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The recent influx of news around the trend of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) that pick up staggering amounts online has a universal reach. While they have recently become all the rage for celebrities to spend millions on, NFTs have a surprising amount of usability that comes along with their collectability. As we continue to explore this new all-digital asset class, we should pay attention to the practical use they can offer: a highly secure, comprehensive approach to online business transactions.
Going Beyond Art — NFTs for Business
The utility for NFTs lies in their use of blockchain technology; a decentralized digital ledger that is almost impossible to modify or hack. In addition to proving ownership of a unique digital asset, this technology has nearly limitless uses beyond simple pixelated art.
Imagine a world where the deed of your house exists as an NFT. Instead of having to regenerate every time the house is sold, the deed records all changes automatically, making closing a breeze. Not only that, but it would also be much safer – nobody could fake the home ownership, because they couldn’t change the NFT.
This wouldn’t just apply to houses either. It would be useful in any environment where ownership needs to be tracked and proven. Rather than having to spend time looking for paperwork to prove you bought and owned something, the NFT would provide a perfect record of an item’s full ownership history.
You could see applications for gig workers and bids for jobs. In addition, having the time tracking and pricing mechanism built into their NFTs creates a digital work order that can be changed in real time as the job progresses. Prospective college students can create an NFT representing their application profile, with colleges bidding for them by offering admission and scholarships. But it’s not all about usability; NFTs also bring an improvement in security.
Related: The NFT Gold Rush: Here’s Why Everyone Is Talking About Non-Replaceable Tokens
A more secure transaction platform
Paper transactions are inefficient, require more human resources and are often lost. However, they have one advantage over the cloud-based documentation in use today: it is often easier to prove the authenticity of a paper document. Documents stored online can be hacked, duplicated, or altered, costing businesses millions of dollars each year.
NFTs of the future can solve both problems. They bring a new layer of security to digital transactions while improving efficiency. Anyone involved in a transaction can see the NFT’s journey from creation to final release in real time and know exactly who else was involved in that journey. It creates a virtually unhackable system that is encrypted, easily distributed and cannot be modified. Identity theft could be a thing of the past. The asset that an NFT represents is tracked and verified to exist, which increases the confidence of all parties to a transaction that it is accurate and beyond expectations.
Related: The Impact Of Blockchain When It Comes To Data Security
A real win-win technology
NFTs have the potential to dramatically reduce transaction processing costs for both the buyer and seller of a good or service. The costs for these transactions, which are often a function of the analog systems used to process them, can be drastically reduced. This could also create the opportunity to increase transaction volume. NFTs are easy to mint and one person can mint several in an hour – something they can’t do with physical records or even many digital records.
It’s hard to think of all the benefits we could see from the widespread adoption of NFTs. The blockchain technology underlying NFTs has already changed the world and will continue to do so as companies work on things like interoperability and widespread adoption by average consumers.
Rather than remain an expensive novelty for the people who already have everything else, the NFTs of the future will be judged on how efficiently and safely they run day-to-day business. There are no losers in that world, aside from perhaps the less palatable characters who take advantage of today’s systems.
Related: NFTs will soon be inevitable. That’s a good thing.
