NFTs are the early stage of a social network that doesn’t rely on ads or ‘poison marketplaces’ to bring communities together, Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko says | Currency News | Financial and Business News

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Ana­toly Yakovenko

Non-fun­gi­ble tokens might be all the rage right now, but they’re in fact the ear­ly foun­da­tions the social net­works of the future, accord­ing to Solana co-founder Ana­toly Yakovenko.

NFTs are often sold as part of a col­lec­tion, or come as part of a play-to-earn gam­ing plat­form, link­ing up own­ers all over the world. The sense of com­mu­ni­ty is built in from the get-go and requires no exter­nal involvement.

“I think these are the ear­ly starts of true web social net­works that do not rely on ads for mon­e­ti­za­tion that don’t rely on Google or Face­book to func­tion,” Yakovenko told Insid­er in a recent interview. 

“They are pure­ly these dig­i­tal com­mu­ni­ties that can monetize/self mon­e­tize from their own con­tent with­out the need of any of these exter­nal poi­son mar­ket­places,” he said. Yakovenko is a long-time crit­ic of some of the adver­tis­ing and data-pri­va­cy strate­gies of larg­er social plat­forms such as Face­book or Google.

Hype around the meta­verse, a vir­tu­al real­i­ty where peo­ple can buy land, homes, lux­u­ry items that they pay for in cryp­tocur­ren­cy, helped make NFTs Novem­ber’s best per­form­ing dig­i­tal assets.

In the past week alone, a whop­ping $275.5 mil­lion worth of NFTs have been sold, accord­ing to Non Fun­gi­ble data, thanks in part to rock­stars’ avatars hang­ing out in the likes of Decen­tra­land or the Sand­box with those of ordi­nary peo­ple, as well as dig­i­tal art sales from the Bored Ape Yacht Club and Cryp­toP­unks NFT col­lec­tions. Com­mu­ni­ty-based NFTs often bring perks to their mem­bers too.

The solana blockchain is a small­er rival to the ethereum net­work. It too can host decen­tral­ized finance appli­ca­tions, like smart con­tracts, as well as run NFTs, which are unique dig­i­tal tokens that rep­re­sent a real-world piece of con­tent, such as art­work, music or video. Unlike cryp­tocur­ren­cies, they can’t be exchanged like for like, mak­ing them a kind of dig­i­tal col­lec­tor’s item.

Chainal­y­sis, a blockchain ana­lyt­ics plat­form, says the suc­cess of NFTs is a result of “com­mu­ni­ty and word of mouth growth”. 

They cer­tain­ly appeal to com­mu­ni­ties such as celebri­ty fan bases. K‑pop idol band BTS, pop star Katy Per­ry, along with fash­ion hous­es Burber­ry and Louis Vuit­ton are just some of the names that have dived into the NFT space. Tik­Tok, a video-shar­ing social media plat­form, launched its own NFT col­lec­tion in Octo­ber. Snoop Dog even has his own meta­verse called the Snoop­verse and a fan coughed up $450,000 for a plot of vir­tu­al land to be the rap­per’s neighbor. 

Even with all the glitz and glam­our around NFTs, they’re main­ly some­thing ordi­nary peo­ple will own. 80% of all NFT trans­fers between Jan­u­ary and Octo­ber this year involved peo­ple that spent less than $10,000 per transaction. 

“I am real­ly excit­ed to see an NFT com­mu­ni­ty go from — 10,000 peo­ple to 100,000 and then a mil­lion and then 100 mil­lion — that’s unbe­liev­able, right?” Yakovenko said.

 “What does that look like when there’s 100 mil­lion peo­ple that are all in — the same com­mu­ni­ty that is dri­ven by this dig­i­tal con­tent?” he said.

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