A16z partner Chris Dixon summarized the current seven types of NFT on Twitter, including:
- Art: These can be collections such as Cryptopunks and “Boring Ape” BAYC, or they can be digital artworks on the Foundation and SuperRare platforms. The reasons why people like to collect digital art are the same as the reasons why people like physical art, fashion, baseball cards, etc.-NFT artwork is a mix of aesthetics, sponsorship, status, collection and social;
- Music: Music is a particularly important field for NFT, because in the Web 2.0 world, musicians get very little compensation. A series of music NFT projects recently launched include arpeggi.io, Sound.xyz, and royal .io;
- Access rights: NFT makes ticket use cases more convenient and interoperable. NFT can replace traditional work orders. A more native use case is digital access, such as private Discord servers or video courses;
- Game props: Web 2 gamers spend about 40 billion U.S. dollars on virtual goods each year, but they cannot really own game props. These props are owned by game companies, and props do not support cross-game interoperability and combination. NFT allows users to truly own game props, and future games may be built around props owned by users instead of making users rely on the game. Such as Axie Infinity and NBA Top Shot have already triggered a boom in Web 3 games, and it is expected that more games while playing and making money will be launched in 2022;
- Redeemable physical goods: Unisocks is a kind of NFT use case innovation that deserves attention. In this mode, tokens can be exchanged for physical goods. This mechanism can be applied to many offline commodities; for example, many high-end collectors of physical commodities keep their collections in vaults. You can create a digital token that represents them and let them be displayed and traded digitally, which not only eliminates intermediaries, but also enhances the user experience.
- Identity: The way of handling personal information in the Web 2 field is not effective. Sensitive personal information is easily hacked, and handling passwords is even more messy. Large companies will change their privacy policies and terms of service at will, and blockchains like Bitcoin and Ethereum have never been hacked. In Web 3, the identity information is the responsibility of the user: there is no central database that can be cracked or sold, which means using ENS so that the system can log in to the system in an interoperable way and identify the identity;
- Web 2 database. Using encryption methods and decentralized data storage, you can extend NFT to anything stored in a centralized Web 2 database today. The Web 2 database may handle simple things, such as your data access preferences, or more advanced things, such as your entire social graph. NFT enables you to seamlessly switch from one service to another-and complete control of your own data, which is also a key part of the Web 3 vision.
In 2021, we will see an explosive growth of innovation around NFTs. This trend may continue for many years, because it is still in the early stages of Web 3 development.