NFTs are becoming an industry, and quite a lucrative one at that. Apart from immortalizing works of art, they are helping bring people unfamiliar with crypto on board, increasing the size of the industry. Many new users have never bought cryptocurrencies before.
Prominent platforms
One prominent industry player is Metaplex Studios, which was founded to help onboard numerous artists onto its NFT platform. Adam Jeffries, the new CEO of Metaplex Studios, talked about the ways, in which NFTs help introduce the general public to crypto, in an interview with Coin Rivet.
Metaplex is a Solana-powered on-chain protocol to mint and auction NFTs. Jeffries was selected to lead advancement of tool functionality to enable creators to manage their NFT businesses more easily.
Jeffries stressed that seeing NFTs as a way to drive investment simplified their value:
They (NFTs) are arguably the most approachable technology to bring non-crypto users into the space – or metaverse. As an investment asset, they can be thought of both as a short-term method of exchange or long-term holding. For a short-term exchange, the analogy would be around providing value at a specific moment in time, such as concert tickets with speculation occurring around the event.
According to him, more and more people are grasping their real potential as adoption and acceptance grow. He noted that NFTs have made it possible to connect users and creators through ownership, which is of paramount importance to their interactions. He sees NFTs as much-needed “common ground” between the parties among other advantages:
NFTs also give creators more of a self-governing role when it comes to earnings and content rights, as well as creating a growing demand from users as the work is limited in quantity.
Anyone can build a primary and secondary marketplace with NFTs
What sets the Metaplex protocol apart from other similar platforms? Its CEO pointed out that it was fully decentralized and working hard to create new ways for users to interface with its open-source code. It makes it possible for anyone to create a customized marketplace and have full control over it, unlike on your typical centralized exchange. He added that users could easily launch a storefront with selling and minting NFTs as well as other basic features. They can also create a secondary marketplace, where a user-to-user resale market can be developed.
A number of projects are currently building on Metaplex, including Aurory, FTX, Degen Ape Academy, Phantom Wallet, and Audius.
