Existing NFT use cases
How are NFTs being used and example projects
Welcome to the 6th issue of the Web3 Curator, a newsletter about interesting Web3 projects.
GM frens!
In this issue, we are going to explore the existing types of NFT and prominent projects within each type, some are popular NFT categories like digital arts and some use cases are taking NFTs beyond artistic content!
NFT, or non-fungible token, is a unique piece of digital asset that live on the blockchain, providing proof of ownership.
The first NFT standard is ERC-721 — Non-Fungible Token Standard — on Ethereum. Other finalized EIP (Ethereum Improvement Proposal) NFT standards are ERC-1155, ERC-2981, with other on-going EIP for NFT standards include ERC-998 - Composable Non-Fungible Token Standard. If you’re interested in learning more about each of the different standards, check it out here.
Digital art, PFPs (profile pictures), photography, music, video and in-game items are the most common types of NFTs. However, NFT can be used to represent ownership over any digital or physical assets.
Let’s dive into each of them. Feel free to jump to the part interest you the most and perhaps you will find some hidden alphas in there.
Digital Visual Art
PFP(Profile Pic)
On-chain Art
Photography NFT
Music NFT
Music video NFT
Writing
Real-estate
Domain name
Fashion
Meme
Virtual Items
Genomic NFT
Ticketing
NFT for causes
Other quick mentions:
Issue decentralized credential
Sports
Gaming
Voting
Membership
Up start DAOs
Digital Visual Art
2021 was the year NFT became a global craze from a niche interest among crypto enthusiasts, with Beeple’s digital art work “Everydays: the First 5000 Days” sold for $69 million dollars garnered mainstream media headlines. Same year, digital artist pplpleasr sold her animated ad for Uniswap V3 called “x*y=k” as an NFT for $525,000 dollars.
PFP
First of all, without a doubt, the most popular NFT projects in the market are PFP (profile pictures) projects, like Cryptopunk and Bored Ape Yacht Club.
PFPs are easy to use as avatar, signal the community you belong to (membership), be your online identity (punk6529), or even to up start a coffee brand if said project grant you the commercial rights.
On-chain Art
A unique art form to the blockchain, on-chain NFT is where both the smart contract and the metadata living on the blockchain. Not all NFTs store all information completely on chain, because of the the storage limitation of the blockchain.
The immutability of the NFT is at stake if the metadata is not stored on chain. The smart contract of the NFT is stored on the blockchain, however the metadata is not part of the contract. Many projects store metadata like rarity, media etc. on off-chain media storage like AWS or decentralized media storage like IPFS or Arweave. If there’s a disruption with the off-chain storage, the media of the NFT will no longer be available. Additionally, the project team can temper with the link where the NFT points to, if they remain the ability to do so. It is a risk to be considered when looking into NFT projects.
Example of a project team change the metadata, like when Azuki played an April fool’s day prank on NFT holders metadata:
The spectrum of on-chain metadata, Dom explained his tweet here:
Some on-chain NFT projects:
Autoglyph
Art Blocks
Terraforms
Photography NFT
The digital nature of photography (or film negatives have converted into digital photos), like that of digital art, make it easy to convert into NFTs. Photography NFT is having its moment since people are tired of all the PFP projects on the market.
One eminent photography artist Justin Aversano sold his Twin Flames #83 at Christie’s for a landmark result of $1,100,000 as the first photography NFT offered at a major auction house.
Subsequently, his “Twin Flames #49, Alyson & Courtney Aliano” from the same collection was sold for 871 ETH, about three million dollars. The work and the 871 ETH fund became the treasury of the RAW DAO, a DAO to support photographers and collect photography NFTs.
There are so many talented artists and great photography NFTs to discover!
Here’s a recent find: Stranger Together by Brooke DiDonato & Ben Zank in Marfa, Texas.
Photography NFT projects to check out:
Quantum: curated photography NFT marketplace
RAW DAO: photography DAO
Music NFT
The legacy music industry presents a lot of challenges and problems resulting very little profit go to the musicians. However, with the arrival of Music NFT, intellectual properties and deal structures in music are re-imagined in the context of Web3.
The composability nature of Web3 can make music free and expensive at the same time. Let music spread as far and wide as possible, support derivative projects build on top of it, create community culture, all these composable parts will make the original Music NFT more popular and therefore increase its value.
Some of the prominent music NFT projects to check out:
Nina Protocol
Holly Herndon - Holly plus
Music Video NFT
What’s next if you already collected your first Music NFT, maybe Music Video NFT then?
Glass.xyz is a Web3 video content platform — Youtube for Web3. Many musicians choose to release their Music Video NFT on Glass.
Check out some music video NFTs:
Writing
Decentralized publishing platforms like Mirror provide writers a censorship-free environment and an economic incentive model to integrate with NFT. Readers can own an article by purchasing the NFT.
Publish on Etherem: Mirror
Publish on Solana: eno.xyz, wordcel.club
Real-estate NFT
Real-estate industry might be one that can benefit the most from blockchain technology — smart contract to replace escrow company, mint an NFT as property deed to signify ownership on chain, and add liquidity to real estate.
TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington bought an apartment using ETH in Kyiv, Ukraine through a blockchain-based real estate platform — Propy— in 2017. He used the same platform to sell the apartment as an NFT in May 2021.
There’s fractionalized NFT on PartyBid, and now investors can invest in fractional residential real estate. Vesta Equity on Algorand offers home equity as NFTs for the US real estate market. How it works is:
Home owners tokenize the underlying value of the property while retain all the residential rights. Then sell whatever percentage to investors and gain access to liquidity. Investors can invest as little as 0.01% of the property value as NFTs using stablecoin. This innovation frees home owners from debt and compounding interest, and it also brings down the barrier to invest in real estate for boarder participation.
Real-estate NFT projects:
Domain name
Web3 domain names can be used as usernames to replace wallet address. You can also use it as log-in for dApps, or launch your own decentralized website. Domain names are NFTs, so you can trade them too.
Check out domain name services on different chains:
Ethereum Name Service / ENS: *.*eth
Bonfida Domains on solana: .sol
Tezos Domains: .tez
Fashion, Digital Wearable
Luxury brand Dolce & Gabbana released collection “Collezione Genesi” on UNXD, a curated marketplace for luxury NFTs built on Polygon, during the Dolce&Gabbana couture event from 28th-31st August 2021 in Venice.
The collection includes 9 handcrafted women, men and high jewelry pieces in both physical and digital (NFT) forms. The collection sells for a total of $5.7 million dollars. Collectors include famous crypto influencer pranksy, seedphrase and fashion DAO — RedDAO.
UNXD has an upcoming Dolce&Gabbana DGFamily drop, more alpha can be found in this Twitter space.
Check out fashion NFT projects:
Meme
Meme is culture. Never before NFT people thought of the possibility of owning culture. The iconic Shiba Inu of Doge originated in 2010, a Japanese kindergarten teacher Atsuko Sato posted her rescue-adopted female Shiba Inu Kabosu in her blog. Kabosu soon became internet famous. On BitcoinTalk forum, member Dogecoin introduced an alternative cryptocurrency based on this meme as a joke — Dogecoin, and the rest is history.
On June 12, 2021, collector DAO pleasrDAO won the auction for the original photo at 1696.9 ETH, just over 4 million dollars at that time. PleasrDAO has fractionalized the Doge meme NFT and now everyone can invest in a fractional of it to receive DOG token.
You can read more about the story and history of Doge meme here.
Virtual Items
To replicate the physical world or to create new virtual world doesn’t obey physics, the metaverse is going to be made of virtual land, in-game virtual assets, virtual pets, wearables resemble our real world and many more. And these new digital private properties come in the form of NFT.
Virtual land projects include Decentraland, cryptovoxels, and NFT Worlds.
Genomic NFT
Harvard medical school professor George Church, co-founder of Nebula Genomics partnered with Akoin NFT marketplace and Oasis network to sell his genome as a ERC-1155 NFT. Each human’s genome is a unique encoding represents the fundamental and personal data. It’s a 1/1 by nature.
However, during my research on this project. I did not find the sold George Church genome NFT, many media reports on this sell are around May and June 2021, but no official sell listed anywhere or on-chain. While remaining skeptic about the sell, the idea of genomic NFT is rather interesting. (Let me know if you find this NFT sell)
Ticketing
Social DAO FWB (Friends with Benefits), backed by A16Z, announced its first multi-day festival in Idyllwild, California for its members. The total of 250 early bird tickets for this festival are sold out at a minting price of 0.5 ETH as NFTs which can be traded on OpenSea.
NFT For Cause
UkraineDAO started by Russian-born activist Pussy Riot raised total fund of 2258 ETH to donate to Ukrainian civilian organizations who help with humanitarian efforts in the Russia-Ukraine war.
UkraineDAO uses Ukrainian flag as the NFT to raise fund on PartyBid, the fractional NFT platform.
Other quick mentions:
So many creative ways of using NFTs. Here are some quick mention.
Issue decentralized credential: 101.xyz an education platform issue non-transferable NFT as credential.
Sports
Gaming
Voting
Membership
Up start DAOs
Thank you for reading! I hope you find this article helpful.
Let me know your thoughts in the comment below, reach out to me on Twitter, or send your feedback here.
See you next issue!
This newsletter is for informational and educational purposes only, not financial advice. Always DYOR.