The basics need to be addressed: what are NFTs employed for in the first place? It’s not surprising that many people still identify NFTs with financial speculating given the amount of high-value NFT sales that have continued to dominate the market despite the current weak market. The easiest approach to explain why individuals ever purchase NFTs in the first place seems to be to include them into this category.
However, NFTs are far more than that.
The need to educate more people with the technology involved in Web3 is one of the reasons brands are flocked to it. Of course, that includes NFTs, which in recent years have essentially provided creatives with a means of completely freeing themselves from intermediaries in terms of generating income from their work. Here is a rundown of some of the top real-world applications for NFTs and how they can make your life a little more convenient in the future.
Gaming
NFT integration offers players a method to maintain all of their achievements and assets across all of their games, independent of platform, whereas most modern games demand you to interact digitally with some sort of screen or device. But for the time being, this still has to be understood and put into practice by big-name game creators.
So how will this work perfectly? Players will be able to keep and genuinely own all of their in-game awards, assets, and collectibles if a game integrates blockchain technology into its range of services. A player’s in-game accomplishments are preserved through many generations of consoles by systems like PlayStation and Xbox, but the same cannot be true for any in-game trinkets or skins they may acquire. The same is true for consoles that were released before the internet revolution that swept the seventh generation of gaming consoles.
Ownership by the player, usefulness, interoperability, and transferability. In a previous interview with nft now, Michael Rubinelli, the president of Wax’s gaming division, stated that these are all things that consumers have demonstrated a desire for for thirty years. “We’ll demonstrate how it functions for [players and developers. Because they failed to adapt free-to-play, it’s 2010 all over again. The firmly established groups have fought every change to a business strategy or platform because they lack operational knowledge.
Rubinelli thinks Wax is well-positioned to serve as an example for other participants in the blockchain gaming market given its engagement in that industry. “We’re creating a north star that demonstrates to the rest of the world how to get player ownership, NFT usefulness, and participation. We’re bringing to light participation options for our economy that have never been legalized for gaming, he added.
Real estate
NFTs didn’t merely open up the market for virtual properties. They might also be advantageous for the IRL real estate market. It also makes total sense. After all, most people’s homes wind up being the only significant financial commitment they ever make. How do NFTs fit into this long-standing sector, then?
Let’s examine precedent first. The first real estate NFT sale was made in 2017 when TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington bought a blockchain-backed apartment on Propy. Real estate NFTs aren’t a completely new concept. He later auctioned off this property on the blockchain in 2021 for 36 ETH, which at the time was worth around $93,000.
This has major implications for the real estate sector. And it mostly comes down to how NFTs can include smart contracts, which might possibly shorten the often months-long process of purchasing and selling real estate. It could only be a matter of time until this new comfortable reality becomes the standard in the real estate industry, given the successful transactions enabled by Propy.
Other parties, like Roofstock, want to make it easier for more forward-thinking homebuyers to purchase NFT real estate. They were able to effectively arrange the one-click sale of a single-family rental home to an investor in October 2022. Real estate investor Adam Slipakoff claimed in a news release shared with nft today that he was able to purchase a fully title-insured, rent-ready property with just one click rather than having to wait months for underwriting, appraisals, title searches, and deed preparation. However, how does this operate? A potential homeowner must first mint a membership token once, after which Roofstock gives these users the ability to complete real estate transactions with only one click.
NFTs in the real estate sector have the potential to increase the number of individuals who see buying a property as a realistic goal. In an interview with nft today, Roofstock’s Web3 chief Sanjay Raghavan stated, “With DeFi, we have the possibility to offer less expensive and quicker asset-based financing choices [to consumers]. “We envisage NFT-powered real estate transactions becoming increasingly relevant for investment properties due to speedier and less expensive purchase and financing possibilities.”
Permanent Records
In a sense, one of the most significant obstacles to establishing the legitimacy of assets with unchangeable lifetime is being overcome by NFTs. Which of these is the best? Sacred Tokens (SBTs). These are a brand-new class of NFTs that Vitalik Buterin, a co-founder of Ethereum, has suggested. They are intended to serve as an all-inclusive toolkit for internet users to maintain and safeguard their identity. So how does this technology that seems to be built for the digital age fit into actual NFT use cases?
SBTs have the potential to significantly alter everyone’s online and offline life if they go live as planned. Users have access to a variety of utilities through SBTs, including the capacity to mint NFTs of their academic records, work histories, medical information, and more. SBTs, on the other hand, cannot be traded, setting them apart from standard NFTs. SBTs are also intended to be immutable, permanent records so that everyone may continue to be connected to both their physical and digital life.
The fact that SBTs are totally opt-in experiences is arguably their most promising feature. To put it another way, you don’t need to have every piece of newly created information associated with your physical identity (or stored away where you might lose it). Users won’t be required to mint every aspect of their life and successes into the blockchain, either. Just the components you wish to keep.
Government documents
One enduring problem persists in today’s largely cashless culture. the trouble that results from losing your wallet. Not your cryptocurrency wallet—although that would certainly hurt just as much, if not more—but your real physical wallet. Debit cards, credit cards, and priceless Polaroid pictures are all missing. Your driver’s license, though, can be the loss that hurts the most in this situation.
But what if replacing it didn’t have to be so difficult? That’s exactly what motivated the Romanian government to create an official NFT market. The Romanian government intends to dramatically reduce the amount of paperwork required to replace or update these papers by allowing citizens to mint their official state documents and ID cards into the blockchain as an NFT. Although it’s not the most fascinating NFT application out there, it could undoubtedly simplify things considerably. The ability to simplify society as a whole acquires credibility when you combine that with the possibility of minting property titles as NFTs.
Voting
Unfortunately, despite the significant advancements in electoral vote recording technology, fraud continues to be a major threat to these systems. Election-related concerns aren’t the biggest issue facing the world right now, but massive voting system fraud is still a possibility. The cause? The shortcomings and vulnerabilities of the electronic voting systems that democratic nations rely on have been extensively discussed online ever since these pieces of equipment first gained notoriety.
However, the idea of conducting elections digitally may not be wholly absurd. Introducing NFTs and the blockchain, of course. Votes may be registered on the blockchain, which ensures that they cannot be altered and will be kept on file eternally.
One Filipino person saw the potential of this and established an online voting system that was supported by the blockchain and, of course, NFTs in time for the 2022 elections in the Philippines. The problem? He was a young man of twelve. However, he could have had a point. His online voting system produced results that were consistent with official pre-election polls and even with the actual outcomes of the Philippine election in 2022.