NFT

Saturday Night Live fans were introduced to Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) a year ago with this skit. Most people know that an NFT is a digital ownership certificate of some asset. That could be a physical asset, or a purely digital asset, like a crude graphic of an ape wearing a sailor’s hat which people are willing to pay hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars for.

The NFT market volume exploded in the second half of 2021:

On-line chain transactions as tracked by DappRadar. Source: Schwab.

The global NFT market is projected to grow from $1.9 billion in 2021 to $5.1 billion by 2028, an annual growth rate of some 18%.

But, why??? Why would people plunk down millions of dollars for just a certificate of ownership of something which may not be particularly beautiful or functional? It is just not something that would ever occur to me.

Part of the answer must be that there are a lot of people who have a lot of money that they don’t really need. This may be a function of the ever-increasing income inequality, but we will not go down that rabbit hole. But still, assuming some 30-something has 50 grand that he doesn’t need — why spend it on an NFT?

I did a real quick search on this topic. The most common reason appears to be the same reason many people buy rare coins or rare wines or other “collectibles” – they hope that someone else will pay them a higher price in the future. There also seems to be a sense of participating in some “community”, e.g., of Bored Ape Yacht Club aficionados. Much of it comes down to the psychology of what others will pay for something, which can be often explained in hindsight, but can be hard to predict if some asset class has not yet become “hot”.

It turns out that there are some other nuances to NFTs beside just hoping some “greater fool” will pay you more for the ownership of your ape drawing five years from now. I will conclude by pasting in some excerpts from an article on the Hyperglade blog, which frames the discussion partly in terms of the familiar economic concept of scarcity:

The key value proposition that NFTs often claim is scarcity. NFTs, as their name suggests, are each inherently unique on the blockchain, i.e. they can be attributed to a specific ‘hash’ or ID. But scarcity alone doesn’t drive value – it has to be a ‘scarcity’ that people want.

One of the first types of scarcity that people want is exclusivity. Exclusivity in this context means something that is very rare and has attributes of originality. Long before NFTs existed, collectibles took center stage in this arena. For example, trading cards, comic books, and antique toys were very valuable due to their scarcity and history associated with them. For example, the Captain America Comics No. 1, from 1941 sold for over $3 million! The NFT equivalent of this would be Jack Dorsey’s first tweet, which went for $2.9 million. Jack’s tweet illustrates the quintessential NFT qualities; distinct historical moment, a special creator, and only one of them.

Collectible NFTs come in many forms (in image, audio, or video formats), but the primary category is art (e.g. the Beeple NFT), followed by music, and sports moments (e.g. NBA top shot). Subsequently, given the depth of the cultural penetration of the content involved, collectibles are the most popular reason for investing in NFTs. According to Crypto.com’s NFT survey of ~30,000 polled users, 47% of those who own NFTs bought them for collectible value. Their primary motive – to be able to ‘flip’ (sell) at a higher price.

Access to a Network

More recently however, is the emergence of NFT collections that empower communities. These collections give holders access to special privileges, primarily access to special cryptocurrency related services and benefits (e.g. higher investment rates). For example, The famous Bored Ape Yacht club holders get to attend special events, E.g. in October 2021, members celebrated annual Ape Fest in New York City, Bright Moments Gallery.

Assets in virtual worlds and gaming

If you haven’t heard of them already, Virtual digital worlds are computer-simulated environments in which users roam around using their personal avatars. So NFTs neatly solve the problem of immutable land ownership. And depending on the demand, access and foot-traffic to certain places in these simulated world prices for virtual lands have skyrocketed. For example, even the cheapest land in decentraland exceeds $10,000. In a very similar way, web 3.0 games are expanding the use case by digitizing in-game assets so that they can be physically owned by players on the blockchain. In-game assets can include characters, cards, skins, etc. a list of which you can find here.

Last month I posted on “The Different Classes of Crypto Stablecoins and Why It Matters “. The main point there is that some so-called stablecoins (e.g., USDC) maintain their peg to the dollar by holding a dollars’ worth of securities (preferably U.S. treasury notes) for each dollar’s worth of stablecoin. This mechanism requires some centralized issuer to administer it. As long as said issuer is honest and transparent, this should work fine.

Crypto purists, however, prefer decentralized finance (de-fi), where there is no central controlling authority. Hence, clever folks have devised stablecoins which maintain their dollar peg through some settled algorithm which operates more or less autonomously out on the web; various other coins or assets are automatically bought or sold, or created/destroyed in order to keep the main stablecoin value more or less fixed versus the dollar. We warned that this type of stablecoin is “potentially problematic”; it is the sort of thing which works until it doesn’t.

In 2018 the Terra project was launched by Do Kwon and others. The Terra stablecoin (UST) was designed to “maintain its peg through a complex model called a ‘burn and mint equilibrium’. This method uses a two-token system, whereby one token is supposed to remain stable (UST) while the other token (LUNA) is meant to absorb volatility.” Terra grew very rapidly, to become something like the fourth largest stablecoin at over $30 billion in capital value. As the supply of Terra increased, the market value for LUNA also increased. Many investors bought into LUNA and for a while were making big bucks as its value soared. A headline from February read, “LUNA shines with a 75% surge in February as $2.57 billion is delisted.” Woo-hoo! And this headline from May 10 proclaimed, “Terra Ecosystem is the strongest growing ecosystem in 2021.”

However, just as that laudatory article was hitting the internet, Terra/Luna blew up. I am not clear on the exact sequence of events, especially on whether the catastrophe was a result of just some accidental market fluctuation or of deliberate dumping by some party who was positioned to benefit. In any event, the value of Terra quickly dropped from $1.00 to around $0.61, which triggered the issuing of vast amounts of LUNA, which cratered its value by some 98%. Since Luna was mainly what backed Terra, this was a positive feedback death spiral. This is same way the $2 billion IRON stablecoin imploded in June, 2021: a “stablecoin” was backed by an in-house crypto token whose value depended on more people buying into the system. Ponzi scheme, anyone?

Both Terra and LUNA got delisted from major exchanges for several days. As of today, the value of Terra (UST) is about ten cents. Poof, there went some $40 billion of investors’ money, just like that. Do Kwon is under police protection in Seoul after a man who lost $2.3 million in Terra/Luna tried to break into his home to demand an apology.

And this just in today: “DEI becomes latest algorithmic stablecoin to lose $1 peg, falling under 70 cents “. Ouch. Looks like the federal regulators will be swarming the stablecoin space, or at least we may get some grandstanding Senate hearings out of it.

In other news, transactions connected to the insanely (I chose that word deliberately) popular and costly Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs overwhelmed the Ethereum transaction network about two weeks ago; this is kind of a big deal because a whole lot of de-fi and other blockchain applications depend on Ethereum as the backbone of their transactions:

When Bored Ape Yacht Club creators Yuga Labs announced its Otherside NFT collection would launch on April 30, it was predicted by many to be the biggest NFT launch ever. Otherside is an upcoming Bored Ape Yacht Club metaverse game, and the NFTs in question were deeds for land in that virtual world. Buoyed by the BAYC’s success — it costs about $300,000 to buy into the Club — the sale of 55,000 land plots netted Yuga Labs around $320 million in three hours.

It also broke Ethereum for three hours.

Users paid thousands of dollars in transaction fees, regardless of whether those transactions succeeded. Because the launch put load on the entire blockchain, crypto traders were unable to buy, sell or send coins for hours. The sale highlights the growing profitability of the NFT market but also the uncertainty around whether blockchains are robust enough to handle the attention.

… Because the Otherside mint impacts the whole Ethereum blockchain, people doing completely unrelated things like selling ether or trading altcoins would also have to pay huge fees and wait hours for their transactions to clear. Someone tweeted a picture of them trying to send $100 in crypto from one wallet to another, showing it required $1,700 in gas fees.