page on their website. (See banner image.)
During that time, my coworkers and I didn't even feel comfortable putting the job on our LinkedIn profiles because the sentiment was that all crypto companies are scammers. It could be career suicide to have that on our LinkedIn.
Successful games are resistant to move to the blockchain for obvious reasons--these games have already built a revenue-generating game economy; why would they risk that by allowing game players to own and control the transactions of game items?
So crypto games have to start from scratch, designing the gameplay based on NFTs as their economic model. That is not an easy task. Some games end up going the "gambling route," and some studios pivoted to building DeFi instead. Among the many failed games, finally, in 2021, after 3 years, one game stood out. That game had US$42 million in NFT sales in June 2021. Have you heard the name Axie Infinity? Here's the link to their Wikipedia page.
We finally see mainstream adoption beginning for NFTs. Two weeks ago, during the NFT panel discussion in the Chicago Solana x Hxro meetup, Dan Moriarty, the head of digital businesses of Chicago Bulls said that every company is considering an NFT strategy--if they haven't, they should. Check out Chicago Bulls' NFT site, powered by Shopify here.
Do you think NFT has a use case for your business? Or in your industry?
At first sight, I thought that this whole NFT craziness was very similar to the ICOs boom of a few years ago. But it's actually very interesting, even from a psychological point of view of how people act in front of scarcity.