Beyond JPEGs and GIFs: What to Expect of Future NFT Use Cases

With so much recent activity in the NFT art space, it may seem tricky to separate the concept of NFTs from the lucrative flipping of JPEGs and GIFs. 

It shouldn’t be a surprise that the topic of NFTs often brings up a few consistent data points: 

An NFT is simply just a token on a blockchain that identifies something unique; this “something” can be anything from a house to the legal rights of an idea. 

The following article explores how NFTs stand to revolutionize a few industries ripe for renovation. 

Why NFTs?

NFTs are unique digital tokens in that they can carry data stored in an immutable blockchain ledger; this data specifies a .JPEG, MP4, or .TXT of a contract. 

Every time a specific NFT token goes through a transaction, the blockchain adds a new block to the blockchain with the new owner’s information. This chain of transactions allows one to trace the ownership of digital assets throughout the entirety of its history. 

Keep the following features of NFTs in mind before we go through the top future NFT use cases:

Indivisible: The “non-fungibility” of NFTs means that they cannot be broken down into sub-assets– you technically can’t cut a CryptoPunk into a dozen pieces. However, there can be fractional ownership of a single NFT; multiple people can share a percentage of the NFT through other mechanisms. 

Verifiable: The blockchain gives anyone the ability to verify the authenticity of a digital asset, no matter how many times it has changed hands. 

Indestructible: Since an NFT exists solely on the blockchain, it cannot be destroyed. For example, let’s say you buy a Cool Cat NFT for the ETH equivalent of $15,000. You decide to buy a digital frame for $150 and put it on your wall. If a burglar breaks in and steals your frame, you only lose the frame; the NFT would still exist on the blockchain. 

#1: Real Estate

Real estate is an industry entrenched in traditional, inefficient processes. The actual ownership of physical real estate alone is a sub-sector of the industry exhausted by outdated practices. For example, in order to prove you own a property, you’d use a title deed document to prove so. If it’s misplaced, or its record cannot be found online, you could find yourself riled in legal disputes and complexities. 

All of this can be avoided by using NFTs. Since these tokens digitally represent assets, such as land, buildings, or even rooms, tracking the ownership and authenticity of a tokenized property would be possible from anywhere in the world. 

One such startup, Propy, is already utilizing NFTs for real-estate transactions. 

It’s worth noting that NFTs are also being used to represent virtual land ownership, as seen on projects like Decentraland

Decentraland

#2: Ticketing 

If you’ve ever bought a ticket to see a concert or sporting event online, you’d get a quick glance at one of the most visible ticket industry problems– the “convenience” fee that sometimes amounts to 20% to 30% of the transaction.

Even worse, the moment in-demand tickets go for sale online, the site is flooded by scalpers and bots trying to buy as many tickets as they can to flip them for higher prices in secondary markets. 

And in these secondary markets, one out of ten people is likely to get scammed; they frustratingly find out at the event gates– potentially hours of travel, waiting in lines, preparation, and excitement only to find out you got ripped off. 

NFTs solve most of these problems.

For one, NFTs play nice with other blockchain-based solutions, which tend to disintermediate the middle-man ticketing companies charging a third of the ticket price in convenience fees. 

Second, NFTs offer immediate authenticity verification and secure owner transfers. This is an incredibly valuable feature on secondary markets– NFTs make trust the default in a trustless environment. 

#3. Domain Name Ownership

Blockchain-based domains, usually represented by NFTs, play a very important role in domain ownership. 

For starters, NFT domains are owned by you, not rented. No one actually owns a domain, which is a tricky concept– you pay to register your domain with a domain name registrar, but not even registrars own the domain. These registrars are delegated the management of top-level domains like “.com” or “.uk” by ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers). 

Traditional domain name ownership is a rabbithole, but in a nutshell, the whole system only works because everyone in it agrees that it should. 

Modern domains can be incredibly valuable– the most expensive sale yet was $872 million for Cars.com.  

The problem NFTs solve is that domain name ownership is centralized and vulnerable to centralization. If someone (i.e. the government) wants a specific domain shut down, it can probably get it done with limited complications. 

Alternatively, NFT-based domain owners pay a one-time registration fee (compared to an annual renewal cost) and own the domain. 

The domain is stored in a wallet just like a cryptocurrency coin or token, and no one can take it from you unless your wallet is hacked. 

In practice, your NFT-based domain points to content stored on a decentralized storage network. 

NFT Domains can be purchased through retailers like UnstoppableDomains or on marketplaces like OpenSea.

#4: Intellectual Property and Patents

Some of the most valuable assets in the world don’t actually exist in the real world, which makes proving or splitting ownership among multiple parties a nebulous task. 

Intellectual property and patents are very illiquid, and disputes around ownership or sale can require mountains of paperwork and hundreds of billable legal hours. 

Not only can NFTs be used to represent ideas on the blockchain, they can also seamlessly fractionalize this ownership among multiple parties. 

The application of NFTs to IPs and patents is still in its nascent stages, but there are a few notable projects making rapid progress, and NFT licensing framework is setting the stage for future innovations. 

The most notable progress is by IBM’s collaboration with an IP ecosystem platform called IPwe; the organizations are attempting to tokenize patents so patent owners can enable their trading on safe and accessible marketplaces. 

Final Thoughts

While the above NFT applications are some of the hottest today, this list is by no means exhaustive. If this article is outdated by the time you read it– good, that means we were right. 

Any industry that needs verifiable authenticity will also benefit from the immediacy, finality, and transportability of NFTs. 

When updating this article in the future, you’ll see a heap of new use cases emerging from public, private, and government sectors, and hopefully with progressive policies regarding the NFT space. 

For now, we anticipate the NFT conversation will continue to be dominated by the most aesthetically consuming and appealing applications of NFTs, but we expect the popular “XYZ Art NFT sells for $50 Million” headlines of today to slowly start morphing to “$114 Million Bel Air Mansion Sells as NFT” or “Rare Metallica Back-Stage Pass Sells for $10M” to become commonplace. 

NFT Overview: How Cool is the Cool Cats NFT?

Cool Cats NFT is an Ethereum-based collection of 9,999 Cool Cats, each randomly generated and stylistically curated.

Members of the Cool Cat community, a membership that is as simple as holding a Cool Cat NFT, can participate in exclusive events such as raffles, community giveaways, and NFT claims. 

Outside of a super rare 66 cats, Gen 1 Cool Cats are all blue with a variety of attributes, running the gamut from pirate hats, monocles, mohawks, epaulettes, knight helmets, and so on. The first generation of Cool Cats (the only generation, currently) has over 300,000 potential options– and cats with completed outfits tend to be considered the coolest.

Holders of Cool Cats also have the freedom to do anything with their Cool Cats they please under a non-exclusive license.

About Cool Cats, the Community

The Cool Cats project was launched in July 2021. It claims and aims to be very community-driven, giving back 20% of all ETH raised back to the community through raffles and contests. 

Holders of Cool Cats can claim custom limited edition Cool Cat NFTs every month. 

The September 2021 airdrop to some Cool Cat Holders
The September 2021 airdrop to some Cool Cat Holders

Cool Cat holders also have a say in future features, such as breeding, next generations of Cool Cats, apps, and more. 

The Cool Cats project is run by a “team of 4 nerds” with passions in cryptocurrency and art; it is partially pseudonymous and consists of:

  1. Clon (The Catoonist (https://www.instagram.com/thecatoonist/) as the illustrator, credited as the originator. 
  2. Tom, who is responsible for smart contracts and other technical interfaces
  3. Lynq, who built and maintains the website
  4. ELU, who leads the creative direction and helps with marketing, project management, and leads who is on creative direction.
thecatoonist’s Instagram

The tokenomics of the project are straightforward: of the 9,999 cats, 100 cats were reserved to give away in competitions and holder airdrops. Each of the four staff members was also given a Cool Cat, not from the reserve stack. The site claims the bulk of the reserved cats will be distributed after the launch, and don’t occupy early token ids. All other cats were listed for sale. 

Cool Cats have been traded over 21,100 times in secondary markets. The vast majority of holders have 1 Cool Cat, and about 37 wallets have 11-15. 

Source: Dune Analytics

The Cool Cat team’s primary means of communication is via Town Halls on Discord, as well as its Twitter (@coolcatsnft).

What’s Cooler Than Being Cool?

The Cool Cat team created a point-based system for how cool a cat is. Points are determined by the items each Cool Cat NFT has. For example, a green bucket hat is worth fewer points than a rare item like a gold crown, and the market tends to price the cats accordingly: as of writing, the green bucket hat floor is 6.4 ETH and the gold crown is 29 ETH.

The majority of cats are worth between 3 to 6 points. The coolness breakdown is as follows:

  1. 4,599 cats are between 3 to 4 points and considered Cool.
  2. 3,000 cats are between 5 to 6 points and considered Wild.
  3. 1,750 cats are between 7 to 8 points and considered Classy.
  4. 650 cats are between 9 to 10 points and considered Exotic.

The majority of Cool Cats fats fall into the Cool and Wild Range, and the price floor contains many common attributes you’d find throughout: green shirts, beanies, berets, beards, and so on. 

The rarest cats of the bunch are 1/1000; the exotics feature a completely different style without any repeated attributes.

Cool Cats Collabs

On August 13th, 2021, Cool Cats announced a collaboration with TIME magazine.

The collaboration was catalyzed when TIME President Keith Grossman expressed his admiration for the project on Twitter. 

There were 400 total pieces minted:

  • 100 x Elu’s cat
  • 100 x Clons’ cat
  • 100 x Xtremetom’s cat
  • 100 x Lynoid’s cat

8 collaboration Cool Cats were awarded to the 8 best meme creators, whereas the remaining 392 cats were raffled off to Cool Cat holders. 

The Future of Cool Cats

One of the most anticipated features by the Cool Cat community is the introduction of breeding, which the Cool Cat team plans to introduce in Generation 2. 

Although there is limited information on how this breeding will take form, it’s not a stretch to assume that holders of at least two Cool Cats will have the option to “breed” them on the Cool Cat site or third-party platform by connecting their MetaMask. 

Final Thoughts: We Like the Cats

Cool Cat NFTs have experienced a rapid rise in adoption, the number of wallets holding cats, floor prices, mid-range prices, and ceiling prices since its launch in July 2021. 

The Cool Cats OpenSea description urges us to consider, “remember, all cats are cool, but some are cooler than others.”

Rare Cats

The Cool Cat NFTs are designed in a way to foster a community of Cool Cat holders, and the rarer the attribute, the more admirable the Cat. However, the Discord conversation doesn’t seem to be elitist or preferential of rare Cool Cat Holders. Check out Cool Cats on its website and OpenSea.