The Symbol
A serial project in which we ask Toshinao Sasaki about the future of technology and society.
The theme this time is the inherent value created by NFTs
I would like to ask you about the past and future of NFTs. First of all, what is your view on the current state of NFTs?
Toshinao Sasaki (hereinafter Sasaki): NFTs initially became popular because there was a lot of attention on the fact that it was possible to assign ownership to digital art, which previously could be copied and had no physical form.
A famous example is the first tweet posted by Jack Dorsey, the founder of Twitter (now X), in 2006, which was put up for sale and sold for a high price, which led to a bubble in the market until around last year.
However, if you looked at the digital art being listed on the NFT marketplace at that time, there were a lot of cheap images that could hardly be called art, and things that were simply copies and pastes of other works.
Another common thing that happened was that a large number of companies would emerge trying to make money by digitizing any famous work, and as a result, the bubble quickly overheated and collapsed, which was the situation from the year before last to last year.
I see. So the situation for NFTs up until last year wasn’t great.
Sasaki: That's right. In other words, the NFT market collapsed as a result of the emergence of a large number of people who attached value to things that had no inherent value and made speculative moves.
This is not just about NFTs, but also a part where the fraudulent nature of Web 3.0, which began with Bitcoin, was exposed. Originally, Web 3.0 was started with the idea of returning the Internet to its original open and democratic form, rather than a centralized one, in response to the domination of big tech such as GAFAM.
However, the core technology of Web 3.0 was placed on the blockchain, and the blockchain spread through Bitcoin, which gave rise to a large number of scammers and money-grubbers who flocked to it.
The tragedy of the current Web 3.0 is that the entire Web 3 became a means of making money, dragged along by such people, and NFTs were used as part of that, causing the market to collapse. That was until last year.
