Fighting asset fragmentation in blockchains
The word on the street is that NFT fever is not over, and a single search in your search engine of choice will definitely confirm it. News about the release of an interactive NFT Platform, the first-ever NFT trophy for UEFA’s goal of the tournament, or pictures of unique monkeys and giraffes all over social media, from Twitter to Instagram. But what exactly is an NFT, and more importantly, where do these NFTs actually live?
Back to basics
An NFT (or Non-Fungible Token) is a non-interchangeable digital asset backed by a blockchain system. While a unit of Bitcoin or Ether is interchangeable, any two units of the token will have the same exact value, this is not the case for NFTs. NFTs are “one of a kind” tokens, and they are uniquely identifiable. This is why they are usually used to represent collectibles (like art, music, games, or even real estate) or unique digital resources (like domain names or identities). They are the ultimate way to represent ownership and scarcity of digital resources. How can one own an image on the Internet when anyone can copy-paste it and replicate it? Well, NFTs try to tackle this problem; they won’t be able to prevent others from copy-pasting it, but at least there’s a way to track back its ownership directly to you.
