NFTs — it’s not just about digital art

Carolin Wend, Co-founder of Mintbase.io

NFTs are not just about art. Into this exploding field comes estalished player, Mintbase, with ambitions to rethink NFTs. Just as we get our heads around the concept of digital art NFTs then another cargo-load of applications arrives to really fry the brains.

So let’s begin at the beginning shall we? Carolin Wend joined me from sunny Lisbon to go through some of the basics. First up, NFTs themselves or non-fungible tokens.

“There are two types of tokens, fungible and non-fungible. Fungible for example is like a dollar or a euro. It’s exchangeable ‘like for like.’ In addition, it’s tangible so you can break it down and swap one dollar for two 50cent pieces.

“On the other hand, a non-fungible token is something unique and which cannot be broken into two pieces. An example might be a birth certificate or a title to a house. It might also be a ticket, a song or anything except money. Anything in this world can be an NFT — it’s the new standard of technology — it’s like an open API.”

NFTs first came to prominence with digital art. Finally, artists were able to share their art online showing not only provenance but also delivering a unique art piece — one that could not be copied as the original was backed with an NFT.