Beyond Beeple and Bored Apes
Some Utility Cases for NFTs
First there was the Beeples. Maybe not like first first, like, chronologically. First in the public consciousness. First elevated to front page headlines. Tens of millions of dollars at a Sotheby’s auction for a jpeg that anyone can still download in hi-res for free. Heads turned.
The cats and kitties and punks emerged. Then apes and penguins, lions and bears, a veritable Noah’s ark of algorithmically generated art. Somewhere a friend’s friend’s eight-year-old drops an NFT collection and makes more on the mint of scribbly garbage than their parents do in a year, two years, three years – combined.
The hype curve went nearly vertical. The sharks raced in to rug the rubes with scam collections, counterfeit art, phishing attacks, shadow sales. Finally – finally – at the apex, the culture vultures arrived to grift, toting real money capital, along with their creative teams, to extract due tribute. Artists and designers who believed web3 would be creative salvation, now roam the valley of disillusionment in abandoned Discord servers, telling stories and comparing frauds. In the past weeks, the market has crashed/is crashing and Bored Apes broke the Ethereum Mainnet with a metaverse land drop. Even stable coins have lost their supposed stability.
This bit of hyperbole tells the mainstream story. NFTs are dumb. Some virtually worthless. Others a speculative bubble. Like beanie babies before them. And baseball cards before them. And tulip bulbs before them… Scarcity convergences with seemingly endemic lottery ticket optimism, prices escalate, consumers rush into the market, the market overproduces, scarcity evaporates, prices crash. Ipso facto, NFTs equal dumb.
Such reactions focus on a sensational, but narrow use case for NFTs – the Beeple as Basquiat – an investment in an asset class expected to appreciate in value while providing in-group social and cultural cachet for a capitalist elite. A dynamic plays on late night TV with celebrities bragging about ape ownership - looking at you Jimmy and Paris.
But what if, wait for it, what if they’re not dumb? What if when NFTs don’t cost everyday humans hundreds of thousands of dollars, they help us fund community projects, share access to collective goods, affirm trust, and build a more diverse, equitable, and inclusive society. Below, a few extrapolations and analogies that imagine the utility of NFTs for the peoples.
NFTs as Commemorative Bricks
Communities often lack the capital sources to build parks, stadiums, swimming pools and other iconic post-war suburban amenities that stick in the sepia-toned public imagination. So communities crowdsource. You will be recognized for your contribution. Donate - you get a brick. Your name forever displayed in handsome red clay. Web3 communities are selling NFTs to fund collective projects. You donate to the cause, you get an NFT. You hang it in the metaverse to let neighbors know you support habitat preservation for Kagu, The Ghost Bird of New Caledonia.
NFTs as Patents
NFTs are information, not simply artwork. Authors, researchers, and knowledge workers produce intelligence, wisdom, ideas – products that don’t degrade no matter how many times they are consumed. NFTs might allow knowledge workers to commodify intellectual property. One could, for instance, publish this article on the utility of NFTs, then mint an NFT that confers access to the report so that only the wallet that holds the NFT can access the knowledge - like fancy password protection - then auction the intellectual property on an NFT platform, deleting the original publication once sold (removing the intelligence from the public domain). The new owner has the only access key - the NFT. And if they choose to resell the NFT, say to a competitor at an inflated price, the original authors would receive fractional royalties for each subsequent sale.
NFTs as Memberships
Web3 technology promises a decentralized internet with automated protocols that regulate trust. That promised land remains somewhere over the rainbow. Decentralized communities are turning to NFTs in the interim to build trust and nurture communities. Unlike speculative collections, membership NFTs convey benefits in perpetuity for some ongoing mission. LinksDAO aims to resuscitate the struggling golf and country club industry with a Global Member NFT sale. Invisible College is a community selling Decentraliens to fund the future of education where NFT holders have access to a library of community generated classes. The NFTs seem to promote network formation and intrinsic motivation in web3 communities and DAOs.
Disclaimer: I purchased an Invisible College NFT for my baby nephew to hedge against college tuition inflation in 2040.
NFTs as Loyalty Programs
Loyalty programs are the OGs of data analytics, offering points on the package discounts and specials in exchange for your psychographic information. At least then you had to opt-in. But if you don’t opt-in, now you’re left out of the garden, in the cold, doomscrolling MySpace. Alone. Back in the day you could still buy the cereal at regular price.
The data privacy wars still wage, but suffice it to say, data ownership remains in the hands of (very few) corporations. NFTs could provide an alternative. With an NFT Loyalty Card in a blockchain wallet, consumers could both access benefits of loyalty programs and retain ownership of their data. These human ‘data models’ might then license the data, including data from sources outside the loyalty program, to the company to improve the product or customer experience.
NFTs as Blueprints
Distributed, additive manufacturing imagines a more agile, sustainable, supply chain capable of delivering personalized products built right in customers backyards (figuratively). Imagination might outpace reality, but as manufacturing integrates with the metaverse, NFTs might become blueprints that bridge the virtual and the physical worlds. A pair of limited run sneakers bought in a virtual store could be 3D printed in the real world. A sculptural NFT auctioned off at Sotheby’s would contain the code to manifest that art in your home. Literal building blueprints might be encoded as NFTs that automatically initiate the sustainably sourced supply chain when activated. Just like Sears used to do. (Remember Sears? They say it’s still around. I don’t believe them).
NFTs as Identities
This last one is a bit more speculative and maybe a bit sinister. Clothes. We’re all familiar with clothes. And well they might not make us, we can all tacitly agree that clothes are part of us. In the metaverse, clothes are wearables and wearables are NFTs. Some are rare. Some are like a plain Hanes white tee. Once avatars move beyond the starter closet and buy wearables, they start to form a virtual identity. The possibilities are broad: be an avatar with sword and dragon helmet riding a dinosaur skeleton; be a teddy bear with horns in a Miller Lite t-shirt; be a ship captain with a sparkly afro and angel wings walking around in pixelated puppy dog slippers.
Virtual identities might morph into commodities. In the future, agencies might design NFT identities that promise to increase your popularity and matches on a metaverse speed dating platform, musicians might auction the rights to their digital likeness and make money without making anymore music as that character, normcore criminals might swap NFT identities on the run from the virtual fuzz. Transcending physical form might even give rise to a virtual experience that empowers people to express themselves as the truly want – teddy bears and dragon slayers need love too – and strip away some of the biases attached to appearance that follow us through our physical lives.
These NFT imaginings are far from the fever dreams of degens and wen drops, but they do illustrate the potential and versatility of the technology. Creative applications that benefit distributed communities, that make it easier to build more and build together, will encourage mainstream adoption long before Mom and Dad wander into a Discord server and whitelist for a derivative ape. So let’s start building some community pools, people. And a grange! And...