Ready Player NFT: How Blockchain and NFTs Fit into Today’s Technology for Games, Crypto, and Other Things

If there is one single keyword to summarize the buzz around digital innovation over the past year, it is “NFT.”

NFTs, or non-fungible tokens, are essentially digital assets that exist on the blockchain; an unofficial virtual ledger that allows anyone to verify the authenticity and ownership of an NFT. Unlike other digital assets, NFTs are created, sold, and bought via blockchain using cryptocurrency. Additionally, each NFT is embedded with a unique digital signature to verify its status as a one-of-a-kind asset and who officially owns it.

Since their emergence in 2017, NFTs have been generated and traded as digital assets as images, videos, music, and even former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey’s first-ever tweet. Their popularity, however, began gaining traction with the integration of NFTs into games like CryptoKitties, Axie Infinity, and My Crypto Heroes, which allowed players to acquire and sell in-game content as NFTs using the cryptocurrency contained within their digital wallets on the blockchain.

Nearly 5 years after their emergence in the digital Zeitgeist, the concept of NFTs has generated headlines around the world as a new form of digital asset with the potential to completely shift consumer markets and behavior across global industries. In this article, I want to discuss some of the ways in which NFTs and blockchain are melding into contemporary technology.

Cryptocurrency, NFTs, and the consumer

If NFTs are unique digital assets, cryptocurrency is the means by which those assets are acquired. While the concept of cryptocurrency itself is nothing new, with bitcoin being considered the world’s first cryptocurrency following its release on blockchain in 2009, the utilization and trade of cryptocurrency — and bitcoin, in particular — has exploded in recent years. Between its release in 2009 and April of 2021, the value of one single bitcoin jumped from $0.09 to over $60,000 per coin, prompting institutional and amateur investors alike to hop aboard the crypto train.

Between that time, dozens of other crypto coins were created and subsequently released for trade via blockchain, including altcoins like Ethereum and Litecoin, as the concept of decentralized money encrypted via blockchain technology grew in popularity with an increasing percentage of tech-savvy consumers. That popularity around cryptocurrency and blockchain technology continued wiith the advent of NFTs in 2017, as these new forms of digital assets allowed consumers to create real-world value from the content they created in the form of art, music, and more.

The emergence of NFTs and their explosion across markets

One of the first consumer markets to broadly adopt and spur the utilization of NFTs across the blockchain was the digital art sector. In 2017, digital artists John Watkinson and Matt Hall designed and released CryptoPunks: a collection comprising of 10,000 pixelated portraits—each one its own separate NFT. By 2018, a handful of these portraits, which are considered by many to serve as the first iteration of NFTs, sold for $1 million or more, with some selling for upwards of $10-11 million. The art world would be rocked by the buzz of NFTs again in March of 2021, when another digital artist Mike Winkelmann (who goes by the moniker “Beeple”) auctioned off his own NFT collection of art through Chrtistie’s for over $69 million.

Just weeks before Winkelmann’s history-making auction, the NBA made headlines in the NFT world when an NFT was purchased on its Top Shot marketplace by 31-year-old Jesse Schwarz for over $200,000. Despite being around since 2019 and created with the help of the Vancouver-based blockchain development company Dapper Labs (the same company that developed the blockchain game CryptoKitties), Schwarz’s acquisition of his NFT from the NBA set a new precedent for the sports industry; one that exemplified the ability for NFTs to serve as the next generation of collectible sports memorabilia. In this way, NFTs are akin to the consumer market of sports trading cards famous from past decades.

Future cross-platform capabilities of NFTs

There’s no question that talks around the utilization of cryptocurrency, blockchain, and NFTs now cross virtual all consumer markets, as their demand as a new form of valuable digital asset has become increasingly sought after by those with access to blockchain. At the same time, there has been rising speculation regarding the ability of NFTs to be traded not only from user to user, but also from one platform to another.

For example, just as Apple’s integration of its Silicon chips within its hardware (e.g., iPhones, iPads, Macbooks, etc.) enables the development of mobile applications across different platforms on the iOS operating system, many consumers have begun to theorize the possibilities for similar cross-platform utilization of NFTs, particularly within the gaming industry.

Considering that NFTs themselves are unique digital assets, imagine the potential for gamers to purchase or otherwise acquire a certain piece of in-game content (like rare items, playable characters, or avatar skins) within one blockchain game they play on their PC using cryptocurrency, but also be able to transfer that NFT into the same game on a separate platform, or even an entirely different game on another platform.

Should the gaming industry showcase this as possible, it would undoudbtedly open the door for similar transfers of NFTs between users on platforms like iOS mobile applications. Imagine being able to acquire one NFT from a mobile app game, transfer that NFT as a digital asset to another mobile application, or even sell it to another user who plans to use it during their Call of

Concluding remarks

The introduction of NFTs has already served as one of the most innovative and disruptive digital innovations in modern history. Though their wider integration across additional industries and consumer markets has yet to be fully actualized, the potential is clear to many consumers. NFTs give them the opportunity to generate real-world value from acquiring these unique assets via blockchain technology, and that value will likely only continue to appreciate over time as an increasing number of consumer markets begin heightening their demand for them.Duty online or Fortnite stream on Twitch at a profit. This is just one example of how the broader adoption of NFTs as digital assets can fit into the evolutionary trajectory of today’s technology.

Written by Hironobu Ueno, CEO — double jump.tokyo

Author Bio

Hironobu Ueno, CEO and Founder of double jump.tokyo, Inc. Previously, Mr. Ueno worked as a developer at Nomura Research Institute building systems for the financial sector and helped develop the gaming platform at Mobcast, Inc. He is supported by an international team with expertise in marketing, gaming, finance, blockchain technologies, and cryptocurrency.