Beyond the hype: NFTs can lead the way in transforming business experiences
2022.06.05 19:46
Beyond the hype: NFTs can lead the way in transforming business experiences
Many businesses and big brands have already jumped on the nonfungible token (NFT) bandwagon, including Nike (NYSE:NKE), the National Basketball Association, Pepsi and even Taco Bell. But are these just for the show, or are these NFTs creating value? Much like digital services have become essential for every business in and outside of the technology sector, I believe that tokens — and, specifically, NFTs — are likely to become equally crucial in the emerging Web3 economy for at least two reasons.
First, my view is that NFTs tokenize ideas at the atomistic level, creating rivalry and exclusivity around goods or services. Markets cannot form when goods and services are non-rival — when one person’s consumption does not trade off with another’s — or when they are non-excludable — when it is prohibitively expensive to gate access to a good or service with a price mechanism. NFTs, on the other hand, create rivalry and exclusivity by leveraging smart contracts on the blockchain that deliver NFTs to peoples’ digital wallets when they make a purchase.
Christos A. Makridis is a research affiliate at Stanford University and Columbia Business School and the chief technology officer and co-founder of Living Opera (NASDAQ:OPRA), a multimedia art-tech Web3 startup. He holds doctorates in economics and management science and engineering from Stanford University.
