Investors and developers believe in the prospects of NFT.
Venture capital and crypto funds became interested in the sector in early 2018. So, the company Dapper Labs (developer of CryptoKitties) in 2017 first raised $12 million in funding, in 2018 another $15 million, and in 2019 another $11.2 million.
Game studios Rare Bits and Lucid Sight raised $6 million each, and Immutable (developer of Gods Unchained) received $15 million in funding in September 2019, Mythical Games — $19 million, and the OpenSea marketplace — $2 million.
It is difficult to calculate the exact volume of the NFT market. Non-exchangeable tokens are not traded on conventional crypto exchanges — instead, they are bought or sold mainly for ETH on specialized platforms, fan sites, or inside computer games. The largest NFT platforms: Opensea, Nifty Gateway, Knownorigin, Makersplace, Super rare.
According to the NonFungible website, the total sales of the ten most popular NFT projects amounted to more than $109.5 million, of which more than $1.8 million was received only in the last 7 days. As you can see, the NTF market is still quite small. But more importantly, its volume is steadily growing. NFT games are brilliantly ruling over the gaming world. You can find some of the best NFT games on this site including lightnite, illuvium, my defi pet, and lost relics
According to the calculations of the publication Decrypt, the volume of trading in the NFT market for the summer of 2020 increased by 57%, which led to an increase in the value of the industry to about $100 million.
According to Dune Analytics, monthly sales in the NFT sector exceeded $ 1-3 million in the summer alone, reaching a peak of $6 million in September of this year. However, according to the art platform SuperRare, only in October they sold digital works worth more than $4.34 million.
Lot’s of numbers here. To learn about NFTs, follow the FAQ NFTs: Everything You Need to Know About NFTs.
NFT can Create a billion-dollar Market and Popularize Blockchain:
NFT is a promising sector for the development of the crypto market with hundreds of millions of potential users: sports, pop culture, computer games, and art lovers who are willing to pay for their hobbies.
Therefore, startups that bet on this direction have something to compete for. Most likely, it is for these markets that we will soon see sharp competition.
But it is not worth waiting for the triumphant boom of the market of non-interchangeable tokens. Such tokens have long been known to the players of the crypto market, but have not yet received a truly mass application. So far, the belief in NFTs among their developers and investors is stronger than the need for them among crypto users.
So, for example, to become popular among hundreds of millions of gamers, gaming cryptopredmetry in the NFT format must be integrated into the most popular video games. But it is not profitable for their developers, because they can lose a significant part of their income.
Sports and music fans, art aficionados and collectors are also only looking at NFT for now. Those, although they belong to only one owner, do not allow you to interact with the underlying asset physically — and without this, the same digital picture is not much different from the reproduction.
Another difficulty is technical. Tokens on Ethereum are too dependent on their network, which is not yet suitable for mass use. That is why the same CryptoKitties game switched to the new Flow blockchain in May 2020. However, after the beginning of the upgrade of Ethereum to the 2.0 state, the scaling problem should gradually disappear.
Will the NFT be used outside of digital art? Hard to answer. 2mcuchfoffee also researched the topic and come up with the paper.
In any case, it is great that NFT startups understand all the difficulties and do not give up trying to create a new market, explore ways to use the technology, and monetize it. If the enthusiastic expectations about this market come true, his works will hit the jackpot.
But to do this, it is necessary to conduct “explanatory work” and clearly prove to a wide audience the advantages of NFT.
