The Future of NFTs in the App Universe

Source: SensorTower

These digital art pieces have been selling for record breaking amounts in the last year. What’s thought of as the first ever NFT was created by Kevin McCoy in 2014 and sold for $1.4 million in 2021. This number is nothing compared to the $69 million paid for Beeple’s “Everydays: The First 5000 Days”. The list goes on with Matt Hall’s “Crypto Punks” series each selling for over $7 million and Pak’s ‘The Merge’ at $91.8 million (possibly the most expensive NFT ever sold).

“Everydays: The First 5000 Days, Beeple. Source: Dexerto

These staggering numbers beg the question – why put so much money into intangible items that are essentially, available for the world to access? (For example, accessing Beeple’s famous NFT pictured above.) In short, they are changing the way consumers buy and sell assets, and it is pivoting many industries along with its adoption.

What is an NFT?

An NFT, or non-fungible token, is a digital asset that represents real-world objects such as art, collectables, games and music. They are, essentially, collector’s items that have been digitized and sold online. As the name “non-fungible token” suggests, each NFT is a unique, one-of-a-kind digital item. NFT’s are frequently bought and authenticated with cryptocurrency, meaning that every transaction is recorded on a blockchain – similarly to how crypto is tracked. The blockchain maintains a tamper-resistant record of transactions and keeps track of who owns what.

The main impact of NFTs is that it makes buying and selling digital content much easier and trackable. Before NFTs, artists wishing to sell their work online had trouble monetizing their art directly because consumers could just download or screenshot for free. By creating an NFT, creators are able to verify scarcity and authenticity of anything digital. To compare this system to a more traditional way of collecting art: there are endless copies of the Mona Lisa but only one original piece. The technology behind NFTs helps to assign ownership of original pieces of digital art.

Buying NFTs

There are numerous ways to buy and sell NFTs and although the most popular platforms are still web-based, the exchange of these digital assets may be slowly migrating to mobile apps.

OpenSea is arguably the internet’s most popular NFT marketplace with a market value of $13 billion. OpenSea provides a simple interface for users to list, browse and bid on tokens without having to interact directly with the blockchain. However, with this booming growth brings a cartload of headaches as OpenSea has struggled to keep up with emerging security incidents and endless copycat NFTs. Most recently, there was an attack on OpenSea with hundreds of NFTs stolen that were valued at more than $1.7 million.

OpenSea launched their first app in September of 2021 and by January already had over 2 million users on their app. However, the app is not meant for the buying and selling of NFTs but rather for browsing purposes only. This leaves a huge space in the market for apps to sell these digital assets. Market opportunity for NFT trading apps is growing as interest and usage increase, with not much competition so far. When will the app market offer the best apps for trading NFT’s? When will the NFT app market catch up with demand?

Apps and NFTs

With not much competition, it's hard to say what is the best app for NFT trading currently. However, the most recent app to dip it’s toe into the NFT waters is VeVe. VeVe is an app-based marketplace for premium licensed digital collectibles, aka NFT app marketplace. VeVe initially launched in 2018 and had slow but steady growth since its inception. In November of 2021, VeVe partnered with Disney to create limited edition Disney Golden Moments NFTs, resulting in the most downloads in a single day for VeVe's mobile app on the collection's drop day on November 9. Worldwide installs reached 39,000 on that day – up nearly five times from approximately 8,000 installs on November 2nd. VeVe saw $4.4 million in consumer spending on Disney+ Day (November 12th) – the most the app has generated in a single day.

This example has no doubt sparked the fire for other apps to join in on the NFT app goldmine. Shopify, a commerce platform that lets you start, grow, and manage a business, announced in July of 2021 that they will be implementing the exchange of NFTs through their website as well as their app. Apps such as GoArt and Dream by WOMBO have been created to help consumers make their own NFTs. Both these apps have seen tremendous growth (over 800% increase in users to be exact) within the last three months due to the increased popularity of NFTs.

Although mobile apps aren’t the most popular way to buy and sell digital assets, NFT trading apps are likely to make their way into the app universe just like cryptocurrency transitioned into the mobile space.