25 NFT Use-Cases You Should Know About
Learn how to take your brand into web3 or take your Web3 project to market
Imagine that your job is to make a product. You want to know how many people will buy it, but before you can put that information into a spreadsheet, you have to figure out how much money each person will pay for the product. The answer could be anything from $0 (free) to $100 or more - but there's no way of knowing until someone actually buys something!
You can't just ask everyone who likes what you do if they'd pay money for it; some people will say yes no matter what because they're nice people and don't want to hurt your feelings. But on average, everyone who says yes is not going to spend very much money on your thingy in particular; most won't even consider spending any money at all!
Instead of trying to get everyone who likes what you do paying customers... why not concentrate on getting 100 true fans?
Tokenizing the Attention Economy
Tokenization is a new way to monetize content
Tokenizing the attention economy is a new way to monetize content
How to Build Immersive Worlds with NFTs
It's true that NFTs are digital assets, and they have value. But what other kinds of things can be made into NFTs? Maybe you're a writer who dreams of creating an immersive world that your readers can explore. Maybe you want to make a video game with characters whose stories exist on the blockchain. Or maybe you want to build a theme park where people could spend their time in an interactive experience like Marvel's Avengers: Endgame VR ride at Disney California Adventure Park. The possibilities are endless!
The best part about building worlds with NFTs is that it doesn't require any programming knowledge; all you need is a good idea, some creativity and an artist or designer who knows how to bring your vision to life using 3D models—the same kind of tools used by video game developers around the world every day!
Here's a list of all the use cases I see, in no particular order:
Fashion
AR clothes NFTs - NFTs as clothing items would emerge as AR gets better & more accessible. As virtual fashion becomes the dominant trend, NFTs signifying ownership would help create an emerging market for virtual clothes & clothing brands.
VR clothes as NFTs: Similar to AR, VR brands can issue clothes as NFTs whether they’re specific to a VR world like Rec Room, Decentraland or Horizon Worlds.
Luxury NFTs: As the data about Luxury goods & clothing goes on-chain, virtual luxury goods would become the defacto standard for luxury, as the supply of every item & collection, and by extension- the scarcity of such items, can be verified on-chain. Brands resorting to fixing the supply of such goods through smart contracts would gain the benefit of retail trust as code is law & they won’t be able to inflate the existing supply, even if they want to in the future.
Music
Pay-to-Stream NFTs: Music NFTs can be programmed to use microtransaction mechanics to reward musicians.
Royalty-sharing NFTs: Musicians can choose to issue royalty-sharing NFTs that rewards their NFT holders with a percentage of their total royalty.
Music label NFTs: Music labels can issue NFTs to artists for every song that they issue, resulting in artists getting a constant daily revenue stream, instead of waiting for months or quarters for the same.
Band NFTs: NFTs can be issued to each member of a band & programmed with immutable royalties to make sure everyone gets paid in a transparent manner. Such contracts would become more commonplace with the rise of pseudonymous musicians.
Remix Rights NFTs: Musicians choose to sell exclusive remix rights of their NFTs to fellow musicians. NFTs which exist as applications to facilitate this inside wallets will end up reducing hours of friction and win over the remix market.
Synchronization Rights NFTs: Musicians or music labels can sell the synchronization rights to movie studios or indie directors who want to use their music in their works.
DAO-created Music NFTs: DAOs can create & collectively vote on different parts of a song like intro, verse, pre-chorus, chorus and bridge, publish this song on-chain as an NFT, and collectively receive royalties earned from the music sales & streaming.
Domain Names
NFT domain names: Domain names, unique by design, are the perfect use-case for perpetually owning domains in a secure, transparent & permissionless manner. The same can be traded & ownership can be tracked on-chain.
Subdomain NFTs: Once domain names are bought, subdomain NFTs can be issued from the high demand domain names, leading to a new sub-market. NFT editions can facilitate this but a new standard is needed in most chains for that.
Domain renting: A renting market will emerge for domain names that are owned perpetually, thus leading to the same domain business model that we see in Web2.
Fractional domain NFTs: Not only does this allow domain name owners to add liquidity to existing high-demand NFT names that they own, but fractional domain name owners can also participate in the rent income if the NFT is rented out.
Ticketing
Event Ticketing: Event ticketing is a perfect use-case for NFTs as it both brings down supply chain costs and is an immutable record of presence at any event. This also ends up being a more efficient process as it roots out rent-seeking middlemen & reduces costs of service.
AR NFT Tickets: AR glasses can allow access to experiences at certain locations to only those who hold the AR NFT tickets. This means, while a warehouse may look like a random warehouse to the vast majority, those with the NFT tickets will be able to see the event happening inside the warehouse, and verifiably get access to it.
Loyalty Rewards
Loyalty NFTs: Brands giving away NFTs with the first purchase can choose to use these NFTs to build loyal customers by airdropping NFTs & tokens in the future, and by rewarding repeat customers with discounts & gifts. Such a trend is already taking place among brands like Starbucks, Budweiser, etc.
Sports
Fan tokens: NFTs can be used as fan tokens, specially representing each player of a team or club, and allow fans to be a part of the governance process.
Attendance NFTs: Attendance NFTs can be issued to everyone who watch the game live, either in-person, verifiably at the gate or on-chain, or through tracking watchtime of every individual person streaming the game. Such NFTs are an on-chain proof of the “I was there when X happened,” and thus, it’ll align incentives and make more people support their favorite teams & reward those who do.
NFTs in the transfer market: Players tokenized as NFTs will enable retail to participate in the transfer market, allowing for an entirely new source of revenue for clubs & teams.
NFTs in e-Sports: As Web3 gaming improves to include AAA titles, E-sports will be the first major adopter of NFTs. This’d enable the audience to invest in their favorite player, invest in prediction markets related to the price of such investments & participate in the upside of their favorite players.
Early Adopter Branding
NFTs as early status signal: Established companies entering this space & offering NFTs at a fixed price would end up creating the most value for these early adopters if they continue to iterate on the NFT’s utility. While most independent projects don’t have the bandwith to survive bear market cycles, large corporations can just continue to live off their main cashflow businesses, letting their NFT holders perpetually hold the earliest NFTs throughout time.
Intellectual Property NFTs: NFTs representing rights to intellectual property, and NFT marketplaces facilitating the buying/selling of these patents or rights would be an extremely relevant use-case for NFTs in the near future.
Collectibles - By far the most popular use-case at the moment, just the act of a collection of NFTs sharing similar attributes allows creators to create a shared sense of community behind a specific idea or niche.
I’m excited to see what the future holds in this new creator economy. As we get more and more creators creating amazing things, we’ll see a shift in how they can monetize their work and make money from it. It will be interesting to see if fans are willing to pay for content that isn’t being produced by a studio or publisher—and what kind of relationship creators will have with their followers if that does happen!
As we’ve discussed here today, there are many different options available—but none of them are perfect. That said, we firmly believe that NFTs offer some exciting solutions that can help creators capture value from their work by giving them control over how they distribute it while also making sure fans don’t miss out on getting access if they want it badly enough!
If you’d like to discover more ways to monetize your digital content using technology like Web3 and NFTs, I’m holding a free workshop “Monetization Attention” this Friday at 19:00pm SAST.
Register to join here (spots are limited).
In the workshop, I’ll reveal how you can monetize your digital content at a higher level while working less.
There will also be a Q&A time at the end where you can ask me any of your burning questions about digital assets.
It’s going to be a great time, and I hope you’ll join me.
Let’s ALL make it!
Wisani
P.S Whenever you’re ready, there are 4 ways I can help you:
Join my free Monetization Strategy for Creators workshop here.
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