NFTs are about to change our world: Life Hacks by Charles Assisi – Hindustan Times

Aversion of this column is now available as a non-fungible token or NFT. I will post updates on Twitter (@c_assisi) as bidding progresses.

Why? Partly because I figured, if Beeple could sell an NFT artwork for $69 million, why not? But also because it’s time for the concept of NFTs to go, in the popular imagination, beyond collectibles and gaming.

I believe NFTs could change our world as dramatically as digital payment platforms have. (Think about it; how many of us even carry cash today? Think of how differently business is conducted, and the implications of that on everything from governance to taxation.)

First, a brief NFT explainer. A non-fungible token is essentially a digital-only asset. It is its own guarantee of originality; the fact that it exists indicates that no exact replica can exist, because nothing else will ever have its exact digital signature in the blockchain.

In the not-so-distant future, NFTs could potentially be used to create watertight contracts, confirm patents. In a slight segue, it’s important to note that all payments around NFTs must be made in digital currencies such as Bitcoin or Ethereum. So it’s a good thing that India has announced plans for a digital currency; incidentally, one of the first major economies in the world to do so.

Back to the NFT version of this column… why would anyone bid for it? Because it will be unique in ways that go beyond just format. Before uploading the NFT version of this piece to the platform OpenSea (you can go to opensea.io/cassisi to see it), I wrote my favourite poem in the “margins”.

Now, because NFTs are a relatively new asset class (they only began to boom last year), there is another element of uniqueness driving the market. This column, for instance, is the first newspaper article written in India with the explicit intent of creating an NFT.

The desire to own the first of something has driven initiatives such as the Canadian studio Larva Labs’ CryptoPunks project, a set of 10,000 collectible NFTs. It’s part of the reason buyers of NFT collectibles range from singer Justin Bieber to tennis legend Serena Williams.

What would one do, eventually, with the NFT version of this column? Exactly what one does with any collectible: Retain it as an artefact and / or investment; pass it on as an heirloom; trade it for cryptocurrency. With an NFT (unlike with Yeezys or a designer handbag, for instance), one can also make a limited number of copies and auction those.

I undertake to donate to charity 50% of what accrues to me from this column’s NFT (after taxes). I’ll keep the other 50%. Because creating an NFT costs money. Most marketplaces charge a gas fee or a cut of all earnings because of how much it costs them to run the servers it takes to create NFTs. Plus, I believe I must be compensated for the time and effort.

Now, there’s a good chance some of you will think this all rather silly. I have two words for you: Spider-Man comics. My folks couldn’t figure out why I was “overpaying” for Spider-Man comics as a young man. But I was passionate about acquiring them. They indulged me. And even those of us collecting these comic books couldn’t have imagined that the franchise would become the phenomenon it is now.

I believe NFTs, used right, could be the Spider-Man comics of the digital world. I recently paid a premium to acquire assisi.io for a personal website. I think of my social media profiles as extensions of my personality, digital assets that I will pass on to my children. When thought about like this, why ignore NFTs?

What the near and medium-term future may look like is admittedly fuzzy right now, partly because there are no legal frameworks to protect investors, and much of what is up for sale is, in one way or another, fraudulent. But I believe a change is coming. I want to be a part of that change. And my first step is this column, the first news-driven NFT in India.