The next big entertainment franchise could come out of the NFT market. Anatoly Yakovenko, co-founder of Solana and CEO of Solana Labs, said that NFT projects could lead to important IP in the coming decades.
Yakovenko said, “I think if you’re dreaming of starting the next Marvel or Disney in the next 20 years. it’s probably happening right now out of these NFT sets.”
At the moment, he said that NFTs are the “dominant, breakout use case” for Web3 technology. He also said that tokenized assets can be used as the basis for many different things.
“There are no limits to what could happen,” he said. “and this is, I think, the best place to zero-to-one a brand, or a new story, or new lore for whatever—games, movies, IP, franchises, whatever you want. It’s early days, but really, really exciting.”
Popular NFT projects like the Bored Ape Yacht Club, CryptoPunks, and Axie Infinity have generated billions of dollars in NFT trading volume so far, and some of the most sought-after collectibles from the first two collections have sold for millions of dollars each.
An NFT is a blockchain token that represents ownership of a unique item, like a profile picture, a collectible from the sports or entertainment world, or a video game good. The market had $25 billion worth of trades in 2021, and sales and values of NFTs continued to rise in 2022, even though the recent crash of the crypto market in May hurt sales and values of NFTs.
For example, the Bored Ape Yacht Club lets each NFT holder make and sell art and projects that are based on their own images. People have used these rights to make clothing with the Ape logo, packaging for alcohol and cannabis, themed restaurants, and even virtual bands.
On the other hand, a project like Doodles keeps its commercial rights with the people who made it, so it builds its brand in a more traditional way. A project like Nouns, on the other hand, uses a “open source” or “no rights reserved” strategy, which means that anyone, even those who don’t own the expensive NFTs, can use, change, and sell its images.
If Yakovenko’s prediction comes true, it will be interesting to see which method wins: one in which holders (or the general public) can do whatever they want to spread the IP, or one in which the original creators keep control of the project.
As a co-founder of Solana, Yakovenko has a front-row seat to the growing NFT market. Solana is the second-largest platform for NFTs after Ethereum in terms of trading volume, and it has given rise to valuable projects like DeGods, Okay Bears, and Solana Monkey Business.
He compared the rise of NFTs to the rise of online forum communities in the 1990s, which led to the social media platforms of the 2000s and the industry titans of today. Could an early NFT project become a huge franchise in the next 20 years? Yakovenko believes so.
“I don’t know which way it’s going to go, but it really feels like you’re looking at bulletin boards in the 90s,” he said. “Like, OK—some of these are going to be Friendster, MySpace, or Facebook, but it’s really, really hard to predict.”
Leave this field empty if you're human:
