Editorial Listening

This was the shot that was heard around the world: Beeple, a celebrated Crypto Artist, sold, on March the 11th of this year, “Everydays — The First Five Thousand Days”, a non-fungible token (NFT), for a record-breaking US $69 Million at Christie’s Auction House.NFTs swiftly entered the realm of polite conversation: artists and collectors obviously acknowledged the sale as an important event, but tempers quickly flared and the conversations mushroomed on social media often without an authentic understanding of NFTs, of the aesthetics of Crypto Art, and of the massive impact of NFTs on the Art World.Let us not commit the same sin and immediately define the object of this article. It is clear that most people associate NFTs with digital art, as it is the most visible and perhaps the most lucrative use case of NFTs, for which the demand rose by 299% in 2020 alone.An NFT is first and foremost a unique, indivisible and non-fungible digital token generated through cryptographic methods on a specific blockchain network, according to a certain technical standard.By non-fungible we mean that such a token cannot be exchanged for something else, due to its uniqueness and scarcity – NFTs cannot be exchanged in the same way we exchange fungible currencies like dollars or euros.An NFT is linked with an asset, digital or physical. The token’s metadata contains vital information such as the timestamp of its creation, the crypto wallet address of the creator, and specifics about the asset that is linked with the token. When we come to understand that an NFT is a cryptographic token linked with an asset, we can appreciate the sheer scale of what is possible.The linked asset need not be Digital Art.Digital art is only one type of asset that can be linked with a cryptographic token. There are many others.Licenses and Certifications: An NFT can represent a license or a diploma. For the verification of such documents, it would be easy to leverage an NFT’s metadata, and this in turn would greatly lower administrative overhead. Storing documents like these as NFTs is also an alternative approach for storing evidence of course completion.Real Estate: NFTs may simplify the process of buying and selling properties, by drastically lowering the administrative and bureaucratic overhead and expediting the sale process. An NFT can represent a property. The property’s deed can be a part of the token’s metadata. The entire history of a property’s ownership and rights can be recorded on a blockchain and be instantly verifiable. NFTs can also unlock liquidity trapped in properties, for example through fractional ownership, without having to turn to a bank.NFT Finance: NFTs can easily be bought and sold on secondary markets. Additionally, certain lenders now accept NFTs as collateral, and it is possible to lock NFTs for a certain period of time and receive interest for doing so.Patents: Patents are considered illiquid assets. However, tokenised patents (we “tokenise” an object when we link it with a cryptographic token) are an attractive proposition for patent holders. NFTs allow them to commercialise their patents in a safe and accessible trading environment.NFTs and Memberships: NFTs can be used to represent memberships. Data about the membership can be recorded in an immutable manner on a blockchain.NFTs, cryptographic tokens living on blockchain networks and linked with assets (digital or physical) are an opportunity, not merely due to the massive amount of money they seem to attract; they promise to drastically lower administrative, bureaucratic overhead and unlock billions of dollars of liquidity trapped in assets.It seems many use cases for NFTs are yet to be discovered.

The venerable ticketing Industry and Non-fungible Tokens (NFTs) are on a highly desirable and long-awaited collision course: it appears nothing and no one will be able to prevent the emergence of an hybrid ticketing industry, that will redefine what it means exactly to hold a “ticket” for an event.The ticketing Industry is currently riddled with problems and is in dire need of a system upgrade.One of these problems is the industry’s aging infrastructure. Very often, tickets are printed (when they are not printed in an honorable attempt to mitigate the impact of this industry on the environment, tickets are sent to email addresses as pdf files – which are in turn printed from home), and this implies they have to be shipped and stored. When an event needs to be modified (for example, a headliner was not able to obtain a visa to perform at a festival), the tickets often need to be reprinted and redistributed.As we can see, this aging infrastructure carries with it a heavy overhead – ticketing is expensive.Another problem that characterizes today’s ticketing industry is the difficulty associated with authenticating tickets. Scammers excel at manufacturing fake tickets which are indistinguishable in terms of quality from genuine tickets. They are able to sell those tickets online or very close to venues, and this happens because the mechanisms for checking the authenticity of tickets function poorly – where they have been implemented at all.NFTs might just be the solution the venerable ticketing industry was waiting for.Tickets as NFTs (or in other words: “Tokenized Tickets”) solve the ticketing industry’s infrastructure problem by moving ticket issuance and control to the blockchain. Event organizers can now Mint, very cheaply, and in seconds, a predefined amount of tickets, track transactions and reseller activity on secondary ticket markets, assign tickets to specific individuals, and change the details of events on the fly.Issuing tickets as NFTs makes it easier to control the authenticity of tickets: the Blockchain becomes a single, immutable source of truth available for anyone to review.In this brave new world of ticketing, the price of tokenized Tickets does not need to be fixed: promoters can organize sales as auctions and let buyers bid on tickets and determine the price themselves.Tickets as NFTs can be stored in Crypto Wallets and be transferred peer to peer, to other users, to applications and secondary markets. The transfer of NFTs, from the initial sale to any subsequent resale, is recorded immutably on the blockchain, making it very easy to verify the authenticity of a ticket and to review the history of its owners. Even better: when the resale of a ticket is forbidden (something that has proven to be very difficult to enforce in real life), an NFT can be programmed as non-transferable, so they physically cannot be transferred, and therefore resold, to another individual.Tokenized tickets can easily be induced in the Decentralized Finance (DeFi) ecosystem: they can be staked, lended, swapped, borrowed and used as collateral. This being said, the GET Protocol gives us a glimpse of what is possible when tokenized ticketing and DeFi converge. This particular protocol will soon allow the pre-funding of events: event organizers, putting their stock of minted tickets up as collateral, an exciting and fascinating practice which the event industry has never seen before, can get the funds they need to organize events. This type of collateralized crowdfunding will help event organisers mitigate the risks associated with organizing an event.