NFT is another fancy concoction of programmers, which is essentially a unique record in a distributed registry (blockchain). It can usually be sold/transferred to another person. Ever heard of shareholder or real estate registries? This is it, just decentralized and on blockchain. A record in the real estate registry confirms that you own a certain apartment. A record in the share register confirms that you own a certain amount of stock in a certain company.

An NFT (token) record confirms… and that’s where it all starts: a token may or may not confirm anything – it depends entirely on the willingness of companies and society to recognize or not recognize them. There can be an ephemeral “ownership of the original digital work”, which gives no rights at all, or there can be full-fledged sets of rights stipulated by the agreement with the NFT exchange and the creator of the token.

And no, NFT is not a pyramid scheme or necessarily a scam – like other technologies, it can be used in different ways. But you can’t deny that the concentration of scam projects on NFT now exceeds reasonable limits.

It’s only for “owning” pictures, isn’t it?
No. While NFTs have had their explosive growth because of image trading, that’s not their only use. It just happens to be the thing that works best with pictures. It’s essentially the same as owning an original work of art – if you’re okay with the fact that there are people willing to pay $72 million for “White Center (Yellow, Pink and Purple on Pink)” Rothko stamp, then selling the NFT as proof of the authenticity of the “original” shouldn’t be too surprising.

The key difference is that it is much easier for the average person to get involved in NFT transactions than in buying real paintings, which is why there is a rather large and active market, where everyone believes in the “greater fool theory”. This study (eng) says that in March 2021 tokens were selling for $10 million a day.

The pictures gave a boost to the popularity of NFT, and businesses began to look for ways to use the technology to make money. The authors of this study (eng) suggest further use of tokens, including in games and “meta universe”, but here it is important not to repeat the common mistake and not to make direct analogies with selling pictures (do not forget to add here the joke about “Save picture as…”).