NFTs are not to blame

T206 Honus Wagner baseball card sold for $6.606 million just this August 2021, Pikachu Illustrator, a pokeman card sold for $195,000 in 2019. You can get different Micheal Jordan's basketball card on e-bay ranging from couple of thousands to couple of millions. Sentimental and collectible items have always been part of the human experience. NFTs are not to blame.

Why should pieces of cards with pictures of athletes (or game characters) be worth that much? Why should JPEGs/PNGs be worth that much? Maybe because humans also value things for sentimental reasons just as they do for utilitarian/sustenance reasons.

NFTs only made the act of ownership that was so easy to establish in the physical realm, also possible in the digital realm. It's only natural it will be used for digital arts/collectible culture.

The mistake to avoid, is thinking NFTs are only about digital arts and collectibles. No! they are more than this. The ability to create unique, non fungible digital items that can be provable owned, can be, and is being deployed for other use cases.

Why I am offering NFTs as a crowdfunding perk

Non-equity funding campaigns are always based on promises: "Back us now, and we promise you early access to the product when we launch, or we promise you a discount, digital shout-out or swags". I am currently running an Indiegogo campaign where the promise will also include an NFT: Non Fungible Token, which is a digital artifact that can be used to prove things like ownership. This, as far as I know, is the first time NFTs would be used in this capacity.

In this post, I will shed some light on what NFTs are and share my thoughts on why they are a  perfect perk for a non-equity crowdfunding campaign. In doing so, I will touch on my thoughts on the continual march towards the digitalization of the human experience. How digitalization and technologies like virtual/augmented reality, blockchain technology, etc are making it possible to further digitize aspects of society and human interaction that were previously rife with problems or just plain impossible to digitize.

By the way, my campaign is to kickstart the development of DishAfrik: a recipe app to discover, enjoy and share African recipes. Think of it as Yummly or Tasty.co but focused on African cuisine. One of the perks of the campaign is going to be 54 uniquely generated collages made up of 54 recipes from 54 countries. 54 because currently Africa is home to 54 fully recognised sovereign states.

You should check out the IndieGoGo campaign and back the project :) Find it here 

TL;dr 

• Ever since the third industrial revolution, there has been a march towards digitalization of the physical world. 
• Blockchain-related technologies, like NFTs, provided the possibility to digitize aspects of the physical world that relied on scarcity, uniqueness, and proof of ownership, aspects that were previously hard to digitize. 
• DishAfrik's Indiegogo campaign will be making use of NFTs as a perk, using it as a way to capture participation, while also creating digital art in the form of a recipe collage that can also be owned.