Money Talks: NFTs can be more than a fun collectible, but pick wisely, says a collector
NFTs or non-fungible tokens made headlines in 2021 for their eye-watering price tags. How are digital assets – which are easily duplicated – worth millions of dollars? Saniya Ramchandani, blockchain insights lead for Momentum Works, explains the value of NFTs beyond the hype on an episode of the Money Talks podcast.
Illustration of NFT art (Image: iStock/5./15 WEST)
SINGAPORE: Saniya Ramchandani, 24, has lost count of the number of NFTs that she owns.
As she was getting into the space and trying to understand how NFTs work, Ramchandani figured the best way to learn was to simply “dive in”.
I’ve bought NFTs that are art, I’ve bought an NFT that supports the production of a movie. So as that movie goes into production, and if it earns money, I get some of that royalty back.
Related:
Think of NFTs as one-of-a-kind assets in the digital world that can be bought and sold like any other piece of property. Virtually anything – digital artwork, a video or an audio clip – can be “tokenised” to create a digital certificate of ownership that is stored on a blockchain. The original digital file can be endlessly copied. But the NFT is unique.
So how does that make it valuable? Ramchandani has a simple answer for that – “if enough people believe there’s value, then there’s value”.
But she acknowledges that NFTs are very much in an infancy stage, and people dropping money on certain tokens may be doing so out of speculation. “It's akin to buying a lottery ticket. You're hoping that it increases in value.”
If you are looking at NFTs for their investment potential, Ramchandani has this piece of advice: “The NFTs that are less speculative are the ones that have utility. Buy NFTs beyond just buying them to collect. You can buy them as tickets to concerts, you can buy them to watch a TV show.”
When you invest in the use cases of NFTs that can provide real world tangible value and companies that are developing that technology, that's an investment.
