NFTs: some love them, some hate them, some don’t completely understand them, yet everyone knows that each day they’re becoming more and more influential. NFTs are almost as big as the entire global art market, with a market value of over $40 billion.

NFTs have seen a surge in popularity since they were introduced over a year back. But why was this non-fungible token even created?

“The only thing we’d wanted to do was ensure that artists could make some money and have control over their work,”
wrote Anil , the co-creator of the first recognized NFT, “Quantum (NASDAQ:).”

Over the last few decades many efforts have been made to validate digital art. The only way artists could sell their art was to convert them into tangible forms. The Blockchain technology is trying to change this.

Anil Dash (CEO of Glitch), worked alongside Kevin McCoy in a Hackathon 2014. They founded the first version of ownership proof for original digital work, backed by blockchain technology, and called it “monetized graphics.” This “system of verifiably unique digital artwork” is now known as NFTs. This was done to aid digital artists with monetization and protection of their work.

“We absolutely didn’t call our implementation NFTs or “non-fungible tokens” because that technical term, while accurate in some sense of how code is implemented, truly sucks as a mainstream name, especially when trying to empower artists,”
Dash posted his thoughts in his blog.

Do NFTs just provide URL links to other websites?

“Technology should be enabling artists to exercise control over their work, to more easily sell it, to more strongly protect against others appropriating it without permission,”
Dash shared.

Dash and McCoy noticed the flaws of the NFT prototype: the actual digital artwork could not be stored in blockchain due to technical limits as most blockchains aren’t capable of holding an entire image. Instead of inserting an altered image in the blockchain, McCoy and Dash decided to add the URL of the image, or a mathematical compress of it, to be used as a reference. Today, NFTs are kept in the same manner.

“The NFT token you bought either points to a URL on the internet, or an IPFS hash. In most circumstances it references an IPFS gateway on the internet run by the startup you bought the NFT from,”
Jonty Wareing, a software engineer wrote this on Twitter (NYSE :).

An NFT seems to be a certificate of ownership that you own a digital item. An NFT, however, is a document that certifies ownership but not the actual item. The item, or a digital picture of it, can be ‘right-clicked and saved’ by anyone.

However, eight years ago the implementation Dash and McCoy made was insufficient compared with what is possible today using blockchains like and.

NFT is a Market That Is Not Current

“Our dream of empowering artists hasn’t yet come true, but it has yielded a lot of commercially exploitable hype,”
Dash shared.

NFTs that are not authentic copies or scams of real works can pose a major problem. Unknown individuals create NFTs, without permission from the original artist, and sell them for alarming prices.

NFTs have been a great investment tool. Many lucky crypto lovers are now able to capitalize on promising NFT project. This opened up the doors to the digital world and the metaverse. People can now show their collections and belongings online with NFTs. Owning an NFT not only makes you an investor but also a “member of a club, a brand shareholder, and a participant in a loyalty program all at once.” NFTs became something different from what Dash and McCoy originally planned.

The Flipside

• Kevin McCoy Sold “Quantum,” the first NFT ever minted, for $1,472,000.

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