The Laboratorium (2d ser.) (I Do Not Think That NFT Means What You Think It...)

In the long run, the market will need to contend with the transaction and environmental costs currently associated with using crypto technology. We will also need to establish more explicit legal frameworks around NFT ownership, and clarify how NFTs relate to existing forms of ownership rights — especially around intellectual property. At the same ... See more

Blockchains and NFTs will change this state of affairs dramatically. First, they will digitize the rights to digital content in the form of blockchain assets. Second, they will allow for the assets to be placed on secondary markets. Thus, we can view NFTs as liquid intellectual property (“liquid IP”) for all forms of digital content, a marketplace ... See more

The technology behind OpenSea is not quite “OpenSea keeps a list, in Excel, of who owns which NFTs.” The underlying list is kept on the blockchain; it’s just that OpenSea can modify its version of the list however it wants, and its modifications are in practice pretty binding. And in fact there are regular rounds of stories in which (1) some gullib... See more

An NFT serves as a digital certificate of authenticity, backed by math, on a public ledger, that incontrovertibly proves that the holder owns a one-of-a-kind digital (and sometimes physical) asset.