Technical jargon: What does "NFT" actually mean?
In his column «Fachchinesisch,» Benno Maggi explains terms from the fields of marketing and communications. This time, he explains the term «NFT»—non-fungible tokens.
Non-fungible token - to take the cryptographic aspect of this acronym right away - means a unique, non-exchangeable key. But why is everyone talking about this? An NFT is the antipode of bitcoin, because bitcoin is just that fungiblein other words, interchangeable. The fact that they cannot be replicated makes these tokens very popular because they give people a feeling of security, provided they have a digital affinity.
They turn what can be copied into something unique and allow interested parties to participate in things that have remained unattained until now. While bitcoins are hailed as the digital answer to currencies, NFTs are now those for trading and collecting goods. If the person owning a token changes, this information is stored forever and tamper-proof in the blockchain.
Like mushrooms from the ground
Fungibility denotes the property of goods to be interchangeable within the same genus with other pieces of the same kind or - in the case of non-fungible - not to be interchangeable. At first glance, however, the word conjures up completely different associations: the fungus or the mushroom. But don't worry: their finely meshed growth resembles current developments in the network or your neuronal thought processes. The skeptics who should be worried are those who believe that this is all a bubble, like the Internet back then, which, as we all know, burst in March 2000 with a loud crash and huge losses. Of course, it doesn't help that a purely digital work of art by the artist Beeple (real name: Mike Winkelmann) was recently auctioned off at Christie's for a breathtaking 69 million dollars, and that he only commented on the price on Twitter with a "Holy Fuck. Something like that can't be serious. But neither were the turtlenecks or hoodies worn by the CEOs of so-called Internet companies, and yet their reputation has risen to unimagined heights over the past 20 years.
This auction may therefore be the temporary culmination of a hype, which, however, gives the acronym NFT an aura like the WWW radiated back then. Thanks to NFT and other elements of the blockchain - for example, smart contracts - The democratization of investments soon took place, similar to the democratization of knowledge through the WWW. And what happened with it has long been history.
* Benno Maggi is co-founder and CEO of Partner & Partner. He has been eavesdropping on the industry for over 30 years, discovering words and terms for us that can either be used for small talk, pomposity, excitement, playing Scrabble, or just because.
