A Slam Dunk NFT for Space Jam?

“Space Jam: A New Legacy” went all-out in marketing, collaborating with video games like Fortnite and launching massive campaign awareness via digital billboards and other means. It didn’t end there, though. Because Warner Bros. and Niftys recently joined, Space Jam NFTs were bound to come. So this week, 91,000 free NFTs were distributed, and they were gone faster than a game-winning jump shot.

The newest Gary Vee venture, VaynerNFT, has locked in Budweiser.

VaynerNFT was launched this week by VaynerX, led by crypto and NFT supporter and long-time entrepreneur Gary Vaynerchuk. In addition, the VaynerNFT team announced Budweiser as their first large “NFT agency of record” client. After previously minting tokens for sub-brand Stella Artois and cooperating with NFT horse-racing platform ZED.RUN, Budweiser parent company AB InBev is reaffirming its commitment to NFTs. Budweiser has been a VaynerMedia partner for nearly a decade, and their connection will now be strengthened through NFT participation.

Copa America Mints Trophy NFT

The South American Football Federation teamed up with Ethernity, an NFT platform, to create a trophy NFT. As a result, Argentina successfully conquered its title for the first time in 28 years.

Damien Hirst: It’s Your Call: Physical or Digital

Damien Hirst, a well-known modern artist, will release 10,000 hand-painted works of art with accompanying NFTs later this month. NFT holders have one year to determine whether or not they wish to trade their NFT for a physical piece of Hirst’s work; if they do, the NFTs will be destroyed. Hirst plans to make the NFTs available on the HENI platform. Hirst is said to be the wealthiest living artist in the United Kingdom.

Polygon is Not Just DeFi

Polygon has made significant progress in the DeFi world, but why stop there? The site has teamed with Community Gaming, an esports tournament organizer. It will begin conducting tournaments in August that will include purchasing, holding, and selling NFTs as trading cards.

The platform is also collaborating with Dolce & Gabbana to present NFT’s “Collezione Genesi” (“Dress from a Dream”) line. In addition, three D&G events will feature the NFTs next month.

Rolling Stone

When it comes to media firms and NFTs, the list is endless: CNN, TIME Magazine, and so on. As of this week, feel free to add Rolling Stone Magazine to the list. The publication is launching a magazine cover campaign for Rolling Stone Australia.

Kieran Warwick, the co-founder of the upcoming NFT-powered gaming metaverse Illuvium, has stated that he achieved a profit of over 9,000 percent by flipping a virtual parcel of land he bought from the Axie Infinity metaverse.

Warwick, Synthetix founder Kain’s brother, recalls purchasing the plots in mid-2020, adding that there “weren’t too many use cases” for digital land at the time, with in-metaverse advertising and mining still being uncommon as virtual property utilities.

He paid $300 for the land and announced the sale a year later on July 13 for $28,000.

Despite the seeming lack of utility, Warwick put “quite a bit of money” into Axie Infinity because of “the promise that they will develop up the metaverse.” While players wait for Axie to finish developing its land, Kieran points out that the plots have increased in value by thousands of percent in the last year.

“Basically, it was guesswork; I just assumed that play-to-earn, which is a new gaming paradigm that is now gaining traction, would attract a large number of players to our game. Whatever the case may be, if I purchase a unique piece of property, it will be valuable,” he said.

Warwick has put money into four metaverse initiatives but mentioned only Axie Infinity and Mars.

“I want to have land in all of the different games that I think are […] going to grow in the next few years.”

He compares his investment method to physical real estate, stating that when predicting whether property values in a certain suburb would rise, investors look for new developments and other expansion signals.

“It’s the same principle in the metaverse,” Warwick explained. “If you believe there will be a lot of interest and other people developing next to you […], then buying these land parcels is a no-brainer.” But, on the other hand, they’re quite unusual in practically every case.”

“You can see how the scarcity will actually create some allure if they mint 10,000 land plots, and then all of a sudden, there are a million players.”

Land Can Be A Productive Asset

Beyond speculative buy-and-hold strategies, Warwick underlines that virtual real estate investors can put their land to work by hosting advertisements on their plots in Decentraland.

While Warwick believes that “advertising opportunities are probably the biggest use case” at the moment, he believes that as metaverses evolve, the possibilities for virtual land will be “endless.”

Warwick also stated that his own project, Illuvium, will begin selling land soon, underlining that the virtual parcels will have “a use case from day one.”

Illuvium, he claimed, will have a mini-game that will allow virtual landowners to mine for an in-game mineral that will be used to mint products in the game.

“You can only mine it if you have land,” Warwick explained, underlining that he doesn’t want Illuvium’s real estate to be used solely for speculation: “just a stagnant thing where people buy, and it’s only important if someone else wants to buy it.”

The NFT bubble, according to recent assessments, has burst (again). As a result, doomsayers are once again writing the obituary for non-fungible tokens, but, like Bitcoin, which has been pronounced dead over 400 times and never remains buried, don’t be surprised if NFTs continue to survive to thrive in the months and years ahead.

To summarize, non-fungible tokens (NFTs) are a type of digital asset. Still, unlike cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, which are fungible in nature, each Bitcoin is valued the same — each non-fungible token is unique. This year, NFTs have gotten a lot of attention because of their rapid rise in the digital art sector. The market capitalization of NFT projects increased by 1,785 percent in the first three months of the year, but if that wasn’t enough, a single NFT artwork sold at Christie’s for $69 million in March.

Growth

Some observers appear to have predicted that the NFT market will continue to expand in popularity without interruption, but not all niches flourish in the same way. Many markets, particularly in crypto, have peaks and troughs, and the NFT sector is not immune to the whims of speculators.

Several news agencies, including CNN, determined in April that NFT pricing had plummeted and questioned whether the NFT market had already gone bust. The same tale resurfaced at Surface in June, and now Protos has said that the NFT bubble has burst once more, this time with chart data to back up their assertions. “NFTs peaked on May 3, when $102 million worth of them were sold in a single day,” according to Protos.

That’s not too shabby for a bubble that popped in April, according to CNN.

Protos’ analysis’s first problem is that not all of the chart data is clear cut; the second is that market declines are rarely as deadly as is commonly asserted. The third is that a broadening of what NFTs can accomplish will ensure the market’s long-term health. That is to say; the existing NFT market has barely begun to touch the surface of the technology’s potential.

Is NFTs’ Era Coming to an End?

Looking past the hyperbole and editors’ eagerness to create a sensationalist title, the Protos data may indicate the beginning of the NFT market diversifying beyond collectibles. Although the collectibles market as a whole appears to be in decline, “NFTs related to the so-called “metaverse” — such as digital real estate and other virtual artifacts — are actually outselling tokens tied to crypto-art,” as Protos points out.

This isn’t always a bad thing; NFTs have applications far beyond digital art. Furthermore, as technology advances and the list of applications for which NFTs can be used expands, the NFT market will become significantly more resilient.

The Present and The Future

The NFT market may be currently in a period of stabilization. Gauthier Zuppinger, the Chief Operating Officer of Nonfungible.com, proposes this view. “The issue is, every time you witness such a rapid surge on any trend, you’ll see a relative decline, which basically represents for a market stabilization,” he told CNBC in June.

As the NFT market moves past the speculative stage, new applications for the technology are emerging in fields as diverse as music, real estate, banking, gaming, e-Sports, documentation, and even logistics. Music is a great example and quickly becomes one of the most popular uses for NFTs, with musicians like Grimes selling $6 million worth of NFTs in less than 20 minutes. Meanwhile, Steve Aoki went away with $4.25 million from his NFT transaction, while 3LAU took home $11.6 million. Platforms like Mozik are letting lesser musicians tokenize their tracks, so it’s not just the big names who are getting in on the fun. We’ve also witnessed the start of earnable NFT usage, as evidenced by apps like NFTrade’s NFT farms. Although trading activity in the NFT market has decreased slightly since its high earlier this year, earnable NFTs remain hotter than ever, indicating that interest in this space and asset class is only just getting started.

NFTs are also expected to revolutionize land ownership, both in the real world and in virtual worlds like Decentraland, where non-fungible tokens represent plots of land on a map that also serve as the foundation for an entire virtual reality world. Furthermore, NFTs can be used as proof of ownership in areas other than land, and in the future, they may even be used as proof of identification, such as digital passports.

There are reasons to believe that NFT technology has yet to realize its full potential everywhere you look. But, unfortunately, those who assert differently may be deficient in perspective.