I'm new enough to the world of NFTs -- and that world is shifting so rapidly -- that I'm certain my authority over the subject is woefully inadequate. But as the consumer-facing nature of the blockchain is also only recently beginning to bloom, I'd say it doesn't take much yet to get a reasonable education. With that in mind, the following is my take on why NFTs may represent a more fundamental economic shift than what I had originally imagined them to be.

NFTs: Beanie Babies of the Future

Or, at least, that's where I started. At first blush and through the nuance-crushing filter of typical media reporting, the idea seems like nothing more than digital ownership of an "asset" with no marginal cost of replication. And that sounds insane. Pictures of apes are trading for tens of thousands of dollars, and the most charitable notion I could come up with was that this is a phenomenon likely to appeal only to the intersection of "collectors" and "technophile early-adopters."

And anecdotally, that bit still seems to be true. That friend of yours who spends too much money on speculative nonsense obviously bought a Topps baseball highlight NFT for thousands of dollars because, like, they're gaining so much value! And somewhere in the back of your mind, some recollection of Beanie Babies and tulip bulbs are throwing off warning signs.

Why do you need your baseball card on the blockchain? And why would you want to "own" something digital like a sports highlight? I mean, I can see it online just as easily as you can.

The Stock Market for Everything

Then again, though, there are some fundamental mechanisms at play here that, regardless of this particular implementation, may actually become pretty ground-breaking. NFTs are just another implementation of the distributed ledger system, but rather than tracking ownership of "currency" like Bitcoin or Ethereum (which can be used to buy things, at least in theory), NFTs track ownership of something more abstract: anything at all.

As it turns out, "fractional ownership" akin to the stock market is maybe a better analogy than digital Beanie Babies. Combined with smart contracts to, say, pay out dividends according to ownership, NFTs may replicate (and multiply) the individualized access to the stock market that Robinhood's arrival on the scene had. But in this case, we're securitizing not companies but ... well, just kind of anything a...

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