Top Crypto Trends (September 2023)

The most expensive painting ever sold was priced at nearly half a billion dollars, yet it’s free to look at for anyone with an internet connection. This is because there is, and will only ever be, one true version and because scarcity drives value. To date though, there hasn’t been a tool to create scarcity for digital products. Blockchain allows this and NFTs (non-fungible tokens) are the new asset class everyone is now talking about, exemplified by the explosive growth of NBA Top Shot and the recent $69M purchase of a piece of virtual art at a Christie's auction. Since digital assets can be freely copied and viewed, everyone has access to them, but NFTs represent a secure, verifiable way to give exactly one person ownership.

 

Sorare is a company that produces licensed NFT-based sports cards for fantasy sports. This combines the addictive nature of fantasy sports with the speculative excitement of buying, selling, and trading scarce digital assets.

 

Because NFT transactions are recorded on a blockchain, they can be viewed and tracked by anyone. This creates a market for data aggregators adjacent to every major NFT. Soraredata.com is growing as fast as sorare.com, albeit from a smaller base, and alongside the widely-talked-about NBA Top Shot is the domain topshotdata.com, which has already been registered and is awaiting a landing page. There's a precedent for this working: CoinMarketCap.com, a site that tracks cryptocurrency valuations, is one of the 400 most-visited sites in the world. Data sites use the picks-and-shovels-in-a-gold-rush model: while any given NFT might be under or overpriced, the aggregate behavior of all of the NFT buyers and sellers creates business opportunities.