We have walked you through the definition, standards, and history of the NFT in our previous TRON 101 lessons. Today, let’s turn our focus to classical NFT use cases of the year 2022. The list below may not be exhaustive, but it surely covers the most popular ones these days.
NFTs & Digital Art
Releasing an artwork as an NFT is no longer something novel in the world of digital art. NFTs ensure artists full ownership of their artworks and allow them to sell their art without intermediaries. Also, artists can earn royalties from any further trades of their works.
If one has to name the pioneer of NFT art, Beeple is undoubtedly the choice. On March 12, 2021, his work, Everydays: The First 5,000 Days, was auctioned off at Christie’s for an astronomical $69 million, making him one of the top three living artists with works of the highest value.
NFTs & Interactive Art
Interactive art is an advanced version of digital art. An interactive NFT is designed to change as it goes through the hands of more traders. The Merge by digital art guru Pak is an exceptional example.
To purchase this experimental creation, a user has to buy specified NFTs that are visually represented by small circles. As the user buys more circle NFTs, the circles held in the same account will merge into a single one that changes in size and color. The Merge was eventually sold for $91.8 million to 28,000 buyers collectively, marking the largest ever sale by a living artist.
NFTs & Physical Art
Prices of physical art are often prohibitive. (Some digital artworks are surely not wallet-friendly as well.) But such expensive artworks can be made accessible to ordinary collectors through tokenization, which also makes tracing the ownership of artworks much easier. For example, we can tokenize, or NFTize, a precious art piece and split it up into thousands of individual NFTs. This allows collectors to acquire artworks as a DAO.
Supported by TRON founder Justin Sun, APENFT Foundation has always been committed to NFTizing the world’s physical art masterpieces. Its NFT trading platform APENFT Marketplace went live on April 15, enabling a wider public to own a precious piece of art.
NFTs & Digital Avatars
Digital avatars are an early use case of NFTs. From Crypto Punks in 2017 to the recent Bored Ape Yacht Club, NFT avatars have fetched more money than even the aforementioned NFT artworks. Today, with the exposure brought by Justin Sun, Stephen Curry, Jay Chou, and other celebrities, top NFT avatars have already been established as a symbol of status and recognized luxury worldwide.
There are also games and DAOs using NFT avatars as proof of membership. It looks like these little pieces of digital art still have a promising story to tell in Web3 and the metaverse.
NFTs & Moments
Moments NFTs are a creation of NBA Top Shot, a blockchain-based game that tokenizes NBA games’ epic highlights and sells them to fans. Inspired by the idea, Aston Martin joined the ranks and began to sell NFTs of F1 race highlights to fans. The most controversial of all is Jack Dorsey, founder of Twitter, who managed to sell the NFT of his first Tweet for $3 million.
But this first-Tweet NFT has failed to be the Moment over time: its price plummeted 99% within a year, making it a sheer joke rather than a legend. There are a lot more crazy NFTs like Jack Dorsey’s. Remember, DYOR!