Jesse Walden - A Primer on NFTs

I think a really simple way to define NFTs are as a file or a file type that lives on the blockchain. You have MP3s, you have JPEGs—these are files that live on your phone or your computer. NFTs are a new file type, a digital media file, that live on the blockchain.

There's going to be a market correction, and there's going to be a lot of people saying 'I told you those NFTs were stupid. Who wants to own a digital asset when I can just copy & paste the original?' ... We've seen market cycles in crypto a number of times now—after a big run-up in price, there's always a correction and there are always naysayers who come out of the woodwork ... What you see if you stay in the space long enough is that the technology just gets better and better and better. There's sort of a Moore's Law going on with crypto technology—and that goes for NFTs too.

We will get to a point where every photo you take on your iPhone enters the world as a NFT. Every piece of media that's created will be registered on the blockchain to you as the creator, and that gives you an option on it becoming socially valuable and, as a result, financially valuable in the future.

In a nutshell, NFTs make it possible to own a piece of digital media in the same way that you are able to own a digital currency, like Bitcoin.

The value of an NFT is, in fact, directly correlated with the number of times the image, the video, the song, has been shared. So, the more viral it is, the more value there is in owning the original.