What is an NFT? And 21 other pressing questions about non-swipable tokens
WAGMI: We’re All Gonna Make It, an abbreviation for optimism – sometimes deserved, sometimes delusions – around NFT projects.
NGMI: Will not make it. An insult reserved for incompetent investors, rip-off projects and NFT haters in general.
DIAMOND HAND: The ability to hold on to NFTs for a long time. If you can wait out early losses in hopes of a big payday, you have diamond hands.
PAPER HANDS: The opposite of diamond hands: Someone who saves and sells early.
PFP: Profile image, used to refer to a collection of NFT-linked images designed to act as Twitter avatars. (See CryptoPunks, Bored Ape.)
ANIMALS: Do your own research. Because Web3’s self-sovereignty ethos means there is no safety net if you make a mistake, collectors are on their own when it comes to avoiding scams and finding the most promising projects.
COIN: The act of transforming a digital resource – a JPEG of a penguin wearing a hat, a trance song, etc. – into an NFT.
DAO: Decentralized autonomous organization. Basically a club, but without central management. Members usually merge cryptocurrencies and make decisions about what to do with their money.
CC0: A type of license that waives copyright and puts an NFT’s art in the public domain.
4. What makes an NFT valuable?
Think of an NFT as any collector’s item: Jordan’s dead stick, Pokémon cards, taxidermy. Some items are simply more scarce, which provides value. To learn more, we contacted Kevin Rose, a technology founder, podcast host and co-founder of Proof Collective, a private community of NFT collectors where membership cards have traded for around 100 ETH each, and Moonbirds, immediately one of the best-selling PFP collections from 2022. – DC
GQ: First, why did you go into NFTs?
Kevin Rose: It was 2017, and it was just a project called CryptoPunks. My friend said, “Here are these cute 8-bit characters that you can collect on the blockchain. We can swap them.” I bought 10. I think I paid $ 5 or $ 8 each, so I forgot.
After a while there started to be more movement, so I stuck my head back in. The NFT standard had been that [widely established]. Marketplaces can exist. And it was all these native digital artists who just produced work on the blockchain. I said, OK … So scarcity has been proven, and it’s all on the chain in a transparent way. It is durable, so it will not deteriorate in quality over time. I can easily transfer it. And there is a 24/7 market for liquidity [i.e., converting crypto to real cash]. There is so much emphasis on crazy NFT prices now, and it is not sustainable. But I know that NFTs are 100 percent here to stay because it’s just better technology.
What makes a specific NFT valuable? I do not think it is fair to put all NFTs in the same bucket. If I’m buying a one-on-one from XCOPY for $ 800,000, it’s because I know XCOPY is Banksy in the NFT generation. He’s like any great artist, but I can not collect his work in any other way, because he has a very unique, animated style that can not be reproduced in a non-digital form.
