Home EdaFace Component 5: NFT Marketplace Introduction (NFT) Article
Besides their unique features mentioned above, the reason why NFTs are generating widespread interest across the world is also because of the utilities they provide.
Indeed, NFTs can be utilized in various ways in any industry. Some of these use cases are as follows:
NFTs are playing a direct role in digital games and other forms of entertainment.
Digital games are becoming very popular, with an estimated 1.1 billion online gamers worldwide. In 2020, the number of mobile gamers increased by 46%, and consumers spent over 19 billion USD on mobile games between April and June 2020.
These digital games are often powered by cartoons, avatars, memes, etc., which are crafted as NFTs.
In general, the main advantages of holding popular NFTs as entertainment tools are:
NFT owners like to show off their holdings by using them as a profile picture that is visible to everyone.
Creative influencers are creating and minting limited editions of NFTs for their fans. In some instances, people who hold such limited-edition NFTs are easily recognized and automatically put in a close circle.
A good example is the Mandela NFTs that were created and minted for 1918 men and women who formed the Mandela Foundation.
NFTs can be minted and displayed to depict the socioeconomic status of the owner. Soon, several influencers will be buying into this idea of minting Prestige NFTs, which will be given exclusively to individuals who fall within a defined social status.
In fact, some people in the luxury industry have started to entertain this idea. A good example is the legally embattled MetaBirkin NFTs that were created and patterned after Birkin, the luxurious, fashion handbags designed for affluence and being produced by the multi-million-dollar company, Hermes International.
MetaBirkin NFTs and the legal issues around NFT ownership have been discussed in Book Two of this series.
Metaverse refers to virtual reality in which users can interact with each other as avatars, and conduct activities like buying and selling goods, performing social functions, working, and, indeed, carrying out any normal activity as in the physical world.
The technologies driving the metaverse are Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR). The main difference between the two is that AR blends virtual content with the real world, while VR completely immerses users in a simulated environment.
Interestingly, both the AR and VR of the metaverse are powered mostly by NFTs.
The power of the metaverse is yet to be felt as the technology is still in its nascent stage. Properties like land and houses have been developed and sold in the metaverse. Some of these virtual assets are growing in financial value more than some physical assets.
For example, on 30th November 2021, Sandbox company developed a virtual estate in the metaverse and sold a 24 x 24 estate land for 4.3 million USD to Republic Realm from Atari, a video game company, that now owns the virtual land.
Here are other examples of land deals that were executed in the metaverse (Melo, 2023):
• Fashion Street Estate in Decentraland: Sold for $2.4 million on November 22, 2021
• Genesis land in Axie Infinity: Sold for $2.33 million on November 24, 2021
• Otherdeed #59906 in Otherside: Sold for $1.57 million on May 8, 2022
The most expensive Metaverse land sale as of the writing of this manuscript was 5 million USD, purchased by Curzio Research for 19 commercial properties in TCG World on May 22, 2022.
In fact, there were 622 436 total parcels of land in the ten largest metaverses. The average price of the top 10 metaverse deals was 2.06 million USD, which was enough to buy a below-average real-world home in the high-brow places like Beverly Hills, Malibu, or Hollywood Hills of the USA.
It is of interest to note that each parcel of these virtual properties was an NFT with digital title deeds that demonstrated proof of ownership.
The amount of land on each virtual world platform is theoretically finite, and each land token has coordinates, just like real-world parcels. Combining two or more adjacent parcels results in a virtual estate.
Owners of these parcels of land can develop their property into VR worlds, overlay user experiences, build interactions, superimpose objects, etc. Virtual real estate can be bought (wholly or as fractional ownership), sold, or rented.
Buyers can purchase land with a metaverse mortgage or pay with fungible cryptocurrency like Ether, EDA, USDT, etc. via crypto wallets (Mariotti, 2022).
Hope you are getting the idea about the power that NFT technology holds for humanity, and this is just the beginning!
Besides entertainment and the metaverse, another life-transforming use case of NFTs is Asset Tokenization.
Asset Tokenization is the process of issuing a blockchain token to represent tangible or intangible real-world assets.
Such real-world assets include commodities like cotton, petroleum and gas, precious metals, artworks, music, physical and digital collectibles, commercial and residential real estate, cars, and corporate equity.
Other assets that can be tokenized include financial instruments such as treasury bonds, certificates, intellectual property like patents and licenses, gift cards, sports teams, athletes, identity and celebrity work, data, etc.
In other words, there is no asset of yours that you cannot create an NFT from and then market the NFT to generate an extra source of income.
To make Asset Tokenization a bit clearer, consider this example. Imagine you have built a beautiful house. This house is, therefore, your physical asset.
You can approach your architect to draw up a three-dimensional picture of your house.
Finally, you can pass this three-dimensional picture of your house through a blockchain. When this has been done, the three-dimensional picture of your house will now become an NFT.
You can then make many copies of this house NFT and market them to your family members, tenants, friends, colleagues, and the public to generate extra income.
Note what has happened: By your actions, you have successfully created three kinds of assets:
(i). Physical Asset
This is the physical house that you have built.
(ii). Digital Asset
This is the three-dimensional picture of your house that has been designed by your architect.
(iii). Blockchain Asset
This is the three-dimensional picture of your house that has been passed through the blockchain to become an NFT.
In other words, one asset (your physical house) has generated two other kinds of assets – a digital asset and a blockchain asset. The digital and blockchain assets are real assets with market values.
Asset Tokenization is a rapidly growing use case for NFTs. It offers a lot of benefits.
NFTs are essentially non-divisible. Nevertheless, several people can come together and pay for a certain NFT. This is referred to as Ownership Fractionalisation.
In other words, an NFT can have joint ownership, and any profits realized from trading such an NFT are shared among the joint owners in proportion to the size of their ownership share.
The benefit of ownership fractionalization is that it allows investors with small capital to have ownership rights to an otherwise expensive asset. For example, NFT tokenization will allow retail investors to participate in markets previously out of their reach, such as an investment in large commercial estates, e.g., hospital buildings, stadia, etc.
Since NFTs are cryptocurrencies, they can be traded for profits like any fungible cryptocurrency.
Furthermore, some owners of NFTs go a step further and mint a fungible token to represent their NFTs. Such fungible tokens of NFTs pick up financial value and can be traded as well.
For instance, EdaFace NFTs are minted on the Ethereum blockchain and can be bought and sold with EDA or Ether coin. Likewise, EdaFace NFTs that are minted on the Binance blockchain can be bought and sold with EDA or BNB coins.
Thus, EDA, Ether, and BNB coins are fungible tokens, which are used to trade specific EdaFace NFTs.
Because the coins and tokens are tied to the NFTs, as more of the NFTs are traded, the value of these coins and tokens rises. This means if you are not interested in acquiring NFTs, you may choose to trade their fungible cryptocurrencies.
A digital asset can easily be plagiarized (that is, pirated). Creators and several artists have suffered great losses from their stolen digital assets. Many songs have been pirated so that the musicians do not make much profit.
For example, television and film piracy costs the US economy about 71 billion USD in lost revenue each year.
Thousands of people in the entertainment industry lose their jobs due to piracy. A good example is the music industry, which records annually between 230 000 and 560 000 job losses and 47.5 billion to 115.3 billion USD in reduced gross domestic product in the USA alone. Imagine the losses globally!
Indeed, piracy is a real problem.
Similar to plagiarism is copyright infringement and disputes. A lot of copyright infringement and disputes abound in the creative industry. Many scientists have cried out against their stolen works.
For example, in 2021, the Global Innovation Policy Center (GIPC) estimated that copyright infringement was worth between 29.2 billion and 63.6 billion USD globally. In 2011, the U.S. economy alone lost a staggering 58 billion USD annually to copyright infringement.
The good news is that once these copyrighted works are tokenized as NFTs, piracy, copyright infringement, and disputes are eliminated because such NFTs enjoy the authentication and transparency of blockchain technology.
As the Crypto Market evolves, NFTs are progressively finding other use cases for their existence, such as:
NFTs can be used to verify licenses and certifications.
Imagine if a university crafts an NFT into each certificate it issues! What that means is that the originality of each certificate issued by the institution can easily be ascertained by checking its embedded NFT unique signatory features.
In that way, certificate forgery will be a thing of the past, and the university administration could save a lot of time and resources required for certificate verification by simply accessing such licenses with the functionalities of their NFTs.
(b). Control of Counterfeit Tickets
One common headache in public (and even some private) events, such as the World Cup soccer, is ascertaining the authenticity of entry tickets. Counterfeit tickets and corrupt merchandise are some of the critical issues that plague the sports industry.
However, NFTs can bring a solution to these plagues.
Imagine if the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA), which is the world governing body of football, were to issue an NFT for each World Cup with its tokens! The fans acquire the tickets by simply buying the World Cup NFT tokens. Imagine if each of the tickets sold carries a unique signature of identification!
This will not only be a source of revenue for the event, but it will also be a means for checking duplicated or forged tickets. It means the issue of counterfeit tickets and manipulations of tickets to favor some privileged people to the detriment of the soccer game will be a thing of the past.
Remember that blockchain cannot be manipulated, hence such World Cup NFT-inscribed tickets will be free from undue manipulations by any corrupt official.
As a soccer fan, like many other fans around the world, I’ll be delighted to see the day when the Confederation of African Football (CAF), FIFA, and other sports confederations wipe off corruption completely from sports. NFTs can help achieve that!
Online collectibles such as Cryptokitties were among the initial ways in which people learned about the use of NFTs. Each digital kitty carries specific crypto traits such as fur patterns or eye color.
A user can purchase two different crypto cats and breed them by simply clicking on a button. The resulting new breed of kitten carries features of its own identity and the Genetic Algorithm.
In the same manner, parents and grandparents can breed new collectibles specifically for their family, and such collectibles with a specific genetic algorithm can be passed on through generations as family legacies.
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References
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Capa Learning (2025) “10 Big Brands Jumping On The NFT.” [Online] Available from: https://capalearning.com/2024/07/10/10-big-brands-jumping-on-the-nft/ (Accessed: 13 July 2025).
CMC (2024) “Highest Price NFT Stats.” CMC – CoinMarketCap. [Online] Available from: https://coinmarketcap.com/nft/ (Accessed: 29 May 2024).
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Mariotti T. (2022) “Metaverse Real Estate Statistics (2024)” [online] Available from: https://www.rubyhome.com/blog/metaverse-real-estate-stats/#:~:text=10 Largest Metaverse Real Estate,biggest virtual real estate deals (Accessed: 05 April 2024).
Melo L. (2023) “Most Expensive Land in the Metaverse.” [online] Available from: https://dappradar.com/blog/most-expensive-land-in-the-metaverse (Accessed: 05 April 2024).
Mozée C (2021) “A plot of virtual land that went for $4.3 million in The Sandbox is the most expensive metaverse property sale ever.” [online] Available from: https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/currencies/metaverse-property-sandbox-virtual-real-estate-deal-record-4-million-2021-11 (Accessed: 05 April 2024).
Vogue Business (2022) “Why Nike's next Web3 move is a black hoodie: Rtfkt’s founders tell all.” Maghan McDowell, July 18, 2022. [Online] Available from: https://www.voguebusiness.com/technology/why-nikes-next-web3-move-is-a-black-hoodie-rtfkts-founders-tell-all (Accessed: 13 July 2025).
Vuleta B. (2023). “23 Corrupting Piracy Statistics You Must Know in 2023.” [Online] Available from: https://legaljobs.io/blog/piracy-statistics#:~:text=TV and film piracy costs,and $71 billion every year (Accessed: 7th February 2024).
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