Collectibles are here to stay — which NFTs will stand the test of time?

The NFT trend that began in the spring continues to gain momentum. According to Cointelegraph research, NFT sales are aiming for a record $17.7bn in 2021. If you are looking to understand the NFT basics, such as what they are, how they work, and what types there are, read our in-depth blog on the subject here.

A significant share of the NFT market belongs to the GameFi industry. The growing popularity of this industry is the result of the rapid development of DeFi and gaming. In this article, you will learn why GameFi is an industry that is impossible without NFTs, what the Metaverse is, and which NFTs will stand the test of time and contribute to the new digital future.

Why is the GameFi industry impossible without NFTs?

Many gamers see it as a problem that in-game items do not belong to the actual players. From a legal and financial point of view, buying an item from a game developer is more like renting because the objects or characters themselves are locked in one game, and the ownership is wholly with the developer, who can ban your account and all your items.

Only thanks to NFTs has it become possible to create blockchain games where players could own in-game items and characters. Therefore, every day there are more and more people who play NFT games. According to Dappradar’s data for the last 30 days, there are more than four million players in the top 10 NFT games.

The term GameFi (short for Game Finance), proposed in 2020 by the famous DeFi developer André Cronje, encompasses the variety of game projects that are based on blockchain. This technology began to penetrate the industry back in 2014 when the first online casinos started accepting Bitcoin deposits. If you’d like to dive deeper into the GameFi industry, head over to our previous in-depth blog post about it.

A popular NFT games genre is the Play-to-Earn model (Gods Unchained, Star Atlas, Zed Run). This model allows players to earn profits through internal tokens, which can be used in the game, traded on crypto exchanges, or exchanged for real money.

The price of most GameFi tokens is growing today due to their NFT component: investors earning by reselling game heroes and various digital items. This gives rise to an increase in the value of native tokens in most blockchain games.

NFTs as part of the Metaverse future

The concept of the Metaverse is one of the hottest topics in the GameFi industry. Today, people interact online through websites, social media, and apps, while in the Metaverse, users can do more; moving, exploring, communicating, and participating in various activities in the digital world. People in the Metaverse are represented by their 3D Avatars, which they buy on NFT marketplaces, or receive upon registration in a game, depending on the conditions.

The upcoming project Metaverse AI is developing an open social metaverse on the Internet 3.0 with a digital human engine and virtual celebrities. Built on the fast and affordable NEAR blockchain, the Metaverse AI engine will let users create high-fidelity 3D avatars that will allow them to own, store and move their valuable data and assets across the Metaverse. Metaverse AI has already partnered with NVIDIA to develop products for virtual celebrities, which is predicted to be a trillion-dollar market for a wide range of applications.

Which NFTs will stand the test of time?

Speaking about the boom of NFT collections, which occurred this spring, when sales soared by hundreds of thousands of percent, and in September fell by 50% on the most famous OpenSea marketplace, we can conclude that the hype for buying collections is a very volatile phenomenon. The demand for collectible NFTs, from the point of view of human interest, will undoubtedly remain, but it will be difficult for new artists to repeat the success of CryptoPunks or Beeple.

We believe demand will grow for NFTs, with investors massively involved in pre-sales of game heroes, digital items, or land pieces of even unreleased NFT games. The GameFi industry is at the initial stage of its wider potential, as evidenced by the constantly increasing number of new projects and players, who, in turn, will buy NFTs for games interaction. Thus, we can safely say that any NFTs related to the GameFi industry and Metaverse will stand the test of time.

If you are interested in the potential of this sector and want to tokenize real assets, we have the necessary knowledge to create secure smart contracts through which they can be transacted. If you want to launch your marketplace, INC4 can help you create an NFT platform that stands out from the crowd. Contact an INC4 representative today to see our full offering.