💡 NFTs will go mainstream when they become ubiquitous. Not when we talk about them all the time. And a good comparison to understand this is PDFs…
📜 Nobody wants a PDF…
Think about it… When we're looking for a document, a book, an article, a research paper, or a slide deck, do we say that I'm “looking for a PDF”? Probably not. But, we often assume that the format will be a PDF.
And that's because we appreciate its ease of use and portability. PDF has become a ubiquitous format. Many different readers are available for it, and as a result, it has become a preferred format for many people.
However, it's important to remember that what people are ultimately looking for is not the PDF format but the information contained within it. And while the PDF format may be convenient and widely used, the document's content is ultimately the most important thing.
💫 A format for digital ownership
NFTs are like PDFs in that they are a format that serves a specific purpose. But instead of being a format for digital documents, NFTs are a format for digital ownership, allowing for the creation and exchange of unique, one-of-a-kind digital items.
What usually happens is that most NFT-based companies (and Crowdclass included) still focus too much on the format. But let's be honest, maybe a niche subset of geeks are into the format, but to make NFTs mainstream, the way to go is to focus on their final deliverable.
And these final deliverables can be many things:
- A signed digital Collectible from your favorite football player;
- A Piece of Digital Art you bought from you
- A Digital Certificate that is tamper-proof;
- A Proof-of-Attendance badge as a memory you were at a particular event
- A Digital Gift or Postcard you bought on your favorite vacations and offered
- An in-game item that you won on a battle or a skin that you purchased for your favorite character
- A Digital Trading Card collectible.
And the list goes on…
And just like a PDF is a format for digital documents that allows them to be easily shared and viewed across different devices and platforms, NFTs are a format for these digital assets that enable them to be user-owned, collected, shared, and traded across other devices and platforms.
🖼️ Only by becoming ubiquitous will NFTs go mainstream
And to get NFTs to the mainstream, we should focus our message and target on these deliverables. Make it easy for people to collect and own, using NFTs in the background, and slowly, people will realize the value of the format.
But for NFTs to work, they must become ubiquitous, like PDFs. In the future, all of us will own Digital Collectibles or In-game items (many of us do).
And in the same way, if we own a book and prefer the format to be PDF, in the future, we will prefer that if we own Digital Assets, the format used is NFT because it's unique, verifiable, portable, and genuinely user-owned.
