NFTs: The futuristic artform
What is an NFT? What do you understand by the term NFT? Do you think that “F” in NFT stands for Future? Well, if you have these questions in mind then this article will definitely give you all the answers and will make you understand the technology behind it.
NFT stands for “NON FUNGIBLE TOKEN”. Let's break down each term and understand what exactly this means. NON-FUNGIBLE: means anything that cannot be replaced and interchanged or exchanged. it means that the thing is unique and cannot be replaced with anything else. for example, BITCOIN(BTC) is fungible because if you trade one BTC for another BTC you will have the exact same thing. but a unique trading card is non-fungible because you will get a completely different card when you trade it and that different card makes the unique card non-fungible.TOKEN: is something that provides you with the whole or fractional ownership of an asset. It might also provide you access to future products or services. Hence making NFTs an asset class. Each digital asset can be made up into multiple identical files and each identical file is given unique individual ID’s and hence each asset is issued a unique crypto-token that contains authenticity data.
NFTs allows buying and selling of digital items and verifying ownership of the digital items. With many NFTs , a buyer may not be getting ownership of the item instead they might be getting a version that is digitally signed by the creator. An additional value-add, NFTs also confidently capture the details of the new owner so that there can be no disagreement as to who the current owner is.
Today the most popular blockchain platform for NFTs is ETHEREUM. Although other blockchains are also emerging for NFTs,ethereum has made certain tokens in order to empower the domain of NFTs and most importantly ethereum support due to smart contract capability has established it as the main platform. In 2018, ethereum implemented an NFT standard called ERC-721.
ERC-721:
Ethereum(E) Request(R) for Comments(C) #721 introduced standard APIs. It creates an API between other applications used by the artist and the smart contract-driven tokens on ethereum. Now the question arises why do we need this token? We need this token because NFTs are typically managed on a growing ecosystem of third-party applications. ERC-721 connects those third-party applications to the token store on the ethereum blockchain. ERC-721 helps in token ownership verification, token transfer and creation, management, ownership, and trading of NFTs. NFT marketplace has grown exponentially since 2018 and is expected to rise much more because entry barriers to buying and selling NFTs are negligible. Being so tech-savvy NFTs also face certain challenges such as high power consumption in minting each NFT and copyright issue. The ease with which someone can take your work and easily mint the NFT is known as a copyright issue. Though many sites have already copyright appeals processes in place, many are still lacking behind in this.
