NFT expert, Crypto Casz, explains NFTs and why you should start paying attention.

Many of you have almost certainly heard of NFTs by this point. Whether you know what exactly it is or not, you’ve likely at least heard the term being thrown around. But what actually is an NFT? My name is Crypto Casz (https://twitter.com/CryptoCasz )and I’m going to explain exactly that.

First, who am I? I’m from the traditional finance world. Having my college degrees in mathematics and physics, I was quickly recruited as a “quant” for a large hedge fund. These jobs pay great, but it’s the type of job that kills your soul and makes life impossible to enjoy. I used my skills to eventually begin day trading, and long story short; this led to crypto investing, and then blockchain technology. It was at this point, that I finally found something I truly loved, and I’ve never turned back.

So, let’s jump right into it, what is an NFT? This stands for “Non-Fungible Token”. This probably didn’t help you at all, so let’s start with what a fungible token is to help explain the counter. As an example, a dollar is fiat currency, and this is a sort of fungible token. If we both have a dollar bill, we can trade them, and they’re worth the exact same. On the other hand, we can both have a piece of art, for example. We can trade, but one could be worth substantially more than the other. One piece of art could be from a famous artist, and the other could be done by my 12-year-old niece. There are important characteristics that differentiate the value, making them non-fungible.

Let’s go a step further with this example. Say you have a very expensive piece of art and wanted to sell it. To do so, you would have to prove its value and that it is not a counterfeit. In the physical world, you could do this by a certificate of authentication. If you lose that certificate, or for some reason cannot get it re-authenticated, you cannot sell it until you do. But before NFTs, there was simply no way to do this in the digital world. If you owned a digital art piece, I could take a picture of it and there would be no way for you to prove that you actually owned it. This is where NFTs and the block chain comes in.

The block chain records each individual transaction, and this is open for everyone to see. And so, you can now easily prove that you are the actual owner, and your piece is now assigned the appropriate value, and the stolen picture is now worthless. This is fundamentally what an NFT is, it is the proof of ownership of any digital asset-but the application for this technology is just the start. Many of you probably associate NFTs with those JPEG images, but in reality, that is just the proof of concept. Since then, music artists have used NFTs to launch albums, they can be used to track digital collectibles, NFTs can be used to disrupt the billion-dollar video game industry, NFTs can be used to capture and own memorable moments in sports or movies, and the list continues.

NFTs, as I said, are simply proof of ownership. It was popularized in art, but this was only the first phase and merely proving that the technology works. In the process, it created a 70 billion industry with millions of lives changed forever. Imagine what can be accomplished through mass adaptation at full scale. The fact of the matter is that NFTs , the metaverse, Web3, crypto, and blockchain technology as a whole will continue to change the world.

If you’d like to learn more, I‘d highly suggest that you find some people in the space to follow and learn from. I am a great option, you can find me on twitter at https://twitter.com/CryptoCasz , and there are many others too. No matter what you do, it’s important that you at least acknowledge that the world is changing, because it will not wait for you to catch up if you fall too far behind.